Might the Voynich Manuscript be a Finno-Baltic birth registry? Might the names of some of the nymphs really be “Ellda, Sellai, Saisa, Saillar, Sia, Ella, Sara, Saisa, Rllai, and Eillkka”?

On the positive side, Claudette Cohen already has more words decrypted than Stephen Bax (she has a plucky ten to his stodgy nine), so she should clearly take some comfort that her brave-hearted Finno-Baltic decryption is numerically more of a success than his plainly inferior effort. And she also thinks that she has found thirteen points of similarity with a 1910 map of Sortavala, though with more than a passing nod towards “Karelian embroidery” (it says here).

Cipher Mysteries readers surely don’t need an advanced diploma in telepathy to know what I’m thinking here.

“Good for you, Claudette Cohen – even though you’re wrong for about a thousand different reasons, I’m happy for you that this is how you’ve come to the Voynich Manuscript. Enjoy your stay, and try to have some fun with it!”

Modern life plainly has me stumped: I now can’t even tell email spam and Voynich theories apart. Both seem to be generated from long lists of largely comprehensible phrases, before being dumped in my inbox as self-evident truths: both make my head hurt.

So with that gushing introduction over, here’s this week’s Voynich theory, courtesy of Jimmy Craig on starseeds.net (don’t ask what that is, you can guess enough to tell from its URL that you probably don’t want to know), who believes “that the Voynich Manuscript is describing “Food”, as in the “Mana from Heaven”, that Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat.” Moreover,…

The Characters in the Voynich Manuscript, are a description of the process that removes time. All the language in the Voynich Manuscript is apart of this algorithm based description, because of the complexity of the argument itself, the algorithm is parsed. This is probably the correct way, or more correct way of addressing the algorithm itself. The Process that Removes Time is Nibiru the Star Wormwood, Star of David. It is the great flood at the end of time, that brings mankind into Forever Night. The characters of the Voynich Manuscript are this Ocean, that is Nibiru the mechanism that removes time.

Craig then refers to the dragon picture on f25v, where the little dragon seems to be vacuuming up a giant plant into its snout:-

The Green Flower is Nibiru, the dinosaur in white below it is “Time”, the Star Nibiru is consuming “Time”, consuming the Dinosaur that is vomiting out the Flood Waters. Time is being destroyed by Nibiru we see the food or mana from heaven being produced thus some have concluded the Voynich Manuscript was a recipe book, when in fact it is a description of the translation of the universe. Therefore, it is a difference in the description of potential for the portion of man inheriting the new universe.

My own meta-theory is that there is a Voynich theorybot out there on a cunning, distant server, busy cranking out Voynich theories. You may think that this is a lousy hypothesis to explain the current near-Biblical flood of Voynich theories but… where’s your disproof?

Tonight (23rd March 2014), Coast to Coast AM talk host George Noory will be discussing the Voynich Manuscript with “spiritual artist and musician Stuart Davis” and PR-hungry Voynich theorist Stephen Bax.

Well… at least the musician guy sounds credible. 😐

I have to admit that, not so many years ago, I would experience a frisson of excitement whenever I heard about the Voynich Manuscript’s being picked up by the media. Back then it would get no more than one or two genuinely substantial mentions per year, whether in Cryptologia, Nature, New Scientist, or wherever: and I was fascinated to see how the Voynich cultural meme developed over time.

But over the last few months it has been mentioned in so many goshdarned articles that the same phenomenon instead induces a wave of nausea – my stomach sinks and I wonder “how are they going to misrepresent Voynich research this time?”

For instance, Stephen Bax seems doggedly determined not only to recapitulate every single error made in Voynich research up to 1970 (e.g. …
* reading Voynichese as an obscure-but-lost-or-maybe-polyglot language;
* parsing Voynichese as if it were a simple letter-for-letter language;
* looking for obscure language matches for possible herbal cribs;
* assuming that any published research must have some Rastafarian-truth-in-all-truths viability; etc, etc),
but also to represent his own nine wonky words as if they somehow define cutting edge Voynich research.

In fact, the mistakes Bax has made (and indeed continues to make) are about as stolidly retro as rockabilly quiffs.

But, of course, the chances of anybody outside the Voynich world having the history and cryptology chops to call him on this are terribly slim. Would George Noory ask him why he is so certain that Voynichese is actually a language, when…
* the dictionary statistics are all wrong, with words often differing by a single letter;
* different letters have different preferences for positions on the page;
* indeed, “p” gallows tend to occur in pairs halfway along the top line of paragraphs;
* frequently occurring groups like “aiiv” and “aiir” are apparently the same as medieval page references;
* and so on?

Incidentally, Bax’s most recent ‘find’ is that the plant depicted on f6v is Ricinus communis, the castor oil plant. Father Petersen, Ethel Voynich, Ellie Velinksa, and even Mazars and Wiartz (2006) all think this is a good match, so he’s kind of kicking at a long-opened door here. However, when Bax suggests that EVA “qoar” (which recurs 11 times throughout the manuscript) might be the name of the plant, I think he’s just being equal parts overoptimistic and foolish, and showing his ignorance about how Voynichese works.

Perhaps at any moment in history we get no more and no less than the Voynich ‘experts’ we deserve. What a horrible thought. 🙁

How many more Voynich Manuscript theories does 2014 plan to dump in my inbox? Hot on the heels of Tucker & Talbert, Fallacara & Occhinegro, and indeed Stephen Bax (who I recently banned from commenting on Cipher Mysteries) as well as several others whose theories I’m patiently working through (please forgive the delay, but e.g. it takes time to learn Nahuatl well enough to comment on it), comes yet another new Voynich theory, this time courtesy of Jutta Kellner of Dransfeld.

Kellner has historical mystery ‘form’, in that she previously self-published a (2011) book 2012 + 4,3 Die Lösung des Mayakalenders und mehr… (i.e. a 2012 Mayan calendar theory book). And just so you know, her company JKdesign also sells a range of curiously beautiful neck-warmers as well as loads and loads of zips.

But what of her Voynich Manuscript theory, I hear you asak? Well, she claims to have first begun to solve the puzzle over an intensive five day period in February 2007, and to have been supported in her extensive secondary research by a family member ever since. Now she is looking for some kind of ‘crowdfunding’ to help her complete the last stage – translating the body of the text – by the end of 2014: she’s looking for somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 euros. Which is, of course, a lot of zips.

But rather than laying to claim nine wonky words or one wobbly diagram, Kellner has actually published some fragments of her decryption. She claims that the plaintext is in Latin, dates from the 13th and 14th centuries, and “was written as a kind of adventure novel”: specifically, “it’s all about battles, assaults, quarrels, togetherness, voyages, captureing ships and much, much more…” So why can’t we just read it all straight off? Her good reason is that:

No computer program in the world can do this translation work, because you first need to extract the meaning from a “speech cloud”, but in the end there is always a unique solution. You never know in advance how long a sentence is. It’s like solveing a two-sided crossword in the head.

Of course I will not exposure the key. That would be just like you publish an ingenious invention without patent application. There were many inventors or explorers in the past who were cheated, exploited and ignored.

All the same, I think we can get pretty close to what (she thinks) she’s doing to decrypt our mysterious manuscript’s text. Let’s look at one of her examples (decrypted from Voynichese into Latin, and then translated into German and English), the top line of f28v (though she has the first word as EVA “tshol” when it should clearly be “kshol”):-

Voynichese: tshol qooiiin shor pchoiiin shepchy qoty dy shory

German: Zum Vierten Male Wasser zu holen ist mit Mühe verbunden. Wir sind sauer, weil wir nicht in den Hafen können, da dieser natürlich nicht die Tiefe hat. Demzufolge müssen wir jetzt außerhalb vor Anker liegen.

English: A fourth time to fetch water requires effort. We are angry because we can not in the harbor, because it certainly does not have the depth. Accordingly, we now have to be at anchor outside.

(Incidentally, Kellner dates this page to “10/12/1245”.)

For a Voynich researcher, the top line of f28v presents lots of classic Voynichese ‘motifs’ (one might even call them ‘leitmotifs’):
* it has a gallows character as the first letter of the line, paragraph, and page (just as you’d expect)
* it has a horizontal “Neal key” (a pair of single-leg gallows half-to-two-thirds of the way across the topmost line of the paragraph)
* it has a double ‘o’ in the second word (qooiiin), as a result of which looks to me as though it may well have been miscopied from ‘qoaiin’
* it has a jarring e-gallows pair, that (again) looks like it may have been miscopied (‘shepchy’ as written, when I would have instead expected ‘shcphey’)

Perhaps the most visually obvious thing about this short line is that it contains about eight words, and many of those are built up out of extremely common patterns: ol, or, qo, aiin, dy. But while I would broadly agree with the late Mark Perakh’s conclusion that the Voynich Manuscript’s text is probably abbreviated in some way, I somehow doubt that it could have been abbreviated to the degree that Kellner’s claimed decryption would appear to have been.

What’s going on here? I suspect that Kellner is translating the “4”-shape in the first “qo” pair to “A fourth time”: but this would make no sense for a 13th century or even a 14th century text, because the digit “4” wasn’t written in that way until very late in the 15th century. As for the rest, I have the strong suspicion that she is largely reading the rest as a Latin acrostic – i.e. building up phrases based on the first letter of the words only.

Perhaps Cipher Mysteries readers will do better than me at working out precisely what she’s doing with all this. But really, whatever it happens to be, right now I honestly don’t think it will turn out to be anything much to do with either cryptology or linguistics.

As always, you are entirely free to do with your own money whatsoever you will. But so far I’m failling to find any reason at all to direct any of my own crowd-of-one’s money in the direction of Dransfeld.

( Chapter 1 )

Chapter 2.

— Day Two, 9am —

“Hold the door, Max!”, Joey calls good-naturedly from just behind me, and heavily jogs up the steps into the tiny ante-room we amuse ourselves by calling a ‘foyer’. “Was that…?”

“Yes, it was indeed our purple-haired encyclopedia girl Germaine.” I reply, putting the office kettle on and corralling four coffee mugs onto a small tray. “Though she says we should call her ‘Mayne’.”

“Ah, as in The Spanish”, Joey nods conspiratorially, slowly backing his ample frame onto the less-than-entirely-new office sofa. “So… how do you think this is going to play out, young Mr Harmer?” He’s called me ‘young’ ever since college, when he was in the year above: it’s sometimes hard to believe that was fifteen years ago.

“Well…”, I muse, reaching for the coffee jar, “half of me thinks we’re completely doomed: but the other half is looking at the money our man Charlie has already wired through, and liking it a lot.”

Light taps at the door herald Mayne’s return, along with two sizeable crates of Voynich-related books she’s wheeled along on a kind of powered carrying gadget. “Charlie said that you’ll be wanting these.”

Fortuitously, this is when Parker – the third (and fittest) member of our troika – skateboards in: and so the kettle is left to boil while he and I ferry the books up the steps and onto our war table.

By the time everything’s in its proper place, Joey has – slightly unusually, it has to be said – finished making coffee and has moved on to thumb through Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, though with what looks like a slightly sour look on his face.

I catch his eye. “Not quite to your legalistic taste, J-Man?”

He winces. “If this is as good as it gets, what we’re dealing with with this Voynich Manuscript thing isn’t ‘evidence‘ but ‘stuff that people think might one day become evidence‘. Really, it’s all a bit virtual for me – and you know how much I hate that word.”

“Along with every other word coined after Shakespeare”, chimes in Parker. He’s not wrong there.

I turn to Mayne, who by now is happily sniffing the coffee fumes from her mug. “What’s the low hanging fruit?” I ask her.

“Yes. Ah.”, she stutters. “That would be ‘The most easily achieved of a set of tasks, measures, goals, etc.‘”

A silence falls on the room. Mayne looks around slightly puzzled.

“Oh, and a 2012 track by Tenacious D. ‘She wears the beekeeper suit‘. Is that the answer you wanted?”

I perhaps should have instead started the day by telling Joey and Parker about Mayne’s tendency towards extreme literalism.

“Ohhhh kayyyy…”, I interject, “let’s try asking you about the low hanging fruit of the set of Voynich theories we might reasonably consider disproving.”

“That’s also a good question”, she frowns. “Perhaps Gordon Rugg’s grille-text?”

“Hey – isn’t that the one from Scientific American way back when?” puzzled Parker.

“June 21st 2004, yes. Rugg famously claimed that, by using Cardan grilles randomly moving over a set of tables, a 16th century hoaxer could have produced a manuscript indistinguishable from the Voynich Manuscript.”

This has me puzzled. “But the Voynich’s radiocarbon dating was 15th century, right?”

“Yes, the same dating that a whole bunch of other internal evidence has.” She slurps her coffee unself-consciously. “Rugg therefore concludes that it must have been written on century-old vellum, while all those other features must similarly have been contrived by a sophisticated hoaxer to look as if they had been added in the 15th century.”

“But given that there are no 15th century books that look like it, Rugg has to be claiming that it’s a hoaxed copy of a book that never itself existed?”

“That’s correct.”

“How marvellously 1980s”, shrills Joey, “a Baudrillardian simulacrum!”

There’s an awkward, tumbleweedy silence as Parker and I stare at him blankly.

Germaine coughs politely. “Jean Baudrillard used the word ‘simulacrum’ to denote a thing which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. Its earlier meaning was ‘an image without the substance or qualities of the original’.”

Parker, ever the mathematical logician, is shaking his head. “That’s all very well, but… come on – was Rugg actually able to prove any of this?”

We all look at Germaine. “In fact, no. Skeptical physicist Mark Perakh demonstrated that the Voynich-like text Rugg reconstructed had statistical properties much more like those of gibberish than those of the actual Voynich text.”

Parker shakes his head: “So all Rugg really proved was that a 16th century hoaxer could have produced something that superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript, as opposed to something that actually had the same statistical properties as the Voynich Manuscript.”

“That is correct,” Germaine nods.

“As a piece of computer science, it’s probably quite interesting”, Parker muses, “but as historical research, it seems worthless. Who really cares if a 16th century hoaxer could possibly have made something that only superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript?”

“So have I got this right?”, I ask. “Rugg has no actual evidence, an hypothesis that doesn’t do what he says it does, and has spent the last decade dining out on the headline rather than fixing the problem. Meanwhile, all the actual Voynich evidence out there he dismisses, saying that reproducing anything that trivial should be well within the range of a sophisticated 16th century forger.”

Joey dejectedly sinks back into the far end of the sofa. “If anyone’s a hoaxer in that whole sorry saga, I’d have thought it was him.”

“But guys, guys”, I say, “- and Mayne, please consider yourself an honorary guy – whatever our opinion, how do we go about trying to disprove Rugg’s theory? You know, like we’ve been paid to?”

“Do we need to?” Parker asks. “That Mark Perakh guy has already cut it down to almost nothing. And if Rugg, with all the modern computing power at his disposal, hasn’t in a decade been able to use his grilles and tables to construct a replica of his supposed simulacrum with the same statistical properties, the chances of a supposed 16th century hoaxer doing the same must surely be basically zero.”

“Yeah”, says Joey, “if Rugg thinks it’s a fake replica but can’t replicate it using the approach that he claims was originally used to make it, why should anyone else think the same? Case closed, in my opinion.”

“Great work, guys”, I concur, “I’ll email this through to boss-man Charlie straightaway. Then shall we break for an early lunch?” I look out at a roomful of eagerly nodding heads. Proof is good, but lunch is better.

A new day breaks here in the suburbs, bringing with it birdsong, A-road traffic noise, and yet another Voynich theory to bang my head against.

On paper, Professor Stephen Bax certainly has the combination of big brain, linguistic experience and personal ambition that you’d think would be needed to crack open the Voynich Manuscript’s crab-like shell. But… then again, so did poor old Professor William Romaine Newbold; and his Voynich non-decryption ended up enraging Charles Singer so much (justifiably, it has to be said) that he was still angry thirty years later.

All the same, Bax believes that he has tentatively identified a number of words in the Voynich Manuscript, and has posted a 62-page PDF on his website describing his findings. His initial press release has been picked up by BBC News, the Bedfordshire on Sunday, and the irrepressible Daily Grail amongst many others. He has a lecture arranged for 25th February 2014 in Luton (if you happen to be nearby and interested), and is even planning a small Voynich conference in London in June 2014 to try to get other academics involved in his Voynich research programme.

Yet as Rene Zandbergen likes to point out, the most difficult thing about Voynich research is developing chains of reasoning while avoiding big mistakes. And while I hate to be the one to unplug the sound system just as it’s starting to really get the party started, I’m quite certain that every single one of Stephen Bax’s conclusions to date have been built upon a long sequence of easily demonstrable mistakes.

In fact, even though he is trying to use a sensible sounding methodology to elicit his results, I can’t think of a single piece of Voynich Manuscript evidence or secondary historical evidence he uses that I’d agree is a sound starting point: and I’m not convinced that any of his conclusions could be right either. I’ll go through a whole load of points, you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

1. “Initial Words On Herbal Pages Should Be Names”. Errrm…

As Bax rightly points out, you might reasonably expect the unique-looking first word on each of the Voynich Manuscript’s herbal pages to be the name of the plant depicted on that page, because that is indeed how many medieval herbals were laid out. This is not a new observation or idea: Leonell Strong assumed this as part of his Voynichese decryption in the 1940s (he thought the plaintext was written in English, but enciphered using a curious repeating offset into a local substitution alphabet).

But there’s an immediate problem: almost all the Voynich’s Herbal A pages start with one of the four gallows letters: EVA ‘p’ (53 times), EVA ‘t’ (24 times), EVA ‘k’ (21 times) or EVA ‘f’ (10 times). Which for simple substitution ciphers, broadly as John Tiltman pointed out roughly 50 years ago, would mean that the name of pretty much every plant in the Herbal section must start with one of three or four letters. Which would be nonsensical. (Leonell Strong was fine with this, because he thought the cipher scrambled all that stuff up a little: basically, he didn’t think it was a straightforward language.)

Yet Bax persists, and asserts that all of these gallows glyphs simultaneously map to plaintext C or K (in order to keep his ‘oror’ mapping intact, see [3] below), and as a result almost all of the plant names he considers start with the letter C – Centaurea, Cotton, Kaur, Crocus, etc. I’m sorry, but this whole notion is directly contradicted by the immediate statistical evidence. This isn’t something to build on, it’s something to abandon and leave far behind while you find some genuinely useful historical evidence to work with.

2. Bax’s proposed Voynichese alphabet has three letter R’s

This too flies in the face of supposed common sense. The Voynich Manuscript has a limited and compact alphabet, with roughly 18-22 characters occurring with particular frequency: and yet Bax concludes from his multi-language linguistic analysis that three of these (EVA r, EVA m, and EVA n) encipher the letter ‘R’. Come on: this is surely close to as unsystematic a system as could be constructed, a giant Red Flag of Non-Believability being waved in front of his train of reasoning.

3. The Voynichese word “oror” = the Hebrew word “arar”, meaning ‘juniper’

f15v not only has “oror” on, it has “oror or” and “or or oro r” immediately above each other on the first two lines. Did Bax not notice this when he picked this out? This is terribly selective and unconvincing. Moreover, “arar” itself is twice as common in the Voynich Manuscript than “oror”: while Bax himself points out good reasons why it shouldn’t be “oror”.

So… why does he persist with “oror” == juniper? “oror” appears throughout the Voynich Manuscript, while “or” appears extraordinarily frequently. This just seems a hopeful (and unsystematic) stab in the dark in exactly the wrong kind of way.

4. Bax thinks that EVA “kydain” = ‘centaur’ – but has he not noticed “dain” everywhere?

Now this is just ridiculous. One of the genuine mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript is the repeated presence of what look extraordinarily like medieval page references (EVA “aiin”): and here’s one apparently embedded in a word right at the top of f2r. So is there any real chance this also happens to encipher “kentaur” in the way he thinks? No, none whatsoever, I think.

5. “doary” = Taurus. Oh, really?

The reason people have in the past suspected the label by the “Pleiades”-like group on f68r might be “Taurus” was because of the late-medieval “-9” style Tironian nota at its end, preceded by a letter that looks like “r”. But both those correspondences remain a bit of a stretch, and so this seems basically unworkable in the way he hopes.

6. Reading EVA “keerodal” as “coriander”.

Ask people who have been working with the Voynich Manuscript’s “Voynichese” language for a few years and they’ll probably tell you (as I’m saying now) that this word is almost certainly a copying error by the Voynich Manuscript’s scribe. It is extremely rare to see “eer” (while “ar” and “or” are both extremely common), so I’m confident that this should instead have been written “karodal”, which closely matches how the Voynich Manuscript’s “labelese” often parses out in pairs, i.e. “k.ar.od.al”. Hence I have practically zero faith that this word could be a natural language version of “coriander” in the way Bax suspects – he has misparsed and miscategorised it.

7. Relying on Edith Sherwood’s hopeful plant identifications.

Oh, come on. Edith tries hard to do her thing, but remember that we’ve had real herbal authorities (such as the fantastic Karen Reeds) look closely at the Voynich’s herbal drawings, and they haven’t seen even 10% of what Edith Sherwood thinks she has seen.

So, in summary: of the nine words Bax claims (in his Appendix 1) to have identified, I disagree with the evidence, reasoning, and linguistic rationale for every single one. I am also sure that his letter assignments are fatally flawed. Contrary to the title of his paper, I honestly don’t believe that through his efforts he has yet identified a single “plausible” word in the Voynich Manuscript.

For me, this isn’t even a matter for Ockham’s blessed Razor: to be even remotely workable, a hypothesis needs to have a single example of evidence that chimes with it in a way that can actually be seen to work. And on the above showing of evidence, what he has presented so far is not yet a workable hypothesis in any obvious way, sorry.

Over the past week or so, I’ve spent some time patiently going over Fallacara & Occhinegro’s book which tries to connect the Castel del Monte with the Voynich Manuscript. The two guys are clearly intelligent, hard-working architecture historians who have spent several years trying not only to understand the Castel del Monte’s physical construction, but also to reconstruct how it was built and the purposes for which it was designed. But they have additionally posited a connection between the building’s design and numerous key design features found within the Voynich Manuscript, and have made lots of follow-on claims yada-yada-yada.

Hence what I’ll do here is look at their architecture bit first, and then move on to the Voynich layer perched atop their architectonic stuff. OK? Let’s go.

A River Ran Through It

The Castel del Monte in Puglia has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, and over the years its unusual physical configuration has attracted numerous fringe theories claiming to explain its many odd features. To what degree have these two authors succeeded in looking past the façade of history and documentation to the actual building underneath?

Actually, I think their architectural research project has been a great success. What emerges from the (admittedly carefully chosen, but nonetheless strongly relevant) fragments of evidence presented in their book is that, contrary to its modern appearance, the site originally was very probably home to a natural spring thought at the time to have health-giving properties. A river even ran close by in previous centuries, as evidenced by the way the area is represented in the Tabula Peutingeriana.

On this location, Frederick II had a curious octagonal edifice built, one too small to be a proper castle but also not really functionally suitable for being a hunting lodge. Fallacara & Occhinegro have picked up on suggestions made by previous architectural historians as well as on numerous physical and archival clues, and have pieced together a reading of the Castel del Monte as a hamam – a restorative Turkish bath complex of the type that at that time was just starting to become fashionable in Europe.

This all aligns with what we find in Pietro da Eboli’s bath-praising poem De Balneis Puteolanis, which has been mentioned on Cipher Mysteries a fair few times, and which arguably helped to start the whole balneological ‘craze’. So up to this point, I don’t see anything at all wrong with the two authors’ reading of the Castel del Monte.

But are they justified in also reading the evidence as of an alchemical obsession by Frederick II? Their evidence in this regard seems to be no more than some circular-shaped stains on the floor, from which they somehow infer alchemical activity on the site. This seems decidedly thin: and I’m fairly certain that the idea of alchemy as promoting eternal life is something that came in many centuries later – in Frederick II’s Europe, chrysopoeia (‘gold-making’) was alchemists’ almost total focus.

This whole idea extends further to spagyria (herb-based alchemy, or herbal medicine made using alchemical-style processes), which as both a term and a practice dates to Paracelsus (much later in the 16th century). I therefore don’t see a way to accept their argument that Frederick II would have designed a building focused on spagyric alchemy with the purpose of retardatio senectutis, because that would simply be anachronistic.

Finally, the authors try to make some play about the 8-sided structure, but I personally see the likelihood of there having been some kind of Platonic or numerological basis for this as basically zero. So-called “sacred geometry” is one of those secret history things that sounds nice in an airport novel, but in almost every case disappears when you look for it in the cold light of day. The Castel del Monte has a nice little design, sure, but… anything beyond that is just too much hand-waving for me to bear.

So, in summary, I like the chain of inference that leads to the Castel del Monte’s being a hamam, at the forefront of the whole balneological fever: but extending this claim to include alchemical or numerological significance seems speculative at best, if not just plain wrong-headed.

All That, And The Voynich Manuscript Too?

Well… no, not really. Given that I don’t accept the link they claim between the Castel del Monte and alchemy or spagyria of any sort, the evidence they present in their book attempting to link the Castel to the Voynich Manuscript is a thin, unnourishing soup indeed.

For example, the image from the book’s cover tries to conflate the (apparently) hexagonal-bodied, round-turreted magic circle page in the Voynich Manuscript with the Castel del Monte’s (very definitely) octagonal-bodied, octagonal-turreted design. Personally, this looks to me no different to other super-selective Voynich theories: really, you have to do better than one partially suggestive image match to back up a claim of a systematic “philological” match between these two very different things.

And similarly for the plants: a palmful of comparisons with carefully selected individual drawings plucked from a broad set of medieval herbals really isn’t methodologically good enough. The bigger problem with comparing the Voynich Manuscript with medieval herbals is that quite a few of its drawings are apparently drawn from life, a practice which happened before and after the Middle Ages (if after, say 1425 or so), but not really during them.

The authors are also aware that it is a long way back from the (early 15th century) radiocarbon dating to the (early 13th century) court of Frederick II (the Castel’s Decretio Regis dates from 1240), and so conclude, unsurprisingly, that it must have been copied by a later dumb copyist etc etc. There are indeed a number of codicological features that suggest that the Voynich Manuscript was in some way a copy.

But there are many problems with a 13th century dating for its original content, which is why nobody has seriously re-proposed Roger Bacon as its author for several decades now. Never mind the 15th century stuff I keep going on about, the crossbow technology depicted in the Sagittarius archer’s hunting crossbow points to “the first half of the 14th century”: while Erwin Panofsky famously opined “as he came to the female figures (in conjunction with the colors used in the manuscript) he came to the conclusion that it could not be earlier than the 15th century“. The hair-styles and clothes (such as they are) are all thought to be 15th century (or possibly later) – which is an inexact method of dating, sure, but it really should be good for the nearest century.

I also don’t buy into their ideas about “proto-toilets”: having read numerous earnest-sounding books on the secret history of toilets over the last decade (I kid you not, and recommend Lawrence Wright’s (1960) “Clean and Decent”), I really don’t think 13th century engineers were even remotely close to getting that nailing that tricky jelly to the garderobe wall. Yes, they did have limited water engineering and hypocausts: but my own reading is that toilets only became a plumbing possibility once Vitrivius had been revived in the 15th century. So that suggestion doesn’t work for me either.

Hence I think it’s going to take a lot of saving hypotheses (mainly around embellishing copyists, rather than time-travelling Gallifreyans) to pull a 13th century dating back from the cliff-edge sheer drop its feet are pedalling rapidly over, Wile E. Coyote-style. And while that’s still possible, it’s not very likely on this showing.

I don’t know, really. Fallacara and Occhinegro were very kind to send me a copy of their book, and I do wish them luck with their ongoing research into the Castel del Monte, which offers a reasonably solid hamam-based angle on a nice and genuinely mysterious piece of Puglian tourist history. But I can’t even remotely endorse the 13th century Voynich story they want to tell (which will probably come as no great surprise to them): unfortunately, it mars what is otherwise a perfectly nice (if fairly specific) piece of architectural / balneological history.

I think the simple truth – or as close as we can get to it without going excessively TL;DR – is that the Castel del Monte was on the leading edge of European nobility’s obsession with thermal baths, while the Voynich Manuscript was far closer to its trailing edge. Fifty or a hundred years yet further on, baths were thought (wrongly) to be the cause of syphilis and all kinds of other STDs: and so the whole craze abruptly stopped, with baths (and books about baths, which flourished in the 15th century) falling rapidly into disrepair. Perhaps the last century’s craze for unsupportable Voynich theories will abruptly stop some time in the future too? Well… I can dream, can’t I?

The American Botanical Council (who neither I nor many of you had heard of before this week) are celebrating their 100th issue of their quarterly peer-reviewed journal “HerbalGram” (it says in this press release here) by publishing an article revealing the hitherto undecrypted herbal secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.

The two authors, Arthur O. Tucker Ph.D (“botanist, emeritus professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbarium at Delaware State University“) and Rexford H. Talbert (“a retired information technologist formerly employed by the US Department of Defense and NASA“) found themselves so inspired by the similarity between the plant drawn on the Voynich Manuscript’s f1v and xiuhamolli / xiuhhamolli “the soap plant depicted in the 1552 Codex Cruz-Badianus of Mexico [on f9r]” that they concluded that the Voynich Manuscript must not only be post-Columbus, but also post-Conquest Nueva España (i.e. after 1519-1521).

Voynichese, they believe, is therefore nothing more than a New World polyglot studded with “loan-words […] from Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, Taino, and Mixtec“, but which is overwhelmingly in an “extinct dialect, keeping much of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets intact… for now.

So… does this all reduce to nothing more than an “ethnobotanical cold case”; and if it does, have these two plucky independent authors actually cracked it? In the interests of open-mindedness and fair debate, you might want to flick through their paper for yourself here before you read the rest of my article dismissing their historical naivety and overhopeful botano-centricity.

What, you already think I’m being unfair to their abductive logic? For a start, if “abductive logic” isn’t a sixty-dollar term that means nothing much more than “generating hypotheses sufficient to explain observations” (and normally only a carefully-selected subset of observations to boot), I wasted my time studying logic at University.

I hate to start out by pointing out the ridiculously obvious here, but here in Voynich Research Land, we’re already up to our necks (and gasping for anguished breath) in plausible-sounding hypotheses that similarly seek to explain other carefully-selected observations. Selective abductivity is the disease, not the cure, and what they’ve done is terrifically selective.

The proper Intellectual History methodology (of which their methodology is the palest of shadows) is to take on board the sum-total of all the evidence across all the different analytical historical domains, and only then try to construct abductive hypotheses that explain the whole lot simultaneously. Here, the two authors found themselves driven towards a post-New Spain New World origin by a single apparently persuasive piece of evidence, and then rippled through the consequences of what that would have to mean for that portion of the rest of the evidence they allowed themselves to consider.

What they didn’t consider: the demonstrably 15th century vellum in play (radiocarbon dating), 15th century digit shapes (in the quiration), 15th century number forms (in the quiration), 15th century contractions (on the zodiac roundel hand) and 15th century parallel hatching (in several drawings). So, that’s evidence from the domains of codicology, palaeography, and Art History immediately consigned to their great big wastepaper basket of Not Examined Here Stuff.

However, the way that they bracket these multiple classes of evidence is to say “but such spurious claims [of pre-Rudolfine origins] have channelized scholars’ thinking and have not been particularly fruitful“. In fact, what has held back Voynich research most over recent decades is the set of spurious claims of post-Columbine origins (e.g. John Dee, Edward Kelley, Cardan grille hoaxes, sunflowers, etc), of which these authors’ paper is merely the most recent example. For when you bracket out evidence from multiple parallel research domains, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Another thing that annoyed me was that even though they tentatively identified Voynichese as Nahuatl, they nowhere mentioned John D. Comegys (twin brother of Cipher Mysteries regular James Comegys), who for years has championed a Nahuatl Voynich link. Even Kircher & Becker’s ridiculous book identified Voynich as a polyglot mess mix of “l’allemand, le suédois, le néerlandais, le latin, l’anglais, avec quelque notions de gaélique et de nahuatl“, and hence dated the object to “entre 1570 et 1610”. Hence it doesn’t seem to me that Tucker and Talbot even attempted any kind of literature review beyond a grudging scrollthrough of Wikipedia (ha!) and voynich.nu.

They also seem unaware of the light painter / heavy painter debate (i.e. they naively take it as read that all the paints the manuscript presents are original, despite the evidence to the contrary), and the bifolio reordering debate (i.e. they naively take it as read that the foliation is original, despite the evidence to the contrary). Oh, and they seem completely unaware of the post-1990 debate over the Voynich “sunflowers”, with their account starting and stopping with Hugh O’Neill in 1944.

They also bracket out the “medieval German script” on f116v (which they consistently mis-spell as “Michiton Olababas”) as a freestanding mystery, apparently unaware that Voynichese letters are embedded within both this and the marginalia at the top of f17r (which I found in 2006 with a UV blacklamp, but which were later photographed by the Austrian documentary makers in 2009).

Many other things annoyed me (their treatment of the Codex Osuna, the “maiorica”, etc, etc), but I’ve got to 850 words already and that’s more than enough annoyance for one post. But one last aside…

What I came to hate about the Voynich mailing list was that some time around 2006 it had subsumed the trendy-but-ghastly management meeting notion that “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” (usually said in a dippy, please-don’t-be-a-hater voice). Actually, if you have a whole array of basic physical evidence to work with, yes there definitely is such a thing as a bad idea. And the sooner people putting forward such bad ideas get to take their fingers out of their ears and stop saying la-la-la at all the thousands of pieces of ‘inconvenient evidence’ they’d rather bracket to tell their story, the sooner we’ll get to hear some good ideas instead.

In short, I would be delighted (and would indeed be the first to cheer) if Tucker and Talbot had put forward a good idea. But I think they have failed to do so in numerous different ways, all of which were easily avoidable.

Hillary Raimo has something big to smile about: a few weeks ago she got to spend some time with the Voynich Manuscript (assuming those Beinecke curators didn’t cheekily swap it for Klaus Schmeh’s prop version), taking 600 photos in preparation for writing an article to be published in a French magazine in 2014:-

hillary-raimo-at-the-beinecke-cropped

She has also been adding Voynich-related articles to her blog The Yin Factor, including a new one that explains her idea of how the Voynich Manuscript is tied in with the Dogon tribe’s ‘Nommo’ gods. In case you don’t know, the Nommo are hermaphrodite amphibians from the binary star Sirius, giving them “the best of both worlds” in just about every permutation of the phrase.

She starts her piece with a long quote from Jason King’s “The Cannabible III” (summarizing the whole Dogon / Sirius mythology thing popularized in Robert Temple’s (1976) The Sirius Mystery). However, her view goes much further: that the manuscript “traces the star map of human origins. Through the plants harvested from them.” Essentially, she thinks that naturally occurring DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) in cannabis was brought here from Sirius (along with the human race), and that the Voynich Manuscript is one of the documents that can magnificently reconnect us to the raw ancestral (and interstellar) reality we moderns are so divorced from.

Raimo is also fascinated by the apparent occurrence of the Pleiades in the Voynich Manuscript (on f68r3), a featurette that has already inspired several generations of Voynich theorists (perhaps most notably Robert Teague, P. Han, etc), though this doesn’t seem to be anything to do with Sirius. (Incidentally, the Voynich-Pleiades connection also has a modern fan-base in the form of Wayne Herschel, Michelle L. Hanks, etc.)

Of course, there may be some problems here both with Raimo’s evidence and with her conclusions.

If I were a rich junkie burning my way through an inheritance and I really, really wanted to know where to find a type of cannabis that had a natural lychee and guava aftertaste, The Cannabible series of books is probably the first place I’d go. However, as a source of historical information it seems decidedly unsatisfactory, particularly where it credulously quotes Robert Temple’s work on the Dogon tribe.

Moreover, my own opinion on Temple’s book on the Dogon is that it is an historical crock, based as it is upon Marcel Griaule’s ethnologically crocked research. And if you want a good summary of why that was crocked, I suggest you read Michael Heiser’s long-ish 2011 web-page on the subject.

Do I therefore think that there is the remotest possibility that there is a star map of the Nommo-esque origins of the human race / cannabis hidden in the Voynich Manuscript? Errrm… no, not really, sorry. But please feel free to form your own opinion.

Newly arrived Voynich theorists Giuseppe Fallacara and Ubaldo Occhinegro will be holding their book launch at the European Parliament in Brussels tomorrow (4th December 2013, 6pm, room ASP 5G2 if you just happen to be nearby).

They’ve even managed to bring Roberto Giacobbo, the hugely well-known (and much-parodied) guy from long-running TV history / pseudohistory documentary series Voyager on Italian channel Rai 2 along to the presentation to give his thoughts, along with MEP Sergio Silvestris, no doubt somewhat delighted that anyone outside of Brussels remembers that he has a pulse. Cipher Mysteries readers with sad photographic memories for trivia may recall that it was Giacobbo’s Voyager programme who busted the infamous “John Titor” time-traveller hoax waaaay back in 2008. Though not everything on Voyager has managed to reach the same level of factual accuracy and careful research, if its many critics are even partially to be believed.

As far as I can tell, what the two Italian Voynich authors will be demonstrating is that the Castel del Monte was not only an incomplete Imperial hunting lodge (as if anything so obvious could be the case, pshaw!), but also a planned fantastic herbal laboratory (of sorts) for gaining eternal life, via Voynich-style spagyric alchemy. It’s true that they seem a little bit wobbly as far as physical history (Roger Bacon? Hmmm) / codicology (what?) / art history (where?) goes – frankly, their Voynich theory seems to be all about architecture and nothing else – but that’s probably entirely par for the course. Perhaps they’ll have something genuinely interesting and insightful to say about the Voynich Manuscript I’m not expecting… anything’s possible, I guess.

The nicest thing of all is that they plan to stream the whole event live-and-direct to we far-away denizens of the Whole Wide World via their shiny website www.castello-manoscritto.it. So there’s still time to get a refund on that EasyJet flight to Belgium you just booked for tomorrow, because you can watch the whole thing at your PC or Mac, perhaps even in your dressing gown (depending on your timezone relative to 18:00 Central European Time).

I doubt they’ll allow questions from the (virtual) wings, though… it all looks that bit too fragile to stand up to proper scrutiny. I’m sure you’re way ahead of me already as far as what questions they’d find hard to answer (i.e. why does the Voynich’s cryptography so resemble ciphers made 150 years after the dates you’re talking about? etc), so I won’t list them here. 😉

Will I be in Brussels tomorrow? Well, not unless a CIA black team descends on Cipher Mysteries Mansion and some kind of extraordinary rendition thing happens (and it’s reassuring to that know the rules have changed so that I wouldn’t now get tortured in the process). However, my best guess is that no three-letter agency (or even honorary members GCHQ) is currently sufficiently bothered about the Voynich Manuscript to do that. But all being well, I’l doubtless try to stream it. Hopefully that will be as close as I need to get! 🙂