“Pax Nax Vax” revisited…

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Back in 2010, I speculated that one of the oddly-unreadable lines of text on the Voynich Manuscript’s last page (f116v) might have originally read “pax + nax + vax”. Here’s a little bit more background on that mysterious phrase…

A Prague Nun’s Amulet

In “The Book of Grimoires: The Secret Grammar of Magic” (and in several other of his oddly-similar books), Claude Lecouteux mentions that:

During the restoration of the Saint George Basilica in Prague, a parchment strip requesting the cure of a case of trench fever for a certain Dobrozlava was found under the plaster of an alcove. The prayer ended with: “May Pax + nax vax be the remedy for this servant of God. Amen.”

Confirming this account is “STÄRKER ALS DER GLAUBE: MAGIE, ABERGLAUBE UND ZAUBER IN DER EPOCHE DES HUSSITISMUS” by František Šmahel (p.322, Bohemia Band 32 (1991)):

Einen nicht weniger seltenen Beleg stellt das Original eines Pergamentamuletts aus der ersten Hälfte des 14.Jahrhunderts dar, das die Schwester Dobroslawa aus dem Prager Benediktinerinnenkonvent des hl Georg vor dem Schüttelfrost bewahren sollte. Wurden die magischen Wirkungen des Textes in diesem Falle durch die Beschwörungsformel „pax-nax-vax” erhöht, so erfüllten im Milieu des einfachen Volkes einzelne Buchstaben oder auch deren bizarre Ansammlungen diese Funktion, wie wir sie z.B. auf keramischen Gefäßen finden.

…which Google Translate (slightly tweaked) turns into:

An original parchment amulet from the first half of the 14th century, which the sister Dobroslawa from the Benedictine convent of St. George in Prague was to protect against the chills, is no less rare a document. If the magic effects of the text were increased in this case by the incantation “pax-nax-vax”, in the milieu of the common people individual letters or their bizarre collections fulfilled this function, because we find them on ceramic vessels, for example.

Šmahel’s footnote 19 gives as his sources:

Eine Photographie aus dem St.-Georg-Kloster nebst Transkription und Übersetzung enthält Nováček, V. J.: Amulet ze XIV. století, nalezený v chrámu sv. Jiří na Hradě Pražském [Ein Amulett aus dem XIV. Jahrhundert aus der Basilika des hl.Georg auf der Prager Burg]. ČL 10 (1901) 353 f. Es bleibt zu erwähnen, daß ein Mönch aus dem Kloster Ostrov den Nonnen des St. Georg Klosters zu Beginn des 15. Jahrhunderts das gegenseitige Beschenken mit sog. Amuletten oder Talismanen an bestimmten Tagen im Jahr vorhielt, siehe Truhlář, Josef: Paběrky z rukopisů klementinských VIII. [Nachgelesenes in den Clementinischen Handschriften VIII.]. VČA 7 (1898) 210f. Aufschriften und Buchstaben auf mittelalterlicher Keramik belegt Švehla, Josef: Nádoby a nápisy na středověké keramice z Ústí Sezimova a Kozího hrádku [Aufschriften auf mittelalterlichen keramischen Gefäßen aus Ústí Sezimovo und Kozí hrádek]. ČSPSČ 19 (1911) 10-18. Interpretationen der beschützendmagischen Funktion der Aufschriften auf mittelalterlichen Glocken (lateinisch geschriebene hebräische Ausdrücke, Buchstaben des griechischen Alphabets u.a.) finden sich bei Fiodr, Miroslav: Nápisy na středověkých zvonech [Aufschriften auf Mittelalterlichen Glocken]. SPFFBU C 20 (1973 148f.

…which Google Translate also turned into pretty good English (has GT recently been upgraded, it seems better than usual?)…

Nováček, V. J.: Amulet ze XIV. Století, nalezený v chrámu sv. Jiří na Hradě Pražském [An amulet from the 14th century from the Basilica of St. George in Prague Castle]. ČL 10 (1901) p.353 contains a photograph from the St. Georg monastery along with transcription and translation.

It should be mentioned that at the beginning of the 15th century, a monk from Ostrov Monastery reproached [the nuns for] the mutual gifts of so-called amulets or talismans on certain days of the year, see Truhlář, Josef: Paběrky z rukopisů klementinských VIII. [Manuscript fragments from the Clementinum VIII.]. VČA 7 (1898) p.210.

Inscriptions and letters on medieval ceramics are documented by Švehla, Josef: Nádoby a nápisy na středověké keramice z Ústí Sezimova a Kozího hrádku [Inscriptions on medieval ceramic vessels from Ústí Sezimovo and Kozí hrádek]. ČSPSČ 19 (1911) 10-18.

Interpretations of the protective, magical function of the inscriptions on medieval bells (Latin Hebrew expressions, letters of the Greek alphabet, etc.) can be found in Fiodr, Miroslav: Nápisy na středověkých zvonech [Inscriptions on Medieval Bells]. SPFFBU C 20 (1973 p.148

This in turn leads Google to a footnote on p.65 of Benedek Lang’s (2008) “Unlocked Books” which I mentioned in my 2010 post. Lang gives the following transcription of the charm’s text, which refers to the famous legend/story of Seven Sleepers:

+ In nomine + patris + et filii + et spiritus + sancti + In monte + Celion + requiescunt septem dormientes + Maximianus + Martinianus + Malcus + Constantinus + et Dionisius + Seraphion + et Johannes. Domine Jesu Christe liberare digneris hanc famulam Dobrozlauam a febribus quintanis. pax + nax vax sit huic famule dei remedium Amen.”

Actually, it turns out that we can do even better than this, because Nováček’s 1901 article has been placed online. Nováček describes the strip of parchment as being 10cm x 4cm, folded three times and then pierced twice, through which holes a narrow strip of the same parchment was threaded. He describes the lettering as somewhat poor, but definitely dating to the first half of the 14th century.

To my pleasant surprise, the scan included a low resolution image of the parchment charm itself:

It’s not the best scan you’ll ever see, sure, but it’s a lot better than nothing. 🙂 To my eye, a reasonable transcription would be:

+ In nomine + patris + et filii + et spirit[us] + sa[n]cti + In mo[n]te + Celion + requiescu[n]t septe[m] dormie[n]tes + Maximia[n]us + Martinianus + Malcus + Co[n]sta[n]tin[us] + et Dionisius + Seraphion + et Joha[n]nes. Dom[ine] J[esu] Ch[rist]e liberare digneris hanc famula[m] + dobrozlauam a febrib[us] quintan[us]. pax + nax vax sit huic famule dei remediu[m] a[m]en.

Dr. Čeněk Zíbrt

Finally, Nováček directs readers who would like to know more to an article by Dr. Čeněk Zíbrt entitled »Kouzla a čáry starých Čechů« in Archaeolo-gických Památkách XIV (1887), which details inscriptions found on a number of similar amulets.

Of course, I couldn’t let the minor impediment of not even remotely reading Czech stop me pursuing this a little further. 😉 So I tracked down a Czech academic website where all the volumes of “Památky archaeologické a místopisné” were digitized, and found the article in Volume XIV (1887-1889).

However, just to make life difficult, Zíbrt’s article was broken up into lots of smaller pieces: but I’ll summarize the relevant pieces below.

Zíbrt starts by confirming that he had seen written mention of such amulets in the Třeboň and Jindřichohradecký archives. For example, in 1474 the Kantor in Soběslav wrote to the Burgrave in Krumlov about a “Mrs. Makhny”. She had been instructed to wear a certain amulet around her neck for nine days, because the Burgrave of Chúsnický had said that when he wore the same thing around his neck, the disease had gone away. (Arch. Třeboň.)

Similarly, the Catholic missionary Matěj Václav Šteyr wrote in 1719 about people believing (falsely) that amulets guard against fevers. The words found on such amulets were:

  • Hax, pax, max etc
  • Arac, Amou etc.
  • Barata, Daries etc
  • Galhes Galdis etc
  • Gibel, Cor etc
  • Ira, Bira, Lira, Pira, etc (to protect against the bite of a rabid dog)

In 1564, the scholar Wierus (who wrote “De praestigiis daemonum”) wrote that he had seen “Hax pax max Deus adimax” written on an amulet to protect against rabies. Rukop. univ. knih. Pr. (17 D 4), str. 81 contains the following: “DEX PEX NOVA MXZATX VAhX PRAX ZVAX ZISX PYX IVONXAX ANIX”. [Might some of these Xs actually be crosses? NP]

The last amulet Zíbrt discusses is a Czech variant on the SATOR / AREPO / TENET / OPERA / ROTAS magic square:

Along the way, Dr. Zíbrt confesses that the article was triggered by seeing a similar series of amulet-related articles from 1880 onwards in Verhandl d. Berlin. Gesellschaft f. Anthropologie, Ethnologie u. Urgeschichte, and feeling affronted that nothing similar had been written from the point of view of the Czech archives. But I’ll leave those articles for another day, this post is already more than large enough. 🙂

Meanwhile in Vltava…

One Czech web page reports the specific wording of a formula found being used on an amulet in the Vltava region to protect against fever, as reported by Matěj Václav Šteyr:

“Ve jménu Otce i Syna i Ducha svatého Ve vrchu Kelion odpočívá sedm spících….Pane Ježiši Kriste osvoboditi ráčiž tuto služebnici od zimních pětidenních. Pax nax vax budiž této služebnici Božím lékem amen. ” [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Lord Jesus Christ, free this servant from the quintan fever. Pax nax vax let this servant gain God’s cure. Amen].

According to the dissertation by Mgr. Jitka Rejhonová, Matěj Václav Šteyr was the most published Bohemian missionary of the Baroque period. Anyone wishing to read more Czech is welcome to download this and find out more.

Regardless, it already seems more than clear to me that this specific charm text (combining the Seven Sleepers with pax nax vax to protect the wearer against fever) was a long-held belief in the region, from the 14th or 15th century right through to the 18th century.

Finally, f116v…

So, the question is: what does this tell us about the three-line block of marginalia on the Voynich Manuscript’s final page (f116v)?

I can certainly easily see how the middle line might (before one or more heavy-handed emenders got in on the act) have originally been “six + pax + nax + vax + ahia + ma+ria +”, so my previous suggestion that this block of text might have been the text of a charm still basically stands.

Moreover, given that it seems to have been traditional to write amulet charms on a piece of vellum (presumably because vellum is so durable), I wonder whether the reason someone wrote the charm on this sheet was because they intended to then cut it out and use it as magical protection. Perhaps, having written it, that person then realized that there was writing on the other side, and so decided (or was told) to leave it instead?

Finally, given the long-standing link between the story of the Seven Sleepers and pax nax vax, I now wonder whether the first word originally was not “michiton” but in fact “m[onte] celion“. Something to think about, anyway. 🙂

Other Pax nax vax examples…

In his (2011) “Norse Magical and Herbal Healing“, Ben Waggoner takes a close look at AM 434a 12mo in the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen, an Old Norse-Icelandic medical text from circa 1500.

In his footnote 158 to the phrase “res [shape], fres †, pres †, tres †, gres †”, Waggoner notes:

The magic words are gibberish. MS Royal Irish Academy 23 D 43 uses similar words in blood-stopping charms: fres † prares † res † pax † vax † nax † (Larsen, Medical Miscellany, p. 138) and fres pres res rereres reprehex (Larsen, Medical Miscellany, p. 139). A blood-stopping charm in AM 461 has pax, vax, vax, hero, boro, iuva tartar gegimata, and another in the same manuscript has sumax pax (Kålund, Alfræði Íslenzk, vol. 3, pp. 109, 111).

MS Royal Irish Academy 23 D 43, which was written a little before 1486, is described in Henning Larsen’s 1926 article in Modern Philology (it’s in JSTOR): Larsen believes that it was assembled at Munkelif in Bergen from primarily Norwegian sources. However, the full discussion seems to be in Larsen’s ultra-rare 1931 book “An Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany” (which I haven’t seen).

Handritið AM 461 12mo is discussed here (admittedly in Icelandic): “Consummatum est, inclinato capite emisit spiritum. Pax, vax, vax, hero, boro, iuva tartar gegimata + In nomine patri et spiritus sancti”. (p.124) This same (encyclopaedic) manuscript includes an Icelandic Cisiojanus, which is nice.

My point is that the fifteenth century craze for using “pax nax vax” seems to have happened all across Europe. Anyone hoping to fix this just to Bohemia will therefore probably be fairly disappointed. Just thought I’d say!

PS: also mentioned in AM 434a is the formula where “a man writes these words in Latin letters with dog’s blood on his own wrist: “Max, píax, ríax”…” (p.48)

Pax Nax Vax’s Father, Rex Pax Nax

For the benefit of anyone trying to Google more stuff about Pax Nax Vax, I should add that it seems highly likely to me that it evolved out of a well-known earlier toothache charm, Rex Pax Nax. For example, there’s the one you can read in Edward Thomas Pettit’s critical edition of the Lacnunga (Remedies) in MS. Harley 585, f.183a, b (11th Century):

[Contra dolorum dentium]:
(Cristus) sup(er) mamoreum sedebat; Petrus tristis ante eum stabat, manum ad maxillum tenebat, et interrogebat eum D(om)in(u)s dicens:
“Quare tritis es, Petre?”
Respondit Petrus et dixit :
“D(omi)ne, dentes mei dolent.”
Et D(omi)n(u)s dixit :
“Adiuro te / migranea uel gutta maligna p(er) Patre(m) et Filium et Sp(iritu)m S(an)c(tu)m et p(er) celum et terram et p(er) XX ordines angelorum et p(er) LX p(ro)phetas et p(er) XII apostolos et p(er) IIIIor euangelistas et p(er) om(ne)s s(an)c(t)os q(u)i D(e)o placuerunt ab origine mundi, ut non possit diabolus nocere ei, nec in dentes, nec in aures, nec in pal[a]to, famulo D(e)i, ill(i) non ossa fra[n]gere, nec carnem manducare, ut non habeatis potestatem nocere ill(i), non dormiendo, nec uigilando, nec tangatis eum usq(ue) LX annos et unum diem. “
Rex pax nax in (Cristo) / Filio . Am(en) . Pater noster.

A later (and significantly cut-down) version of this from the Wolfsthurn handbook appears in the introduction to Kieckhefer’s “Magic in the Middle Ages” (p.4). There, it says that a person afflicted by toothache should have “Rex pax nax in Cristo filio suo” written on his/her jaw. (This came from the 14th century physician John of Gaddesdon, according to the Routledge History of Disease, p.56: BL Harley 2558 is online here).

Rex pax nax also appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1451, and San Marino, Huntington Library HM 64, and no doubt close to a hundred other medieval manuscripts. Hence my best guess is that pax nax vax started its life as a garbled / misremembered version of Rex pax nax, a formula which was still reasonably current in the 15th century.

[Incidentally, if I had money to burn, I’d now buy access to Lea Olsan’s (2003) “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice” in Social History of Medicine, Volume 16, Issue 3, December 2003, Pages 343–366, as well as a copy of Don C. Skemer’s (2010) “Binding words: Textual amulets in the Middle Ages“. But I’ve already managed to blow half of my 2020 book budget, so I hope to return to these at a later. *sigh* ]

Nicole Oresme’s “Treatise of the Sphere”, revisited…

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In a 2017 post, I listed the copies of Nicole Oresme’s (1368) “Treatise of the Sphere” (“Traité de l’espere“) that are still extant:

* BNF MS Franc. 1350 (ff. 1r-38v) [formerly owned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683)]
* BNF MS Franc. 2240 (ff. 61r-95v) [ARLIMA description]
* BNF MS Franc. 7487
* BNF nouv. acq. 10045 (ff. 1-39) [ARLIMA description]
* BORDEAUX, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 0531 ff. 90r-127r [1454-1458]
* FIRENZE, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 1604 [end 14th century]
* LEIDEN, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS Vossius gall. f° 010, ff. 1r-31v [15th century]
* OXFORD, St. John’s College, MS 164, ff. 1r-32r [around 1364-1373]
* VATICANO (CITTA DEL), Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 1337, ff. 29r-44v [last quarter of the 15th century]

According to Mackley (2012), the earliest of these is Oxford SJC MS 164, because “[t]he ornate illustrations and marginalia, as well as horoscope tables personal to Charles and his family, suggest that [this] manuscript belonged to Charles himself.” (pp.4-5).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my next challenge here is to find whether any historian has constructed a cladistic tree for these nine Treatise of the Sphere manuscripts.

Simultaneously, I’m still strongly considering my 2017 suggestion that the person most likely to have helped diffuse Oresme’s ideas out of France was Blasius of Parma (who was in Paris for a while prior to 1388). So the follow-on question there would be: can we determine which of these nine manuscripts was closest to the one copied by Blasius to take back with him to Italy? Might Blasius’ copy have in fact formed part of this tree?

Clearly, some good basic historical legwork needs to be done here.

The Importance of Oresme’s Treatise

Before proceeding any further, I think it should be said that Oresme’s treatise isn’t just yet another summary / translation of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera (e.g. BN Lat 7267, 7363 and 7400, as Rene Zandbergen once pointed out here). Even though his treatise follows the general sequence previously set out by Sacrobosco, Oresme is quite scathing about some of Sacrobosco’s claims (e.g. his estimate of the Earth’s diameter). [There’s more technical discussion of this in “Nicole Oresme et les Voyages Circumterrestres”, by M. Lejbowicz.]

More generally, in “Heaven and the Sphaera Mundi in the Middle Ages” (2000), Edgar Laird points out that Oresme’s account marked a turning point in the history of accounts of the spheres. This is because Oresme tried to force a definitive split between that which can be physically studied and that which should be treated as simply religious speculation: (p.25)

We also expect that at this point Oresme will explain what theology can contribute to the study of the sphere, but he writes instead, ‘Then some say that above it [i.e., the ninth sphere] there is an immobile heaven, then a heaven of crystal, and then the empyrean heaven in which is the throne of Solomon, and such things as pertain to neither physics nor astronomy. Therefore it will be sufficient for us to speak only of the nine spheres mentioned above’.

Oresme’s writings therefore mark him out as something of a rationalist (though pitching him as a ‘proto-scientist’ would be a modern back-projection). All the same, despite his small treatise’s similarities to previous works, it has to be said that there is something intensely new going on in the commentaries, thoughts and glosses he stitched through it.

As always (even with Copernicus), Oresme pulls his horse up before accidentally jumping over the Heresy puissance wall. But I’m sure the direction he was heading in was clear to many of his readers at the time.

Towards a Cladistic Tree…?

Almost certainly, the definitive work here is Lillian Margaret McCarthy “Maistre Nicole Oresme, ‘Traitié de l’espere’“, critical edition, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1943.

…and unfortunately that’s where this post stops, because I can’t see how to get access to it. The University of Toronto has lots of digitized dissertations from 1950 onwards online here, but 1943 is just before their cut-off date.

So… does any Cipher Mysteries reader have any suggestions as to how I can get a copy of this?

Alice Kober vs Linear B, The World vs Voynichese…

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I’ve just finished reading @MargalitFox’s excellent book “The Riddle of the Labyrinth“, which untangles the skein of history around the decryption of Linear B to reveal the quiet (but huge) contribution made by Alice Kober.

Fox’s belief (which I largely agree with) is that Kober would, had she not died early, almost certainly have completed her decryption programme before Michael Ventris. Regardless, Ventris had spent years making a fool of himself by insisting loudly and at great length that the language of Linear B must surely be Etruscan (it was actually an early form of Greek, Δ’Ω!), and he only began making swift progress once he took Kober’s results on board.

Because Linear B was an unknown language written in an unknown script, Kober always insisted that anyone who took a theory about the language as their starting point was doomed to failure. Rather, the single route to the finishing line was, she asserted, to find the patterns and deep symmetries inside the primary texts that we have, and to work outwards from there.

Kober’s attempts to systematically comb through the Linear B texts were frustrated through the 1930s and part of the 1940s by Sir Arthur Evans’ refusal to release more than a modest fraction of them. However, she built up card indexes and added physical cross-referencing means (using carefully punched holes, she was able to optically find matching patterns, like using postcards to build her own Google search facility for Linear B ).

It is easy to draw a long list of comparisons between her sustained attack on Linear B and The World’s somewhat scattershot attacks on Voynichese. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few of these cast the latter in anything like a favourable light.

Similarities

Both Sir Arthur Evans and the Voyniches had very fixed (and, in retrospect, quite wrong-headed) ideas about the historical sources of their respective scripts / languages: and both released only a small number of images to scholars before their respective deaths.

Hence the constraints Alice Kober was working within during the 1930s and 1940s weren’t really so different from those that Voynich researchers ‘enjoyed’ for most of the 20th century. Her specific response was to make her own transcriptions, build her own analytical machinery, and construct her own decryption methodology.

If you want a direct apples-to-apples comparison, I’d perhaps suggest looking for the methodological parallels between Kober and Captain Prescott Hunt Currier (1912-1995). They both consciously and deliberately attacked their targets without a specific plaintext language in mind; discovered deep language-like patterns that nobody had either noticed or grasped the significance of; and then disseminated them openly.

Differences

The #1 difference is that while Linear B had Michael Ventris, Voynichese has had no Gary Lineker or Filippo Inzaghi hanging around on the goal-line to head Captain Currier’s critical cross into the goal.

While it’s easy to say that Ventris was brilliant, in many ways his whole approach to Linear B had been naive and self-defeating from the start. Margalit Fox concludes that Kober thought Ventris was yet another hacky Linear B amateur, far more of a research liability than a research asset: that he was so blinded by his idiotic Etruscan theory that his research would never (in fact, could never) produce anything of genuine value.

But Ventris’ key personal asset turned out to be that he had, as the famous US entrepreneur/investor Fred Wilson put it back in 2016, strong views weakly held. That is, once Ventris finally twigged that Kober had found something genuinely telling that was incompatible with his (previously strongly held) Etruscan theory, he had the strength of character to be able to jump ship completely. (Though admittedly Ventris did strongly hedge his initial description of what he had come up with by describing it as something that might be no more than a wonderful delusion.)

For me, the oddest thing about Voynichese is that even though modern researchers now know a vast amount about its inner workings (for example, you could hardly fault Torsten Timm’s diligence and persistence), they remain steadfastly unable to figure out the next step forwards.

If you can imagine a Voynichese football hanging in the air in front of goal while all the strikers are squabbling at the opposite end of the playing field, you’re not far off the truth. 🙁

Synthesis

Even though many now know about Linear B, what is less known is the story of Linear A. Also discovered by Sir Arthur Evans, the Linear A script is almost certainly a syllabary that was used on Crete to write a (now-lost) Minoan language. When the early Greek invaders came from the Mycenean mainland, they adapted Linear A as a script to write down (admittedly somewhat imperfectly) their Early Greek language.

Alice Kober realized early on that despite the many visual similarities between their sign shapes, Linear A and Linear B were writing down entirely different languages. Hence she abandoned all attempts to decrypt Linear A (because there were so few examples of it) and focused instead on the much more promising Linear B.

In many ways, we have a closely analogous situation with Voynichese, in that it comprises the two major ‘languages’ that Captain Currier identified in the 1970s. More recent research has identified even more subtlety to Currier’s A vs B division: the researcher Glen Claston (Tim Rayhel) asserted that he had identified the specific sequence by which Currier A evolved (or was actively mutated) into Currier B.

Even now, however, it remains absolutely the norm for researchers – even otherwise very good researchers – to carry out their analyses on the whole of their Voynichese transcription, i.e. all the A pages and B pages merged together into a single whole, as if they were all the same kind of thing.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that, to me, this is akin to mixing Linear A and Linear B into a single Linear corpus, superficial amateurish nonsense that Kober had nothing but disdain for in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hence if you genuinely want to be the Michael Ventris of Voynichese, I would suggest that you start by trying to learn from Alice Kober and Captain Currier:

  • Assume you know nothing at all about the unknown language(s) beneath the unknown script (because you don’t, you simply don’t)
  • Tackle one corpus at a time (say, Herbal A, Quire 13, or Quire 20)
  • Build up what you consider to be a reliable transcription for it
  • Build up contact tables
  • Begin with the patterns at the start, middle, and end of words
  • Determine the precise internal logic of the script, with the idea of working out how that might be interfering with the unknown language beneath that script

A Father Christmas attack on the Voynich Manuscript…?

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It’s that time of year when a Voynich researcher’s mind turns to life’s most important questions. Such as whether it is possible to use Father Christmas to decrypt the Voynich Manuscript.

For a start, it’s entirely possible that there is Christmas-related imagery hidden in plain sight in the Voynich Manuscript, but we’ve just been too distracted by the details to notice them:

Before I go any further, I should say that I do know full well that what we now think of as ‘Santa Claus’ was in fact a 19th century faux-historical mash-up of loads of other stuff, and that he originally wore green clothes (not red). But I would – as spin doctors now tell us all the time – say that, wouldn’t I?

All the same, it’s probably safe to say that we would have zero luck using a 19th century cultural crossover to decrypt a 15th century object. However, we might have more luck with the layer that preceded him – by which I mean St. Nicholas.

This might be interesting because the zodiac roundel drawings in the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘zodiac’ section bear a strong resemblance to the zodiac roundel drawings found in early fifteenth century Alsace calendars (specifically 1420-1430, it’s all in the sleeves and the necklines). Hence I think there’s a reasonably good chance that what we’re looking at there is some kind of calendar – and the most important details written on calendars were feast days celebrating local saints.

If this section is indeed some kind of calendar (and it’s still speculation, remember), there’s a decent chance it was arranged not by zodiac degree but by month. But what day did the year start on in the 15th century?

Back then, this was not universally 1st January, not at all. In fact, as Rafal Prinke pointed out in 2001 (I quoted him in 2009), the Venetian year instead started on 1st March, while the Florentine year started on 25th March. The reason this is relevant is that the first zodiac sign depicted on a Voynich zodiac roundel is Pisces, which (though it astrologically / zodiacally starts in late February) was typically associated with March. (We are sufficiently certain of the folio order that we can be sure Pisces came first.)

So let’s make today’s educated guess: that the Voynich ‘zodiac’ section is actually a calendar of feast days that starts on 1st March. (It might even be some kind of wonky Cisioianus, nobody knows.) Does that give us a Father Christmas attack on the Voynich Manuscript?

Well… it might do. On the page for (according to our guess) December (it has a Sagittarius crossbowman roundel drawing in the centre), there are thirty ‘labels’ (attached to the thirty ‘nymphs’). And one of these labels might just be saying St. Nicholas, right?

As an aside: to my eyes, there are plenty of annoying (or at least slightly unsettling) details on this page:

  • It seems that the labels were added in a different ink and by a different quill
  • It seems that most (but not all) of the nymphs’ breasts were added by that same different hand
  • Some of the nymph outlines were also updated with that same quill
  • There’s a particularly badly drawn barrel outline added behind the top-left nymph just outside the largest ring
  • There’s green paint contact transfer from the facing page BUT that would seem to imply that the now-missing folio immediately afterwards (Capricorn and Aquarius) was not there when the green paint was added. Which would seem to imply that the green paint (at the very least) was added some time (probably a century or more?) after the initial composition phase(s).

But, getting back to Cisioianus (feast day mnemonics), a German 15th century Latin version for December run as follows:

  • December Barba Nico Concep et alma Lucia
  • Sanctus abinde Thomas modo Nat Steph Jo Pu Thome Sil.

We can decode this syllable by syllable to reveal the list of feast days that the mnemonic was trying to help people memorize (with a little help from Grotefend’s 1891 “Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters“, p.35):

  1. De-
  2. cem-
  3. ber
  4. Bar- – Feast of St Barbara
  5. ba
  6. Ni- – Feast of St Nicholas
  7. co
  8. Con- Feast of the Immaculate Conception
  9. cep
  10. Et
  11. Al-
  12. ma
  13. Lu- – Feast of St Lucy
  14. Ci-
  15. a
  16. Sanc-
  17. tus
  18. Ab-
  19. in
  20. de
  21. Thom- – Feast of St Thome Ap
  22. as
  23. mo-
  24. do
  25. Nat – Nativ. Domini
  26. Steph – Feast of St Stephen
  27. Jo
  28. Pu
  29. Tho- – Feast of St Thome Asp (St Thomas a Becket)
  30. me
  31. Sil – Feast of St Sylvester

What immediate emerges is that if we’re looking for St. Nicholas in the 15th century, his feast day was actually on December 6th, neatly sandwiched between St Barbara (December 4th) and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th).

Hence if the text on this page is some kind of Cisioianus mnemonic for December, we might hope to find labels in a sequence that looks vaguely like “Bar Ba Ni Co Con“. Now, I personally can’t see anything there that quite fits this pattern at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 😉

But, sadly, this is just about as far as St Nicholas’ Christmas sleigh can carry us into the speculative world of Voynich research. Happy Christmas to you all! 🙂

Pavia MS Aldini 488: “Collectio de Balneis”…

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When a comment landed here today from Diane O’Donovan about the (sometimes asserted, sometimes denied) connection between the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (the ‘balneo’ folios) and the late 12th century De Balneis Putolanis by Peter of Eboli, it reminded me that there’s a 15th century balneological manuscript out there I really want to know a lot more about – MS Aldini 488 “Collectio de balneis”.

Q13A vs Q13B (again)

However, before I launch into all that, I first need to recap various codicological features of Q13 before we start trying to work with it.

The first thing to know about Q13 is that its bifolios have ended up bound in the wrong order. We can tell this because a bifolio that was originally at the centre of a quire / gathering has ended up not at the middle. Moreover, following the logical through to the end leads (as per The Curse of the Voynich back in 2006) to a situation where you can reconstruct the central two bifolios’ nesting order: f84 – f78 (centre) f81 – f75.

The second thing to notice is that the drawings on these two nested Q13 bifolios (which are all about bathing ‘nymphs’) seem to sit in a quite different category from the drawings on the other three Q13 bifolios (which largely revolve around plumbing, though whether this is real or imagined is hard to say). Voynich researcher Glen Claston proposed that the first two bifolios form a balneological quire on their own (which he called “Q13B”), while the other three form a medical quire (which he called “Q13A”). Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his specific interpretation, his basic codicological division into two separate artifacts has stood the test of time: so it seems we are looking at two separate (though similar-looking) things whose constituent bifolios have ended up interleaved. Glen also proposed that Q13B was constructed before Q13A.

The third thing to be aware of is that on the Voynich Manuscript’s page f81r (in Q13B, the bathing nymphs section), there is apparently a poem. I raised this poem section as something which we might look for parallels with in other texts when I started discussing the ‘block paradigm’ approach (where you look for structural matches between a page of enciphered text and plaintext pages from similar contemporary or earlier manuscripts). Interestingly, it seems (from the line-initial gallows characters) that the f81r poem has a 7 / 8 / 8 / 8 line structure, which would be consistent with the writer / copyist having accidentally skipped past a line within the first block of the poem.

Putting all these pieces together, the implication is that we should be looking for a block-sized match between the contents of the two “bathing nymphs” bifolios and 14th / early 15th century balneological texts (which are possibly but not necessarily illustrated). The poem embedded in the middle (it’s on the right half of the central bifolio) seems to be structured as three verses, each containing four couplets (i.e. eight lines). This is because if we can find a source match that’s tolerably close to this basic ‘block specification’, we might just be in business.

Arnold C. Klebs

Back when I was writing The Curse of the Voynich in 2006, to be honest I hadn’t yet found much balneological source material at all. It was only a little later (in 2009) that I found an online version of the (1916) article “Balneology in the Middle Ages” by Arnold C. Klebs. This mentioned a number of late medieval / early modern people who had written on the subject of baths, e.g.:

  • Giovanni de Dondis
  • Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348)
  • Ugolino Caccino of Montecatini (d. 1425)
  • Matteo Bendinelli (1489)
  • Michele Savonarola (who I already knew about)

Klebs also mentioned the printed book “De Balneis omnia quae extant” Venice, Giunta, 1553, fol., 447 leaves, which he describes as “the first text-book on balneology“.

A source Klebs also refers to specifically for German bath history is:

  • Martin, Alfred “Deutsches Badewvesen in vergangenen Tagen,” Jena, Diederichs, 1906. With 159 illustrations from old originals.

Giunta’s (1553) De Balneis Omnia

Google Books lists two separate copies of Giunta’s (1553) “De Balneis Omnia Quae Extant apud Graecos, Latinos et Arabas” (etc etc), both of which freely downloadable:

The bad news is that this is a super-heavyweight Latin compendium of balneological sources (the PDF runs to 1033 pages). However, the good news is that Giunta has assembled it from just about everyone pre-1553 who had written about baths, water etc: so there are large sections excerpting books from early authors such as Pliny, Avicenna, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, along with selections from 16th century authors such as Gesner, Fuchs etc.

One thing I found was that, Pietro d’Abano’s “De Balneis” aside (which is written in hexameters), almost none of the balneo sources quoted by Giunta seem to appear in verse form. Even the promising-looking verse section on p.90 by “Ioannis et Iacobi De Dondis Patavinorum” turned out to be a poem by Claudian (370AD-404AD) (“Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi, / Fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis“).

Having said that, Giunta’s selection is entirely in Latin and far from complete. So it may well be that, if we can somehow go back to some fifteenth century collection of balneo manuscripts, we can see these in their original form – which may well be in Tuscan (rather than Latin), in verse (rather than in prose), and illustrated (rather than just text).

But where on earth would we find such an unlikely-sounding text?

Pavia, MS Aldini 488

It turns out that there really is such a text: and it is at the University of Pavia. Sadly, this “Collectio de Balneis” hasn’t yet been digitized (or if it has, its digital pages have not yet been shared outside the University of Pavia). But we do know the contents of MS Aldini 488:

Aldini 488, Collectio de Balneis. Cart., sec. XV, cc. 78 n.n., 232 x 154 mm.
c. 1: Savonarola Michele, De balneo et termis naturalibus omnibus Italiae sicque totius orbis proprietatibusque earum
c. 45: Ugolino da Montecatini, De balneis mineralibus et artificialibus
c. 61: Epigrammata de balneis puteolanis
c. 66: Consilium pro balneis de Corsena in comitatu luchano pro domino Lanzaloto de Crotis ducali consiliario
c. 67: Tura di Castello, Regula et tractatus balnei de poreta
c. 68v: Tractatus pro balneis de aquis per Petrum de Tussignano
c. 70v: Antonii Guaynerii papiensis de balneis aquis ciuitatis antiquissime que in marchionatu montisferrati sita sunt tractatus
c. 74v: De balneis secundum Petrum de Ebano
c. 75v: Tractatus de balneis secundum Gentillem
c. 76v: De balneis de Burmio secundum magistrum Petrum de Tussignano
c. 77v: Regula balnei loci de Aquaria in territorio regii
c. 78v: De balneo aque porrete
Collocazione cd: Mediateca nas bu 269
Collocazione vol. originale: Aldini 488

Because this is not yet available online, it is where – unless you happen to know better? – our current breakneck tour of balneological sources stops,

Note that there are a fair few monographs on individual balneo authors:

  • This Spanish Prezi presentation by Sergio P on Michele Savonarola lists eight manuscript versions of his book on baths (including Paris BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat 889, dating to 1452), seven printed versions of the same (1485-1562), plus four separate monographs.
  • Pietro da Tossignano’s (d. 1401) “Tractatus de regimine sanitatis” was printed in 1535 (his medical recipes are online here). Giuseppe Mazzini wrote “Vita e opera di maestro Pietro da Tossignano” in 1926 (reprinted in 2007).

As an aside, I also found an interesting chapter (in French) on the balneo literature – “Les traités médicaux sur les bains d’Acqui Terme, entre XIVe et XVIe siècles“, by Gabriella Zuccolin – from a recent book, “Sejourner au bain”. Zuccolin further notes that many of the treatises are covered at speed by Lynn Thorndike, but… they would be, wouldn’t they?

Voynich Manuscript: Letter Contact Tables

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A recent post on voynich.ninja brought up the subject of differences / similarities between Voynichese words starting with EVA ch and those starting with EVA sh. But this got me thinking more generally about the difference between ch and sh in Voynichese (i.e. in any position), and even more generally about letter contact tables.

Problems With Letter Contact Tables

For ciphertexts where the frequency instance distribution has been flattened, a normal first test is William Friedman’s Index of Coincidence (IoC). This often helps determine the period of the cryptographic means that was used to flatten it (e.g. the length of the cyclic keyword, etc). But this is not the case with the Voynich Manuscript.

For ciphertexts where the frequency instance graph is normal but the letter to letter adjacency has been disrupted, the IoC is one of the tests that can help determine the period of any structured transposition (e.g. picket fence etc) that has been carried out. But the Voynich is also not like this.

So, when cryptologists are faced by a structured ciphertext (i.e. one where the frequency instance graph more closely resembles a natural language, and where the letter adjacency also seems to follow language-like rules, the primary tool they rely on is letter contact tables. These are tables of counts (or percentages) that show how often given letters are followed by other given letters.

But for Voynichese there’s a catch: because in order to build up letter contact tables, you have to first know what the letters of the underlying text are. And whatever they might be, the one thing that they definitely are not is the letters of the EVA transcription.

Problems With EVA

The good thing about EVA was that it was designed to help Voynich researchers collaborate on the problems of Voynichese. This was because it offered a way for them to talk about Voynichese that online was (to a large degree) independent of all their competing theories about what specific combinations of Voynichese shapes or strokes genuinely made up a Voynichese letter. And there were a lot of these theories back then, a lot.

To achieve this, EVA was constructed as a clever hybrid stroke transcription alphabet, one designed to capture in a practical ‘atomic’ (i.e. stroke-oriented) way many of the more troublesome composite letter shapes you find in Voynichese. Examples of these are the four “strikethrough gallows” (EVA ckh / cth / cfh / cph), written as an ornate, tall character (a “gallows character”) but with an odd curly-legged bench character struck through it.

However, the big problem with EVA is arguably that it was too successful. Once researchers had EVA transcriptions to work with, almost all (with a few heroic exceptions) seem to have largely stopped wondering about how the letters fit together, i.e. how to parse Voynichese into tokens.

In fact, we have had a long series of Voynich theorists and analysts who look solely at Voynich ‘words’ written in EVA, because it can seem that you can work with EVA Voynichese words while ignoring the difficult business of having to parse Voynichese. So the presence of EVA transcriptions has allowed many people to write a lot of stuff bracketing out the difficult stuff that motivated the complicated transcription decisions that went into designing EVA in the first place.

As a result, few active Voynich researchers now know (or indeed seem to care much) about how Voynichese should be parsed. This is despite the fact that, thanks to the (I think somewhat less than positive) influence of the late Stephen Bax, the Voynich community now contains many linguists, for whom you might think the issue of parsing would be central.

But it turns out that parsing is typically close to the least of their concerns, in that (following Bax’s example) they typically see linguistic takes and cryptographic takes as mutually exclusive. Which is, of course, practically nonsensical: indeed, many of the best cryptologists were (and are) also linguists. Not least of these was Prescott Currier: I would in fact go so far as to say that everyone else’s analyses of Voynichese have amounted to little more than a series of minor extensions and clarifications to Currier’s deeply insightful 1970s contributions to the study of Voynichese.

Problems With Parsing

Even so, there is a further problem with parsing, one which I tried to foreground in my book “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006). This is because I think there is strong evidence that certain pairs of letters may have been used as verbose cipher pairs, i.e. pairs of glyphs used to encipher a single underlying token. These include EVA qo / ee / or / ar / ol / al / am / an / ain / aiin / aiiin / air / aiir (the jury is out on dy). However, if you follow this reasoning through, this also means that we should be highly suspicious of anywhere else the ‘o’ and ‘a’ glyphs appear, e.g. EVA ot / ok / op / of / eo etc.

If this is even partially correct, then any letter contact tables built on the component glyphs (i.e. the letter-like-shapes that such verbose pairs are made up of) would be analysing not the (real underlying) text but instead what is known as the covertext (i.e. the appearance of the text). As a result, covertext glyph contact tables would hence be almost entirely useless.

So I would say that there is a strong case to be made that almost all Voynichese parsing analyses to date have found themselves entangled by the covertext (i.e. they have been misdirected by steganographic tricks).

All the same, without a parsing scheme we have no letter contact tables: and without letter contact tables we can have no worthwhile cryptology of what is manifestly a structured text. Moreover, arguably the biggest absence in Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma” is the lack of letter contact tables, which I think sent out the wrong kind of message to readers.

Letter Contact Tables: v0.1

Despite this long list of provisos and problems, I still think it is a worthwhile exercise to try to construct letter contact tables for Voynichese: we just have to be extraordinarily wary when we do this, that’s all.

One further reason to be wary is that many of the contact tables are significantly different for Currier A and Currier B pages. So, because I contend that it makes no sense at all to try to build up letter contact pages that merge A and B pages together, I present A and B separately here.

The practical problem is that doing this properly will require a much better set of scripts than I currently have: what I’m presenting here is only a small corner of the dataset (forward contacts for ch and sh), executed very imperfectly (partly by hand). But hopefully it’s a step in the right direction and others will take it as an encouragement to go much further.

Note that I used Takahashi’s transcription, and got a number of unmatched results which I counted as ??? values. These may well be errors in the transcription or errors in my conversion of the transcription to JavaScript (which I did a decade ago). Or indeed just bit-rot in my server, I don’t know.

A ch vs B ch, Forward Contacts

A ch
(cho 1713)
—– of which (chol 531, chor 400, chod 196, chok 130, cho. 113, chot 94, chos 50, chom 28, choi 20, choy 18, chop 14, chof 12, choe 11, choa 7, choc 6, choo 5, cho- 4, chon 4, chog 2, cho??? 69)
(che 918)
—– of which (cheo 380, chey 229, chee 156, chea 64, chek 30, chet 19, ched 12, ches 8, chep 7, cher 2, cheg 1, chef 1, che. 1, che* 1, che??? 7)
(chy 544)
(cha 255)
(ch. 112)
(chk 60)
(chd 35)
(cht 31)
(chs 21)
(chch 5) (chp 5) (chsh 4) (chm 2) (chi 2) (chc 2) (chf 1) (chl 0) (chn 0) (chr 0) (chs 0) (ch- 0) (ch= 0)

B ch
(che 3640)
—– of which (ched 1482, chey 597, cheo 565, chee 537, chek 119, chea 82, ches 55, chet 42, chep 25, chef 15, cher 4, cheg 4, che. 2, chel 1, che??? 117)
(chd 725)
(cho 633)
—– of which (chol 200, chod 123, chor 83, chok 65, chot 44, cho. 34, chop 7, chos 22, choa 10, chop 7, choy 4, choe 4, chof 4, choo 4, choi 2, cho= 1, cho??? 26)
(ch. 403)
(chy 331)
(cha 185)
(chk 84)
(chs 50)
(cht 38)
(chp 20)
(chch 6) (chc 6) (chsh 5) (chf 2) (chi 0) (chm 0) (chl 0) (chn 0) (chr 0) (chs 0) (ch- 0) (ch= 0)

Observations of interest here:

  • A:cho = 1713, while B:cho = 633
  • A:chol = 531, while B:chol = 200
  • A:chor = 397, while B:chor = 83
  • A:che = 918, while B:che = 3640
  • A:ched = 12, while B:ched = 1482
  • A:chedy = 7, while B:chedy = 1193
  • A:chd = 35, while B:chd = 725
  • A:chdy = 21, while B:chdy = 504

As an aside:

  • dy appears 765 times in A, 5574 times in B

A sh vs B sh, Forward Contacts

A sh

(sho 625)
—– of which (shol 174, sho. 143, shor 105, shod 77, shok 32, shot 22, shos 11, shoi 9, shoa 6, shoy 5, shoe 4, shom 4, shop 4, sho- 1, shof 1, shoo 1, sho??? 26)
(she 407)
—– of which (sheo 174, shee 84, shey 81, shea 20, she. 19, shek 12, shes 8, shed 3, shet 2, shep 1, sheq 1, sher 1, she??? 1)
(shy 153)
(sha 58)
(sh. 39)
(shk 13)
(shd 7)
(shch 6)
(sht 5)
(shs 3)
(shsh 1)
(shf 1) (everything else 0)

B sh

(she 1997)
—– of which (shed 734, shee 386, shey 334, sheo 286, shek 78, shea 37, shet 18, shes 15, she. 13, shep 6, shef 5, shec 2, sheg 2, she* 1, shel 1, sher 1, she??? 79)
(sho 284)
—– of which (shol 89, shod 59, shor 43, shok 24, sho. 23, shot 8, shos 8, shoa 5, shoi 5, shoe 3, shof 2, shoo 2, shoy 1, shop 1, sho??? 11)
(shd 161)
(sh. 136)
(shy 104)
(sha 67)
(shk 35)
(sht 13)
(shs 12)
(shch 6)
(shsh 1)
(shf 1) (everything else 0)

Observations of interest here:

  • A:sho = 625, while B:sho = 284
  • A:shol = 174, while B:shol = 89
  • A:shor = 105, while B:shor = 43
  • A:she = 406, while B:she = 1997
  • A:shed = 3, while B:shed = 734
  • A:shedy = 2, while B:shedy = 629
  • A:shd = 7, while B:shd = 161
  • A:shdy = 3, while B:shdy = 100

Final Thoughts

The above is no more than a brief snapshot of a corner of a much larger dataset. Even here, a good number of the features of this corner have been discussed and debated for decades (some most notably by Prescott Currier).

But given that there is no shortage of EVA ch, sh, e, d in both A and B, why are EVA ched, chd, shed, and shd so sparse in A and so numerous in B?

It’s true that dy appears 7.3x more in B than in A: but even so, the ratios for ched, chedy, shed, shedy, chd, chdy, shd and shdy are even higher (123x, 170x, 244x, 314x, 20x, 24x, 23x, and 33x respectively).

Something to think about…

Ethel Voynich talk in Dublin…

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Anyone in Dublin this week with even a passing interest in Ethel Voynich could surely do no better than drop by Dr Angela Byrne’s talk: Ethel Voynich, Transnational Revolutionary at 5.30pm to 6.30pm on Thursday 10th October 2019, at EPIC (The Irish Emigration Museum), Custom House Quay, D01 T6K4 Dublin 1. And did I mention it’s completely free?

The talk’s synopsis:

Cork-born Ethel Voynich was raised in London, where she became involved in anarchist circles and translated the writings of exiled Ukrainian revolutionary, Stepniak. She travelled around Russia in 1887–9, teaching music and associating with radicals. Her novel, The Gadfly (1897) inspired communists worldwide for decades – but by 1917, she had moved away from radical politics. This talk details her transnational radical networks and asks, what was the extent of her involvement in the Russian revolutionary movement?

Ah, yes: and I can confirm that it’s a pleasure and a delight to finally have some Ethel Voynich-related news that isn’t related to lingerie.

Finally, some proper (Ethel) Voynich fashion…

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The normal scenario for Voynich fashion is for some short-run digital-print textile house (whether making T-shirts, hoodies or whatever) to put some nice evocative Voynich image on the stuff they sell. You know, on sites such as RedBubble and the like.

Teito T-shirts

And this is basically the deal with classy Japanese T-shirt company Teito T-shirts, which I saw a few days ago. They sell one T-shirt with a nice balneo picture, one with a nice astro picture, and one with a nice Herbal B image (in fact, the concealed ‘car’ page I proposed back in 2006, Curse fans).

Siddhartha Tytler

If you want some Indian designer Voynich gear, controversial creator Siddhartha Tytler (son of Jagdish Tytler) has some rather livelier print-on-demand designs for your delectation and delight. For children, he offers a Voynich printed skirt with choli/shirt kurta (though the design isn’t that Voynichy to my eyes, I have to say):

Tytler also has a multicolour Voynich kurta with patiala pants combo, which is a bit more in the right kind of direction, I think:

Ajour Lingerie

So far so (reasonably) predictable. But… then I stumbled upon a Voynich range of lingerie, courtesy of Anna-Bella Lingerie of Alpharetta, GA. From there, Pam McKinzie kindly redirected me to Tetyana Kravchuk of Ajour Lingerie in Ukraine, the company who designed and made the range, some of which is below:

Now: having looked very closely (in the name of primary evidence, of course, why else would anyone do such a thing?) at these, I honestly couldn’t see any design elements linking these with the Voynich Manuscript at all. And so I asked Tetyana Kravchuk why they chose the name. She replied:

“The line name [is] Voynich because the general theme of the collection was names of the writers and novelists. Especially this line named Voynich, because it’s so much different from others. Seductive and modest, revolutiona[ry] & calm.“

So there you have it. It’s actually Ethel Voynich lingerie.

And now you know.

Revealed! The Voynich Manuscript and The Secret Order of the Seagull…

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If asked who the greatest historical codebreaker was, would I point to Jim Reeds, Jim Gillogly, or even William Friedman? No! That accolade would surely have to go to Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon.

Like, why? Well, despite the twin handicaps of (a) being accompanied by much younger, sexy sidekicks, for whom his awkwardly lustful old-guy feelings constantly get in the way, and (b) being a thinly drawn fictional character being played by a thinly drawn actor who was much better in ‘Big’, Langdon does solve some kick-ass cipher mysteries. Which is cool.

And so I recently set out to solve the kick-ass cipher mystery that is the Voynich Manuscript using Robert Langdon’s historical cipher playbook as my only guide. And boy oh boy, you’ll never guess where that led…

Birds of a Feather / Flock Together

So how would Langdon begin? Duh! Obviously, he’d turn to the very first page of the manuscript, where an obscure detail (that everybody had looked at before but glossed over) would, in his cavernous brain, trigger some insanely erudite / off-the-wall connection that nobody else could ever make, ever. And he would then have the intellectual courage to follow its trail of breadcrumbs through to its logical end, no matter what awful truth (usually guarded by some millennia-spanning conspiracy) it revealed.

So let’s channel our inner Langdon, and look in the upper left side margin of the first page of the Voynich Manuscript (folio 1r). This is what we see:

“Why, that couldn’t be…”, Langdon would muse, “or… could it?” Yes, it can!

I think you (and Robert Langdon) would surely agree that what is on the first page of the fifteenth century Voynich Manuscript is, without any doubt, essentially the same logo used by Californian children’s faux surf-wear company Hollister. But how? Wasn’t Hollister founded in 1922?

Now, Langdon would immediately know (as sure as if he had Wikipedia open on his leather-bound tablet) that Hollister was a fake brand concocted by Abercrombie & Fitch in July 2000 to help them target a younger market, and that all the talk of it having been created in the 1920s was just made up.

But at this point, Langdon’s eyes would narrow and his forehead would furrow slightly, and he would say something enigmatic in Italian: eppur si muove – “…and yet it moves clothes“. Or something like that.

Despite the logical difficulties, he would be immediately convinced that the two seagulls shared a subtle connection, one that he would have to travel to a long stream of good-looking locations to pursue. After all, what does Langdon ever have to lose, apart from his stellar reputation, his cushty academic job, and the lives of his ex-lovers and oldest friends as they accidentally get caught in the (literal) cross-fire?

And once he had reviewed all the available evidence (say, ten minutes later), he would conclude that there was only one possible way that the propositional variables of the Voynich Manuscript and the Hollister logo could be connected. How? You guessed it – a centuries-old conspiracy one of his nutty old mentors (who probably originally worked with Edgar Wind, but let’s not hold that against him) had once mentioned to him in hushed breath after an exhilarating iconographical lecture at the Warburg Institute… a conspiracy with a terrible, awful, powerful name he could never forget, no matter how hard he tried…

“The Secret Order of the Seagull”

Langdon would also instantly recall that Abercrombie and Fitch had been founded in 1892 by Establishment favourite David Abercrombie, initially selling outdoorsy apparel and related stuff from his Manhattan shop. Yes, Langdon would muse (thinking out loud over a Bellini to an old girlfriend who he had just randomly met on a traghetto in Venice, and who would be sadly heading to her doom in a couple of reels’ time) David Abercrombie was clearly the inheritor of a terrible age-old secret. Look, it’s obvious – you can tell by his moustache and sad mouth, for sure.

But who had been the Grandmaster of The Secret Order of the Seagull before Abercrombie? Well, only Anton Chekhov (not the Star Trek navigator, but the Russian playwright, *sigh*) could fit that bill. And after the disastrous 1896 debut of his play “The Seagull”, Chekhov must surely have sold the dreadful secret he had been looking after to Abercrombie on a outdoors goods buying trip to Moscow.

And yet… might some aspect of the secret also be embedded in The Seagull? In its Act II, which Langdon inevitably has memorized in the original Russian, we find the following:

Nina lingers behind after the group leaves, and Konstantin shows up to give her a seagull that he has shot. Nina is confused and horrified at the gift. […] Trigorin sees the seagull that Konstantin has shot and muses on how he could use it as a subject for a short story: “A young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a seagull, and she’s happy and free, like a seagull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom. Like this seagull.“

“Now, wait a minute”, notes Langdon to a mysterious young lady who has easily sidled into his stuffy, egocentric life, “I’m sure that’s something I’ve seen in the Voynich Manuscript”.

“I think you could be right”, replies the sexy lady whose paper-thin backstory didn’t really make much sense, now you come to mention it. But given that she arrived at a point when Langdon had his mystery-solving head wedged several miles up his mystery-solving ass, he wouldn’t even have noticed if she had seven heads and ten horns. “It certainly looks like a woman by a lake. Even if she is apparently being eaten by a giant fish.”

Homer, But Not Simpson

But Langdon is wracking his colossal brain yet further, like a Greek fisherman beating squid on a rock to tenderize it. “Why is it”, he asks plaintively, “that Homer compared Hermes to a seagull?”

“[he] sped on over the waves like the seagull that hunts for fishes in the frightening troughs of the barren sea and wets his thick plumage in the brine; like such a bird was Hermes carried over the multitudinous waves. But when he had reached that far-off island he left the violet ocean and took to the land until he came to a great cavern; in this [Kalypso] the Nymphe of the braided tresses had made her home, and inside this he found her now…”

“That’s very strange”, says the young girl, whose curious accent really should have flagged her to Langdon as a strange mix of German rifle champion, Sorbonne arts student and Estonian prostitute, had he not been so distracted by her pert body. “I believe”, she continues, passing him a Beinecke printout from her oddly capacious handbag, “that scene is also depicted in the Voynich Manuscript.”

“Clearly the second nymph from the left is Kalypso”, notes Langdon, flexing his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Classics. “Because, as the daughter of the Titan Atlas, she’s bound to be the fittest.”

“So you have reconstructed The Secret History of The Secret Order of the Seagull, all the way from Homer to Hollister”, sneers the girl, suddenly pointing her diamante-encrusted Mauser HSc at Langdon. “This arcane and dangerous knowledge will do you no good when you are (dramatic pause) dead. As a dead dodo who has died. And is dead.“

But just as the conspiracy gun girl is about to shoot, Langdon’s old girlfriend, returning from the bar with their next round of Bellinis, trips on the conspiracy girl’s handbag and falls between Langdon and the gun. She dies, Langdon lives (he is merely grazed by the bullet, of course), the gun girl escapes, and the Secret Conspiracy goes ever on.

You know it makes sense. You’ve read the book, right?

Yes, It’s All As Plain As Day, Fer Sher

So, will the Voynich Manuscript turn out to be linked to some ancient shady symbol-obsessed cabal, of the kind whose dusty evil doors Robert Langdon is doomed to forever find himself accidentally knocking on? Clearly only a fool (maybe even a fool with a History degree) would think otherwise.

Here, I’ve tried to stand shoulder to shoulder with Robert Langdon, letting his indomitable spirit and continent-spanning leaps of faith guide me as we trace the roots of the Voynich Manuscript together. For to one like him (and I can confirm that there are indeed very many like him, because they keep sending me their Voynich Theories, and then snarling that I’m an idiot for not being able to grasp their ineffable brilliance), these things are Easy Peasy.

Perhaps you can learn some important lessons from him too!

Two pages wanted from a Frank Fürbeth book… :-/

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I’ve recently been researching 15th century copies of Johannes Hartlieb’s German translation of Andrea Capellanus’ “De Amore“. My plan is to try to work out if any includes a predecessor of the hand-crossing drawing that appeared in the three 1482/1484 incunabula…

…which, if you recall, is the drawing that Koen Gheuens cleverly suggested might well be linked with a Diebold Lauber workshop drawing and the Voynich Manuscript’s Gemini zodiac roundel…

This is all going OK so far (I now have Alfred Karnein’s magisterial book on the subject, and a copy of his 1985 book should land on my doorstep soon), and as always I’ll post more on this in due course.

However, there’s one other German “De Amore” described by Frank Fürbeth in his more recent book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” that I can’t find anything about. This manuscript, which doesn’t appear in either of Karnein’s books, was (says Fürbeth) Number 3 in American antiquarian bookseller Philip J. Pirages’ 1985 catalogue. But when I emailed the bookseller, Phil Pirages himself kindly replied, saying that he had no record of any such book.

It would seem that something a little odd is going on here. 🙁

Can I therefore please ask any Cipher Mysteries reader who just happens to have easy access to a stupendously good academic library with a copy of Frank Fürbeth’s book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” (currently £80+ on bookfinder.com, somewhat out of my range, sadly) to photograph or scan pages 62 and 63 for me? (This is, according to Google, where Fürbeth discusses the Pirages manuscript.) Thanks very much!

Note: I believe that the 2011 edition of the book is simply a reprint of the 1992 original, but please check to see if these two pages do mention Philip J. Pirages, thanks!