A Brand New New World / Nahuatl Voynich Manuscript Theory…

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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.

A Sirius Voynich Theory, I’ll be Dogon!

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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.

Voynich / Castel del Monte book launch in Brussels…

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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! 🙂

Voynich Manuscript and the Castel del Monte…

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The Castel del Monte is a well-known octagonal fortress in Apulia, constructed in the 13th century for Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. However, it was never properly finished and ended up being used over the centuries as:
* a state prison;
* somewhere to loot nice bits of marble from; and
* a story location in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” (he rechristened his version the ‘Aedificium’). 🙂

Derelict for many years, the Castel was bought by the state in 1876 and subsequently restored (though more or less all the tasty-looking marble bits had been robbed out and scavenged). Nowadays, it’s not really of much consequence unless you happen to be on holiday in South-Eastern Italy and want something nice to look at. It is what it is, which is actually not nearly as much as people once hoped that it was.

But now possibly a brand new (and perhaps architecturally esoteric) chapter in its life has begun. Giuseppe Fallacara and Ubaldo Occhinegro have just had a book published by Gangemi Editore SpA, with the title Manoscritto Voynich e Castel del Monte. Yes, it’s a brand new Voynich theory.

What they seem to be proposing is that some of the Voynich Manuscript’s more architectural-style drawings (particularly the nine-rosette fold-out page, but also various others in the astronomical section, as I understand it) encode sort-of-plans for building the Castel del Monte, and include all kinds of mysterious and little-known plumbing details – “pipes, tubes, channels, cisterns, showers and fireplaces” etc – once present or nearly-present in its construction.

Well… it is certainly true that the design of this little castle was constructed with water management strongly in mind: there was a large cistern sunk in the rock immediately beneath the central courtyard, and tanks for capturing rainwater in some of the eight towers. There was also a (presumably substantial, but now lost) octagonal basin in the middle of the courtyard, briefly mentioned in the Castel’s official webpage.

And so I can certainly see how someone looking at the Voynich Manuscript’s drawings afresh while tilting their head in just the right way might feel somehow compelled to tease out some kind of parallel between the twin themes of architecture and plumbing that apparently inform both artefacts. But in fact active, central water management was a key part of castle design throughout the Middle Ages – for if you find yourself besieged, you can last for a long time with only a little food, but without plenty of water you will soon die.

I have to say that this sounds like the Castel del Monte could be one of the slimmer resemblances or correlations I’ve seen used to construct a Voynich theory upon or around. But Fallacara’s and Ogginegro’s book includes an English version on facing pages, so hopefully I will get to see their argument in full for myself before very long. At 40 euros plus shipping from Italy, the whooshing sound you might also hear is the vacuum left when the money leaves your wallet. But it does look quite pretty, maybe that’s enough. 🙂

Voynich Manuscript: an Andean Sky God Cathar theory?

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Voynich theories are like radish shoots after Spring rain (as Rudy Cambier likes to say) – they keep on popping up. And here’s a new radish shoot theory, courtesy of Morten St George, whose Andean Sky God website digs deep into a whole range of historical mysteries – Nazca lines, Shakespeare, Cabala, Rosicrucianism, and now the Voynich Manuscript.

According to St George, the 9-rosette castle is likely to be a fortress similar to Carcassone, but one “destroyed by the Crusaders, i.e. left without ruins“… “Montségur, the final stronghold of the Cathari Church“. So it’s clearly a Cathar document.

Of course, the 15th century radiocarbon dating presents a problem for any Cathar Voynich theory: indeed, St George acknowledges that “it would seem impossible for the Cathars to have written the Voynich because at that time the Cathars no longer existed, at least not anywhere in Europe.”

So… if the Cathars wrote the Voynich Manuscript in the 15th century but they weren’t in Europe, where were they? St George’s response is unexpected yet logical:-

“The plant drawings in the Voynich provide the answer. The Voynich has drawings of more than one hundred exotic plant species, highly detailed drawings from flower to root, all of which represent plants that no one in Europe had ever seen before. Realistically, there is only one place on Earth that can produce such an extraordinary diversity of plant life, and that’s the tropical rainforests of South America, which I shall call Amazonia. The Cathars went to Amazonia.”

In fact, the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 13 (the ‘balneological section’) has a whole load of drawings of the “elaborate network of conduits, funnels, and containers up in the trees to collect rain water, which they then used for drinking and washing. In the Voynich, drinkable rain water, in contrast to rainforest water, is always depicted in blue color“. Ah, so that is why they’re coloured differently! 😉

However, there is no happy ending for the Cathars in exile: even hundreds of years later, St George is convinced that the Inquisition would hunt down and kill the Cathars in South America. “In such circumstances, the Church of Satan would continue to hunt down the Cathars until the end of time.”

In a worthy piece of soul-searching, St George finishes up his presentation with the following Q&A couplet:-

“Do you think this sounds like the plot of an end-of-times film?

Things are what they are.”

Well…

In the spirit of Rich SantaColoma’s desire to keep all possibilities in play, I freely admit say that there is a small chance that Morten St George has stumbled onto something huge here – that the Voynich Manuscript was indeed written by Cathars in exile in South America, before their being finally (if belatedly) obliterated from the pages of history by the Inquisition. (It also doesn’t take much to connect St George’s ideas with Leo Levitov’s (now venerable) Cathar heresy Voynich theory.)

Of course, the real study of history is about far more than enumerating possibilities, because in the hands of the imaginative (let alone of those really don’t get out enough), there is no list of possibilities that cannot be doubled or tripled in length. Indeed, such possibilities tells us far more about the showboating creative facility of the person or people constructing them than about the real historical artefact itself: the role of the object ultimately reduces to that of a stage on which to play out stories culled from the pareidoiliac static of a troubled mind.

And in my opinion, the biggest sign of such trouble is normally when would-be decrypters discover – almost always to their personal surprise and amazement – that their deciphering methodology developed for one particular object also just happens to work on other, apparently unrelated objects. For example, John Stojko not only could read the Voynich (in Old Ukrainian), but was also (as I recall) able to read Estrucan gravestones. It’s tempting to speculate whether he could in fact have used the same approach to “read” any string of letters. “John Stojko Read My Barcode” isn’t yet a T-Shirt slogan, but perhaps it should be.

If all the world’s a stage, then the evil Church conspiracy, the Rosicrucians, Shakespeare, and the Voynich Manuscript are surely the festival side-stages on which the troubled perform their one-man (or indeed one-woman) shows. Curiously for things of such age, history only has a walk-on part in such productions. The play’s the thing, indeed!

A Visual Map of Voynich Evidence, Theories & People…

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Unless you just happen to have been an expert in Voynichese for a decade or more, making sense of all the evidence and the theories (and even the people) surrounding it can be quite daunting. So I thought I’d help by drawing a map!

theory-evidence-map

From my perspective, the general problem is that once you really latch onto a piece of evidence or a particular angle, you can easily become trapped inside it: and even though the solution you then reach may be entirely logical, it is almost always inconsistent with the other kinds of evidence and types of angle, and hence is almost always nonsensical.

I’d say this is precisely what happened with Gordon Rugg’s hoax theory, Jorge Stolfi’s East Asian language theory, and William Friedman’s artificial language theory – they all relied too heavily on one particular kind of evidence, and so arrived at untenable conclusions. But you will doubtless have your own thoughts on each of these. 🙂

It should also be clear that, like a kind of hummingbird theoretician, I’ve dotted around this diagram over the years, adding different ideas to the mix that try to explain different aspects of the evidence. I still believe that each of these suggestions will turn out to be largely correct, but the big trick will be finding a way – Intellectual History style – of making them all right at the same time!

The Voynich Manuscript, Voynich theorists, and professional historians…

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In four words, the Voynich Manuscript is a puzzling old thing (and really, ain’t that the truth?). Filled with unknown plants, unrecognizable astrology & astronomy, and numerous drawings of small naked women, the fact that we also can’t read a single word of its ‘Voynichese’ text doubles or even triples its already top-end mystery. Basically, the Voynich Manuscript is to normal mysteries as a Scooby sandwich is to an M&S prawn mayonnaise sandwich.

People have their theories about it, of course. The last ripe strawberry of a mainstream Voynich theory came back in 2004 from academic Gordon Rugg, who declared that it was a hoax made using late 16th century cryptographic table-based trickery. Sadly 2009 saw an early 15th century radiocarbon dating of its vellum, which would seem to have made a fool of such fruity ingredients. Or if not a fool, then certainly a bit of a mess.

Despite almost-irreconcilable dating problems, numerous Voynich theories continue to find support from eager evangelists, angrily jabbing their fingers at any epistemological cracks they can see. The most notable get-out clause proposed is that some devious so-and-so could theoretically have used centuries-old vellum for <insert fiendishly clever reason here>, rather than some fresh stuff. This is indeed possible. But also, I think, rather ridiculous.

Why? Because it adds yet another layer of possible unlikeliness (for it is surely extraordinarily unlikely that someone back then would have such a modern sensibility about faking or hoaxing that they would knowingly simulate a century or more of codicological activity), without actually helping us to manage or even reduce any of the existing layers of actual unlikeliness.

Ironically, many such theorists prove anxious to invoke Occam’s Razor even as they propose overcomplex theories that sit at odds with the (admittedly somewhat fragmented) array of evidence we have. Incidentally, my own version is what I call “Occam’s Blunt Razor”: “hypotheses that make things more complicated should be tested last, if ever“.

For more than a decade, I’ve been watching such drearily unimpressive Voynich theories ping (usually only briefly, thank goodness) onto the world’s cultural radar. Most come across as little more than work-in-progress airport novella plots, but without the (apparently obligatory) interestingly-damaged-yet-thrustingly-squat-jawed protagonist to counterbalance the boredom of trawling through what passes for historical mystery research these days (i.e. the first half of Wikipedia entries).

And so I think it was something of a surprise when, back in 2006, I grew convinced that the Voynich Manuscript had been put together by the Italian architect Antonio Averlino (better known as Filarete), and even wrote a book about it (“The Curse of the Voynich”). But by taking that step, wasn’t I doing exactly the same thing as all those other Voynich wannabe theorists? Wasn’t I too putting out an overcomplex theory at odds with the evidence that signally failed to explain anything?

Well… no, not at all, I’d say. Averlino was the cherry on the dating cake I’d patiently built up over the years: the cake led me to the cherry, not the other way around. And that dating framework still stands – all the analysis I’ve carried out in the years since has remained strongly consistent with that framework.

Even so, I’m not wedded to Averlino: my guess is that you could probably construct a list of one or two hundred Quattrocento candidates nearly as good a match as him, and it could very well have been one of those. Yet what I am sure about is that when we ultimately find out the Voynich’s secrets, it will prove to be what I said: a mid-15th century European book of secrets; collected from a variety of sources on herbalism, astronomy, astrology, water and even machines; whose travelling author was linked directly to Milan, Florence, and Venice; and whose cipher was largely composed of 15th century scribal shorthand disguised as medieval scribal shapes (though with an annoying twist).

Averlino aside, please feel free to disagree with any of that… but if you do, be aware that you’ve got some important detail just plain wrong. 🙂

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the Voynich Manuscript is that historians still skirt around it: yet in many ways, it offers the purest of codicological challenges ever devised. For without the contents of the text to help us (and a provenance that starts only in the 17th century, some 150 years or so after it was constructed), all a professional historian can rely on is a whole constellation of secondary clues. Surely this is the best gladiatorial arena ever offered?

I’ll happily help any historian who wants to take the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript on, 21st century style. Yet it would seem that few have the skills (and indeed the research cojones) to do ‘proper’ history any more, having lost them in the dense intertextuality of secondary research. Without close reading to back their judgment up, how many can build a historical case from a single, unreadable primary source?

You know, I still sometimes wonder what might have happened if, in the 1920s, John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert had chosen not Chaucer as their über-subject matter but the Voynich Manuscript instead. As a team, they surely had more than enough cryptological and historical brains to come devilishly close to the answer. And yet… other times it seems to me that the Voynich offers a brutally nihilistic challenge to any generation of historians: for the techniques you have been taught may well be a hindrance rather than a help.

All in all, perhaps (capital-H) History is a thing you have to unlearn (if only partially) if you want to make sense of the Voynich Manuscript’s deep mystery – and that is a terrifically hazardous starting point for any quest. For that reason, it may well be something that no professional historian could ever afford to take on – for as Locard’s Exchange Principle would have it, every contact between things affects both parties. A historian might change Voynich thinking, but Voynich thinking might change the historian in the process… which might well be a risky exchange. Ho hum… 😐

“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back on sale…

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Just a quick note to let you know that a freshly printed boxful of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” arrived here today, and with shinier covers than ever. 🙂 It is, of course, a perfect last-minute cipher-mystery-related Christmas present (for others or indeed for yourself), so feel free to order a copy (click on the appropriate PayPal-linked Buy Now button at the top there, and off you go).

If you don’t know about my take on the Voynich Manuscript, I’ve posted a 1000-word summary of the book here, part of which was covered in the National Geographic Ancient X-Files half-episode you may have seen (and which YouTube has now taken down). What I like best about “Curse” is that for all the potshots people have tried to take at it, it’s all basically still standing, which – considering that this is a highly-contested field where a typical Voynich theory has a shelf-life of a few days at most – is pretty good going, I think. 🙂

As always, I sign all copies bought direct from the Compelling Press site, and offer the option of adding an anagrammatic dedication at the front: so if your name was (for example) “Leonardo da Vinci”, you could have your copy dedicated to “Vindaloo and Rice” (which remains one of the best anagrams ever, however much you happen to like “Invalided Racoon”).

Incidentally, of all the other books on the Voynich Manuscript out there, I’d strongly recommend Mary D’Imperio’s classic (1976) “An Elegant Enigma”, which is now freely downloadable from the NSA as a PDF. Anyone with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript should read this – even if it is a little bit dated in places, D’Imperio does cover a lot of ground.

2012 Advent Calendar Day #6: “The Encrypted” reveals the history of everything…

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Codes – ciphers – concealed stuff – secret histories – I love it all, really I do. But… in moderation and in balance: and the #1 reason I don’t believe in century-spanning conspiracies (of the kind so loved by trashy novelists) is not “because they’re impossible”, but because I haven’t as yet seen a single shred of evidence that actually supports the existence of such things.

Even the infamous ‘Priory of Sion’ was ultimately no more than an archival fantasy constructed by a man who believed it would help support his delusional claim to be King of France: and that was arguably the best of a bad bunch.

All of this is in my head as I turn to a new book called “The Encrypted“. Its author Loret Love claims to have found and decrypted a code more than 5,500 years old, that is hidden in plain sight in (you probably guessed already)…

“the Declaration of Independence, King Tut’s Throne, The Kensington Stone, The Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, Newport Tower, the Voynich Manuscript, and many others. Among the famous artists and writers associated with the code were Da Vinci, Jules Vern, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Francis Bacon, J.R. Tolkien, Picasso, Nostradamus, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, and Bram Stoker. All of these people, places and objects hold shocking mysteries protected and venerated by the early Knights Templar.”

Countless other historical X-Files get pulled aboard Love’s syncretic rollercoaster ride, which ultimately reveals to the world a “horrifying legacy exposing Vampires, Werewolves and shape shifting monsters“. All that and the Holy Grail too… really, if I didn’t know better I’d say the whole exercise comes across like “National Treasure” on badly cut mescaline.

What I found most, errrm, awe-inspiring when reading about “The Encrypted” was that when I looked back at my 2009 cut-out-and-keep map of historical conspiracy clichés, it was as if Love has treated that diagram as Level 1 of a giant game of ‘Conspiracy Buzzword Bingo’, and then decided to write a book around a brand new Level 2.

As a blogger, I’m supposed to operate under the guiding principle “I check out all this stuff (and then write about it) so that you don’t have to“: but in this instance, I simply can’t bring myself to buy a copy – it’s just too much, even for me. Sorry if this disappoints you!

French researchers decode the Voynich Manuscript (errrrm… or maybe not)

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Not only can writers now get books published hyper-fast, so too can their debunkers reply no less quickly: where faulty observing, theorizing or reasoning leave holes large enough to languidly drive a truck-load of Voynich conference attendees through, you can these days expect the same to be pointed out quickly enough. So it rapidly proves to be with the recently published “Le manuscrit Voynich décodé” by mystery writers Fabrice Kircher [love the surname] and Dominique Becker, who boldly claim to have decrypted the Voynich Manuscript: but, as you’ll see, this comes with an unexpected twist in the tail…

Their four-page Chapter One briskly dismisses the preceding history of the Voynich up to 2004, before launching head-first into an explanation of their transcription and analysis. Chapter 5 transcribes the ten last words on f20r thus:

olluig ollug llug golliig hand has ouand uos uouiig lluig

This babble poetry they fearlessly translate as:-

Le mouvement du lac, le mouvement d’ouverture, l’ouverture. Marche la lumière, advient, en glissant, le mauvais esprit inférieur, la basse fumée, l’inférieure vapeur de l’eau, du lac.

They get to this point by interpreting Voynichese as a polyglot mixture of (p.157) “l’allemand, le suédois, le néerlandais, le latin, l’anglais, avec quelque notions de gaélique et de nahuatl“. Because of the presence of Nahuatl (which got to Europe no earlier than 1521) and various other features, they date the object to (p.157) “entre 1570 et 1610“.

By now, most people who’ve read anything about the Voynich Manuscript in the last three years will be sighing miserably at the futility of this whole exercise. Not only have the authors recapitulated Levitov’s sorry polyglottism, they’ve also created a reading that has little obvious to commend it over other long-failed decryptions such as John Stojko’s. Frankly, to my eyes their base theory is a mess; the way all the polyglot languages are supposedly linked together is a mess; and the final translation is a mess. And I suspect that any broadly sane reviewer would say the same.

But here’s the twist: the book comes with an afterword by Jean-Michel Grandsire, a self-taught anti-conformist with a interest in the paranormal. To my great surprise, Grandsire points out the inconsistency with the 2009 radiocarbon dating and the 15th century swallowtail merlons in the nine-rosette page; and suggests (p.170) that the authors may have fallen foul of what Pierre Barthélémy in the discussion at the front of “Le Code Voynich” called la “malédiction du manuscrit” – basically, the curse of the Voynich.

So there you have it: a Voynich theory presented in a way that preempts the need for writing a critical review of it (because they do that for you). How very modern!