After extensively meditating on the mysterious star-disk often depicted behind Christ’s head, Wayne Herschel suddenly realized that…
The Christ story probably involved a ‘gold plate’ that was given to Judas by The Christ and it most likely had a secret inscription on it that would show the star map of the sacred lineage of our ancestors.
So… whatever happened to that gold plate and its secret inscription? Wayne believes that he has uncovered a drawing of it in the Voynich Manuscript’s astronomical section:-
The images on the manuscript depict nymphs – souls travelling the cosmos through cosmic wormholes and records of plants that are probably not of this world.
Yes, “cosmic wormholes” (he had previously posted about this here). He continues:-
On one special page [f68r3] it depicts the sacred cross with all the missing detail Wayne was looking for. It had the star secret and a face Sun star at its centre. It has a cluster of seven stars and a little line as if signifying a path of travel to the Sun star very near to the Pleiades, as already discovered by Wayne in many other ancient civilisations!
Here’s Wayne’s vivid illustration of what he sees when he looks at f68r3 (slightly reduced in size from the image on his site, but I’m sure you get the gist):-
But beware! Discoveries this powerfully convincing are all too easy for rival ideologies to appropriate for their own twisted counter-factual historical narratives:-
A New age group ‘Silver Gate’ has already threatened that they will plagiarise and be promoting Wayne’s Voynich findings as well as all of his star map findings and falsely adjust all of them to make it fit their movement, hoping their followers will not know it is altered.
I don’t know what to say. I’ve now seen literally hundreds of Voynich theories in this same general vein, and it is logically true not only that they can’t all be right, but also that they can all be wrong. The secret history of Christ, Judas, John the Baptist, the Pleiades, Orion’s Belt, Voynich, cosmic wormholes, New Age plagiarists… I think I need to lie down in a darkened room until the crushing headache this has given me starts to abate.
Just be grateful that I read all these pages so that you don’t have to. 🙂
Gifted and talented kids have a pretty tough time of it. Even when they do manage find an outlet for the stuff buzzing in their head (here’s my 5-year-old son’s first film, if you haven’t seen it already), what on earth can their perpetually-lagging-behind parents point them at to keep them stimulated? While there are some genuinely cool things out there (such as the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum), these sadly tend to be as rare as hen’s teeth. With gold fillings.
One nice thing I like to take Alex to is the interactive monthly meetings of the Surrey Explorers, our local Kingston branch of the NAGC (the “National Association for Gifted Children”). He enjoyed building robots with Dr Bobor of Mitsubishi (here’s Alex’s jet-powered kangaroo robot design), finding out about Lonesome George, making music with balloons, learning magic tricks, etc. This term, he’s really looking forward to Street Dance in September and (as you probably guessed already, CM readers) Codes and Ciphers in October.
On this general theme, here’s something I found yesterday when playing with the Scirus scientific search engine. This summer (I believe), an Australian gifted and talented support organization called G.A.T.E.WAYS ran a series of four Voynich Manuscript-themed days (costing about £100 per child) called “The Mysterious Case of the Voynich Manuscript“, hosted by microbiologist / researcher Dr Geoff Crawford. Session #1 was a introduction to the VMs, Session #2 summarized historical codes & ciphers, Session #3 looked at forgery and hoaxes, while Session #4 was set up so that participants could actually try to crack the VMs for themselves. Yes, I’d say that pitching the VMs to kids like this is pretty cool – good job, I hope it went well! 🙂
Incidentally, for ages I’ve been meaning to give a (rather more modestly-priced, it has to be said) Voynich lecture, possibly at Treadwell’s. However, over the last couple of years, it seems – somewhat paradoxically – that the more I learn about the VMs, the less there is to say. “Voynich history”? Wishful thinking. “Voynich theories“? Hallucinatory enigmatology. Which is not to say that I’m pessimistic: but, rather, that I’d rather now talk about what the VMs is rather than what it might be, as the latter seems not to have got us anywhere in 500 years. 🙁
All the same, I think that there are two huge lessons to be learnt from Voynich research (for both adults and children!): (a) how easy it is to make mistakes when trying to do something really difficult, however clever you are; and (b) how hard it is to join different types of evidence together to build persuasive arguments. Hmmm… I’m not sure how well a über-rationalist message like that would go down with a typical Treadwell’s audience, though. Oh well! 😮
Professor Ibáñez presented his increasingly widespread theory: that the Voynich Manuscript is merely a set of squiggles made by someone on hold waiting to talk to their local cable company’s customer service team.
Following six years of arduous research, an unnamed 44-year-old German industrial technician has been trying (unsuccessfully) since 2005 to get his/her Voynich theory “De Aqua” published, either as a book or as an article. Frustrated by the lack of progress, last month he/she placed thirty-three sizeable chunks of it onto YouTube.
Of course, I fully understand that a busy person like you can’t really spare the time to trawl through several hours of German-text video presentation. So, to save you the bother, I’ve compiled a great big list of all highlights as seen from my chair [though here’s the final part (#33), which is a visual montage of all the interesting claims from the first 32 parts].
(1) Part #1 sets off with the basic format we’ll see throughout – endless pages of (almost entirely) German text fading in and out on a coloured background. Firstly, the top-level description of the theory gets presented: that the Voynich is actually entitled “De Aqua” (i.e. “concerning water“) and that the EVA transcription “otork” somehow translates as “aqua”. It then lists page after page of late-medieval things related to water. Part #2 asserts the author’s historical conclusions – that the VMs was written between 1525 and 1608 by four authors (in four writing systems), and that the underlying plaintext is German & Italian – before outlining the VMs’ known provenance since then.
(2) Part #3 is a bit of a scattergun attack on the 16th and early 17th centuries, with Kepler, Dee, Kelly, Paracelsus, Sir Francis Drake, Nostradamus, Isabella Cortese (who probably didn’t exist, incidentally), German mathematician Adam Ries, the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, etc etc all name-dropped in quick succession. Part #4 (only three minutes long, most of the others are closer to ten minutes each) links the three red shapes on f1r to (a) “Astrologie / Astronomie“, (b) “Fauna / Flora“, and (c) “Medizin“. No proof, no evidence, just presented as fact.
(3) Part #5 begins a lengthy discussion of medieval herbals, concluding that f2r depicts Lactuca virosa, f3r depicts a Spanish pepper, that f4v depicts an aubergine (i.e. that the VMs must post-date 1500). Part #6 continues in the same vein, while Part #7 argues that f33v depicts maize (which is where the claimed earliest date of 1525 comes in). Part #8 is broadly similar, lots more of the same.
(4) Part #9 has some nice pictures of things resembling the jars in the pharmacological section (though I couldn’t see references or dates for these?), as well as lots of parallels for details, including a nice little dragon (was this from the same Paris manuscript Sergio Toresella once mentioned?). Part #10 has many more parallels (including the famous “armadillo” [hah!] and the Novara coat of arms, etc), as does Part #11 which again returns to the VMs’ f25v dragon.
(5) Part #12 goes off the rails a bit, with claimed resemblances to body parts; Part #13 covers menstruation and the spongum somniferum (for which Caterina Sforza included a recipe, as I recall), though I can’t make out the yellow annotations to the marginalia on f66r (2:41 into the video); while Part #14 reads f77r as depicting the four elements.
(6) Part #15 gets back on track with astronomical parallels; Part #16 looks closely at the rather strange page f67v2 and proposes that the corner shapes are actually constellations (such as Pegasus); Part #17 goes off on a fairly pointless Giordano Bruno tangent; Part #18 looks at the zodiac pages (including a little discussion on the month names); Part #19 focuses mainly on the month names such as the Leo page (because of its Germanic-looking “augst” month name), though it beats me what Al Pacino is doing in there (4:02). 😮
(7) Part #20 looks at crowns and golden fleeces; Part #21 goes back to the zodiac nymphs, looking more at the structure of the pages, before moving on to discuss the 15th century “De Sphaera” by the deaf Milanese illustrator Cristoforo de Predis, who worked for the Sforza family (ah, them again).
(8) Part #22 (are you still reading this? Just checking!) compares the drawings in Quire 13 with Roman aqueducts and similar water structures; while Part #23 looks at Leonardo da Vinci’s take on water, compares (at 1:21) a detail on f79r with a sextant (Rich SantaColoma recently blogged that the same detail reminded him of early “swimming girdles”, though I suspect neither have it right), and discusses rainbows too. Part #24 discusses water nymph details (poses, rings, cross, horseshoe, spinning top, nail, etc).
(9) Part #25 focuses (rather unsatisfactorily, it has to be said) on various tenuous links with alchemy, with the only high point being the comparison between the balneo section’s “giant grapes” page (f83v) and a page in Das Buch der waren Kunst zu distillieren (1512).
(10) Part #26 is pretty thin apart from a fascinating parallel (0:53) between a detail of f76v and a drawing of Mercurius in Liber II of Giordano Bruno’s (1591) De Imaginum Compositione; Part #27 is even thinner; while Part #28 proposes that the nine-rosette page is a map of Italy with Venice in the middle (yes, I’d say) and Pompeii in the top left (no, as it was only rediscovered in 1748). [I’m not convinced by Valdarno and the Wasserturm, either.]
(11) Part #29 (Perfume and Plague) didn’t really work for me at all; while Part #30 (Hidden Characters in the Manuscript) only briefly gets interesting when looking (1:53) at similarities between our beloved MS408 and Medeltidshandskrift 47 (at Lund University in Sweden) – the discussion of the f17r and f116v marginalia seems superficial and unconvincing to me.
(12) Finally, in Part #31, our anonymous author gets to the point of his whole book – that (unless I’ve misunderstood him/her, which is always possible) some clever computer programmer out there should be able to make use of all the clever cribs he/she has amassed as a result of his/her long journey into the heart of the VMs’ pictures. Part #32 has his/her (fairly diffuse, it has to be said) bibliography; and Part #33, as mentioned above, is a sequential montage of all the visual identifications proposed in parts 1 to 32.
Quite why neither of the German Voynich E-bloggers (hi Elmar, hi Elias) has yet blogged about this I don’t know (perhaps they’re on holiday?): but from where I’m sitting in the UK, there’s plenty to say about it.
Firstly, it is pretty clear that the author has for some years sustained an intense (and independent-minded) assault on the VMs’ pictures – yet at the same time he/she seems quite unaware of many long-running problematic debates, such as the whole “heavy painter” issue. Had the plant on f4v not been overpainted blue, would his/her identification with “aubergine” have been so clear-cut?
In addition, while it’s fantastic to see someone wise to hidden details (such as the concealed people in f86v4, even though this is mislabelled as f68v4 in Part#7), overall I just don’t accept the idea that the VMs’ plants can be identified as solidly as he/she thinks – we’ve now had three or four generations of herbal researchers look at it, with each finding it bewildering in a new way. Furthermore, comparing drawings with modern plants (or even with interpretative drawings of modern plants) is of little use, as virtually every plant you can name has been extensively adapted and altered over the centuries by, ummm, cunning breeders.
While I’m sympathetic to the author’s project and research programme (it is, after all, more or less identical in intention to what I was trying to do with my own “The Curse of the Voynich”), where it falls down is in historical methodology: in this instance, you just can’t get the level of proof you would like from visual similarities, however many of them you try to amass. Has our unnamed author provided coherent and powerful evidence supporting the identification of MS408 as “De Aqua“? I don’t really think so – plants aside, the overwhelming bulk of the discussion is fairly lightweight, and does not gain any real traction on the real history of the manuscript despite the sheer mass of intertextual references.
All the same, there’s plenty of food for thought here (though I wish many of the manuscripts where so many of the nice illustrations were taken from had MS and page references to back them up) – but for all “WilfridVoynich“‘s hard work, the end result simply fails to produce the set of cribs he/she was aiming for. Sorry, but it’s not “De Aqua” as claimed (though, to be honest, I would be hugely unsurprised if the vertical column of letters on f76r does indeed somehow encipher “de aqua”).
The end result, though, is plainly a great personal achievement – and I would be delighted if some of the intriguing and bold visual connections he/she has drawn in it ultimately lead onwards to genuinely productive and useful future research within the overall VMs community. For all its faults and limitations, this is definitely the (virtual) Voynich book of the year for 2009! 😉
Here’s a 2009 Voynich theory for me to add to the big list, courtesy of George Hoschel Jr (of California?). George uploaded his solution as a jpeg’ed scan of his transliteration notes (1) followed by four annotated versions of parts of f80v (2, 3, 4, 5): the basic idea is that Voynichese enciphers what he calls “Old Latin”.
Just so you know, George reads Voynichese as a combination of simple letters (a = EVA a , e = EVA e, o/u = EVA o, m = EVA iii, n = EVA ii, z = EVA q, etc) with a lot of plausible-looking specific abbreviations (er = EVA ch, fr = EVA sh, eri = EVA sh [but with the plume offset to the right], eric = EVA she [which George reads as short for ericius, “hedgehog”], and so forth).
Put it all together, and you get a translation of f80v that reads like:
WINE STRONG DRY TO MAGPIE
SAVED CRUMBLED DRIED TO HOOPOE KIDNEY
TO BOILED KIDNEY FRIED / IN
GOAT VEGETABLE BREAD USING
USING HEDGEHOG KIDNEY TO BREAD
In some ways, to me this reads like “Ready Steady Cook” as directed by Tim Burton – “right, teams, you have 30 minutes to produce a restaurant-quality meal using only hoopoe kidney, goat, vegetables, bread, and strong wine.” Feel free to interpret this in quite a different way!
Here’s a Voynich page that made me laugh, and I hope it will do broadly the same for you too. 🙂
Elias Schwerdtfeger has posted a new meta-theoretical analysis tool to his blog, called VBI – short for the “Voynich Bullshit Index“. By carefully testing your pet Voynich theory against his long checklist of questions (each with its own VBI point rating), you can work out how high your overall VBI rating is… that is, how close to the perfect bullshit Voynich theory you have reached.
For maximum satirical effect, Elias includes a number of questions designed specifically to penalize various well-known Voynich theories: and yes, my Averlino theory is one of them, but I’d probably have been vastly disappointed if he hadn’t. 🙂
Sadly for Anglophones, Elias’ VBI post is only in German – but if you nag him enough (leaving a comment should do the trick) to add an English translation, I guess he probably will. Alternatively, you can annoy him by clicking here to look at his page via Google Translate: he’s forever trawling through his server logs for Google Translate entries and then moaning at me about my inability to read German, which isn’t strictly true – I actually sometimes use it because of my inability to read his German. Which, having just seen what a dog’s dinner Google Translate makes of his post, I don’t feel quite so bad about any more. 😉
Late in 2008, Adam D. Morris emailed me to discuss his Voynich theory: that the VMs might have some connection with Hieronymus Reusner. Finally, I’ve got round to posting about it (sorry for the delay, Adam!)…
Adam’s jumping-off point was the visual similarities between the VMs and Reusner’s 1582 book “Pandora” (a version of the ‘Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit’, Book of the Holy Trinity) – colouring, faces, line-structure, etc. And so he wondered: might Hieronymus Reusner be (or be connected with) the author of the VMs? Or if not him, might it be connected to other Germans connected with him, such as Ulmannus or Franciscus Epimetheus? Additionally, manuscript copies of the “Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit” go back to 1415, so at what point did the drawings we see in Reusner’s Pandora take that general form?
Adam was also intrigued by Bachmann and Hofmeier’s (1999) “Gehemimnisse der Alchemie“, particularly the drawings of people and objects on pp.103-123 which he thought were reminiscent of the VMs.
Alchemy expert Adam McLean has also studied Reusner’s Pandora, and concludes that it is the coloured drawings in The University of Basel, MS L IV 1, UB (entitled ‘Alchemistisches Manuscript’) that were very probably “the original for the woodcuts in Reusner’s ‘Pandora’, rather than their being directly derived from an early manuscript of the ‘Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit’.”
I dug up a couple of images from MS L IV 1, UB on the web: Figure 1 on this page, and Figure 1 on this page. The accompanying text dates the manuscript to 1550, which is a little late for the VMs, but (as I’m constantly reminded by others) not one the current fairly scratchy dating evidence definitively rules out. And, as always, the Basel Alchemistisches Manuscript might well have been copied from a yet earlier source – so there may well be a significant (probably German-language) literature on this manuscript which explores its visual roots. Let me know if you happen to find any of this!
As with a lot of VMs research ideas, what we have here is something and nothing all at the same time. Is a slim visual resemblance a convincing enough reason to spend a significant amount of time attempting to build a case for an historical connection? And (for example) might similarities in paint colour merely suggest that the VMs was repainted in Germany in the middle of the 16th century, rather than anything to do with its actual origin?
Perhaps the bigger problem with this lies with trying to shoehorn the VMs into some kind of alchemical tradition (at whatever date) is that nobody has yet presented any evidence that suggests any sustainable parallel (however fleeting) between the VMs’ drawings and any known set of alchemical drawings.
In the past, Voynich theorists have all too often used “alchemy”, “heresy”, “magic”, “necromancy” and indeed “conspiracy” as catch-all that’s-why-it-must-be-secret buzzwords: but the good news is that people are now starting to see that “why is it secret?” is the wrong kind of question (as per point 5 on the DIY Voynich theory list) to be starting from. Given that the forensics mantra is “forget about the whys, focus on the whats”, I believe that an essentially forensic approach is our only real hope of making progress.
And so I applaud Adam Morris for trying to follow the drawings (for art history surely aspires to be a forensic study of stylistics?), as this is arguably the most sensible route to take: but as he has found, it is a far harder path to follow than it at first seems. Good luck!
Keeping with this week’s Spanish theme, here is a small selection of Voynich tapas to dip into the spicy sauce of your prejudices rich life experiences. Tasty!
(2) Here’s a novel (though only partially formed) Spanish Voynich theory presented in the form of a Youtube video: it suggests a link between the Voynich Manuscript and Juan Ponce de León (1474-1521), the soldier who famously went searching for the fountain of youth (though this was only said of him after his death). The irony, of course, is that Florida (to where he travelled) has come to be stuffed full of retirees doing much the same thing. Personally, I suspect he was more interested in gold than any claims of eternal youth: but never mind. Oh, and if you do choose to look at the webpage, don’t forget to turn the shouty rock music backing track off. 😮
(3) Here’s a Voynich theory that is even less well-formed than the above (yes, it’s possible). “Lord Trigon” suspects that the VMs is an elvish school book that fell up from Middle Earth through a well, in basically the same way that he/she once threw his/her own 5th grade maths book down a well (and said he/she’d lost it). Ah, bless.
(4) Finally, a big Cipher Mysteries Guten Tag! goes out to Michael Johne, who puts up brief German summaries of (usually) English-language Voynich news stories on his blog. At first, it was a little strange to see my own posts pop up there (a bit like having a multilingual stalker), but I’m starting to get used to it. I hope to read some of your own posts there soon, Michael!
Of course, if you’ve yet to be introduced to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the whole associated quasi-legal quest by “millions” to get His Noodly Teachings taught in parallel with Intelligent Design in schools (particularly in Kansas), this may all come as a bit of a surprise. Also, note that teachers would have to wear “full pirate regalia” to do this without being disrespectful to the CFSM: I’m not quite sure of the precise reasoning, but it’s somehow because global warming since the 1800’s has (apparently) been inversely dependent on the number of pirates in the world. Just so you know!
Applying the DIY Voynich Theory checklist:
Doesn’t care about facts? √
Could be made into a T-shirt? √
Major historic figure roped in? √
Personal psychodrama projected on subject? √ (Probably)
Asking (and answering) all the wrong questions? √ (Sort of)
Having fun? √√√√√
So, what’s it to be: sauce or butter? The eternal question (apparently). 🙂
