The WW2 cipher pigeon message we’ve been trying to crack is addressed to “X02″… which is what, exactly?

X02

Speculation in the initial Daily Mail article was that X02 was a code denoting RAF Bomber Command in High Wycombe. However, against that notion runs the facts that (a) the message was written on an Army Pigeon Message pad, (b) the message was inside a red-coloured (probably British Army) canister, and (c) the British Army enciphered much of its communications.

The problem here is that even though this “Bomber Command” suggestion is therefore fairly threadbare, nobody has yet come up with any properly credible alternatives. It appeared to be yet another aspect of the message that was destined to stay mysterious.

But now I can reveal what X02 actually means.

If you spend the day in the archives at the Royal Signals Museum in Blandford Forum, Dorset (as Stu Rutter and I did yesterday), you might just happen to ask their very helpful archivist if the museum’s archives contains any boxes on codes and ciphers cyphers. And you might then just happen to find at the bottom of one of the two boxes of files a small blue handbook:-

army-wireless-operating-signals-1941

This booklet briefly describes a selection of common “X-codes” used in signalling, most of which are made up of “X” followed by three digits. (There is also a large set of three-letter Q-codes and a large set of three-letter Z-codes.)

army-wireless-instructions

However, there’s one very specific exception to the three-digit X-code layout: and that is for codes beginning with “X0”, which are specifically to do with addressees:-

army-wireless-addressees

Hence “X0234” would mean “pass to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th addressees”. In the case of our pigeon message, “X02” simply means “pass to the 2nd addressee“. Which would strongly imply that the (already very short) ciphertext includes at least two addressees. (It was perfectly normal Army practice to include addressees inside ciphertexts: an encrypted address / addressee was known as a codress, while an encrypted address that was concealed within a message (rather than in a consistent place) was known as a “buried codress”.)

And that’s basically it: the mystery of the X02 solved.

OK, I’m sorry Stu & I weren’t yet able to crack the rest of our cipher pigeon’s message, but rest assured we’re hot on its trail… 🙂

And now for something completely different… “The Voynich Experiment”, a free online Voynich-themed computer game by Marwane [Wan] Kalam-Alami, a software engineer from Lyon, France. Use the cursor keys to roll the ball around, and occasionally press [Enter] to “evolve” your ball, and then press [down]+[left] or [down]+[right] to rotate the evolved entity, solving puzzles as you go.

OK, OK, I admit that the history makes no real sense (dated 1642, and signed “A.K.”, presumably Athanasius Kircher a full 13 years before he had the real thing sent to him), and all that’s really taken from the Voynich is a blanked out scan of f67v and f68r (plus a few bits of Voynichese floating around in the intro), but… give the guy a break, it’s a bit of fun. *sigh*

Enjoy! 🙂

Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. The world-famous WW2 codebreaker furiously twiddled his moustache. Suddenly, a shout – “I’ve solved the Voynich!” It was the television! A small boy and his beagle were smiling at the camera, holding a book up. They had “proved it was a hoax”. This meant one thing: war! The codebreaker slammed the door and drove to the library.

Part II
Seven hundred years earlier, Knights Templar pounded the monastery door. Roger Bacon answered. “We’ll taketh that”, said the knights, grabbing the mysterious book from his hands. “My secrets are safe with you idiots”, sneered the codemaker monk.

Part III
The security guard approached. The codebreaker was in his pyjamas, waiting at the library’s front gate. “You’ll have to wait till morning, sir”, said the guard. A shot rang out. The guard slumped. The codebreaker hid the body in a snowdrift. The history graduate walked warily past the man in bloodstained pyjamas on her way home. The boy on TV carried on smiling.

Part IV
The Knights Templar couldn’t decipher the book. “Torture him!”, the Grand Master screamed. They tried, but Bacon had a heart attack and died. Nobody would ever know. Or would they? And then the whole Templar Order was suppressed. Or was it?

Part V
The gate opened, and the codebreaker ran in past the history graduate, again. The librarian shrugged. But where was the security guard? The codebreaker sped through all the pages one last time, until – yes, there it was! A bloody fingerprint, overlooked by everyone. It wasn’t a hoax! Outside, the librarian noticed the trail of blood and called the police. The dog smiled even harder.

Part VI
Leon Battista Alberti borrowed the book from the Vatican, his oily fingerprints messing up the radiocarbon dating. Suddenly, a thud! Alberti lay unconscious in the street, mugged: the thief ran away with his prize, for his great-grandchildren to sell to the Holy Roman Emperor, and from there to Athanasius Kircher in 1665, the Jesuit archives, and then Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.

Part VII
Bang! The codebreaker lay shot, slumped by the book, his vividly red blood mingling with the ink, the paint and the blood spatter from Alberti’s head. His life ebbing away, he suddenly realized: nobody would ever know. They’d all think it simply a hoax, forever. He lifted his hands to the sky and shouted “Noooooooo!” The boy and the dog danced on top of the kennel, one last time.

THE END

Though I haven’t posted much about the Voynich Manuscript here recently, I have actually been doing a lot of research into it (for Curse 2), as well as a lot of thinking about how to decrypt it, mainly by trying to devise cryptological mechanisms that stand even a passing chance of achieving that (an “attack vector”, if you like).

Yesterday, I came up with something new (well, new to me, anyway). Having recently read a pile of books on WW2 codebreakers (e.g. the excellent “The Man Who Broke Purple”) and WW2 codebreaking (thanks to the whole cipher pigeon thing), an idea fresh in my mind was that one way to break a cipher system would be to get multiple instances of the same plaintext enciphered in different ways, and use that to understand how the cryptographic framework works. So… might there be any plaintext in the Voynich that was enciphered multiple times?

Well: it’s well known that a fair number of the herbal pictures reappear as small versions in the two pharma sections. These might well be visual recipes (as normally believed); or a visual cross-referencing hack (in the Quattrocento style of Mariano Taccola); or nonsense; or something else entirely. At the very least, however, this does tell a visual story about the content: that the drawings are far from completely arbitrary [as would be convenient for some people’s Voynich theories], but instead are consistent and rule-based, even if we can’t yet discern what those rules are.

But what struck me as possibly offering us a chink into the Voynich’s cryptographic armour is the presence of two herbal pages as well as a recipe page all containing what seems to be the same plant… f17v, f96v & f99r:

voynich f17v

voynich f96v

voynich f99r bottom recipe

Might it be that these three pages not only contain the same plant, but also the same (or very similar) plaintext enciphered in different ways? As readers of The Curse of the Voynich will doubtless know, I have a whole constellation of long-standing hunches about how Voynichese works: but finding effective ways of testing all these ideas has proved immensely tricky.

Anyway, let’s have a look at the texts (in EVA) [I’ve used Stolfi’s transcription as a broad starting point, and ‘bold’ed the Neal keys on the two herbal pages’ top lines]:

f17v.P.1;F pchodol chor fchy opydaiin odaldy –
f17v.P.2;F ycheey keeor ctho dal okol odaiin okal –
f17v.P.3;F oldaik odaiin okal oldaiin chockhol olol –
f17v.P.4;F kchor fchol cphol olcheol okeeey –
f17v.P.5;F ychol chol dolcheey tchol dar ckhy –
f17v.P.6;F oekor or okaiin or otaiin d –
f17v.P.7;F sor chkeey poiis chor os saiin –
f17v.P.8;F qokeey kcha rol dy chol daiin sy –
f17v.P.9;F ycheol shol kchol chol taiin ol –
f17v.P.10;F oytor okeor okar okol doiir am –
f17v.P.11;F qokcheo qokoiir ctheol chol –
f17v.P.12;F oy choy keaiin chckhey ol chor –
f17v.P.13;F ykeor chol chol cthol chkor sheol –
f17v.P.14;F olor okeeol chodaiin okeol tchory –
f17v.P.15;F ychor cthy cheeky cheo otor oteol –
f17v.P.16;F okcheol chol okeol cthol otcheolo –
f17v.P.17;F m qoain sar she dol qopchaiin cthor –
f17v.P.18;F otor cheeor ol chol dor chr oreees –
f17v.P.19;F dain chey qoaiin cthor cholchom –
f17v.P.20;F ykeey okeey cheor chol sho ydaiin –
f17v.P.21;F oal cheor sholor or shecthy cpheor daiin –
f17v.P.22;F qokeee dar chey keeor cheeol ctheey cthy –
f17v.P.23;F chkeey okeor char okeom =

f96v.P.1;F psheas sheeor qoepsheody odar ocpheo opar ysar aso* –
f96v.P.2;F ytear yteor olcheey dteodaiin saro qoches ycheom –
f96v.P.3;F dcheoteos cpheos sar chcthosy cth ytch*y daiin –
f96v.P.4;F dsheos sheey teo cthy ctheodody –
f96v.P.5;F tockhy cthey ckheeody ar chey key –
f96v.P.6;F yteeody teodar alchey sy –
f96v.P.7;F sheodal chor ary cthol –
f96v.P.8;F ycheey ckheal daiins –
f96v.P.9;F oeol ckheor cheor aiin –
f96v.P.10;F ctheor oral char ckhey –
f96v.P.11;F sar os checkhey socth –
f96v.P.12;F sosar cheekeo daiin –
f96v.P.13;F soy sar cheor =

f99r.P4.13;F tol.keey.ctheey-{plant}
f99r.P4.14;F ykeol.okeol.o!ckheo.chol.cheodal.okeo!r.alcheem.orar-{plant}
f99r.P4.15;F okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey.daiin.okeol!s.aiin.olaiir.o!olshl-
f99r.P4.16;F qokeeo.okeey.qokeey.okisy.qokeeo.sar.sheseky.or.al-{plant}
f99r.P4.17;F **aiin.c!!!!khey.acthey.dy.daiin.okor.okeey.shcth!!!*!sh-
f99r.P4.18;H ychor.ols.or.am.air.om

The first thing I’d note is that, even though both herbal pages are marked up as “Herbal A” pages, their ciphertexts appear to have a completely different internal structure from each other. Specifically, f17v has lots of repetitive sequences such as “ychol chol dolcheey tchol ” / “chol chol cthol” / “okeor okar okol“, etc; while f96v has a different (dare I say more sophisticated?) feel altogether, with a nicely fluid use of letters. By way of further contrast, f99v is full of “ee” shapes such as “keey etheey” / “okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey” / “qokeeo.okeey.qokeey“, which looks clunky and repetitive in a quite different way from f17v.

The fact that all three text sequences accompany broadly the same diagram is surely some kind of indication that their contents could well be related in some way. However, there is (as far as I can see) no obvious textual overlap between the three of them. Hence I really don’t think the significant differences here can be accounted for purely in terms of presumed content. As a consequence, even though all three texts share the same glyphic building blocks, I think the precise ways the cipher system was employed in all three differ quite widely.

Unfortunately, this probably points to a weakness in the way we tend to talk about Voynichese: that we haven’t really established anything like a proper cryptographic ‘roadmap’ of the system’s evolution to help us navigate these differences with confidence. The page classifications we have inherited from Prescott Currier remain helpful in a fairly high-level sense, but I think our cryptanalytical needs have outstripped their low-level utility – they aren’t really strong enough tools to help us deal with the ciphertext itself.

And so my real Voynich research lead of the day is simply this: that I think we don’t yet know enough about the cryptanalytical differences between individual pages of Voynichese to be able to group /categorise / classify them effectively. What were the stages of evolution of the cipher system? What shapes or groups evolved into (or were replaced by) what? And why has it taken us more than a century to ask such basic questions?

Maybe, though, this is simply a consequence of the lack of detailed codicological insight we have into the original bifolio nesting and gathering layout (as well as composition order). If we had all that properly locked down, then perhaps we’d start to be more inquisitive about the changes going on in the cipher system, rather than just saying “it’s an A-page” or “it’s a B-page”.

Right now, looking at these three short sections, I have to say that it feels to me as if we still know next to nothing about how this cipher actually works.

To summarize Part 1, an ex-pirate known as ‘Le Butin’ left a will, two letters, and an enciphered note describing where he had buried treasure on Île de France (the former French name for Mauritius). But even though this is widely referred to as the “La Buse Cryptogram”, I can’t see any obvious reason to connect the pirate Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) with it. Anyway, our story continues…

The documents were retrieved from the Archives Nationales de la Réunion in 1923 for a lady from the Seychelles called Rose Savy(who was descended from Le Butin’s family): she to flew to Paris with it to try to solve its mysteries. In 1934, the eminent French librarian Charles de La Roncière at the Bibliothèque National de France wrote a book about the affair called “Le Flibustier mystérieux, histoire d’un trésor caché“.

LeFlibustierMysterieux

Spurred on by the promise of gold-gold-gold, numerous treasure hunters have poured decades of their lives into this whole, ummm, ‘hopeful enterprise’. Savy herself believed that the answer was somehow connected with some strange carvings that she found on her property, depicting “chiens, serpents, tortues, chevaux“, as well as “une urne, des coeurs, une figure de jeune femme, une tête d’homme et un oeil monstrueusement ouvert“. [Do I need to translate those for you? I don’t think so!]

Reginald Cruise-Wilkins (1913-1977) “had done code-breaking work with the British forces and he found references to Andromeda in Levasseur’s enigma”, says John Cruise-Wilkins, who even today continues searching for the treasure that so obsessed his father from 1949 onwards. Just so you know, John C-W himself “believes [Levasseur] buried the bounty according to a complex riddle inspired by the 12 labors of Hercules”, ten of which he believes he has solved.

Well… another famous Levasseur story goes that as he was crossing a bridge over what was known as “la ravine à Malheur”, he said “Avec ce que j’ai caché ici, je pourrais acheter l’île” – ‘with what I’ve hidden here, I could buy the whole island‘. So perhaps it’s no wonder that people desperately want to believe that there’s pirate gold in (or perhaps under) them thar island hills. [Though as I say, I’m fairly unconvinced that this cryptogram has anything to do with La Buse. But perhaps that’s just me.]

Another famous La Buse treasure hunter was called Bibique (real name Joseph Tipveau, he wrote a book called “Sur la piste des Frères de la Côte”), but who shot himself in 31st March 1995, I’m sorry to say.

But with my crypto hat back firmly on, I have to say that the cipher system ascertained by de La Roncière could barely be more straightforward: a pigpen cipher, with letters of the alphabet arranged in a very simple manner, and with some of the shapes also used to represent digits (AEIOU=12345, LMNR=6789). Arranged in traditional pigpen style, the key looks like this…

Alphabet_de_la_buse-white

…while the cryptogram itself looks like this (click on it to see a larger image)…

la-buse-le-butin-cryptogram-small

And yet despite all that clarity, the cipher mystery remains, because if you use the above key to decipher the above ciphertext, what you get is an extremely confusing cleartext, to the point that perhaps “clearasmudtext” would frankly be a better word for it. Here’s one version from the Internet with spaces added in for marginal extra clarity:-

aprè jmez une paire de pijon tiresket
2 doeurs sqeseaj tête cheral funekort
filttinshientecu prenez une cullière
de mielle ef ovtre fous en faites une ongat
mettez sur ke patai de la pertotitousn
vpulezolvs prenez 2 let cassé sur le che
min il faut qoe ut toit a noitie couue
povr en pecger une femme dhrengt vous n ave
eua vous serer la dobaucfea et pour ve
ngraai et por epingle oueiuileturlor
eiljn our la ire piter un chien tupqun
lenen de la mer de bien tecjeet sur ru
nvovl en quilnise iudf kuue femm rq
i veut se faire dun hmetsedete s/u dre
dans duui ooun dormir un homm r
esscfvmm / pl faut n rendre udlq
u un diffur qecieefurtetlesl

The best single page presentation of it I’ve found comes from this French site that tries to colour-code the letters. Certainly, there are indeed errors in the text: but I don’t personally think that throwing your hands up and guessing at the correct plaintext values (which is what most treasure hunters seem to do) is methodologically sound.

Far less cryptographically naive would be to try to classify many of the errors as probable pigpen enciphering errors (where, for example, the difference between A and B is simply a dot). The fact that the ‘Z’ shape apparently occurs both with and without a dot implies (to me, at least) that a number of dots may well have slipped in (or out) during the writing. Moreover, there is no suggestion as to which of the ciphertext letters might be enciphering numbers (the two instances of “2” given are actual ‘2’ digits, not carefully interpreted ‘e’ ciphers), and aren’t pirates always pacing out distances from curious rocks etc?

For example, “doeurs” is a mere dot away from “coeurs”; while mysterious non-words such as “filttinshientecu” might actually start “fils…” rather than “filt…”. Might it be that (Voynich researchers will perhaps groan at this point, but…) some of these were emended by a later owner?

Or might it be that the image we’re looking at is actually a tidy copy of an earlier, far scrappier cryptogram, and what we’re most plagued by here is copying errors? I would say that the presence of some composite letters in the text is a reasonably strong indication that this is a copy of a cryptogram, rather than the original cryptogram itself.

Hence I suspect that properly decrypting this will be an exercise rich in cryptology, French patois, and codicological logic. Good luck, and let me know how you get on! 🙂

But after all this time, is there any Le Butin booty left? I read an online claim that several of Le Butin’s treasures have already been found:-
* one allegedly found in 1916 on Pemba Island (part of the Zanzibar Archipelago), allegedly marked with his initial “BN” (Bernardin Nageon)
* one allegedly in Belmont on Mauritius in a cave near the river La Chaux
* one possibly found on Rodrigues (is this the one mentioned in the letter?)
* one allegedly found at a cemetery on Mauritius in 2004, though I found no mention of it in the archives of the weekly Mauritian Sunday newspaper 5-Plus Dimanche.

However, I haven’t yet found any independent verification of any of these claims, so each story might separately be true, false, embellished, misheard or merely mangled in the telling. Please leave a comment below if you happen to stumble upon actual evidence for any of these!

Ulrik Heltoft’s “The Voynich Botanical Studies and The Origin of Specimen 52v” artworks will be at Andersen’s Contemporary art gallery in Copenhagen over the next few weeks (20.04.2013 to 11.05.2013), and I have to say that they’re really rather… eerie. But in a nice way!

Essentially, what Heltoft and his collaborator Miljohn Ruperto have done is recreate (after a fashion) a number of the Voynich Manuscript’s curious plant drawings. Their manipulated images were then fixed as large silver gelatin prints, lifting the Voynich’s unpindownable unworldliness (and indeed impracticability) to curious new heights. Having said that, I’m not sure what “The Origin of Specimen 52v” specifically refers to (apart from f52v itself, of course). Perhaps it will become obvious as photos of the installation start to appear on the Internet.

Anyway, here’s their 52r plant side by side with the Voynich’s f52r plant:

f52r-comparison-small

If you want to see some more, here’s a link to four pretty high-resolution Voynich Botanical Studies images.

But why did they do it? Well, according to this site

Ulrik Heltoft (b. 1973) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1999 and from Yale University in 2001. He is an associate professor of photography at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has had solo exhibitions at Kirkhoff Contemporary Art, Raucci e Santamaria in Naples and Wilfried Lentz in Rotterdam. His works have also been shown at places such as Participants Inc., New Museum, Anthology Film Archive in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Heltoft’s artistic activity is characterized by formally rigorous, technically perfect works in which minimal displacements suggest that “something else” is at play.

So basically, Heltoft is a Yale-graduated photography professor specializing in a rigorous-looking, false-historic aesthetic. Really, could there ever have been a flicker of a doubt in anyone’s mind that one day he’d ‘do’ the Voynich? Hmmm… maybe next he’ll do pages from its balneo section, but where every ‘nymph’ is the same model. Or perhaps instead he’ll move on to the Vinland Map? It’s always nice to have a Plan B, right? 😉

Cipher Mysteries reader Keith Walker was intrigued by the Moustier cryptogram story I recently ran here, and decided to try to hunt down the “published report (Moulart, Basècles; Esquisse religieuse) that the ancient altar of St. Martin was sold or offered for sale at Basècles in 1843” mentioned by the NSA. And just so you know what we’re talking about, here’s a picture of the big old altar in question:

St-Martins-Altar-Basecles-small

What’s good is that he found a scan of the 1910 report by curé Moulart. But what’s confusing is that the relevant passage (near the bottom of page 7) appears to say the opposite of what the NSA article said. Specifically, it says:-

“Dirigeons nos pas vers le bien-amié patron de Basècles, Saint Martin.
Son autel nous est venu de Moustier en 1843. On y voit un rétable avec colonnettes sur lesquelles des corbeilles, d’où s’échappent des flammes, image de la dévotion ardente qui doit animer notre amié dans la prière.”

…which Keith (quite reasonably, I think) translates as…

“Let’s make our way to the beloved patron saint of Basècles, Saint Martin.

His altar came to us from Moustier in 1843. There is an altarpiece with small columns on which baskets, out of which flames are escaping, the representation of the burning/ardent devotion that must animate our souls in prayer.”

So it seems fairly clear that the altar of St. Martin in Basècles actually came from Moustier in 1843, rather than went to there then. Hence I think what we are looking at here is quite probably the altar of St. Martin that was in Moustier before the two new [and apparently enciphered] side-altars were built & installed in 1838. Hence the old altar probably sat around in a shed or similar store for 3 or 4 years before being cleaned up and moved on to Basècles in 1843. Certainly, I think it looks slightly older than Moustier’s two side altars… but probably not a century older, I’d hazard.

Keith wonders whether the Moustier cryptograms may therefore be connected with this altar in some way: though, against that notion, curé Moulart does transcribe lots of other inscriptions from Basècles, and it would probably be fair to expect that if there was something noteworthy about the Basècles St. Martin altar he would have included that too. Even so, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; so the old Moustier altar might well be worth a closer inspection, if anyone just happens to be passing by the church in Basècles.

Incidentally, Moulart happily mentions a chronogram from the church (p.5) placed above the main door in 1779, though (oddly) the letters he highlights in the text apparently making up the chronogram seem to add up only to 1768:

CUNCTIS HIS OPTANTIBUS
A MANDO PROELATO SURREXI

Here, C + V + C + I + I + I + V [+ S???] + M + D + L + V = 1768.

I’m pretty sure that Moulart forgot to include the “XI” at the end of “SURREXI“, which would bring the total up to 1779 (i.e. the number you first thought of).

PS: there’s a little more history on Basècles church here, including a close-up of the carving of St. Martin on the altar. Note the lack of funky inscriptions!

The Voynich Manuscript is a dismal reality TV channel, where every participant’s ten minutes of fame segues quickly into an eternity of opprobrium: few people dipping their feet into its toxic slurry get to keep all their toes for very long. I’m sorry to have to say such a thing, but as the modern philosophers Run and DMC put it, “it’s like that, and that’s the way it is“.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), Gordon Rugg has this week returned to the Voynich’s rancid riverside with a fresh supply of podalic digits for dunking. But this time around he’s appropriating its mysteries not to promote the claimed benefits of his “Verifier Method” (a meme which seems not to have taken root), but to promote his newly-patented toy for 2013, that he somewhat grandly calls the Search Visualizer (rather as if he’s inventing a whole new field).

Yet unless I’ve misunderstood it significantly, all the Search Visualizer actually does is:
* draw a rectangle representing an input document
* draw dots on it wherever one of a user-defined set of syllables or words appears, with each dot a different colour.
Thus a SV user can, for example, map out that ‘witch’ and ‘sleep’ appear in different clusters within Macbeth. So far, so facile.

Nonetheless, I (perhaps) hear you ask eagerly, what can the Search Visualizer teach us about – dan dan darrrr – the Voynich Manuscript? Unsurprisingly (given the amount of exposure his Voynich claims gave the Verifier Method all those years ago), that’s the subject of this week’s blog post from him.

Having used SV to draw a lot of diagrams of (in the EVA transcription) “daiin”, “qo”, “dy”, and “ol”, Rugg concludes from the “banding” (basically, section structure) visible in those diagrams that…

It’s completely inconsistent with the theory that Voynichese is a single unidentified language, or with the theory that Voynichese consists of two dialects of a single unidentified language.

If we’re looking at dialects, then there are at least six of them, and some appear to be more different from each other than English is from German, at least on the preliminary results from my work so far (I looked at other German texts, and saw the same distribution patterns as in the book example above).

If we’re looking at a coded text, then there appear to be at least half a dozen different versions of the code, or at least half a dozen different codes producing similar but not identical types of text.

Of course, the main person who failed to grasp that the whole Currier-A-&-B-languages things wasn’t anything like a binary either-or (despite Rene & I telling him several times, as I recall) was, errrm, Gordon Rugg himself. So this is, unusually, a straw man argument where the straw man is the researcher himself (but 9 years in the past).

Anyway, even though his “Verifier Method” (in my opinion) falls well short of David Hackett Fisher’s splendid book “Historians’ Fallacies”, let’s apply it to the Search Visualizer:-

1. Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.

I’ve read the article and most of his website, too. I’m an IT professional and a computer scientist. I can see what he’s doing: rectangles and coloured dots.

2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, I don’t see any reference to:-
* codicology (though he’s added an addendum noting that the order of the pages may be wrong in “some cases”, this clearly isn’t reflected in his conclusions, which are almost entirely about the whole “banding” and “sub-banding” thing)
* Prescott Currier’s famous analysis (A pages, B pages, but plenty of intermediate ‘dialects’ too) isn’t mentioned once. That’s right, not once. Anywhere.
* statistical analyses carried out by researchers other than Gordon Rugg or his students.

Sorry, but that seems like a very uncritical, self-contained way of working.

I would add that I don’t see a lot of critical expertise being applied to historical cryptography: what instead appears seems to be a partial rendering of the history to support previously held positions.

3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.

There’s plenty of bias towards his grille method, as well as naysaying against mainstream historical cryptography (which, let’s remember, he is trying to rewrite to support his particular story).

There’s also bias towards his 16th century dating in the face of fairly rock-solid scientific, art history, codicological, and palaeographic dating to the start/middle of the 15th century, which doesn’t really appear in his presentation.

4.Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.

What Rugg calls “Search Visualization” (drawing a rectangle of coloured dots) surely seems rather a low-grade kind of search. The point about “search” (in the Google sense) is surely that it finds things you didn’t previously know about and includes filters that promote relevance: whereas feeding pre-determined syllables and drawing coloured dots in a rectangle is only barely pattern-matching, and only barely visualization.

5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.

* Using an outdated transcription
* Not filtering out all the embedded comments (is there a better explanation for this than sheer laziness?)
* Relying on computer science alone without integrating genuine historical research
* Arguing from possibility rather from probability or fact
* Not responding to criticism from actual domain experts

6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.

(Too boring to do if so many mistakes have been identified in steps 1-5.)

7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.

Surely a proper academic would be building a tool that would find telling letter clusters for you from an input text, using Hidden Markov Models and all kinds of proper statistical mechanisms? Shouldn’t something like the Search Visualizer be about finding things you don’t already know about, and only then helping you visualize them?

All in all, I find it extraordinarily hard not to get cross about this, because Rugg seems to be exactly reprising what he did all those years ago, once again at the cost of the whole research area. And once again, his driving force appears to be “ask not what you can do for the Voynich Manuscript, ask what it can do for you.” Sad, very sad.

I think it’s fair to say that even though the French love books in general, there’s one category in particular they adore – anything revealing the long-lost secrets of the Knights Templar. To a relative outsider (such as me), the 1309 suppression of Les Templiers by the French king comes across as a wound to the national psyche that has required a mile-high Band-aid of literary retribution to attempt to heal.

Of course, the not-so-subtle questions that pretty much everyone actually wants answered are:
(a) “where was the Templar treasure hidden?“, and
(b) “can I have some of it?

Admittedly, there is a fairly strong case to be made that by 1309 the Templars were probably close to bankrupt. Following the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), there was effectively no Jerusalem for pilgrims to go on pilgrimage to: and so the whole raison d’etre for the Knights Templar (i.e. protecting pilgrims) had basically vanished. Hence Templar historians I’ve talked with believe that, after 1254, the Order pretty much ‘withered on the vine’, not really taking any new recruits. By 1309, it was an old man’s order, and I suspect its cash reserves had dwindled to close to nothing.

All the same, the romance of secret caches of gold- and jewel-filled barrels remains: and so French armchair treasure-hunters continue to wave their virtual metal detectors over the scantiest morsels of Templar-related texts, hoping that this might just uncover the ultimate secret history haul. Really, Rudy Cambier’s biggest insult against this établissement is his idea that the Templars might deign to bury their precious cargo in Hainaut of all places – when of course, it could only genuinely have be buried in La France! (And let’s not wake up the Sinclair and Oak Island factions here, OK? *sigh*)

Compiling a list of hopeful French Templier-trésor authors would consume decades of anyone’s life: but there’s one whose cycle helmet, in my opinion, is several wheels ahead of the pack. For me the maillot jaune of Templar authors is Alfred Weysen, author of (1972) “L’Île des Veilleurs” (The Island of the Watchers).

Unfortunately, second-hand copies of this are £60+, and the best modern treatment of the same evidence seems to be Paul Amoros, Richard Buadès et Thierry-Emmanuel Garnier’s (2007) “L’Île des Veilleurs, Contre-Enquête sur le Mystère du Verdon et le Trésor de l’Ordre du Temple”, which is currently being reissued (but copies of this also go for £60+). For the moment, these remain only for researchers with particularly deep pockets.

The rest of us will have to make do with this nice French website dedicated to the whole “L’Île des Veilleurs” enigma, which I’ll briefly summarize.

“The Isle of the Watchers” denotes a 66 square kilometre area in Provence, bounded by the towns of Castellane, Le Bourguet, Jabron, Trigance, Soleils and Taloire, and containing Veydon; and by the D252 road to the east and the D955 to the west. The term was coined by Alfred Weysen, though the claim linking the area to Templar treasure first appeared in print in Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Trésors du Monde: Enterrés, Emmurés, Engloutis” [Éditions J’ai Lu].

All the same, Weysen’s book goes far beyond this, by linking all manner of local sites with Templars and other historical narratives. He asserts:
* that Veydon was the subject of Goethe’s 1795 story Das Märchen (Le Conte), or The Green Snake, with Goethe’s having previously been initiated into a centuries-spanning secret society (naturally).
* that a passage connecting La Baume Jardin (The Hermit Cave) to another cave beneath the chapel of St. Trophimus, a Templar church located (unusually) on the side of a mountain.
* that numerous authors support the notion that this area hold Templar treasure.
* that his argument is undoubtedly correct because of various numerological justifications etc etc.

Personally, I have no great interest in unearthing the fabulous wealth of the Templar hoard: anyway, it’ll already take me the rest of my lifetime to spend my share of the Beale treasure. (Ha! As if!) But what does interest me is that Weysen discusses what seems to be a genuine cipher mystery, somewhere in the gorges by Jabron (much loved by canoeists), though it would be somewhat… premature for us to agree that it’s a Templar message just yet, let’s say. And I found a passable picture of the cryptogram here:

jabron-cryptogram

What message do these scratchy glyphs hold? Weysen believed that he was able to decrypt them, and that they said…

Salut! Tu es ici dans les terres de la Vraie Croix. Céleste dominant l’éternité, baille aux languissants la clarté.

Well… I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I don’t think this makes a great deal of sense. But if we can get a better picture of this to work with, I reckon we probably can decrypt it between us…

…Is anyone here going on holiday in Provence this summer who would like to take up this challenge? Just asking! 🙂

Having recently written up the Moustier Cryptograms here (thanks to a declassified issue of the NSA’s in-house “Cryptolog” magazine), I bought a copy of Rudy Cambier’s (2002) book “Nostradamus and the Lost Templar Legacy“, simply because it appeared to contain just about the only thing written about Moustier in the last 40 years.

Initially, Cambier speculated that the cryptogram’s ten pairs of lines of scrambled text contained a somehow-obfuscated version of the Ten Commandments. But given that “the [two] Tablets abound with consonants” (p.132), he dropped that notion and instead hypothesized that the original author “might not have provided the vowels – through a well-known cryptographic expedient” (p.132), i.e. an abjad. Cambier then tells us that this hunch “actually appeared to be the case, and this is what may be considered quite a stroke of luck“, and that he decrypted them on that basis “on three winter evenings in December 1995, with a little effort and a little skill” (p.130).

But what does it say? He claims that the tables “indicate […] to the long-awaited one, to him who will be capable of deciphering them, the secret place where the [Knights Templar] belongings lie hidden” (p.130). Annoyingly, though, Cambier goes on to say that anyone interested in understanding how his lengthy argument goes should instead refer to the article by François Descy in “Le Courrier de l’Escaut” that ably summarizes it.

And therein lies a problem, in that there doesn’t seem to be a copy of this article online. On Le Courrier de l’Escaut’s website, it says that the paper has been following Cambier’s theories for many years, and that its first article covering them appeared on “le 11 février 1998”, but I don’t know whether or not that is the particular article to which Cambier is referring. I’ll try to get a copy, see what it says…

Anyway, according to local historian Jean Connart, work was undertaken on Moustier Church in June 1838 “in accordance with the plans of Philibert Pluvinage and Pierre Joseph Lemaitre”. But who were these two men, exactly?

I turns out that Philibert Pluvinage (b. 1770) was a lay clerk at Moustier Church and also Moustier Philharmonic Orchestra’s first conductor (in 1811). The Tournai archives hold an 1810 document describing Pluvinage’s church-related duties. It’s not clear if he married Françoise Joseph Lepoutte (b. 9th January 1766 Moustier, d. 30th October 1842), for I suspect “Philibert Joseph Pluvinage” was actually his father.

There’s a little more detail on Pierre Joseph Lemaître to be had:
* born & baptised 31st March 1741 in Moustier, Hainaut, Belgium.
* married Catherine Joseph Dehors on 5th May 1779. They had 11 children.
* got a law degree & became a lawyer at the Supreme Council of Hainaut.
* succeeded his father as clerk of Moustier (1794-1807).
* succeeded Willaumez as Mayor of Moustier (1807-1818).
* died 12th November 1822 in Moustier.

Hence it would seem that the 1838 work on the Church was carried out according to plans in part drawn up by the Mayor of Moustier at least 15 years earlier. But without actually seeing those plans (which may well be in an archive somewhere, you never know), that’s just about all we can say for the moment.

So… now that I’ve had a few days to think about this new (to me) cipher mystery, what do I think?

For a start, I have to say that I don’t believe that the two altars look even remotely medieval. Rather, apart from the apparently amateurish quality of their inscriptions, I think they resemble the kind of 18th/19th century monstrosities I recall seeing in churches all over France. (But please correct me if you think I’m wrong!). From the pictures in Cambier’s book, the two altars look to have been made from exactly the same material, by exactly the same builders, and at exactly the same time: so I don’t really buy into the notion suggested by Jean Connart that the St Martin’s altar may have been brought in from elsewhere (and then duplicated for the other altar). So, the only workable explanation I can currently see is that the two side altars were made together in 1838 following the collapse of the church roof during rebuilding work.

And yet the overall mystery remains… why on earth would a church of that general date have cryptograms on its altars?

Having pondered this for a while, I think the explanation will most likely turn out to be that these are imperfect copies of a much older pair of cryptograms that were in Moustier for many years. In fact, they may be not so much cryptograms as badly faded inscriptions (say, from the churchyard?), somehow tied up with the history of the church or town. As such, I suspect that we may stand little chance of deciphering them without an earlier (& hopefully less degraded) copy of them to work with. Hence I believe the best place to search for them would be in the pre-1838 notebooks or sketchbooks of Belgian antiquaries. Someone must have seen a pair of enigmatic inscriptions and copied them down, surely?

Yet I also have to note one odd possibility. Rudy Cambier’s book is all about how he believes Michel Nostradamus was simply an opportunist who took a much older book written in the Picard language (e.g. from the Franco-Belgian border area in the North) and adapted the verses to his contemporary French (Nostradamus was from Provence in the South). And, curiously, “Moustier” is directly mentioned in Nostradamus’ Century I, verse 95:-

Devant moustier trouvé enfant besson,
D´heroic sang de moine & vetustique:
Son bruit par secte langue & puissance son,
Qu´on dira fort eslevé vopisque.

Here, “besson” is an old-fashioned word for “jumeau” – twin. So this would seem to be talking about twin things in front of Moustier. OK, it’s a bit of a long shot, but… might this be a fragmentary fossil of a reference to the (admittedly putative!) earlier twin pair of inscriptions that ended up being (badly) duplicated in Moustier Church’s side altars? I don’t know, it could well be no more than a coincidence but… it’s an interesting thought, right? 😉