Lynn Thorndike’s papers…

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Somehow, I think it was inevitable that a determinedly analytical mind like Lynn Thorndike‘s would have left a well-organized archival record: and so it was that he and his successors left his extensive collection of papers to the University of Columbia, the last place he worked as a History Professor. The archival finding aid went online here only in 2004, so it seems likely that few historians have thought of using it.

All the same, it still comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that there are 60 linear feet of records in this archive (“ca. 30,000 items in 124 boxes and 1 Flatbox; some in Mapcase“). As well as containing the obvious stuff such as correspondence and numerous card files, this also includes “76 volumes of personal diaries, 1902-1963“.

Thorndike’s epic quest to examine, read and understand medieval scientific texts was on a scale few have attempted before or since: his multi-volume “History of Magic & Experimental Science” provides a richly textured background that I think anyone seriously looking at early modern proto-scientific mysteries (such as the Voynich Manuscript, naturally) should have gone through. And even so, how much more might there be languishing in his papers – unseen, unread, unknown to us all?

The Voynich Manuscript for real people…

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It’s a typical writer’s puzzle: when something you read (or write) really sucks, but an even half-satisfactory alternative is nowhere to be found. That’s basically how I feel about almost everything that’s been written about the VMs: even though it’s an amazing mystery, that also somehow highlights all the dangerous sides of knowledge, accounts always amble off in the same kind of leadenly pedestrian way. For example, I spent ages tweaking and polishing the first sentence of “The Curse”:

“In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare books.“

Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can’t be faulted: but it’s aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you’re hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you – the reader is the target.

In short, even though everything surrounding the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery, why do people persist in writing about it as if they are writing a description for a car auction – its size, shape, page-count, first historical mention, list of owners, number of pictures, valves, bhp, lalala? Capturing the raw factuality of a mystery in this way achieves little or nothing.

When I went to the Beinecke, I tried to read the texture of its pages with my fingers (to tell the hair side from the grain side): I smelt its cover and pages (just in case I could pick up any hint or note of the animal from which the vellum was made): I looked at its surface under a magnifying glass: I looked at special features through narrow-band optical filters, which I tilted to try to adjust the wavelength. I tried to stretch my range of perceptions of it to the point where something unusual might just pop out.

But most of all, I tried to imagine myself into the position of someone physically writing it: how the act of writing and state of mind mixed together, what was going on, what they were thinking of, how it all worked. And that was yet harder still.

At supper this evening, I told my son that the biggest mystery in the world is what other people are thinking: and really, that is perhaps at the heart of why the Voynich Manuscript is the biggest mystery ever – because we still cannot reconstruct what its author was thinking. It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.

Yet when authors write fiction, this empathy is typically where they start: working out how to create characters with whom the readers will be able to sustain some kind of reading relationship over the course of 200+ pages. Take that basic connection away, and you can end up with a writer’s folly, an artificial construction to which the narrative or flow is awkwardly pegged.

So how would I start the book, if I were writing it right now? Perhaps with Averlino at his point of death – the moment when his strange book was finally set free.

“What master of Destiny was he, when the Fates had carried him back to this holy place he despised so: and what kind of master of Nature, when he could see his death fast approaching and yet could do nothing?“

You may not like it: but is that just because you’ve become too used to reading Wikipedia?

John Matthews Manly’s papers…

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One of the major figures in the early 20th century history of the Voynich Manuscript was John Matthews Manly, the man who definitively debunked Newbold’s strange micrographic cipher claims. During the First World War, Manly worked in the US Military Intelligence Division, and left in 1919 having attained the rank of Major. After that, he put most of his time at the University of Chicago into researching Chaucer, before dying in 1940.

Interestingly, Manly’s papers are held by the University of Chicago: there’s even an online guide to them, which lists a whole set of Voynich & non-Army cryptographic folders to look at, particularly in Boxes 4 and 5. One day, if I happen to get the opportunity to spend a day in Chicago, I’d love to go through these: Manly was a smart guy, so it would be fascinating to find out what was going through his mind (however indirectly).

Box: 4
Folder: 19 – Table of Latin Syllables
Folder: 20-21 – Photographs of Voynich Ms
Folder: 22 – “Key to the Library” (JMM’s?)

Box: 5
Folder: 1 – Worksheets
Folder: 2 – Photographs of Mss (Including Français 24306, incomplete) and of one printed label
Folder: 3 – Three working notebooks, labelled “Bacon Cipher”
Folder: 4 – Notes on code for article; other notes on Sloane 830 [“Written in the years 1575-6, by a person whose initials appear to be M.A.B.”, according to levity.com] and 414 [two collections of “chymical receipts”]
Folder: 5 – Worksheets on related ciphers: “Galen’s Anatomy” [?] and “Kazwini” [presumably the 13th century Persian astronomical writer Al Kazwini]
Folder: 6 – Articles on the Voynich Roger Bacon Ms
Folder: 7-8 – Notes: ciphers in other Mss; other notes on printed sources
Folder: 9 – Notes on alchemical Mss, etc.
Folder: 10 – Notes for Bacon Cipher; “Key to Aggas”
Folder: 11 – Notes on texts in cryptography
Folder: 12 – Miscellaneous notes and worksheets
Folder: 13 – Bibliographies
Folder: 14 – Photostats of Mss: John Dee (Sloane 3188, 3189, 2599): unidentified
Folder: 15 – Notes on Vatican Latin Ms 3102 [Here’s the Jordanus page on this ms, Manly reproduced f27r in his article, while Newbold’s book reproduced f27r and f27v opposite p.148 and p.150]
Folder: 16 – “Notes on an Inquiry into the Validity of the Baconian Bi-Literal Cypher for the Interpretation of Certain Writings Claimed for Francis Bacon”
Folder: 17 – Comments on “Sixty Drops of Laudanum,” by E.A. Poe
Folder: 18-19 – “The Bi-formed Alphabet Classifier” of the Riverbank Laboratories
Folder: 20 – Notes on Shakespeare/Bacon cipher

Box: 11
Folder: 9 “Roger Bacon and the Voynich Ms” by JMM, reprint [first page is here on JSTOR]

"Voynich Manuscript": two words, two lies?

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While writing my MBA dissertation a few years ago, I spun off a short paper called “Justified True Belief: Three Words, Three Lies?“, where the abstract explained its title:-

Cornelius Castoriadis once famously described the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “four words, four lies”: here, I examine each of the three words of “justified true belief” in turn to see if that too might be based on a fatally flawed discourse. In fact, “three lies” turns out to be a little strong – but the evidence strongly points to “two-and-a-half lies”. We deserve better than this!

My guess is that Castoriadis, for all his pithiness, was ripping off Voltaire, who in 1756 wrote:

This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

So now, by applying the same pattern to the Voynich Manuscript, I’m extending the chain of ripping yet further. Just so you know!

What’s in a name? Wilfrid Voynich never called it “The Voynich Manuscript”: right from the start, he called it “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”. Which was a bit of a shame, given that it originally almost certainly had nothing to do with Roger Bacon.

However, because Voynich desperately wanted it to contain Bacon’s encrypted secrets, he was convinced it had to be medieval. It was in this context that he referred to it as a “manuscript”, because manuscripts are technically defined as being handwritten documents that predate the start of printing, which means 1450 or so. And so you can see that the word “Manuscript” in “Voynich Manuscript” presupposes a medieval document, or else it would have to be called “an early modern handwritten document” (which, for all its precision, is not quite so punchy). And worse, the range of dates it could sensibly have been made goes over this 1450 mark, so we have no real certainty to work from here.

As for “Voynich”: in one sense it should be “Wojnicz”, the book dealer’s surname before he ended up in London. But we sophisticated moderns should perhaps more sensibly name it after the Jesuit Villa Mondragone (where Wilfrid Voynich found it), or Johannes Marcus Marci (who inherited it and whose letter to Kircher travelled with it all the way to New Haven), or George Baresch (arguably the first obsessive Voynich researcher to be documented), or Sinapius / Jacobus de Tepenecz (whose erased signature still faintly remains on the first page), or even Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (who was said to have paid well for it).

All of this still rather panders to an implied need for naming, as if by giving it a name it somehow helps us understand its origins (it doesn’t, can’t, and won’t). It’s an itch we don’t actually need to scratch: we need to learn to be more comfortable about remaining in a state of uncertainty.

My dissertation was all about knowledge and uncertainty: the work I’ve done since then points to my own three-word definition for knowledge – “hopefully useful lies“. Calling this enigmatic object the “Voynich Manuscript” is indeed “two words, two lies” – but as long as we never forget that they are both lies, its name is a most useful tool.

Review of "The Dumas Club"…

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If (like me) you enjoyed Roman Polanski’s film “The Ninth Gate” (I happened to see it in a hotel room in New Haven, giving it a particular resonance for me) which I mentioned recently, you might think about reading the novel from which it sprang, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “The Dumas Club”.

Its main protagonist, Lucas Corso, gets described early on as a “book detective”: but he is closer to the romantic archetype of a charmingly ruthless European antiquarian book-hunter for which Wilfrid Voynich and Hans Kraus both felt nostalgic. Whenever short-sighted, boyish-looking Corso takes off his glasses and puts on his “innocent rabbit” face, everyone seems to give him what he wants: perhaps Wilfrid Voynich used much the same kind of trick, who knows?

But it’s not simply a cherchez-la-livre romance: there are two stories intertwined, one concerning various Spanish book-dealers’ passions for Alexander Dumas’ pulpy (but vastly popular) bestsellers such as “The Three Musketeers”; and the other about the three remaining copies of a mysterious 17th century printed book for summoning the Devil, written in heavily abbreviated/coded Latin and with nine Tarot-like drawings, and whose printer (Aristide Torchia) was supposedly burned at the stake for creating it.

Structurally, this reminds me a lot of the TV show “CSI” (the proper Las Vegas one), which typically fills its hour-long slot by telling two forensic detective stories (each roughly half-hour long), and leaving it as a point of suspense whether the two strands are connected or not. Lucas Corso struggles gamely to see the link, but ultimately none materialises in the way that he expects. Despite the reader’s (and Corso’s) sense of a buzzing conspiratorial coherency in the early few chapters, the book actually ends up more like two intertwined extended short stories (one horror, one literary) than a single majestic novel, which is a shame.

For the film adaptation, Polanski simply ditched the whole Dumas connection, and instead concentrated on the “Book of Nine Gates” half of the book – essentially, whereas he optioned “The Dumas Club”, he actually filmed “The Non-Dumas Club”.

Yet the first hundred pages are simply brilliant, inspiring, edgy, like peering anxiously through Montecristo cigar fug to make out the looming shape of an unknown menace. But then Perez-Reverte (quite literally) loses the plot: the writing disintegrates into a mess of intertextuality and clunky self-referentiality, with the novelist having Corso continually feel as if he is a character in a serial novel – essentially, in a remake of a Dumas novel. Whether that’s true or not, having it rammed down my, errrm, eyes so many times completely broke the spell.

One glaringly missed opportunity throughout is the aspect of whether the unidentified young girl (who takes the name “Irene Adler” from a Sherlock Holmes novel) actually exists, or is merely some kind of strange hallucinatory being, conjured up by Corso himself: a kind of “Dumas Club” meets “Fight Club”, if you like. Kudos to Polanski for picking up this angle more strongly in his film. Perhaps she had to physically exist in the book as a result of Perez-Reverte’s (I think wrong) decision to have to have one of the characters (Boris Balkan) as the storyteller. And so in the book, Irene’s ambiguity centres not on whether or not she exists outside Corso’ mind, but on whether for him she acts as a force for good or evil – an angel, succubus or demon.

All in all, I have to say that I really wish Perez-Reverte had found sufficient writing courage to take the horror through to its logical conclusion, rather than pull up short at the final hurdle. Though Polanski’s literary take on the novel was (perhaps necessarily) quite superficial, his filmic instinct to raise the stakes yet higher than the book worked fabulously well.

For the full literary effect, I’d recommend reading “The Three Musketeers” first, then “Twenty Years After”, then “The Dumas Club”, and then watching “The Ninth Gate” late at night, with the curtains drawn, and a bottle of Bols gin by your side. Enjoy!

Incidentally, looking at the book with my Voynich research hat on, it was nice to see Perez-Reverte pick up on things like “The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient… Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries” (p.202), and to have Torchia trawling around Prague for the cabalistic secrets of an unknown brotherhood (p.203). The uber-convoluted magic circle in the final chapter (p.312) is quite fun, too.

Of the three magic circles in the Voynich Manuscript, it is interesting that both sun and moon ones depict people holding bottles: here’s the left man from the “hidden moon” magic circle – the “S” in his face probably denotes “Septentrio” (i.e. North). I’ll write more about these another day: here’s a link to an earlier post I made on William Kiesel’s lecture at Treadwell’s. Suffice it to say that this picture might simply refer to water and hyssop, both used to purify magic circles for millennia… unless you know better?

Voynich Documentary (for 2010)…

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Well, you can’t say I’m not looking ahead. News reaches my ears of a lavish Voynich documentary being made by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) “Universum” Natural History Unit and Pro Omnia Film & Video Promotion GmbH, in association with “ARTE, ZDF and the Smithsonian Network“.

Now we’ve got past the broadcasting acronym jungle, what is its angle? It’s still early days, but its producers Klaus Steindl and Andreas Sulzer seem already to have focused on the VMs’ Bohemian history as being worthy of study: we’ll just have to wait and see what their research harvests…

Well-known Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen is helping out in some way (hopefully they’ll remember to listen to him, particularly as Voynich research is more about avoiding problems than solving them), and they promise:

“Now analysing the illustrations will give a new angle to decoding the manuscript. Wrapped around the text on almost every page there are drawings of plants, star constellations of the zodiac, bathing female figrues and structures remniscent of piping systems and microscopic views. Do these patterns hold the key? For this documentary a team of scientists takes a new interdisciplinary approach to crack the Voynich code – including the first forensic examination of the book itself.“

Somehow, I get the feeling that they haven’t yet read my book – oh, well. 🙁 But let them continue…

“A recently discovered signature is a new lead: It identifies the early 17th century scholar Jakub de Tepenec – an alchemist in attendance on Habsburg emperor Rudolph II. How was he connected to the unknown author? Did he possess some kind of secret knowledge about alchemy, magic plants and the fabled fountain of youth he tried to hide from the inquisition?“

OK, OK, even though these are supposed to be rhetorical questions, you’d have to say that “only through ownership” and “no” are both pretty good answers. And “recently” isn’t usually used to mean “85 years ago”, but I guess they’re looking at the big picture here. Regardless, there is an incredible wealth of information from this fascinating period in the numerous Czech archives, so I wish them all the best in their search for whatever it is they’re looking for.

Yet as Charles Hope cautions, archival research is best approached more as an exercise in hopeful serendipity than in one of historical problem-solving: as my friend Sergio Toresella said, “In my life I went twice in an Archivio and I haven’t got a spider in a hole (as we say in Italian).” You get the idea.

Me, I think I’ll stick to the Quattrocento. 😉

Become A Voynich Manuscript Expert In Just 5 Minutes…

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Would having “Expert on the Voynich Manuscript” on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I’ll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don’t want you to find out…

Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich expert. All you have to know is:

(a) That the two jargon terms for the Voynich Manuscript are “VMs” (because “Ms” or “MS” is short for “manuscript”) and “Beinecke MS 408” (because it’s 408th in the Beinecke Library’s collection of manuscripts);
(b) That the VMs lives at Yale University in New Haven (because that’s what the Beinecke Library is part of); and
(c) That the VMs is a mysterious old handwritten book that nobody can read. Not even me!

If you really want, you can also read the Wikipedia VMs page: but apart from the fact that the Voynich Manuscript was [re]discovered in Italy in 1912 by dodgy book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (hence its name), feel free to basically skip the rest.

Incidentally, if you’re ever asked about anyone who has written about the VMs (Newbold, Brumbaugh, Terence McKenna, anyone really), any real Voynich expert would nod sympathetically and say “Poor old X – if only they had known what we know now“. Of course, this is a big fat lie, because we still know basically sod all about the VMs.

Stage Two. You continue by actually becoming a Voynich expert. This is also easy, as long as you can get a working grasp of the following basic statements:-

  • The VMs was probably made by a right-handed European between 1250 and 1640.
    If post-1622, explain how Jacobus de Tepenecz’s signature got on the front
    If post-1500, explain how 15th century quire numbers got on it
    If pre-1450, explain how Leonardo-style hatching ended up in some of the drawings
  • If the VMs is a language, note that its words don’t function like those in real languages
    If the VMs is a cipher, note that it doesn’t work like any known cipher
    If the VMs is nonsense, note that its letters appears to follow unknown rules
    If the VMs’ plants are botanical, note that most don’t resemble real plants

Now all you have to do is to devise your very own really, really lame signature theory. As long as it amuses you and doesn’t trample on the above dull bullet-points too badly, congratulations – you’re right up there with the big hitters! But how should you construct this new theory?

Actually, it’s quite helpful here to project how you feel about your own work onto how you think the original author(s) felt about the VMs. For example, if you think that your own work is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written solely to convince your employers to pay your wages, then you might try devising your own variant of the basic hoax theory template (which argues that the VMs is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written by [insert name here] solely to convince Emperor Rudolf II to pay a rumoured 600 gold ducats).

But be bold in your theorising! Be creative! Perhaps think of some vaguely Renaissance figure you admire (though Leonardo’s already taken, and he was left-handed anyway, d’oh!) or just happen to remember, preferably someone whose name you can consistently spell correctly. Wafer-thin historical connections to herbal medicine, astrology, astronomy, ciphers and mystery are probably bonuses here. So, Nostradamus would be a good ‘un: Queen Elizabeth I not so good.

But remember, you’re not trying to prove your theory is correct here (for what kind of an idiot would attempt that with such scanty evidence, 500-ish years after the event?) Rather, you’re just staking your claim to the possibility that [random person X] might have been the author. And the level of proof required to achieve that is, frankly, negligible.

And hey, even if you choose the name with a pin and a biographical dictionary, if it eventually turns out that you are right, think how unbearably smug you’ll be. Possibly for decades!

Finally: however bad projecting your own life onto the VMs’ blank canvas may be as an historical approach (and believe me, it lies somewhere between ‘rubbish‘ and ‘pants‘), it is guaranteed to give you plenty of interestingly ironic things to say about the VMs when you’re asked about it at those hip higher-earner parties you’ll be attending. Oh, and at your book-launch too, naturally. 🙂

Czech Voynich theory…

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My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Jacobus de Tepenecz, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II).

It is certainly true that Rudolf’s interests and obsessions acted as a powerful magnet to draw wonders from all over Europe to his court. Yet given that the claimed link with John Dee and Edward Kelley is gossamer-thin, it is no less sensible to wonder whether the VMs had been brought to Prague by someone from the town: perhaps someone well-travelled?

I mentioned Rudolf II’s manuscript-collecting astronomer / astrologer / herbalist / physician Tadeás Hájek here recently (who studied in Italy), but Jan Hurych regales me with tales of several others: for one, Hájek’s father (Simon Baccalareus) studied alchemy and collected manuscripts… though what happened to his library after his death is not currently known.

Jan has put together a nice page on one of his favourite Renaissance Czech travelling knights, Krystof Harant de Polzic and Bezdruzic, and his travels from Venice to Crete to Cyprus to the Holy Land to Egypt (etc). But I have to say that if a writer had picked up an intriguing cipher manuscript on their travels, it would be one of the first things they would write about: yet there is no mention. So we can probably rule Harant out, sorry Jan. 🙁

But Jan brings up a rather more full-on Czech Voynich theory, courtesy of Karel Dudek’s Czech webpage (though I used Google Translate, Dudek also put up his own English translation here). Dudek discusses Georg Handsch of Limuz (1529-1578), whose 1563 German translation of Mattioli’s Latin herbal came out a year after Tadeás Hájek’s Czech translation (it even used the same nice woodcuts!) Like Hájek, Handsch was a physician living in Prague, but whose main client was instead Ferdinand II Tyrolský (1529-1595) and his wealthy wife Filipina Welserová (1527-1580).

Dudek got his information from Leopold Selfender’s “Handsch Georg von Limuz – Lebensbild a Arztes aus dem XVI.Jahrenhunderts”: but after a bit of a false start (linking Handsch directly to Baresch, which I doubt would convince anyone), he proposes a possible chain of ownership from Handsch -> Welserová -> Ferdinand II Tyrolský -> Rudolph II -> Jacobus de Tepenecz, before Tepenecz’s estate got looted in the chaos of 1618 and the manuscript somehow ended up with Baresch (with the signature erased).

OK… but why Handsch? Dudek points to the VMs’ botany, and Handsch’s translation of Matthioli’s herbal (though I’d have to say that Hájek fits that bill even better). Dudek also discusses a book by Handsch based on his trips to visit medicinal baths and spas in 1571 called “Die Elbfischerei in Bohmen und Meissen” (eventually published in Prague in 1933), and sees parallels with the VMs’ water section there.

But Dudek gets even more speculative, talking about whether Bartoloměj Welser was financed by Charles V to undertake a (possibly Lutheran?) mission to South America, and drew pictures inspired by exotic plants he saw beside the Orinoco (hey, I thought he was a Womble?)

It’s a good story, but a little lacking in connection to the VMs: and doesn’t really explain why we see (for example) 15th century handwriting in the quire numbers, or even the Occitan-like month names on the zodiac, etc. Perhaps we should really admit that looking for an origin for the VMs in Prague may be a little too hopeful, not dissimilar to the way 19th century German historians’ looked to see if Nicholas of Cusa might secretly have been some kind of Teutonic Leonardo. Nice try… but no cigar.

Aliens & Dinosaurs…

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My son likes to invent new toy stories formed out of other toys’ favourite bits: and so you get an Alien Pirate Dinosaur Rocket Car 6000 with Laser-Powered Misher-Masher Crab Claws (and so on). Actually, I’ve met computer games designers who work in broadly the same way, so there’s obviously some kind of pattern going on there.

But now I’ve found an awesome story, straight out of the Dan Burisch / Kirk Allen / John Titor alt.scifi universe, that completely trumps even this.

For several years, Victor Martinez has been running a website called serpo.org to facilitate (so the story goes) the release of classified alien-related documents from “Project SERPO“, under which a team of 12 astronauts apparently flew to (and returned from) Zeta Reticuli to visit the “Eben” world. Ohhhhkayyyy…

For example, SERPO release #29 describes the fabulous alien “Yellow Book” (which displays edited highlights from the history of the universe in your mind for as long as you can watch, but then goes back to the start), which is presumably what Dan Burisch (?) thought was being depicted in the VMs’ pharma section (below, with and without the blue paint):-


(I should also point out that, according to serpo.org, proponents and opponents of SERPO’s existence seem mired in an endless tape-loop of bickering, while UFO boards seem possibly even more confused than normal about this.)

But none of that matters, as SERPO release #30 (that emerged only a few days ago) has a unique quality of demented genius to it that I think makes it stand head and shoulders above the rest: and so I thought I’d share. 🙂

What is now claimed (quite independently of all the Zeta Reticuli alien stuff) is that a UFO was found in 1968 during a dig, buried within 150 million year-old rock strata: its diameter was 45 feet, it had two badly decayed 5-foot-tall aliens inside, and two small dinosaurs they had taken with them. There: I’ve used “aliens” and “dinosaurs” in the same sentence – I feel like a child again, it’s a liberating experience. 🙂

Martinez’s anonymous source then goes on to describe the spacecraft’s mysterious rock-like alien power source (but which didn’t work, of course) and the mysterious “star map” they found there too (but which nobody has been able to decipher or decode). Amazing, incredible stuff: but…

…it’s patently a crock. There would be no “star map” to decode: that’s the kind of flawed retro detail a 70 year-old delusional would insert. In fact, I would hazard a guess that 1968 had particular significance for that person: probably the year that their disturbing mental episodes started to take overl their life. The ‘alien ship’ found buried in 1968 then might well symbolically represent their pre-psychosis personality, buried under layers of delusion: while the whole story is – in a very Kirk Allen kind of way – a kind of proto-therapy, a cry for help. “Rescue and understand the aliens” then becomes a shorthand for “rescue and understand me“.

The point I’m trying to make is that even the oddest, maddest things have a human subtext, which we have a kind of moral duty to try to decode, however imperfectly: though psychiatrists and novelists instinctively understand this, the rest of us sometimes forget.

Spanish Voynich theory…

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Another day, another Voynich theory to add to the list of theories. Today’s one (courtesy of Rolando Hernandez Rivero) proposes that the VMs is written in old Spanish, though with some Latin and English words thrown into the mix. Rolando also asserts that [what he calls] Hand 1 is “scatterbrained” and has many errors, while [what he calls] Hand 2 is a bit more focused. Plants and stars indicate some (unspecified) decoding feature based on the number of leaves or the number of points. The cipher “jumps” many times.

OK, I’ll admit it: though I can read a little Spanish, I’m struggling here. The webpage comprises two sentences, a short 4-line one and a huge 30-line one: it’s basically a sequence of thoughts, a bit like a 5-page PowerPoint presentation converted to plain text. Google Translate and FreeTranslation.com made no more sense of it than I did.

Can anyone translate or summarise this any better?

UPDATE: as the post has mysteriously dropped off the Internet in the last few days, here (courtesy of Google’s cache) is what it originally said:

Este manuscrito esta cifrado con el idioma de HISPANIA, (antiguo idioma que había en España, antes del castellano, de Don Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra que tomo de los sonidos Árabes mientras dominaban en la mitad de la península Ibérica por 800 a y hasta ahora se suman mas de 4500 palabras).

También tiene latín y algunas palabras inglesas, mas no les podré adelantar mucho ni como esta cifrado porque tiene muchos modelos, hasta ahora lo que contiene, no es de mucho interés no revela mucho en comparación con la mano numero 1 a la de la mano numero 2, y si fueron dos los que contribuyeron a este manuscrito tan controversial y de tanto tiempo sin poderlo descifrar, el manuscrito tiene cosas interesantes de parte de la mano numero 2, que no releva cosas de mayor envergadura, hasta ahora lo que he descifrado no tiene mucha relevancia, solo recetas que aparenta ser de brujos y curanderos, de aquellos tiempos, recetas de plantas que existían bajo el cuidado de nomos y otras entidades o elementales, que por el temor a la inquisición la cifraron y clasificaron, para protegerla, mas estaban en manos de quienes la usaban solamente, la mano numero 1 es incongruente, regada y alocada con muchos fallos y la 2 mas centrada en su conocimiento, ambas muy difícil de descifrar, aparenta tener mas de 4 puños de letras y también es un código muy individual, saltan muchas veces de código, (imposibilita avanzar), la carta astral significa simbología de días y noches, no son meses, cubriendo 13 horas, el sol esta pintado como centro y luna a la vez, esto esta en el código privado, aun sin descifrar, (nueve), las estrellas y los dibujos son números también y guía para los códigos que encierran, hasta sus hojas y puntas de estrellas dicen la cantidad que necesitan saber, al igual que las ninfas, flores y puntas de tallos, esas palabras son trocadas como en el sistema de comunicación, nunca podrán hacer una palabra de ellas, hay varias letras que no se utilizan porque estaban catalogadas como de mala suerte o divisorias, por poner un ejemplo la b, (aparenta que existiera otro código troking y que allí si se usaran estas letras camufladas), las que señalaran el 11, numero intocable, mas si se usaba el 13 normalmente, también atrás he pintado las sombras que existen y hay un dibujo de apariencia de nomo o como se vestía Robin el de la manzana y la flecha, y ataras hay como un bosque y adelante aparecen como si fueran animales y bichos de apariencia raros, esto es por ahora para ayudar a los que están queriendo descifrar, el manuscrito voynich.

UPDATE #2: Enrique Joven (whose forthcoming Voynich novel “The Castle of the Stars” I eagerly await) reassures me that this does indeed make little or no sense at all. So now you know!

UPDATE #3: Dana Scott kindly offers up the following translation (somewhat modified to make it more closely approximate intelligibility) – however, he would gladly welcome suggestions as to what the importance/meaning of “11” and “13” are in the final section.

 

 

This manuscript is inscribed in the language of SPAIN, (an ancient tongue that existed in Spain, before Castillian, the language of Sir Michael of Cervantes and Saavedra that drew its phonetics from Arabic at a time when it covered the entire middle peninsula of the Iberian peninsula, around 800 AD, and which today has risen to more than 4500 words. It also contains Latin and some English words, what more I do not have much insight to discern. Nor do I know how this manuscript is inscribed, because it has many forms. Until now what it contains, is not of much interest. Nor does it reveal much when comparing the hand of the first scribe to that of the second scribe. And if there were two scribes who contributed to this controversial manuscript, which for such a long time has remained untranslated, the manuscript contains curious entries on the part of the second scribe, that do not reveal items of major importance. Until now that which I have deciphered does not contain much that seems of interest, only recipes that appear to be for the witches and physicians of those times, recipes of plants that existed under the care of gnomes and other entities or elements, that for the fear of the inquisition it was enciphered and classified, to protect it. What’s more, these secrets were only concealed in the hands of those who used them.

The first scribe is incongruent, rigid and imprecise with many mistakes. The second scribe is more centered in his understanding. Both hands are very difficult to decipher, apparently have more than 4 points of letters and also are very individual (unique) codifiers, which often seem to jump out many timesfrom the codex, (which makes it impossible for us to gain further insight into the manuscript).

The astral text signifies the symbology of days and nights (they are not months) covering 13 hours. The sun is painted at the center of the folio, as is the moon at times. This is in the private codex, though without decipherment, (nine). The stars and the drawings are numbers also, and a guide for the codices that enclose it. Even its leaves and the points of stars indicate the quantity that they need to know. Equally, the nymphs, the flowers, and other points of detail, are words etched in the system of communication. I could never make out a single word of them.

There are various letters that are not used because they are catalogues, such as of bad luck or spells, to put in for example the b. It appears that there exits another codex extant and that there is where it did use these camouflaged letters.

Those that were shown the 11 untouchable numbers would have more if 13 were used normally (unclear sentence; may reference different set of numbers, folios, or codexes?).

Also, in the background (where?), I find painted shadows that exist, and there is a drawing that appears to be a gnome, or how Robin dressed him of the apple and the arrow (William Tell?). In the background there is what appears to be a bosque and in the front it appears as if there were animals and vermin rare in appearance. This is what I have for now to help those who are wanting to decipher, the Voynich manuscript.