Voynich novels latest…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

A couple of emails just in from Voynich novelists: it’s so much nicer to hear about stuff before it happens, rather than haphazardly 6+ months later (sadly the de facto standard for the Internet).

Firstly, Richard Douglas Weber writes to tell me that his Voynich novel is now very well advanced, and that (though I’m exaggerating a tad) it has a VMs-related plot device that will hopefully jolt me out of my novel-reading seat. I’m really looking forward to this!

(As an aside, the last thing that nearly made me choke on my own intestines with surprise was the “canape” sequence in the “Ali G Indahouse” movie. But perhaps I should say no more about that, aiii…)

Richard came to the Voynich Manuscipt sideways while researching a Dee/Kelley/Enochian writing project, but which then got stalled. When it later restarted, the Dee/Kelley angle got dropped while the VMs took centre stage. Unlike many “Voynichologists” out there (*sigh*), he had taken the time to read Mary D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma” (good for him!), though he felt it only really amounted to “a long rehash of everything that was conjectured”… (errrm, it’s not that long, is it?) All of which is fair enough: we’ll all have to wait for his final book to see what angle he takes on the VMs…

I should say that though D’Imperio affects impartiality, if you read “Elegant Enigma” carefully, you can find quite a few places where her actual opinion of the VMs sneaks in. I think it is the structure of Voynichese that particularly fascinated her, the siren singing that pulled her ship toward the manuscript. For example, on p.11 she writes of its “architectonic … quality“, and that “I gain a persistent impression of the presence of rules and relationships, a definite structure with its own “logic”, however erratic and bizarre it might appear when compared to present-day concepts. The intricate compound forms in the script and its matter-of-fact, rather austere style all confirm this impression of craftsmanlike and logical construction in my mind“, before going on to describe the “persistent tectonic element of style in the drawings.” This basic idea recurs on p.16 and elsewhere.

Secondly, Bill Walsh emailed with news of his own Voynich-homage novel with a supernatural twist. It wouldn’t be fair to say more than that at this early stage – even in these electronic times, getting from pitch to draft to agent to publisher to marketing to production to retailer to reader is as slow (and tricky) as it was a century ago. But having now seen some of his writing (which I found sparky and enjoyable), I really wish him the very best luck in taking it further.

Finally, I’ve just picked up a copy of A.W.Hill’s ‘Stephan Raszer’ novel “Enoch’s Portal” (2001), which allegedly has its own supernatural take on the Voynich Manuscript. I’ll post a review here once I’ve imbibed its intriguing mix of “visionary doses of Renaissance magic, Kabbalah and sacramental sex” (according to the back cover, anyway)…

Research breakthrough…

by ⋅ 9 Comments

Not long ago, I mentioned here that I had made a fist-punching-in-the-air breakthrough in my research, and promised to describe it more fully at a later date. Well, that later date has (thanks to a torrent of two gently chiding emails chivvying me along) now arrived: here’s what I found.

Regular Voynich News readers will by now be aware that I’ve spent a long time this year slowly trawling through various volumes of Lynn Thorndike’s vast “History of Magic & Experimental Science”. Given that I believe the Voynich Manuscript is an enciphered book of proto-scientific secrets rooted in Italian Quattrocento culture, Thorndike’s general focus on Italian scientific documents of the 14th (Volume III) and 15th (Volume IV) centuries is pretty much spot on. This approach has turned up a whole set of research leads to follow up over the next few weeks and months… so far so good.

But I also (sad completist I sometimes tend to be) picked up a copy of Thorndike’s rather less-well-known “Science & Thought In The Fifteenth Century” (1929, Columbia University Press): in which I found something pleasantly unexpected. But I’ll fill in all the background first…

Once upon a time (oh, in 2006), I wrote & published a book called “The Curse of the Voynich“, which described how I concluded from my meticulous codicological study that Quattrocento Florentine architect Antonio Averlino (better known as “Filarete”) was probably both the author and the encipherer of the Voynich Manuscript. Part of the textual evidence revolved around a set of “small works” to which Averlino alluded in his larger libro architettonico, and which I suspected were at least in part enciphered in the VMs. However, art historians have long disagreed about whether these other works actually existed, or whether they were just added in for spice to amuse Averlino’s (hoped-for) ducal audience: as far as anyone, there has long been no external evidence either way.

But then on p.219 of Thorndike’s “Science & Thought”, in chapter XII which is largely devoted to Giovanni Michele Alberto of Carrara’s “De constitutione mundi“, I found the following:

Antonio Averlino Filarete (1410-1470), who is commonly thought of as an architect and sculptor, is listed by John Michael Albert [i.e. Giovanni Michele Alberto da Carrara] among writers on plants as having treated that subject “elegantly in the vernacular tongue”. [94]

Thorndike’s footnote 94 then says:

Ibid. [MS Ashburnham 198], fol.78r: “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter.” The work of Filarete on architecture was first printed only in 1890 (W. von Oettingen). In it he alludes to his work on agriculture, which is probably what John Michael Albert has in mind. See M. Lazzaroni and A Munoz, “Filarete, scultore e architetto del sec. XV”, 1908, p.281.

Somehow this whole mention appears to have gone unnoticed by all recent writers on Filarete: yet its existence would seem to strongly tip the balance of probability towards the likelihood that he did actually write his “other little works”. Hence why finding it was so rewarding (for me, at least).

Incidentally, MS Ashburnham 198 (one of the 11,000 manuscripts held by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence) was dedicated to Boniface, marquis of Montferrat: and so was probably written between 1483 (when Bonifazio Palaeologo became marquis) and 1488 (when Alberto was given the title Count Palatine by Frederick III) or 1490 (when Alberto is thought to have died).

I then wondered where Alberto might have seen Filarete’s herbal manuscript. Alberto was born in Bergamo, trained in Padua, returned to Bergamo, and practised medicine at Rovato, Brescia, Chiari: and for a time was private physician to Roberto di Sanseverino, as well as Prior of the College of Physicians in Bergamo. I’d therefore guess that Alberto probably saw Filarete’s work (and perhaps even had a copy made of it) while in Bergamo, where he spent most of his life, only 50km or so from Milan where Filarete was working: or he may even have met Filarete, who is believed to have designed the plans for Bergamo Cathedral circa 1459, and who doubtless visited Bergamo on several occasions.

It would be amazing if Filarete’s elegant vernacular work on plants (or even just its incipit) could be identified: and so I started, emboldened by the archival research content of Day Three of the Warwick/Warburg Course, to think about where I might search (and for what, and for how long).

Identifying herbals from purely written descriptions is not unprecedented. In Thorndike’s “History of Magic & Experimental Science” Vol.IV (p.599), he describes Pandolphus Collenucius of Pesaro learning about herbs in Venice: “There in the street of the spice-dealers in a shop having as its sign the head of an Ethiopian he had consulted an herbal in which the plants were represented so carefully and artfully that you would have thought they grew on its pages.” In a footnote, Thorndike notes that Valentinelli (1872) “has shown that this was the De Simplicibus of Benedetto Rinio, with pictures of the plants by the Venetian painter, Andrea Amadio. The MS is now S. Marco VI, 59 (Valentinelli, XIII, 10).” All the same, we really don’t yet have enough to work with in the present case.

Where did Alberto’s belongings go after his death? Sergio Toresella tells me that Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) wrote: “I understand that this Alberti was an humanist that wrote a lot of comedies and poetry but I do not know were his belongings went after his death.” So at least I’m not the first to ask!

But all is not lost: the Biblioteca Angelo Mai in Bergamo has a good collection of his letters and notes, and many manuscripts from his personal library (and so with his initials and coat of arms added to them). The library’s bibliographical description of its various humanistic documents taken from Kristeller’s Iter Italicum and Iter Supplementum is here. But, as Sergio points out, none looks particularly promising, with the possibly exception of MA 184-186 folio 8v “Ex experimentis et secretis magistri Guelmi” (though this too seems fairly unlikely).

There are some books on Alberto’s work. For instance, a 20th century academic called Giovanni Giraldi seems to have spent his life editing and publishing papers on him in obscure journals, many of which are reproduced in his 1967 book “Opera poetica, philosophica, rhetorica, theologica” (Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini): although none appears to be for sale online (boo), WorldCat lists 5 or 6 copies, one in the Warburg Institute (hooray!)

For Alberto’s life, there is “Giovanni Michele Alberto Carrara” by Ercole Vittorio Ferrario and Gian Camillo Donadi (1964), for which WorldCat lists just one copy (boo)… in the Wellcome Institute Library in London, just around the corner from the British Library (phew!). I’ve been meaning to go there for a while, partly to take a picture of its necromantic painting depicting John Dee (but that’s another story).

Interestingly, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana makes a log of everyone who examines each of its manuscripts available on its website. Of the ten people listed for MS Ashburnham 198, there is someone from the Warburg Institute (in Hamburg!) in 1930, Patrick McGurk from the Warburg (in London) in 1953, Federici Vescalini Graziella in 1987, John Monfasani in 1995, and Ulrich Pfisterer in 1998, though I don’t yet know if Ulrich (who has written papers on Filarete) was or is aware of the mention on f78r: I’ll ask him, see what he says…

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, there’s always the tiny possibility that multispectral imaging of its very first page might just (if Alberto just happened to end up owning it) reveal a faint contact transfer from Alberto’s coat of arms and initials. But I’m more interested in seeing if the incipit is anywhere to be found: that would be far more useful for trying to break its cipher.

All of which may not seem like much to get hugely excited about, but it is a step forward (though admittedly only at the glacial pace normal for Voynich research). *sigh*

Voynich Lonely Hearts…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Yes, some people are now advertising for Voynich widows: online dating site OKCupid currently has six members (3 m, 1 f, 2 bi) who list the Voynich Manuscript as one of their interests (though how they can find any time for other interests beats me).

Of course, I should point out that to be well-matched as a partner for a Voynichologist, you’d need to be comfortable with long periods of –errrm– “benign neglect” (for example, evenings and weekends), and to understand that the itinerary of shared/family holidays will very often end up being finessed to accommodate historical / cultural sites of Voynichological interest (New Haven (of course), Philadelphia, New York, Rome, Milan, etc), or to drop by academic libraries which just happen to hold the only remaining copy of <insert obscure bookname here>.

Just so you know – forewarned is forearmed! (But eight-armed is octopoidal). 🙂

Erich von Daniken & the VMs…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

For those of us who suspected that Erich von Daniken had been silently abducted by aliens at some point in the last couple of decades (but without bothering to look up his Wikipedia entry to find out that this was [probably] not true), a new von Daniken book may come as a bit of a surprise.

Released in German in September 2007, “Falsch Informiert!” promises the reader a thoughtful reappraisal (and a combative intellectual defence against countless assaults) of von Daniken’s claims from all those years ago, such as Father Crespi’s “Metal Library” and the Nasca lines and… oh, you get the general idea. (Personally, I’d be more interested to read Stan Hall’s (2007) book “Tayos Gold: The Archives of Atlantis“, but there you go.)

As ever, von Daniken’s roving eye remains alert for anomalous objects that might just have been placed into an inappropriate historical stratum by careless alien visitors: the Piri Reis map (debunking courtesy of the ever-reliable Map Room blog), the splendid Antikythera Mechanism, and so forth. Both of which seem perfectly sane artefacts to me, with no huge (or even small) need to introduce extraterrestrial visitations to explain their basic existence.

But wait: in “Falsch Informiert!”, von Daniken has also picked up on the Voynich Manuscript as an object apparently inserted out of the correct historical sequence. Now, while I don’t believe that the VMs requires a deus ex machina (a chariot-driving deus, in Daniken’s case) to explain its very-probably-Quattrocento art history, I do think it will be interesting to see what our Swiss chum has to say about it.

As you’d expect, his account may well turn out to be nonsense: but even so, it will very likely be well-argued and well-read nonsense. Which, compared to a lot of the Voynich babble out there, should at least be a bit of fun to read. Just remember not to inhale. 🙂

Adolfo Stromboli (who he?)…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Another day, another claimed Voynich decryption, this time by an archaeologist called Adolfo Stromboli. Though retired from active digging duty, he now claims to spend his time in his climate controlled house in West Virginia solving the Voynich Manuscript.

Stromboli has put a nice little puzzle on the right of his page for fans of pigpen ciphers, marred only by the fact that he misspelt the first word in the plaintext (the penultimate letter is the wrong vowel)… oh well.

Ominously, some Javascript windows pop up at the start, claiming to scan your identity or something similar…

But have no fear, it’s all just a piece of harmless fun, almost certainly concocted by a Worcester Polytechnic Institute student at the WPI Mystery Club. Though the WPI’s claim to fame for Worcester is (according to Wikipedia) wrong: it is probably the second (not third) largest city in New England (after Boston). My two personal favourite Worcester factettes: (1) its original Pakachoag name was ‘Quinsigamond’ (why ever did they want to change that?), and (2) the town was home to modern hero Harvey Ball, the 1963 inventor of the smiley face. 🙂

Shirley Maclaine? Surely not!

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Proof that the VMs meme has entered a whole new era comes from a quite unexpected source: a 2007 thread about the VMs’ positive energy in an online forum for Shirley Maclaine’s online community.

I suspect that, not so long ago, the VMs would not have been described by the same crowd as at all “beautiful”. This is basically what I mean when I say that the VMs is becoming more “mainstream”: it’s not that it is changing, but rather that as people’s tastes are evolving, so the whole Voynichian vibe is becoming more accessible. As always, make of it what you will…

Markov models and line-initial letters…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Once upon a time (as most Voynich research stories begin) around 2003, there was a brief fad amongst VMs mailing list members for constructing Markov (state-based) models for Voynichese. My own (in retrospect not so good) contribution looked like this: incidentally, this is hosted as part of a “non-systematic miscellany of Voynich-related documents, scans, diagrams and images” here on my personal pages.

I’m currently thinking about revisiting this whole Markov model thing, but using tokenised adjacency tables to help construct it. That is, first tokenise the selected text (Currier A pages, Currier B pages, labels, etc) according to a set of predetermined frequent (possibly verbose cipher) pairs (such as ol, or, al, ar, am, aiiii, aiii, aii, ai, qo, etc), then build up a large “adjacency table” (i.e. counting the occurrence of adjacent tokens in a 2d grid, first token indexed up the left, second token across the top).

It might be said that the whole point of constructing Markov models is to work out what the tokens are. To which I would reply that trying to work out both word structure and token structure within the same model has to date proved unhelpful. In fact, I think the overloaded way that “a” and “o” are used within Voynichese (for example, the “o” in “qo” is unlikely to be the same kind of “o” in “ol”) may well be a sign that these were deliberately designed to confuse decipherers as to the structure of the tokens, in a tricky Quattrocento Sforza cipher sort of way.

Or, in terms of signal processing, I’d say that the verbose cipher convolves the text signal, blurring away most of the sharp boundaries in the underlying plaintext you’re hoping to model.

The new twist I have on all this is to exclude a lot of noise when collecting the adjacency stats, in particular the first tokens of each line. This thought came from a recent email exchange with Marke Fincher, who reminded me that the first letter of each line is often unreliable, and in particular…

Check out lines which include the EVA-strings “YSHEO” and “YCHEO”.
These strings are almost always line-initial, and probably because the Y is in fact data from a vertical column of symbols.
Ditto for “dche” I think.

(By the way, I think “eo” occurs twice as often in A pages than B pages.)

Thinking about line-initial letters, if you take a random page from the VMs (say, f77r) and look at the first column of tokens (I used Takeshi Takahashi’s VMs transcription for the following), you’ll see that its elements typically come from a very limited group: the “s qo s qo s qo” sequence near the start could be deliberate padding, rather than just coincidence or a coded reference to an early line-up of Catford’s finest band “Status Quo” (as I suspect Francis Rossi was born post-Renaissance):-

p t qo s qo s qo s qo d qo qo che qo sheo d ot qo s ol s qo qo q d qo s d t p ol d d qo d shee qo d y s

Yet if you look at the form of the “s” characters when written as the first character of the line (which occurs more in B pages than in A pages, I think) as appear on the page, you can see various subtle scribal forms of it appearing: “round head s”, “flat head s”, “short s”, “long s”, etc. Might these be a kind of steganographic anti-transcription cipher? It’s certainly a thought..

León Cathedral MS 8…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

One of the better APOD posts I mentioned recently discussed the similarities between f67r1 and pages 10v and 19v of a 10th-11th century antiphonal, which can be seen in “Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain” by Mireille Mentré. This is held in León Cathedral library as its MS 8: I found a good quality image of 10v on a 2006 post on the Dragon’s Scriptorium blog by someone called Emma. León MS 8 is pretty (in fact, very pretty): but I’d need to see the rest of the manuscript to work out how good a match it is to the VMs.
There is also a nice picture of the circular design at Arcos de la Frontera on the Associacion Torrestrella blog, which dates it as no later than the fifteenth century. But I’d have to say it’s not an obvious match for f67r1.
Moving from Spain to Italy, and there are also plenty of geometric circular designs in Italian churches: a nice one from the floor of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice is at the bottom of this page from quilt artist Linda M. Poole.

But there is one of these which I can’t find anywhere, which I think I caught a glimpse of in “Francesco’s Venice” on TV: it was in the floor of the entrance of the Marciana in Venice (and so would have been made by Jacopo Sansovino). As I recall, this was almost exactly the same shape as the circular drawing in f67r1 (though without the face in the middle). But I have been unable to find a copy of it… drat! 🙁 [please email me if you find one!]

APOD Voynich discussion…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Browsing idly through the few Google search results for Voynich above Voynich News a few days ago, I wondered how voynich dot org, a parked domain with no content and no inward links could rank so highly out of 225,000 hits. Now that is a mystery: whatever SEO ayahuasca they’re using, I want some.

Following that micro-enigma, the next two search hits along (dated 2002 and 2005) are for APOD, the “Astronomy Photo of the Day” from our dear friends at NASA, faux Star Wars space mission specialists and erstwhile inventors of the Techno-Trousers. Why does Google mysteriously rate these two tiny pages (both featuring the same cropped picture of f67r1) so highly?

Well… it seems that the author of the 2002 APOD entry received so many emails related to it that he re-posted it again in 2005, with a request that interested parties should not post their, ummm, fascinating thoughts to him (tellingly, the email address has been replaced by “[email protected]“) but instead post them to The Asterisk* online forum. And so they did, again and again, with about 280 posts in the main thread within a week, plus various auxiliary threads (such as this one) since.

I thought I’d trawl through them to see if there’s anything of any interest there. Despite lots of posts debating Gordon Rugg’s “Ruggish” hoax hypothesis in a fairly vacuous way, here is what I found (though heavily edited, or I’d still be typing in a week’s time).

(1) Adrian Nedelkovic from Beograd (Belgrade) in Serbia, mentioned his hypothesis that had been published on p.42 of the 28th October 2004 edition of “Planeta”, a Serbian popular science magazine. In a dusty corner of the Wayback Machine are copies of his first two pages (part 1 and part 2, though the images have long vanished into the ether), where he proposes that one particular fragment of Voynichese should be transcribed (you’ll see in a moment why I’ve put certain parts in bold) as:-
Nedelkovic believes that this “is about applying a medicine in a right and wrong way, with a warning in the end about the wrong appliance or a lost recipe”, and translates it as (with “?” for missing words):

Tu kur uluruda ula kur deiiv fulkaiko fuias kus cius deiiv D kur fueiiv
kileiiv kllur kus kur clus da uila fuileiiv da
Ailca kur a ileiv deiiv cilla u leiiv uila ulccl deiiv
Allcallk a leiiv ulcur ulus ula lusda

 

To cure your ? cure ? ? fools ? close ? ? ? ?
The cure (for you) cause cure close the ? ? the
? cure a life ? ? you live ? ? ?
All call a life you’ll cure, you loose you’re lost

Which would seem to add an as-yet-unknown type of deciphering delusion to the list: the misplaced belief that text messaging was invented in the early Renaissance.

(2) As a representative sampling of the messages in the thread, Samten suggests that the 24 spokes on f67r1 represent the “planetary hours”, “D J Matulewicz suggests that the same picture might represent a “sailor’s compass through the night sky”, while geon wonders whether f34r shows when to cultivate opium poppies, f76r1 when to harvest them , and f75r/f78r how to turn them into morphine, possibly as part of an entire book about manufacturing narcotics.

(3) The first really substantive post on f67r1 in the whole thread (a third of the way down this page) comes from dandelion, who excitedly points to “the Calendar Pages from the “Antiphonal, León Cathedral, 8 Fol. 10v and 19v., 10th-11th century” ” as mentioned in “Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain” by Mireille Mentré: and concludes that “it is definately a Calendar” of undetermined age.

(4) Woody NaDobhar suggests (a third of the way down on this page) that the VMs might be a “Book of Shadows”, “a book of times and recipes used by practitioners of hedge magic”, but with many of the “obviously not real” plants being “botanical chimera” in a kind of “Georgia O’Keefe” way.

(5) It should be noted that few of the posters really engage with the VMs (but then again, at least one of them was a 9-year-old boy, who at least showed courage). This annoyed Helen, who rather snarkily wrote: “The poster who suggested that we can’t read [the VMs] because it’s not English and the one who enters nonsensical links followed by emoticons are to be commended for managing to post on the internet in spite of their severe limitations.” Say it like it is, sister: how many times have I pulled back from typing this myself?

(6) About halfway down this page, Hotrod (Mike H) sees f67r1 as an “Archeometre“-style drawing [actually a 19th century “Atlantean” text, with a pseudo-Lullian Renaissance vibe], and infers from the large number of apparently-pregnant women that the whole manuscript is about fertility: while at the very bottom, theAtarian suggests a similarity between it and an Egyptian hypocephalus. The preceding page has a post by MrTim (Tim Ackerson), linking to his page describing the VMs as being a single substitution cipher hiding a mix of Early Welsh, Irish, Latin, Old Cornish and numerous unknown (and probably unknowable) languages. While on this page, Misfit wonders whether it is written in cursive Bulgarian, before going on (in a separate post) to suggest a translation of “qokedy” as “who will give”, “qochek” as “the head or hard part of a cabbage”, while “dal” means “whether or not”.

(7) We’re now onto page 17 of 19, and (at long last) a sensible post. John Keirein had just seen a PBS travel program about Arcos de la Frontera in Spain, with an f67r1-like pattern on the plaza outside the church. “But the mysterious highlight is this 15th-century magic circle: 12 red and 12 white stones — the white ones with various constellations marked. Back then on a child’s baptism day, the parents would stop here first for a good exorcism. The exorcist would stand inside the protective circle and cleanse the baby of any evil spirits. Then they could proceed into the church.” (Copied from this site). Then Misfit posts again, this time about a magic circle his aunt gave him; and then some more translations (he says it is phonetic “Macedonian”, i.e. a Bulgarian dialect): “oteey chedal oteedy” = “why does it burn why did you give“; followed by tales of his aunt apparently poisoning half his family, but that’s OK because it’s her religion.

Then, just as things were starting to warm up in a nicely mad way, the moderator pulled the plug and locked the thread. Finito, fin, the end: all in all, he’d had just about enough of so many odd-shaped peas jammed in APOD. And, despite all the occasional flickers of intelligence, can you really blame him?

Dan Burisch & the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Have you ever lifted up a stone in the woods and found something icky you really wished you hadn’t seen?

Or, in our modern ‘armchair explorer’ days, have you ever clicked confidently onto a website where, errrm, oh deary me, oh no, that’s not, you can’t… (you get the basic idea)?

Unfortunately, the point of being a blogger (or indeed any kind of writer) is that you document the odd things you see so that other people can decide whether to seek them out for themselves (rare) or to avoid them like the plague (far more common). Which means that bloggers have a vaguely journalistic obligation to follow any given story right through to its logical endpoint, wherever that may happen to be.

Now, even though once upon a time I worked on an “X-Files” computer game, I freely admit that I don’t actully know much about UFO lore. The closest thing on my bookshelf is Nick Cook’s thought-provoking “The Hunt For Zero Point“, but that’s more about odd terrestrial flying objects than alien ones per se. Which, as will become rapidly clear, made the story of Dan Burisch and his claimed decipherment of the Voynich Manuscript even more ‘out there’ to me than most things I tend to run into.

On the surface, it’s all straightforward enough. Burisch thinks the VMs is by Roger Bacon, who apparently wrote it in a kind of disguised / dyslexic Hebrew lettering. The text direction, as you’d expect from Hebrew, runs right-to-left (though, oddly enough, Burisch needed a mirror to read it). Line 17 of f35v has a Voynichese EVA fragment “daiin.dain.chkaly.choly“, the last three words of which are transcribed halfway down the page here (presumably by Burisch?) as “dain mkaly(e) moly(e)“, deciphered right-to-left as “elom el akim niad” – “everlasting God will establish knowledge“. Of course, add the missing “daiin” back in and it should probably read “everlasting God will establish knowledge knowledge“: but that’s normal for this kind of claimed VMs decipherment.

As an aside, Googling for “elom” returns links to (1) “the personification of the moon among southern Hebrews“, and (2) “Eloms were short, stocky, bipedal sentients, with a thick pelt of oily, dark fur, native to the frigid and mineral-rich desert planet of Elom” on the Elom entry in the Wookieepedia, an online Star Wars wiki. Further down in Google’s search results, the (real) Wikipedia entry also notes that Elom is “a tribal ewe name meaning “god loves me” or “loved by god”“. It is hard not to get the feeling from this that someone is either (a) being somewhat impressionistic with their supposed translation, or (b) having a Star Wars-themed laugh at the expense of UFOlogists. [In the following, I presume (a) to be true, but sadly there’s no obvious reason to discount (b) at all.]

Burisch’s claimed decryption reprises, just as you can find countless times in the museum of failed Voynich solutions, a large number of by-now-oh-so-familiar motifs of pathological enigmatology: selective transcription, Roger Bacon, mirror writing, disguised Hebrew, confusing and repetitive text, selective dyslexia, arbitrary anagramming, religious / liturgical / Gnostic plaintexts, arbitrary / optimistic / free-form translations, etc. So far, nothing hugely unexpected, then.

But dig a little deeper and things quickly gets bizarre, even by the historical standards of Voynichianity. Burisch claims to have been given the key to solving the VMs by “#3-15”, the keyname of an alien (“J-Rod”?) visitor/prisoner held at Area 51 by Majestic, the secret organization for whom Burisch allegedly worked. The remainder of the decryption was placed in “File 21” (held in Europe somewhere?), and described Burisch’s future discoveries (about ‘Looking Glass’? Man-made stargates? The “Ganesh” particle?) that he has not as yet made. The whole Burisch affair revolves around conspiratorial claims of time-travelling aliens meddling with human affairs and how 4 billion people may well die (in 2012?) as a result of the immense explosion of a manmade stargate, or possibly of the natural stargate on “Frenchman’s Mountain” where some Voynich lettering can allegedly be found carved in the stone.

Now, I’m in no way qualified to judge on this kind of end-times stuff (after all, who is?). But purely as far as Burisch’s claims about the Voynich Manuscript go, I have to say that I’m quite sure they’re a load of nonsense. The VMs is a historical artefact that was demonstrably constructed more than a century after Roger Bacon’s death, the word patterns don’t match Hebrew (or any other known language), the left-right direction of writing doesn’t match Hebrew, the strongly-structured letter patterns within words don’t show any signs of dyslexic-style anagram transposition, and I would predict there is an overwhelming (>99.9%) probability that the Hebrew-style pattern that was found on part of one line on f35v could not be found duplicated in more than 0.05% of the Voynichese corpus as a whole – and in any case, such fragments would very likely not make syntactical or semantical sense as a meaningful sentence. Right now I’m not even hugely convinced that the four words “elom el akim niad” can be contorted to mean what they are claimed to mean.

I’m all for novelists’ appropriating the VMs for their books (though it’s actually a far harder trick to carry off than most seem to realise): but when this kind of “kooks and spooks” looking-glass world tries to claim the VMs as one of its own, it’s hard to find a point of mutual accommodation. Sure, the VMs was mysterious enough 30 years ago for Terence McKenna to be intrigued by it: but we’ve come a long way since then, and it’s now merely an historical curio right on the cusp of mainstream thought.

Perhaps if the decrypted contents of “File 21” come out into the open, we’ll all fall back in stunned amazement (before fleeing as far away from any of the stargates as we can). But until that day… sorry, but I’ll have to admit to not being a believer.

UPDATE: More on Dan Burisch & the VMs