The Voynich Manuscript’s paragraph stars, explained…?

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I’ve long wondered about what’s going on in the Voynich Manuscript’s final (and, many think, ‘boringest’) quire, Quire #20: I summarized a lot of current Q20 research here last month. But just what Q20’s paragraph markers – whether they turn out to be stars, comets, or flowers – are remains a mystery… basically, why are they there at all?

You see, because each star sits at the start of a paragraph and (as Elmar Vogt helpfully pointed out) many are arranged on pages in what seem to be repetitive x-o-x-o-x-o patterns, it seems fairly safe to conclude that these are mostly decorative, and hence there is probably nothing much “written in the stars”. Of course, anyone who desperately wants to go a-huntin’ for a biliteral ciphertext hidden there is more than welcome to try (go ahead, feel free to knock yourself out), but I don’t honestly think you’ll squeeze much juice out of that lemon, sorry. And wipe that sour look off your face, OK? 🙂

Yet even so, the brutal fact remains that the paragraph stars are there: and given that pretty much everything else in the VMs mutely screams of carefully-executed disguised intention, I think we should expect there to have been a perfectly good reason for their existence, however mundane that might actually be. So probably the best question to be asking is: what function (however minor) could these stars be performing? What did they help the author(s) do?

Until a few days ago, this was pretty much the brick wall my chain of reasoning had hit: but then I read an interesting post by Rich SantaColoma on the ‘weirdo’ red glyphs on f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript). In particular, Rich points out the striking similarity between the first “bird glyph” (the first symbol of the second paragraph in the VMs) and marginal paragraph markers in some 16th Century Spanish manuscripts, the Codex Mendoza [1541/2], the Aubin Codex [started in 1567] and the [probably fake!] Codex Cardona, while in the comments to Rich’s page, Ernest also mentioned the Codex Osuna [1565] and the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.

Ultimately, Rich’s reasoning comes down to this: in these Spanish manuscripts, the glyph is simply a decorative “Y”-shape, short for “Ydem”, which is used in lists pretty much the same way as both “item” and “ibidem” (which we still use in its differently-shortened form “ibid.“), so it seems reasonable to infer that this is what’s happening  on f1r of the VMs too.

All fair enough: but regardless of whether Rich’s idea turns out to be right or wrong (and it’s desperately hard to build up a really convincing case on a single instance of a single shape), what struck me most was the parallel between the paragraph stars and these similarly itemized lists. (But no, I’m definitely not proposing that Q20 is a Powerpoint presentation from the Renaissance).

So… might each star simply be an embellished / disguised “y”, short for (say) “ydem” / “ytem” / “idem” / “ibidem” / “item”? Actually, I think yes: look at the following picture (which contains all the paragraph stars from f104v), and I’ll show you how I think the “y” was hidden in the first four stars (highlighted in bright red), make up your own mind for the rest:-

Now tell me the second best explanation for these! And yes, I do know that some of the (probably later) pages in Q20 have tail-less stars, but the basic hidden-in-plain-sight steganographic conceit was probably getting a bit boring by then, 300+ stars later. 🙂

New Voynich A/B hypothesis…

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More than 30 years ago, ex-US military codebreaker Prescott Currier was looking at the Voynich Manuscript, when he noticed not only that the handwriting changed (though he was uncertain how many different scribes were involved), but also that the language itself (or, more precisely, the rules governing how Voynichese letters meshed with each other) changed. He called the two major Voynichese ‘dialects’ thus identified “A” and “B” (though it turns out that quite a few pages are subtly intermediate between A and B).

Hence one large shadow hanging over any discussion of Voynichese is the issue of why such a clearly constructed language / system as Currier A (which was almost certainly written before Currier B) needed to be modified to make Currier B. After all, as Jerry Pournelle used to say every couple of months in Byte magazine, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it“, surely?

And yet it seems that the Voynich’s author did fix it: so, might the presence of statistical differences be a clue that Currier A was in some way broken? To me, this implies that we should try to quantify and model the differences between A and B pages, so that we can see what aspects of A were modified to make B pages, just in case this exposes some subtle weakness of the A language. Basically, what flaws in the A language were the A→B hacks trying to cover up?

As part of this whole process, I’ve recently been looking closely at the ‘l’ character in EVA transcriptions of the Voynich Manuscript, and what the different treatment of ‘l’ characters on A and B pages might be able to tell us. It’s well-known that ‘l’ is very commonly preceded both by ‘o’ and by ‘a’ – but does this behaviour change much between A pages and B pages?

According to my online Javascript analysis tool:-

  • In A pages, ‘l’ is preceded by ‘o’ 72.7% of the time, and is preceded by ‘a’ 22.9% of the time.
  • In B pages, ‘l’ is preceded by ‘o’ 43.7% of the time, and is preceded by ‘a’ 29.0% of the time.
  • Freestanding ‘l’ (i.e. ‘l’s not preceded by ‘a’ or ‘o’) occur 118 times in A pages, but 1706 times in B pages.
  • ‘ol’ usually appears preceded by a space (97% of the time in A pages, 96% of the time in B pages)
  • Freestanding ‘l’ usually appears preceded by a space (90% in A, 95% in B).
  • The summed counts for ‘ol’ and freestanding ‘l’ remains roughly the same (5.1% in A, 4.7% in B)

What is most interesting about this to me is that it seems to be saying that ‘ol’ and freestanding ‘l’ function in very similar ways, but in the transition from A to B, freestanding ‘l’ seems to have replaced ‘ol’ in about 37.5% of cases. That is, it seems to me that ‘ol’ and ‘l’ (when not preceded by ‘a’) might well represent exactly the same token: which is to say that, al’s aside, ol = l.

So, according to my current forensic reconstruction, ol and al were verbose tokens in the A pages, but because ol appeared so often (4.57%) in A pages (thus bloating the size of the ciphertext), the author finessed this in B pages. By replacing many ol’s with l, ol’s percentage went down to 2.67% while freestanding l went up to 1.66% in B (relative to 0.27% in A).

I’m pretty sure that Glen Claston’s concern about the bloating effect of verbose cipher was shared by the VMs’ author, and that at least some of the changes between A and B were done in order to tighten up the output. Why else fix it if it wasn’t broken?

Possibly Voynich-themed Japanese music (etc)…

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Here’s another (possibly?) Voynich Manuscript-themed musical composition on YouTube you probably haven’t heard of. The notes that go with it say:-

Circle: N-tone
Album: Side material “FLOW”
Artist: ziki_7 [Dust_Box_49] (which seems to be some kind of Japanese musical fanzine?)
Original: ヴワル魔法図書館 (which is Japanese for “Voile, the Magic Library”, whatever that means)

Make of it what you will – it reminded me in places of semi-ambient computer game soundtracks circa 2001, which I don’t think is a completely bad starting point. Enjoy! 🙂

“Silk Road prostitution” Voynich theory…

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One historical cipher mystery I haven’t really put a lot of time into is the “Oak Island Mystery” or the “Money Pit Mystery” (perhaps I’ll post about that another day). One reasonably well-known Oak Island researcher is Keith Ranville, a Cree “self-taught researcher born in Manitoba“, who in 2005 “relocated to Nova Scotia to further research and advance his theories on the subject“: if you’re interested, here’s a fairly extensive description of Ranville’s main 2007 Money Pit decryption claim.

But now he’s crossed over into our world, and this month (September 2010) put forward his own tentative interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript posted in his “Oak Island Treasure Mystery Canadian Journal of New Research (Latest News)“. Which is that the Voynich might possibly be a Silk Road pimp’s log book / accounting book, artistically camouflaged to resemble pictures of spices and drugs (the herbal pages) and persian rug designs (the circular designs on the nine-rosette page), with individual prostitute availability somehow encoded into the zodiac pages.

As Keith Ranville notes, “Al Capone had a bookie accountant” to track all his various criminal activities (that was how Capone was eventually caught) and “maybe this is the same kind of principle going on with this elaborate voynich manuscript?” You’ll have to make up your own mind on this: don’t shoot me, I’m merely the runner messenger…

The 14th European Skeptics Conference – does it really exist?

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The next European Skeptics Conference starts in Budapest in a few days’ time (17th-19th September 2010), and features Klaus Schmeh giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript.

Though Klaus has invested a lot of effort into building up a hardline skeptical position on VMs theories (basically, that more or less everything written on it is either pseudoscience or pseudohistory), I personally don’t think this is particularly fair. Compared to the frankly fantasmagorical literature on the Phaistos Disk or even the wistfully nationalistic fancies floating around the Rohoncz Codex, I’d actually say that the majority of VMs theories do tend to rest on a far less rumpled bed of historical evidence and tortuous historical reasoning (if you put the alien Nazi Atlantean end-times theories to one side).

Yet it is also true that VMs theories also often share the same historical methodological flaw (some people would call it an “antipattern”). What I call the “Big Man” fallacy is the conviction that the only way of constructing a convincing explanation for the VMs would be to weave it into the narrative of a well-known historical (but occult- or cryptography-tinged) personality. As examples of this, you could quickly point to theories name-checking Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Trithemius,  John Dee, Edward Kelley, Francis Bacon and perhaps even (I’ll say it so that Klaus doesn’t have to) Antonio Averlino.

Of course, the awkward truth about the Renaissance is that for every one half-decent such historical candidate, there were probably a hundred better qualified ones long lost in the fog of time: so the odds are always strongly against anyone succeeding in taking on the Voynich in the absence of proper scientific / codicological data to build upon.

Perhaps this marks the line between cynicism and skepticism I mentioned a few weeks ago: whereas a cynic dismisses any such speculative exercise as a unsupportable waste of effort, a skeptic realizes that the challenge of acquiring proper, revealing historical information is always going to be significant, and so struggles to retain a core of optimism. Is getting to such an extraordinary end line worth precariously balancing optimism and pessimism for? I think so, but… opinions differ! 🙂

Owl House Voynich tattoo gag…

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Here’s something you don’t see every day: an online comic with a Voynich tattoo gag. The Owl House’s theme is “problem solving and paranormal investigation“, which are apparently (take note, Scooby Doo fans) “not mutually exclusive“.

Of course, until we can actually read the VMs, the real problem with having a Voynichese tattoo is that – unlike “Mum” or “I ♥ Chantelle” – it might be saying just about anything. Imagine finding out that your prized “otedy dal daiin cheey” tattoo translates to “Lick My Hairy Butt”… perhaps it would be better to stick to a dolphin instead, eh? 🙂

Occitan herbals and recipe books…

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It’s time for a new Voynich research direction!

Thanks to Benedek Lang’s “Unlocked Books”, I’m starting to realise that I’ve perhaps spent too long thinking solely about codicology of the single text, when what is often as important is the ‘codicological context’ – i.e. the collection of other (but presumably conceptually related in some way) texts that were bound alongside by the owners and users of the text. Just because the Voynich Manuscript has come to us without any such informative context doesn’t automatically mean it would have been “so ronery” in its very early life too.

So… given that the Voynich Manuscript is (quite probably) a 15th century herbal / astronomical / astrological / recipe manuscript with both Occitan marginalia [the zodiac months] and possibly Occitan marginalia [f17r, f66r, f116v] in another hand, I suspect that the place to hunt for external codicological clues would surely be late medieval / early modern Occitan Provençal herbals and recipe books, for the simple reason that of all the documents we could think of, these are surely most likely to have shared one or more owners with the VMs, right?

And so I would like to thank Professoressa Maria Sofia Corradini at the University of Pisa for putting such a terrific amount of effort into collecting, editing and publishing a whole set of late medieval Occitan / Provençal herbals and recipe books back in 2004: here are the online versions of her edited texts (click on the headings below “Letteratura medico-farmaceutica” on the left to get started). The works she lists are:-

  • The Princeton Ricettario
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 1r-9v;14r-18r; 21v-23v; 31v-36r.
  • The Auch Ricettari
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 15r-19v; ff. 71r-79v.
  • The Chantilly Ricettari
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 33r-37v; f. 53r; ff. 59v-62r; f. 71v.
  • Las vertutz de las herbas
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 15v-21v.
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 2r-14v.
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 46r-52v.   [in verse]
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 53v-59v.  [in prose]
  • Letter from Hippocrates to Caesar
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 9v-14r (seconda parte); ff. 23v-31v (prima parte).
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 67r-68v; 72v-73r; 77r-v;69r-71r.
  • The Thesaur de pauvres
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 1r-22r.
  • Appendix to the Thesaur de pauvres
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 26v-33r.
  • Rimedi per le febbri 
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 22v-26v.

Which is to say that while there are only three actual Occitan sources (Princeton, Auch, and Chantilly), each one comprises multiple documents, which presumably were copied from various sources (possibly overlapping, but let’s not get hung up on stemmatics here). In her preface, Prof.ssa Corradini notes the link between the medical schools around Montpellier and Toulouse and vernacular copies of texts, a local tradition to which these three books of Occitan would seem to attest.

Unfortunately, if you’re hoping at this point I’m going to include images or even some more detailed bibliographic information for these three items, you are sadly out of luck. I couldn’t find MS 330 at the Musée de Condé; the archive at Auch seems to have no online access at all; and the arcane front-end to Princeton’s legacy manuscript database quite defeated my search for MS Garrett 80. Perhaps someone else will do better in finding any of these?

Incidentally, the only secondary literature Prof.ssa Corradini mentions is a 1956 book by Clovis Brunel called “Recettes médicales alchimiques et astrologiques du XVe siècle en langue vulgaire des Pyrénées [beginning “Aysso es lo libre que fec lo mege Arcemis”]. Publiées [from the manuscript I 4066 of the Archives départementales du Gers]” according to the British Library, which has a copy (thank heavens), shelfmark 12238.ee.4/30.

Meanwhile, according to this page of links to related researchers, 54 years later “I[laria] Zamuner (Univ. di Chieti) is cataloguing all scientific texts in medieval Occitan, a task that will bring the work of Cl[ovis] Brunel up to date“. Central to this study is the Provençal vernacular version of the Secretum Secretorum, the one mentioned by Benedek Lang  (p.61) which helped set this whole train of thought in motion for me. But apparently J. Rodríguez Guerrero is also looking at some unpublished Occitania-area alchemical manuscripts from this period, which might also be very interesting; and there’s possibly more from Professor Peter Ricketts, too.

Might there be some kind of Occitan repository for scans of these documents, as part of the RIALTO project or something? I’ll ask around, but it may take some time to determine… please let me know or leave a comment here if you happen to find out! 🙂

Voynich pub meet reminder…

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Just a quick reminder that the next Voynich pub meet is set for 4pm this very Sunday (i.e. 5th September 2010) at the Prospect of Whitby, 57 Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SH. Though plenty of Voynicheros are hoping to come along, as always we’ll just have to see who manages to get there on the day…

Incidentally, if for some random reason – you know, pub cat trapped beneath an unexploded WWII bomb, that kind of thing – the Prospect of Whitby turns out to be closed when we get there, Plan B is to meet up at the nearby Town of Ramsgate pub (also on the Thames), while Plan C is Captain Kidd‘s (also on the Thames, but not as historical as Plans A & B).

Chances are Plan A should be fine, but I thought I’d mention the others just in case. Hope to see you there! 🙂

Hacking, ‘Generation R’, and the Voynich Manuscript…

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I hack, you hack, he/she hacks, we hack, they hack – whether you’re tying something to your key-ring with string, or trying “Username=admin / Password=admin“, you’re officially a hacker. Furthermore, says well-known YCombinator startup guy Paul Graham, the word “hack”…

…can be either a compliment or an insult. It’s called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that’s also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.

Believe it or not, the two senses of “hack” are also connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that’s merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).

An ugly-to-beautiful rule-breaking continuum, eh? Further on in the post, Graham muses about what was wrong with living in Florence…

But after I’d been there a few months I realized that what I’d been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I’d just left. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. (So I went back to America.)

Put all these pieces together, and do you grasp what Graham is feeling his way towards? That the Renaissance started with wave after wave of Florentine hardware hackers (Brunelleschi et al) and software hackers (Alberti et al), using their restless ingenuity to bypass & sidestep the rigid rules and conventions holding wobbly medieval practices & thought in place. But, irritatingly, this was not done under an elegantly humanist banner: no, this was a grass-roots, geeky, reality-hacking startup crew (let’s call them ‘Generation R‘, for want of a better name), all vying for Series A-style funding from the Venture Capitalists of the day (Medici, Sforza, Rucellai, Malatesta, etc), where the ‘exit strategy’ on their proposals wasn’t an IPO, but something much greater: fama – eternal individual fame.

It’s true that it’s a looong time since Burckhardt’s progressivist ra-ra-Renaissance-in-Florence line has been the dominant historical narrative for the Quattrocento; and yes, the Middle Ages also saw plenty of invention (see Jean Gimpel’s “The Medieval Machine” if you don’t believe me); but all the same, I suspect there would be more than a Tower grain of truth in the idea that the history of hacking can indeed be traced back through time right to Generation R’s door. Even if you don’t buy in to the rest of the simile. 😉

Putting our cipher mystery hat back on, does this mean that our favourite early modern cipher object – the Voynich Manuscript, of course – might merely be the ultimate software hack of its era? If so, is it an ugly (yellow duckling) hack of temporary convenience and cunning, or a beautiful (black swan) hack born of unique happenstance and intellect? Or might it instead sit somewhere in the foggy continuum between these two poles? Something to bear in mind, anyway…

Voynich f116v: pax nax vax?

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Many historians and palaeographers have concluded that the interleaved ‘+’ signs added to the Voynich Manuscript’s back page indicate that the containing text is some kind of spell, incantation, chant, charm, curse, pious utterance, etc. Well, it’s completely true that ‘+’ was used in all of the preceding forms to indicate that the (non-silent) reader should physically trace out the sign of the cross at the same time, so this would seem a perfectly reasonable suggestion (if perhaps a little non-specific).

Here I’m particularly interested in the (apparently heavily emended) third line of text on f116v, where I have strongly enhanced the image to make the tangled textual mess I think this has ended up in clear. Note that (as I have discussed several times elsewhere, e.g.here) this line of text seems to end “ahia maria“, which I think pretty much confirms that the ‘+’ shapes are indeed crosses.

So, do we have any idea what the first part of the line originally said? It is certainly striking that all four words at the start of the line seem to end with the letter ‘x’, which gives the overall impression of some kind of magical chant. But what might that chant be?

This is where I wheel in Benedek Lang’s fascinating “Unlocked Books” (2008), which focuses on medieval magical manuscripts from Central Europe (and which you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I’m currently reading). As part of his discussion (p.65) of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (Maximianus, Martinianus, Malchus, Constantinus, Dionisius, Serapion & Johannes, since you’re asking) who were walled up for two hundred years but magically awoke during the reigh of Theodosius, Lang mentions a 14th century Czech amulet with the seven sleepers’ names as well as the text “pax + nax vax“, all used as a healing magic charm against fever.

Incidentally, I should note that “hax pax max adimax” is another piece of nonsense Latin that (for example) appears in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, and which some wobbly etymological sources give as the possible origin of the phrase “hocus pocus” (though I have to say I’d probably tend more towards the idea that it’s a corruption of [the genuine Latin] “hoc est corpus“). But regardless, I don’t think “hax pax max” is what we’re looking at here.

“pax nax vax“, then, is basically the right kind of phrase, with the right kind of structure, from the right kind of period. I’m not saying it’s definitely 100% right (history is rarely that simple): but even if it’s wrong, it may well turn out to be a very revealing attempt at an answer.

All in all, I’m really rather intrigued by the possibility that this line originally read (or read something remarkably close to) “six + pax + nax + vax + ahia + mar+ia +“: it’s just a shame that the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library doesn’t have finer wavelength (i.e. multispectral) scans of this contentious feature so that we could test this kind of hypothesis out. One day, though…