The Lake Constance Voynich hypothesis…

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As many Cipher Mysteries regulars will know, the two reasons I focused my Voynich Manuscript research on the 15th century were (a) the Voynichese ‘4o’ sign reappears in a number of (far less sophisticated) 15th century cipher alphabets, thus pointing to a post-1400 date; while (b), as John Matthews Manly pointed out in 1931, the manuscript’s 15th century quire numbers strongly imply a pre-1500 date. (Though it was nice that the radiocarbon dating didn’t contradict this, the evidence was actually there all along. *sigh*)

All the same, numerous aspects of the codicology and palaeography of the Voynich Manuscript remain unresolved: for example, my presentation at next month’s Villa Mondragone Voynich centenary conference will revolve (at great speed) around quire numbers. Fascinatingly, a whole lot of interesting quire-number-related stuff has emerged over the last few weeks, thanks to French Voynich blogger Thomas Sauvaget.

You see, Thomas decided a while back to see whether he could dig up examples of Voynich-like features in scans of manuscripts available online, i.e. zodiac month names, gallows characters, the odd ij mark on f57v, and (of course) the quire numbers.

While trawling through St Gallen’s online manuscript collection, Thomas found something I’d missed when looking there (shame on me, but probably because I was looking for quire numbers at the bottom of pages) – a ‘pm9’ [primus] in the top margin of f176r of Cod[ex] Sang[allensis] 839 that is pretty similar to the ‘pm9’ used to number the Voynich Manuscript’s first quire. (The jpeg at the top shows the two overlaid).

Now… Cod Sang 839 [a copy of Nicolas Oresme’s five books of commentary on Aristotle’s Physics] was a copy made in 1459 by the same (according to Scherrer’s 1875 catalogue) scribe who wrote Cod Sang 840 in 1459 and Cod Sang 841 in 1462. Yet the ‘pm9’ appears not in the text, nor even in the scribe’s colophon, but in a table of contents added later, in a different hand.

Thomas concludes (from the back-to-front shape of the ‘4’ digit) that this table-of-contents scribe was not the same person who added the quire numbers to the Voynich: and that’s perfectly reasonable. Yet at the same time, it remains a pretty strong match, which I think in and of itself broadly points to the conclusion Thomas ultimately comes to (which I’ll get to further below).

Incidentally, Cod Sang 841 has an ownership note added by a Johannes [Hans] Lippis:

“Johanes Lippis possessor h. libri bin uff Gais gsin und do hand mir die Heren das buch geben und hand es mir geschenkt.”

It was far from clear to me exactly what this was saying, so I passed it over to the ever-careful Philip Neal, who very kindly and lucidly translated it as follows:-

“I, Johannes Lippis, owner of this book, was at Gais, and there the lords gave me the book and made a present of it to me.”

This seems to be consistent with the Johannes Lippis mentioned as a lawyer in a 1441 charter, who was perhaps representing the St Gallen abbey’s local interest in the town of Gais. Might it have been some kind of sweetener or (dare I say it) bribe? Possibly! Even so, it also seems unlikely to me that Lippis was given all three as a gift, while his clunky text seems rather at odds with the person patiently trawling through Oresme’s commentary to produce an index.

I strongly suspect that all three manuscripts ended up at St Gall simply because they were from a single local hand, and that a fairly senior librarian in St Gall probably added the table of contents. However, you’ll have to make your own mind up in the absence of any better evidence – I emailed St Gallen’s manuscript cataloguer to ask about this, but didn’t get a definitive enough reply either way to confirm or deny this.

Anyway, Thomas carried on searching and found yet more pm9 marginalia in a 1467 music book by Hugo Spechtshart in Esslingen in Southern Germany, this time along with Voynich-like abbreviations for secundus, tertius and quartus… though once again, not as quire numbers.

Putting all the pieces together, Thomas thinks that they all point to a ‘Lake Constance hypothesis’: that the quire numbers were examples of an abbreviatory style that flourished 1450-1500 on the various edges of Lake Constance, where we now see Southern Germany, Switzerland (St Gallen isn’t far away at all), Austria, and even Liechtenstein (pretty much).

Al perfectly reasonable. Of course, rewind the clock 550 years and Switzerland was actually the Confederacy, with the conflict with the Habsburgs in the Swabian War (1499) yet to come. I’m not entirely certain, but it seems that the angsty neighbours around Lake Constance circa 1460 were:-
* the Prince-Bishopric of Constance to the North
* Thurgau to the West
* the Prince-Abbacy of St Gall to the South West
* the Federation of Three Leagues (i.e. the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, the League of God’s House, and the Grey League) to the South-East

[All of which sounds to me more like the turbulent political setting for an Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ space opera novel, but there you go.]

Heaven only knows where all the archives for these ended up! Good luck to Thomas trying to find them! Myself, I’m following another (far simpler) research lead entirely… but more on that later! 😉

Norse cosmology Voynich theory…

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Even though the endless procession of Voynich theories tends to get somewhat wearing after, say, a decade or so of exposure to them, every once in a while a new one pops up that – despite its shabby just-plain-wrongness – you can’t help but have a bit of a soft spot for.

So here’s a cute Voynich theory to pet and coo over, a bit like an abandoned cryptographic kitten: Yve Kupka posted (apparently in 2009) that the nine-rosette page actually corresponds to the nine worlds of Norse mythology.

Basically, Yve claims that the 3×3 rosette array maps on to the nine Norse worlds as follows:-
* Row #1: Svartálfaheimr (Dark Dwarf World), Jötunheimr (Giant World), and Vanaheimr (World of the Vanir)
* Row #2: Múspellsheimr (Fire World), “Middgard” (Manheimr, Human World), and “Hel” (Helheimr, World of the Dead)
* Row #3: Ljósálfheim (Alfheimr, World of the Light Elves), Niflheimr (Ice World), and Asgard (World of the Gods)

Further, the Jötunheimr rosette is claimed to depict a solar calendar (with 13 divisions, it does resemble the 12-division calendar in Q9) and the Niflheimr rosette a moon calendar (with 7 divisions, it does resemble the 8-division calendar in Q9) with everything wrapped in the rainbow bridge Bifrost (i.e. all the pathways connecting the rosettes).

Of course, you may not yourself agree that there’s a rocket ship depicted travelling between Jötunheimr and Manheimr nor that the page also illustrates the interior of a nuclear explosion, but all the same, give the author full marks for lucidity of expression! Enjoy! 🙂

Ultimate Voynichiana: Lynn Thorndike’s 1929 review of Newbold’s book…

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Lynn Thorndike (1882-1965)

In this postmodern, post-macho era, you’re not supposed to have heroes – to the point that most modern kids’ heroes are lame (Ash in Pokemon, Mickey Mouse, Mario, Ben 10, dare I say Harry Potter for most of the books?). Who now doesn’t honestly prefer antiheroes like Team Rocket, Bugs Bunny, Wario, Kevin 11, Voldemort?

Well, I don’t care much for trends: my #1 historian hero is Lynn Thorndike. Hence, as a Voynich manuscript researcher, I always wanted to know what he thought of this troublesome artefact: and while trawling through his (1929) “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” in 2008 was delighted to discover that Thorndike thought Newbold’s claimed decryption was, frankly, nonsense.

But now I can go one better: on the Roger Bacon wikipedia page, someone recently edited in a link to a 1929 review Thorndike wrote in American Historical Review Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jan., 1929), pp. 317-319 on JSTOR. Oooh, I tell ya, that Mr Thorndike didn’t think that his late friend Professor Newbold would have wanted to see his notes published like that; and he wasn’t at all impressed that it went out under the august auspices of the University of Pennsylvania.

You also get a sense of Thorndike’s frustration at constantly being asked his opinion on “an anonymous manuscript of dubious value”. If I had stepped out of the Tardis to ask him about the Voynich Manuscript circa 1929, he might very well have grouchily punched my lights out.

“I should like to be able to force every one who asks me my opinion of the Voynich manuscript to read [Newbold’s] book from cover to cover. I think it will either kill or cure.”

Even though Thorndike’s review doesn’t go so far as to offer his own opinion, he does ironically predict the whole sad demented future of Voynich research, for which we should perhaps be grateful:-

“I would offer the ironic suggestion that the illegible writing is only a blind, and the the pictures should be interpreted symbolically, were I not afraid that some self-constituted successor to Newbold would take the suggestion seriously.”

Now ain’t that the truth, brothers and sisters of the faith? Oh, well! *sigh*

An entirely different “HC Reynolds”…

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Just a short note: if you search PapersPast (the online newspaper archive for New Zealand) for “H C Reynolds”, you get a 1926 mention in the Waiapu Church Gazette (no, I’m not making it up) of someone with that name from Wellington taking a Theological exam. The more you search, the more you find about this Reverend H Reynolds who ended up as an Anglican missionary in Melanesia before (and indeed during) the Second World War, and whose name was often written “H V C Reynolds”. But then the trail goes cold… so could this be our elusive man, hidden from view in the Solomon Islands, Aoba, and Lower Hutt? (Not to be confused with ‘JabbaThe’, of course).

…errrr, alas no. PapersPast archives peter out after WWII, reminding us once again that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. A web-based follow-up search reveals that this Reynolds was actually Henry [Harry] Vivian Collett Reynolds (b. Sep 1902), whose years of work as a Melanesian missionary brought him recognition. So, although he was someone of the right age, location and (mostly) name, he was also definitely not our missing man. Oh well!

It turns out that there’s a decent biographical entry on HVCR in the huge Blain Biographical Directory of Anglican clergy in the South Pacific (2011 edition) (though note that the PDF formatting is a bit haphazard if you try to copy-and-paste-from it). And just in case someone strolls past here looking for more information on this Venerable Archdeacon H V C Reynolds, I’ve put together all my notes here: H V C Reynolds. There’s bound to be much more on him in the Southern Cross Log, but I stopped when I’d hit my limit for researching Anglican Melanesian missionaries, I’m sure you understand. 😉

2012 Arabic Voynich theory…

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OK, I’ve just received a comment on a post I once made on a 2006 Jewish Arabic Voynich theory: it was left by systems analyst Joachim Dathe, directing us all to his new theory on the Voynich – basically, he has written a little programme (“eva2arab.exe”) that transforms EVA-style Voynichese (Dathe refers to the “Yamamichi” transcription, but I guess he probably means the Takahashi transcription) into phonetic Arabic, a text that Google Translate (etc) is apparently able to translate.

Here’s a link to the table of letter correspondences that Dathe has put together. As normal, there are some fairly obvious problems:
* Given that Arabic is an abjad [vowel-less] script, it’s a bit odd why there’s an a, two e’s and an o in there.
* Given that Arabic has 28 letters, it’s a bit odd that only 15 or so appear in the table.

All the same, Dathe claims to have answers to all these questions in that the text output by his reverse Romanization is a kind of phoneticized Arabic, and that he thinks “well educated Arabs would not have big problems to cope with that stuff”: more on that here.

The proof of this pudding is, alas, mostly evaporated in the cooking: Dathe’s automated attempt at translation of Voynichese text (from f58r?) remains a long way from what just about any cryptologer would deem at all convincing. But please be your own judge, as frankly I’m a bit bored of receiving affronted emails. I’m sure most of you know exactly what I mean. Oh well! 🙁

2011 Polish Voynich paper…

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Here’s a 2011 paper by Grzegorz Jaskiewicz of the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology at Warsaw University of Technology, entitled “Analysis of Letter Frequency Distribution in the Voynich Manuscript“.

Essentially, Jaskiewicz used some Java code to screen-scrape a mini-corpus of text from 23 different languages via Wikipedia’s Random Article button, and then compared each of them with Voynichese (he used Glen Claston’s Voynich-101 transcription): cutting to the chase, the top five matches were Moldavian, Karakalpak, Kabardian Circassian, Kannada, and Thai.

Obviously, if you’re a Voynich cipher true believer (or even a Voynich hoax false believer), none of this will cause you to lose any sleep. Similarly, if you’re a Jacques Guy-esque Chinese language supporter (and Jacques Guy himself isn’t, Voynich trivia fans), you’ll probably be patting yourself hard enough on the back to send your dentures flying.

Personally, I think there’s something utterly wrong with the Chinese hypothesis, and indeed about this kind of experiment. In effect, what people are doing isn’t comparing Voynichese with a language, but instead comparing a clunky transcription of Voynichese with a clunky transcription of a language. Wherever a given language fails to be captured by ‘pure’ Romanized letters, it almost inevitably ends up being expressed using paired language groups – letters and modifiers. I’ll give some examples from, let’s say, Jaskiewicz’s top 5 matches:

First example: Kannada. Its 49-letter alphabet includes “half-letters” which combine to form a huge number of compound letters known as “vattakshara”.

Second example: Kabardian Circassian. This is a language shoehorned into the Cyrillic alphabet by forming compounds of letters to create a single sounds (one such compound is four letters long).

Third example: Moldovan and its various transcriptions form a hugely political issue – I can’t even display the Moldovan Wikipedia page in Internet Explorer, that’s how bad it gets. I can only presume it has ended up in some kind of 16-bit Unicode limbo.

Fourth example: Thai. This has 44 consonants (“phayanchaná”), and 15 vowel symbols (“sàrà”) that further combine into 28 or more compound vowel forms, as well as four tone marks. It’s a complicated compound transcription.

The point I’m making (in a somewhat laboured way) is that what Voynichese shares with these languages is a clunky transcription that does not naturally capture the essence of the language itself (and the stroke-based EVA transcription is probably even worse for this). Yet for Voynichese, I argue that this is not a linguistic feature but a cryptographic feature: even though Voynichese letters like “o” and “a” are intended to resemble vowels, their statistical structure is that of modifiers – “4o” / “ol” / “al” / “aiir” / “aiiv” all statistically operate as compound letters.

So ultimately, I have to say that I find such language comparisons futile and misguided: they are almost always built on an insufficient grasp of both the nature of Voynichese and the nature of languages and transcriptions simultaneously. What’s behind this isn’t innately bad science or bad history, just an unrefined (and actually rather primitive) human desire to understand things by trying stuff out. Yes, for all the newmedia technology sheen and stats smarts, it’s no more than hitting a rock with a hammer and hoping for a perfect diamond to fall out. But yuh ain’t gonna get no diamonds that way this week, bubba. 🙁

H C Reynolds – we now have a date of birth!

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Cheryl Bearden & I have managed to eke out lots more tiny details in our hunt for the elusive merchant seaman H C Reynolds, including his precise date of birth! And I’ve also exchanged some intriguing emails with the Anonymous Lady who put forward the ID card in the first place. But all in good time…

First things first: given that the three ships Reynolds worked on during his 18 months at sea were all owned by the Union Steam Ship Company (a sprawling Australasian shipping company known as the “Southern Octopus”, and at one point the largest private employer in New Zealand), I thought we might be able to find something in the USSCo’s archives. Having eventually tracked down the bulk of them to the City Archives of Wellington City Council, a very helpful archivist managed to find a short record relating to H C Reynolds in AF019:1:1 (“Pursers records [1-4] – 1879-1925“), which she noted seemed to be “the log book [listing] pursers holiday leave”. It said:-

Reynolds, H.C.:

Appt [appointed] ass [assistant] purser: Manuka 12/11/17

Jnr [Junior] Hobart Branch

50 pound Birthday 8/[2]/1900

Asig [Assigned] Koonya 15/4/18

Shore mate £75 as from 1/11/17

Resigned

Hence, I think we can now be reasonably sure that the H Charles Reynolds on the ID card was born in Hobart, Tasmania on the 8th February 1900. Curiously, this is also precisely the same date of birth listed on ancestry.com for the Horace Charles Reynolds who was born in Triabunna, Tasmania (a mere 50 miles away): which you have to say is either an extraordinary coincidence, exactly the same person, or crossed archival wires. (I’m not offering an opinion here – I prefer to find evidence rather than inflict yet more speculation upon you.)

Unfortunately, a more detailed follow-up search of AF020:1:1 (“Record of pursers services – 1883- 1919“), AF050:3:1 (“Register of employees (shore staff), no. 1-699 – 1909-1976“) and particularly AF050:4:1 (“Register of employees (shore staff), no. 700- 1399 – 1909-1976“) which “covers the year a shore staff member joined service between the years 1917-1919” failed to find even a single mention of Reynolds. Which is, of course, a great shame. 🙁

I also recently discovered PapersPast, an online archive of New Zealand newspapers: though it doesn’t have quite as flexible a search interface as Australia’s Trove, it’s still pretty good. So, now that we know Reynolds was appointed to the Manuka on the 12th November 1917, I tried trawling through the shipping columns on the editions around that date to see if he was mentioned at all (there was often a “Personal” section that mentioned appointments etc). And indeed, in the Evening Post of 14th November 1917, the shipping column noted, plausibly enough, that:

Mr H. Reynolds has joined a vessel as assistant wireless operator in place of Mr. R. K. Lewis.

However, I was unable (as always, it would seem) to find any other obvious references to him there. Cheryl Bearden was also unable to find any reference to R K Lewis. Once again, it seems that archives are mainly characterized by their solid brick wall construction, with special internal brick walls for researchers to conveniently hit their heads against repeatedly. 🙁

I also recently found an online “Index to Vessels Arrived, 1837 – 1925” in the NSW archives, listing all the Koonya’s arrivals in Sydney, which corresponded very closely to the manifests Cheryl Bearden already found, except for a missing 8th December 1918 arrival. This turned out to be another “Chas Reynolds” signature:-

* 08 Dec 1918, Koonya, arr Sydney NSW (from Melbourne). Chas Reynolds, 18 years, born Hobart, Purser.

This inspired Cheryl to look once again at the same archives whereupon she intriguingly discovered that while H C Reynolds was filling in on the RMS Niagara, a certain “M Reynolds” was working on the Manuka:-

* 02 Apr 1918, Manuka, arr Sydney NSW (from Hobart). M Reynolds, 17 years, born Tasmania, Boy.

Now, H C Reynolds couldn’t sensibly be on two ships at the same time: so could this possibly be HCR’s younger brother, covering for HCR while HCR was away on the big mail ship? If that’s right, then we may possibly now have another Reynolds to go looking for – one hopefully not quite as elusive as HCR has proved to be so far. However, Cheryl Bearden was yet again unable to find any other reference to an “M Reynolds”, so this too would seem to be a dead end (for now). 🙁

Incidentally, one thing that has bothered me was how H C Reynolds managed to get fast-tracked to a full purser’s job at such a young age (18). There seems a good chance that he had some assistance, some insider track or external accreditation to recommend him to the management. So, I dug up a couple of additional connections between Reynolds people and USSCo, one of which might possibly offer this link:-

(1) There was a well-respected Captain Reynolds, who sailed numerous ships (such as the SS Glaucus and the labour vessel Helena) around Wellington & Adelaide. Here’s a news report from the Evening Post of Captain Reynolds arriving from Surprise Island in 1917.
(2) A company called “T A Reynolds & Co” or “T A Reynolds & Partners” in Hobart bought some ships from USSCo but then sold them back to them later that year (1896). T A Reynolds were “loosely associated with USSCo” and had the contract to build the Strahan to Zeehan Railway, according to this page.

All very interesting, but sadly not even close to helpful as yet. Ah well, I’ll keep on chipping away at the mountain…

Finally, as I mentioned at the top I’ve exchanged some intriguing emails with the Anonymous Lady, who (I think it fair to say) has quite a lot on her mind, with the Unknown Man merely one of many things she is trying to resolve. She’s the person who owns the H C Reynolds ID card, and it was also her who sent that off to Professor Maciej Henneberg. As far as many of the open questions on the ID card go, she noted that:

“The underside corner of the photo was signed and matched that shown on the front. Initially I tried to remove the photo to see if any other information was there,but it was stuck down so hard it would not budge. I thought something this old would give way easily. Glues used in 1918 would be inferior to what’s around now surely? Also HCR photo has the appearance of a dimple or cleft on the chin. I almost did’nt send it due to that, however Maciej found on examination that it was only a mark on the photo. I don’t know if it was placed there deliberately. The back of the I.D.,where it states “Port of……….is empty. His status…Division 1 …….2 ……..3 is unmarked and is unsigned by the Immigration Inspector. If the I.D. was dodgy though, why not just fill it in?”

In a separate email, she mentioned that her father had somehow implied that Reynolds was some kind of artist. Interestingly, I discovered a pavement artist called Ernest Reynolds in some old Australian newspapers, who seemed a curious mix of talent, chutzpah and delusion: he called himself “King of the Pavement Artists”, and traced his lineage back on his father’s side to none other than Joshua Reynolds. There’s even a 1908 interview with him reproduced on a blog here.

In 1933, the same Ernest Reynolds also claimed to have invented a car that could travel at 100 miles an hour over poor ground [I checked AusPat, but he appears not to have patented this]. Also in 1933, he was living in Cassidy Street, Kalgoorlie, way over in Western Australia.

Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. More as it happens…

Alternative Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page…

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Here’s what I think the Voynich Wikipedia page ought to look like. Enjoy! 🙂

* * * * * * *

History of a Mystery

Once upon a time (in 1912) in a crumbling Jesuit college near Rome, an antiquarian bookseller called Wilfrid Voynich bought a mysterious enciphered handwritten book. Despite its length (240 pages) it was an ugly, badly-painted little thing, for sure: but its strange text and drawings caught his imagination — and that was that.

Having quickly convinced himself that it could only have been written by one particular smart-arse medieval monk by the name of Roger Bacon, Voynich then spent the rest of his life trying to persuade gullible and/or overspeculative academics to ‘prove’ that his hunch was right. All of which amounted to a waste of twenty years, because it hadn’t even slightly been written by Bacon. D’oh!

Oh, so you’d like to see some pictures of his ‘Voynich Manuscript’, would you? Well… go ahead, knock yourself out. First up, here’s some of its ‘Voynichese’ script, which people only tend to recognize if they had stopped taking their meds a few days previously:

A nice clear example of Voynichese

Secondly, here’s one of the Voynich Manuscript’s many herbal drawings, almost all of which resemble mad scientist random hybrids of bits of other plants:-

Finally, here’s a close-up of one of its bizarre naked ladies (researchers call them ‘nymphs’, obviously trying not to mix business and pleasure), in this case apparently connected up to some odd-looking plumbing / tubing. Yup, the right word is indeed ‘bizarre’:

voynich f77v central nymph Q13 and Voynich balneology sources...?

Did any of that help at all? No, probably not. So perhaps you can explain it now? No, I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, none of us can either. *sigh*

Back to the History Bit

Anyhow, tucked inside the manuscript was a letter dated 1665 from Johannes Marcus Marci in Prague, and addressed to the well-known delusional Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Marci’s letter said that he was giving the manuscript to Kircher both because of their friendship and because of Kircher’s reputation for being able to break any cipher. The manuscript seems then to have entered the Jesuit archives, which is presumably why the Jesuit college near Rome had it to sell to Wilfrid Voynich several centuries later, just as in all the best mystery novels.

But hold on a minute… might Wilfrid Voynich have forged his manuscript? Actually, a few years back researchers diligently dug up several other 17th century letters to Kircher almost certainly referring to the same thing, all of which makes the Voynich Manuscript at least 200 years older than Wilfrid Voynich. So no, he couldn’t have forged it, not without using Doc Brown’s flux capacitor. (Or possibly the time machine depicted in Quire 13. Unless that’s impossible.)

Incidentally, one of those other letters was from an obscure Prague alchemist called Georg Baresch, who seems to have wasted twenty or so years of his life pondering this curious object before giving it to Marci. So it would seem that twenty lost years is the de facto standard duration for Voynich research. Depressing, eh?

So, Where Did Baresch Get It From?

Well… Marci had heard it said that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had bought the manuscript for the ultra-tidy sum of 600 gold ducats, probably enough to buy a small castle. Similarly, Wilfrid Voynich discovered an erased signature for Sinapius (i.e. Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, Rudolf II’s Imperial Distiller) on its front page. You can usefully assemble all these boring fragments of half-knowledge into a hugely unconvincing chain of ownership going all the way back to 1600-1610 or so, that would look something not entirely unlike this:-

Which is a bit of a shame, because in 2009 the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum was radiocarbon dated to 1404-1438 with 95% confidence. Hence it still has a gap of roughly 150 years on its reconstructed CV that we can’t account for at all – you know, the kind of hole that leads to those awkward pauses at job interviews, right before they shake your hand and say “We’ll let you know…”

Hence, The Real Question Is…

Fast-forward to 2012, and Wilfrid Voynich’s manuscript has ended up in New Haven at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yet many Voynichologists seemed to have learnt little from all that has gone before, in that – just as with Wilfrid himself – they continue to waste decades of their life trying to prove that it is an [insert-theory-here] written by [insert-historical-figure-here].

If repeatedly pressed, such theorists tend to claim that:
* the ‘quest’ is everything;
* it is better to travel than to arrive; and even
* cracking the Voynich might somehow spoil its perfect inscrutability.
All of which, of course, makes no real sense to anyone but a Zen Master: but if their earnest wish is to remain armchair mountaineers with slippers for crampons, then so be it.

Yet ultimately, if you strip back the inevitable vanity and posturing, the only genuine question most people have at this point is:

How can I crack the Voynich Manuscript and become an eternal intellectual hero?

The answer is: unless you’re demonstrably a polymathic Intellectual History Renaissance Man or Woman with high-tensile steel cable for nerves, a supercomputer cluster the size of Peru for a brain, and who just happens to have read every book ever written on medieval/Renaissance history and examined every scratchy document in every archive, your chances are basically nil. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Honestly, it’s a blatant exaggeration but near enough to the truth true: so please try to get over it, OK?

Look, people have been analyzing the Voynich with computers since World War Two and still can’t reliably interpret a single letter – not a vowel, consonant, digit, punctuation mark, nothing. [A possible hyphen is about as good as it gets, honestly.] Nobody’s even sure if the spaces between words are genuinely spaces, if Voynichese ‘words’ are indeed actual words. *sigh*

Cryptologically, we can’t even properly tell what kind of an enciphering system was used – and if you can’t get that far, it should be no great surprise that applying massive computing power will yield no significant benefit. Basically, you can’t force your way into a castle with a battering ram if you don’t even know where its walls are. For the global community of clever-clogs codebreakers, can you even conceive of how embarrassing a failure this is, hmmm?

So, How Do We Crack It, Then?

If we do end up breaking the Voynich’s cipher, it looks unlikely that it will have been thanks to the superhuman efforts of a single Champollion-like person. Rather, it will most likely have come about from a succession of small things that get uncovered that all somehow cumulatively add up into some much bigger things. You could try to crack it yourself but… really, is there much sense in trying to climb Everest if everyone in the army of mountaineers that went before you has failed to work out even where base camp should go? It’s not hugely clear that even half of them even were looking at the right mountain.

All the same, there are dozens of open questions ranging across a wide set of fields (e.g. codicology, palaeography, statistical analysis, cryptanalysis, etc), each of which might help to move our collective understanding of the Voynich Manuscript forward if we could only answer them. For example…
* Can we find a handwriting match for the marginalia? [More details here & here]
* Can we find a reliable way of reading the wonky marginalia (particularly on f116v, the endmost page)? [More details here]
* Can we find another document using the same unusual quire numbering scheme (‘abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals’)? [More details here].
* Precisely how do state machine models of the Voynich’s two ‘Currier language’s differ? Moreover, why do they differ? [More details here]
* etc

The basic idea here is that if you can’t do big at all, do us all a favour and try to do small well instead. But nobody’s listening: and so it all goes on, year after year. What a waste of time. 🙁

A Warning From History

Finally: I completely understand that you’re a busy person with lots on your mind, so the chances are you’ll forget almost all of the above within a matter of minutes. Possibly even seconds. And that’s OK. But if you can only spare sufficient mental capacity to remember a seven-word soundbite from this whole dismal summary, perhaps they ought to be:

Underestimate the Voynich Manuscript at your peril!

Now ain’t that the truth!?

Massachusetts Voynich talk this Saturday…

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The Western Gateway Heritage State Park in North Adams, MA, describes itself as:

A former railroad yard, this urban park uses historical artifacts and exhibits to bring to life the controversial and danger-filled construction of the Hoosac Tunnel, one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century.

What’s there not to love about that? But as if celebrating the Hoosac Tunnel wasn’t already more than enough, at 3pm this Saturday (3rd March 2012) they’re giving an “illustrated lecture” on the Voynich Manuscript at their Visitors Museum. This is part of their regular series of ‘Mystery Night’ talks: last week’s was on the fabulous Amber Room.

No word yet on who’s giving the talk or if it’s just Wikipedia on a projector *sigh*, but let’s hope for the best, eh? 😉 If you’re not too far away and do drop by, let us all know how it went!

Beale Papers trivia update…

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I thought I’d take a brief sideways step over to the Beale Papers, a cipher mystery I haven’t mentioned in a while here. Most of you probably already know about my Big Fat List of Voynich Novels, expanding almost monthly with yet more Voynich-appropriating titles. But is there much fiction based around other well-known cipher mysteries?

Well… I recently bought a copy of Tom Harper’s (2007) “Lost Temple” solely because of the Phaistos Disk lookalike overlaying the front cover… but that was as close as it got. It’s actually quite a good read, with the first Minoan half touching on the same kind of sources as Gavin Menzies “The Lost Empire of Atlantis” (but more believable), and the second half moving onto Greek mythology, Achilles’ shield, and Harper’s version of Unobtainium. Sorry Tom, the house rule here is: no cipher, no review. 😉

Which reminds me that at some point, I really need to read Stephen King’s “The Colorado Kid”, as that gives every impression of having been inspired by the Somerton Man “Tamam Shud” case.

And here’s another novel that does count: Alexis Tappendorf and the Search for Beale’s Treasure (Volume 1), by Becca C. Smith.

[…] Upon arriving in Virginia, Alexis discovers that for the last hundred years the townspeople of Summervale and Bedford County have been searching for a lost treasure buried somewhere in the area by a man named Thomas J. Beale. More importantly, the only clues to finding the fortune are in the form of cryptograms, codes that, when properly translated, tell the exact location of the bounty. In a heart-pounding race to Beale’s Treasure, Alexis and her new friend, Olivia Boyd, join forces to solve the Beale ciphers before the dangerous family, the Woodmores, beat them to it…

So, yet another cipher mystery gets subsumed into the Young Adult Fiction cultural Borg. (No, I still haven’t managed to finish The Cadence of Gypsies, or The Book of Blood & Shadow.) What will be next, Alexis Tappendorf and the Vaguely Heretical Rohonc Codex? [*shudders in a sudden cold draft*]

However, such cultural flimflam may well all be in vain, because – according to the webcomic ‘I Can Barely Draw’, the Beale Cipher has finally been solved. Apparently, it reads: “I accidentally the rest of it“. Well, well, well – who’d have thunk it, eh? 🙂