DIY Voynich theory construction…

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I’m constantly astonished by the inventiveness of Voynich theorists, as if the mundane facts surrounding the manuscript amounted to no more than an unfolded piece of Washi given to a roomful of psilocybin-addled origami experts.

Given that creating a Voynich theory obviously can’t be that hard to do, why not devise your own? You can sell eBooks or T-shirts, maybe even get interviewed by local newspapers – and the best thing about it all is that for now, and probably for a fair while yet, nobody can prove you wrong.

OK, there are already plenty of Voynich theories out there, but a little bit of competition is healthy for the soul, don’t you think? And so here are some practical DIY tips to help you construct your very own Voynich Theory…

(1) Don’t Sweat The Itty-Bitty Stuff (such as facts)

History, schmistory – the Voynich Manuscript’s mystery is so vast that it transcends petty detail-mongering, right? So don’t even bother to try to understand why historical methodologies might help you construct better arguments – you have much bigger groupers to griddle here, for Pete’s sake.

(2) For Clues, Interpret The Pictures However You Like

Your first challenge is to assemble a nice-looking set of visual clues, preferably ones that you can cut-and-paste into a web-page or a T-shirt. Though… I should probably point out that if fifteen minutes browsing Google Images or Flickr for intriguing Voynich images isn’t enough to land you your clue #1, you might find yourself struggling a bit – awesomely great Voynich theorists need only glance at any picture in the manuscript (or anywhere else, for that matter) to be able to instantly concoct a plausible story around it.

(3) The History Of The World Is Your Oyster

Let’s face it, who’s going to give a monkey’s stool about any Voynich Manuscript theory that isn’t also a secret history? I’m sure you know the kind of thing, a story that just happens to link one or more famous historical people into a secret socio-techno-political-religious-occult conspiracy that just happens to explain all kinds of other mysterious things you may possibly have heard of. And so one thing you really need to come up with fairly early on is an unexpected set of one or more edgy, liminal historical figures (think of the Priory of Sion, but toned down somewhat), one of whom might just possibly (if you squint a lot) have had half a hand in the Voynich Manuscript. Unfortunately, most of the particularly good ones (Leonardo da Vinci, Nostradamus) have been nabbed already, but Google will probably come to your rescue here. As a rough guide, anyone born between 1200AD and 1600AD is basically fair game, so you’re not short of options.

(4) Look Deep Into Your Own Heart

The litmus test of a “proper” Voynich Theory is that it acts as a mirror to your own secret desires and wishes, insofar as it functions as a wish-fulfilment object within your personal psychodrama. Which is a $600 way of saying that every wild / exaggerated claim you make about the unsung / misunderstood historical hero figure behind the Voynich Manuscript should be something you’d like others to say about you. Whether you are a frustrated inventor, traveller, writer, physicist, astronomer, or whatever, your Voynich Theory gives you a chance to right those wrongs and so regain your pride (through a conveniently long-dead proxy).

(5) Ask (And Answer) All The Wrong Questions

Sensible questions (such as “what was the original state of the manuscript?”, “what handwriting was added later?”, “how were individual pages constructed?”) lead only to disproof, not proof: and so you should avoid sensible questions at all cost. Instead, focus on the biggest wrong questions you can think of: such as “what historical secret could possibly be so important that an entire cryptographic conspiracy would be required to encipher it?” And then give your own particular answer (of course).

(6) Remember To Have Fun!

Unfortunately, in practice this is the bit many Voynich theorists tend to forget. They get so caught up in the arcane nonsense nearly all of them are spouting (for let’s face it, it can’t be Hildegard of Bingen, Trithemius, AND Leonardo simultaneously) that they take out their ongoing frustration (at being unable to prove the unprovable) on other competing Voynich theorists. Guys, guys (and gals, gals): relax. Until such time as the hard data train finally arrives, nobody can prove a darn thing about the Voynich Manuscript. So, you can just kick back and enjoy the warm feeling that your theory – no matter how ludicrous – is arguably just as valid as anybody else’s.

There – that’s pretty much everything you need to know. So what are you waiting for? Get theorizing! 🙂

Jewish Arabic Voynich theory

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Here’s another (sort of) “plaintext” Voynich Manuscript reading, that I first found back in 2006: having corresponded briefly with the Greek author (who wishes to remain anonymous) at the time, I then managed to completely forget about until a few days ago.

He claims that the Voynich Manuscript is a transliterated Arabic document written down “using a kind of [old-fashioned] Jewish script”, and that it contains incantations to fulfil “all kinds of human desires”, addressed to the goddess “Siit” as part of cult worship ultimately deriving from the Mesopotamians.

René will be pleased to hear that the author gives extensive equivalence tables showing how to map Voynichese letters onto Hebrew letters, as well as a pronunciation guide. (Though note that you will need to resize your browser window to be 1024-pixels wide in order for the left-hand “Gabelsberger Shorthand Symbol” column to line up).

There is also a long section on f116v (the “michiton oladabas” page), as well as comments on other pages:-

Cotton is depicted on page 17, and cannabis sativa on page 16; these are plants used to make fabrics, like the one on the right of cotton, which is flax. On page 11 it is, I think, a lemon tree.

He finishes up by noting that the first few lines of folio 56 (which he says depict an eggplant) read as follows (“aqith” = “eternal”), and comments that “I cite this passage for anyone who knows Arabic well to offer a tentative reading of the whole page“:-

s(tbqd bbk)n sTn rkran bn nbsMb.n bsl bn bn
bstbrn bsd bsdn tsl bn bn trn bsTn hstqSθ
sd brn bstbsd brn ten usten bsten bstkn
usT bsl bsl bst sl btsl bn stql ban
bs bsl bs bsaqdn aqiΘ
ntbs an abrn ten aqiΘ n

Is this the answer we have been looking for? Confidentially… I don’t really think so. As claimed plaintexts go, it appears to have quite a few, errrm, ‘problems‘, let’s say. But perhaps some Arabic-literate Cipher Mysteries reader reading the above will know how to make the Philosopher’s Stone, who knows? 🙂 

Incidentally, the author also refers to a (previously unknown?) VMs book by “Ethan Ashmole Jones” called “The Voynich Manuscript – Who Is Who of a Riddle”, published by Ellinika Grammata (I believe), though I couldn’t see a copy in WorldCat. Anyone seen this before or heard of Ethan Ashmole Jones? Sounds a bit like a pseudonym to me, but (as always) you never know! 😉

The Voynich Cipher for code-breakers…

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Though (as was apparent from the rapid social media take-up of yesterday’s XKCD webcomic) the Voynich Manuscript is now firmly wedged in the cultural mind, sadly the level of debate on it is still stuck circa 1977 – and if anything, Gordon Rugg’s foolish “hoax” claims have helped to keep it there.

But it is demonstrably written in cipher: and so this post tells you why I’m certain it’s a cipher, how that cipher works, and what you can do to try to break it. I’m happy to debate this with people who disagree: but you’ll have to bear in mind that as far as this goes, I’m just plain right and you’re just plain wrong. 🙂 

1. What does the Voynich Manuscript resemble?

Firstly, the overwhelming majority of the Voynich Manuscript is written using only 22 or so letter-shapes: generally speaking, this is the size of a basic European alphabet. Voynichese therefore visually resembles an ordinary European language.

Secondly, even though most of its letter shapes are unknown or unusual, four of them (“a”, “o”, “i”, and “e”, though this last one is styled as “c”) closely resemble vowels in European languages – not only in shape, but also because if you read these as vowels (precisely as the main EVA transcription does), you end up with many CVCVCV (consonant-vowel) patterned words that seem vaguely pronounceable.

Thirdly, dotted through the Voynich Manuscript is a family of letter-groups that look like “aiv”, “aiiiv”, “aiir”, etc. To most contemporary eyes, this looks like some kind of curious language-pattern: but to European people in the 13th to 16th centuries, this denoted one thing only: page references.

  • The “a” denotes the first quire (bound set of folded vellum or paper leaves), “quire a”.
  • The “i” / “ii” / “iii” / “iiii” denotes the folio (leaf) number within the quire (in Roman numbers).
  • The “r” / “v” denotes “recto” / “verso”, the front-side or rear-side of the leaf.

Circa 1250-1550, this “mini-language” of page references was universally known and recognized across Europe: and hence “aiiv” denotes “quire a, folio ii, verso side” and nothing else.

Therefore, the Voynich Manuscript resembles a document written in a 22-letter European language, contains obvious-looking vowel-shapes that are shared with existing European languages, and scattered throughout apparently has copious page-references to pages within its first quire.

However, what even very clever people continue to fail to notice is that these three precise things (the compact alphabet, the obvious-looking vowels, and the page references) have an exact corollary: that this does not resemble ciphertext – for even by 1440, most European cipher-makers knew enough about the vulnerabilities of vowels to disguise them by use of homophones (i.e. using multiple cipher symbols for the vowels). A ciphertext would not contain unenciphered vowels, not unenciphered page references.

The correct answer to the question is therefore not only that the Voynich Manuscript does resemble an unknown (but CVCVCV-based) European language studded with conventional Roman number page references, but also that it simultaneously does not resemble a ciphertext.

2. Why is the Voynich Manuscript not what it resembles?

I think the big clue is the fact that the page references don’t make any sense as page references.

For a start, even though the Voynich Manuscript probably consisted of fifteen or more quires, the page references that appear throughout its text only ever appear to refer to quire “a” (the first quire). What’s more, the first quire appears not to be marked with any form of “a” marking, which is curious because the whole point of quire signatures was to make sure that the binder bound them together in the correct order. Another odd thing is that there only appears to be references to the first six pages of the first quire.

All very strange: but the biggest giveaway comes from the statistics. Counting the number of instances of the different page references, you’ll see that page references to verso pages apparently outnumber page references to recto pages by eight times. Here are the raw counts (from the Takahashi transcription):-

air ( 564)   aiir ( 112)  aiiir (  1)
aiv (1675)   aiiv (3742)  aiiiv (106)

So, even though these superficially resemble page references, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is what they actually are. In fact, the statistics imply the opposite – that despite their visual resemblance to page references, these are not actually page references.

And if it is correct that these are actually something else masquerading as page references, the entire visual-resemblance house of cards collapses – that is, if things are not what they seem, the other visual presumption (that this is a simple CVCVCV-based European language) necessarily falls down with it.

3. If the page references aren’t page references, what are they?

This is precisely the right question to ask: and so, when I visited the Beinecke Library in early 2006, I decided to spend some time looking at a single page containing plenty of clearly-written page references (as described in The Curse of the Voynich, pp.164-168) to try to answer it.

I chose page f38v, from which here are all the page reference letter clusters – can you now see what it took me hours and hours to notice?

f38v-page-reference-groups

The first thing I (eventually) noticed was that there was something a little odd about the top part of the “v” letter (which EVA wrongly transcribes as “n”, incidentally). Specifically, that many of the clusters appear to have been written using two inks – one forthe main “aiiv” part, and another (often slightly darker) one for the scribal “flourish” at the top.

But then… once you start looking specifically at the “v flourishes”, the next thing you might notice is that some appear to have a dot at the (top-left) end of the v-flourish.

The final thing you might notice is that these dots tend to appear in different places relative to the “aiiv” frame.

My conclusion is that what is happening here is steganography – that the position of the dot at the end of the v-flourish is what (possibly together with the choice of cluster) is enciphering the information here.

But what information is being enciphered in this way? I strgonly suspect that it is enciphering Arabic numbers 1-5 (probably with longer flourishes denoting larger numbers), and with “oiiv” clusters perhaps denoting 6-10. This might explain why we see so many of these “page references” immediately following each other (the famous “daiin daiin” pattern): each “page reference” therefore represents a digit within a multi-digit Arabic number.

However, what is strange is that this is only basically true for “Currier A-language” pages (Prescott Currier noted that, to a large degree, the text in Voynich Manuscript pages behaves in one of only two different ways): for Currier B pages, what seems to happen is that the information is enciphered by using different shaped flourishes for the final “v” character, and no dot.

From all this, I think I can reconstruct how the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher system evolved during its writing. In the early (Currier A) phase, some kind of data (probably Arabic numbers) were steganographically hidden by writing page-reference-like “aiiv” groups and placing a single dot above them. At a later date, however, the author decided (rightly, I think) that this was too obvious, and so went through the text hiding the dots by converting them into flourishes. Whereas in the later (Currier B) phase, the author decided to evolve the writing system to encipher the same data in a subtly different way (though still relying on the basic “page-reference” shape as a starting point).

And so the correct answer to the section’s question is: even though the “page reference” groups resemble page references, I think that they are cryptographic nulls designed to give the author sufficient visual space on the page to steganographically hide something completely different – probably Arabic numbers.

Of course, existing EVA transcriptions capture only the covertext (the nulls), while the actual data is enciphered in the dots hidden by the flourishes. But you have start somewhere, right? 🙂

4, What, then, is Voynichese’s CVCVCV structure concealing?

I am certain that the Voynich Manuscript’s apparent “consonant-vowel”-like structure is another visual trap into which the existing EVA transcription (unfortunately) helps to push people. By making Voynichese seem vaguely pronounceable (“otolal”, “qochey”, “qokeedy”, etc), EVA discourages us from looking at what is actually going on with the letters, while also falsely bolstering the confidence of those sufficiently deceived into believing (wrongly) that Voynichese is written in a real language. Basically, anyone who tells you it’s written in an archaic language has fallen into a gigantic intellectual trap first set five centuries ago.

But what of the CVCVCV structure? Where does that come from?

For the most part, I think that it arises from a late cipher stage known as “verbose cipher” (i.e. enciphering a single plaintext letter as two ciphertext letters). Though not all letters behave in this way, it certainly goes a very long way to explain the behaviour of common groups such as: qo, ol, al, or, ar, ot, ok, of, op, yt, yk, yp, yf, cth, ckh, cfh, cph, ch, sh, air, aiir, od, eo, ee, and eee. If you decompose the text into these subgroups (i.e. that these groups encipher individual tokens in the plaintext) while remembering to parse the “qo” group first, all the superficial CVCVCV behaviour disappears – and (I contend) you will find yourself very much closer to a kind of raw ciphertext stream that is more easily broken.

As supporting evidence, I point to those few places where the author has “twiddled” with the final code-stream to try to disguise obvious repeated patterns, arising from repeated letters in the plaintext (code-makers hate repeated patterns in their ciphertext). Perhaps the most notable of these is on f15v, where the “or” pattern appears three times in succession on line 1, and four times in a row on lines 2:-

f15v-space-transposition

I think that the author has added spaces in here to try to disguise the repeated “or” group: in line 1, he has inserted a space to turn “ororor” into “oror or“, while in line 2 he has inserted three spaces to turn “orororor” into “or or oro r“. I’m not fooled by this – are you?

I predict here that that “or” is enciphering “c” or “x” (probably “c”), and that the plaintext reads “ccc … cccc”: but you guessed that already, right?

5. Even if this is right, how does it help us break the Voynich?

I don’t believe for a moment that this explains the whole of the Voynichese cipher system: there are plenty of subtly surprising features that any proposed solution would also need to explain, such as:-

  • Precisely how (and why) Currier A and Currier B differ (for example, the whole word-initial “l” thing)
  • Why “yk / yt / yf / yp” occur more in labels than in normal paragraphs
  • Why so few non-trivial words appear more than once across the whole manuscript text
  • What “4o” codes for (I suspect a common initial-letter expansion, i.e. [qo] + ‘c’ –> ‘con’)
  • What word-initial “8” codes for (I suspect “&”)
  • What non-word-initial “8” and “9” code for (I suspect ‘contraction’ and ‘truncation’)
  • Whether the ciphering system is stateless or stateful (but that’s another story)
  • What “Neal keys” denote (but that’s another story, too)
  • etc

However, what I do believe is that all the above lays down the basic groundwork from which any sensible cipher attack would need to launch forwards. I do not share the widely-held pessimistic view that the Voynich is somehow intrinsically unbreakable – on the contrary, it is an all-too-human artefact from a specific time (between 1450 and 1500) and place (probably Northern Italy, though Germany is possible too), and the craft techniques it deftly uses to conceal its content from us are both far from invisible and far from infallible.

If you take the basic steps I describe above to look beyond the deliberate deception and the mythology, then I am certain you will find yourself on the right path towards seeing clearly both what the Voynich Manuscript actually is and how its cipher system works. Let me know when you’ve broken it! 🙂

Incidentally, there’s plenty more related stuff in my 2006 book (which is where the two diagrams above came from, p.165 and p.160 respectively)… but you knew that already, I’m sure. 🙂

Voynich theory in a webcomic…

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Finally, the Voynich Manuscript has weaseled its way into a serious contemporary medium – the webcomic. Here’s a link to some nerdy stick-figure Voynichian fun from XKCD (“a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language“): its brand new theory should raise at least half a smile. 😉

Meanwhile, someone else has suggested on their blog that the Voynich Manuscript is the world’s first hippy/nerd manifesto. Is the leading edge of a wave – are the nerds reclaiming the VMs?

Jody Maat’s “Old Dutch” Voynich theory…

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Would we recognize the solution to the Voynich Manuscript even if it was right in front of us?

Some people believe that it continues to evade us because our expectations of where we should be looking are wrong: in other words, that, pace Henri Atlan (as quoted by Cornelius Castoriadis), we have got into the habit of looking beneath lampposts for our key because that’s where the light is better. The corollary is that after all this time, the actual solution is more likely to be lurking in the darkness, surely?

I’m not so pessimistic: we “moderns” have managed to use the primary evidence (i.e. that which is disclosed by the manuscript itself) to accrete a fairly substantial body of codicological evidence, which any new theory would need to address. While this hardly amounts to a monoptic “mainstream” viewpoint (just look at the debates I’ve had with Glen Claston), to a very significant degree it isn’t something you can easily brush aside. Yet the fact that Glen and I now broadly agree on most of the evolutionary stages through which the VMs passed en route to its final state is both wonderful (given our long-standing differences) and worrying (because it bolsters any tendency to intolerance).

And so our ongoing challenge is to work out whether our knowledge about the VMs is more solid and advanced than ever before (if we’re basically right), or more fragile and misguided (if we’re basically wrong). Still, we all persist in chipping away at the sheer face, hoping to trigger some kind of epistemological avalanche, whereby removing one tiny stone releases an entire cascade of unexpected evidence. As always, progress remains slow: but is this because the Voynich Manuscript’s encryption system is so hard, or because we’re hacking away at completely the wrong mountain?

Every once in a while, entirely unknown Voynich theorists swing into view: these have often been looking at and thinking about the Voynich Manuscript for years (if not decades), and bring with them a kind of fresh air of hope (privately, many Voynich researchers are jaded and pessimistic, but that’s a bit of a secret), but also fairly unsophisticated claims that we have seen close variants of in the past.

So, in the big scheme of things, Jody Maat’s newly-proposed way of reading the Voynich Manuscript is actually remarkably familiar: his interpretation of Voynichese as a kind of vaguely polyglot “Old Dutch” (it plainly isn’t “Old Dutch” otherwise) reprises Leo Levitov’s claims in very many ways, though you can also find echoes in it of various other Middle European Voynich ‘translation’ claims we’ve seen over the years – for example, Jim Child’s theory and Beatrice Gwynn’s theory.

All the same, just as with Brumbaugh in the 1970s, there are places where Jody’s reading does seem briefly to make sense, as if the pages were lit by a flickering candle: but having myself tried to duplicate his reading on other pages, this only seems to happen once or twice per page – not statistically significant. Just as with Levitov (and with Leonell Strong’s decipherment, to be honest), only by dramatically lowering the quality bar of what you are prepared to accept as “language” does it even remotely make sense.

I have often heard it said that it would somehow ‘make sense’ for a cipher’s plaintext to be written with copious misspellings – because, for example, it was the profusion of stock phrases (such as “HEIL HITLER”, of course) and formulaic weather reports that most helped the Allies crack Enigma. However, to do this to the degree required here would imply an anachronistic level of cryptographic sophistication. And for it to makes sense as a language would require a yet lower quality bar, dipping ever closer to nonsense or babble.

I’m sorry, Jody: for all your desire to read the Voynich Manuscript and the considerable empathy you feel with its subject matter, drawings, and author, I honestly don’t think this is the answer. The subtle genius of the Voynich Manuscript – and this is something that I’ve been pointing out for years – is that it was written in a cipher which had been constructed to resemble an unknown European language. What you are reading, then, is the covertext: the letters on the surface, while the actual meaning swims just beneath.

Please don’t feel bad about your having fallen into a deep intellectual trap – you are in excellent company!

Voynich nymphs = pigeage à pied?

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Here’s a novel Voynich theory I somehow missed along the way. ‘Oiram’, a Senior Member on David Icke’s Official Forums, suggested last October that the ‘balneo’ nymphs in tubs might actually be grape treaders, that the zodiac nymphs are illustrating a grape planting calendar, and that they all had a nice shower after they were finished to clean themselves up.

As with everything viticultural, there’s a 1000-franc phrase for grape-treading – “pigeage à pied” – which I thought you’d like to know. Gotta get that resveratrol hit, eh?

In Oiram’s defence, I have to say that page f83v (below) does indeed seem to depict nymphs treading grapes (can you see the grapes rolling along the pipework at the top left?), along with two stupendously large grapes in the foreground to press the point home:-

giant-voynich-grapes

Truth be told, I somehow doubt Quire 13 will turn out to be a secret book of grape planting. But it would be rather nice if it was, right? 🙂

Robert Teague’s Voynich claim…

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Has Robert Teague found a sensational astronomical ‘crib’ into the Voynich Manuscript’s ciphertext? Several Voynicheros have asked me to have a look at his claim: normally, this is researcher code for “I think it’s nonsense but I’d like someone else to say it rather than me, because I quite like the guy“, but let’s see what he has to say…

Certainly, Robert’s best-known previous attempt at understanding Voynichese (Teague numbers) didn’t work out particularly well – as I recall, he used the table on f49v’s margin as a basis for linking glyphs to numbers, much as Robert Brumbaugh did back in the 1970s. However, given that there is a powerful palaeographic argument this table was added roughly a century after the VMs was originally made, this is a hugely unreliable thing to be basing anything substantive upon.

So, what of Teague’s 2009 assault? He starts out (in his “Cracks in the Ice I” document) by pointing out what he thinks are seven fuzzy matches to “Aldebaran” across several pages, and so links seven Voynichese letters with their Latin plaintext equivalents. The obvious problem with this is that this basic fuzzy template can also be matched throughout the entire text: and you’d have to admit that the notion of the whole of the VMs’ text’s being about Aldebaran is somewhat unlikely. But it’s possible, of course.

He moves on (in his “Cracks in the Ice II” document) to finding a secondary crib for the star Alcyone: however, because I’m pretty sure that Giovanni Battista Riccioli first named this in his (1665) “Astronomia Reformata“, this is probably not correct. Robert also suggests some anagrammatic cribs for HOLLAND, POLLAN (“Poland”), and LAPLAND, all of which seem historically anachronistic (for example, Holland wasn’t known by that name until the 17th century). He also makes extensive use of some letter substitutions suggested by Philip Neal, but almost certainly not in a way that Philip himself would feel particularly comfortable with. He finishes up with a suggested translation for the so-called “PM curve word” (EVA ‘oalcheol‘) as ‘COBBLED”: this is done by picking one out of 128 possible permutations and then anagramming the result, a kind of wobbly mid-ground between Brumbaugh and Newbold. Why he chose ‘cobbled’ and not (for example) the rather more august 13th century Anglo-Saxon ‘BOLLOCS’ you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Finally, in his “Cracks in the Ice III“, Robert moves on to try to work out the rest of the alphabet, but runs into trouble with the much-used ‘4o’ token, to which he assigns a rather arbitrary set of 14 possible letter pairs. At the end, Robert proposes a set of six 21-letter mappings, and presents them in a mysterious colour-coded table, which (frankly) doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Of course, this is the point in the post where I’m supposed to say something withering, dismissive and ironic to leave readers chortling into their morning cup of coffee: but that’s not even close to what’s going through my mind. Right now, I actually feel a huge sadness that for many people these days this kind of thing is what passes for credible research.

In many ways, the Internet has de-skilled historical research: I can quite imagine that many students would now be able to gain a history degree without ever entering an archive, without learning Latin, and without actually physically engaging with the subject. If you’re only one paltry mouse-click away from a plausible answer, why bother to look any further? Why, then, should we be cross with non-specialist historians who replicate this same behaviour?

What we have here, then, is simply misdirected cryptology built on top of poor history, with substantial similarities to Robert Brumbaugh’s attempts three decades ago. Though Brumbaugh was an extremely able and clever scholar, he nonetheless read the Voynich Manuscript just plain wrong – and this is the “same old same old”.

The Voynich Fugue

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Django furiously frisbee-ed his wireless mouse against the wall, but the outer shell somehow failed to shatter as it was supposed to. He kicked his oak desk: that, too, failed to break. For once, it seems he’d got lucky with eBay office furniture: and so he turned angrily back to the cryptographic fugue endlessly playing itself out on his laptop.

It was the guilt that was eating away at him: though his downloadable Voynich Manuscript mystery-cracking screensaver had started out as a half-baked idea in a bar, it had grown into a global monster with sixteen million PCs all hungrily evolving their own mad cryptological strategies, endlessly swapping and feuding over marginal etymological and historical notes.

In many ways, writing a desktop application to simulate mad conspiracy theorists had been the easy part: it was just a matter of working out an appropriate set of parameters for delusion, foolishness, distrust, and so on. However, Django had been most proud of the networking side, by which all his cryptological drones could form into mad communities – virtual bulletin boards, forums, mailing lists – and fight each other to the death. He’d always thought Nietzsche was onto something, and had relished the chance to put it into practice.

But now it had all gone bad, disastrously bad: after one particular accidental change to his infrastructure code, his army of screensaver drones had begun spilling out of the sandbox to invade the real world, posting their programmatic paranoid drivel everywhere, endlessly rewriting Wikipedia pages, sending acutely well-informed (but bizarre) letters to academics and papers, and even creating their own plausible-looking online journals.

And the big red off-button didn’t even work (yes, he’d tried).

Ever the budding ecomentalist, his five-year-old daughter had asked him how much energy the whole enterprise was wasting – how much CO2 Daddy’s ridiculous chimera was causing to be emitted every day. She was right, of course, it had to be stopped – but how? Whenever he tried to argue for the whole experiment to be shut down, he found himself being flamed beyond belief – and he couldn’t now tell whether all the abuse was coming from actual people or from his army of paranoiac screensaver drones.

But even that wasn’t the worst thing – not by a long way.

Terrifyingly, even though he hadn’t programmed the drones to agree, in the last few weeks they had begun to eliminate the worst theories – even mad drones could agree on Popperian falsification, it would seem. But nobody apart from Django knew this was happening: to uninformed eyes, the screensaver pattern he had written to show the status of the enterprise looked simply like strange pulsing, rippling, 3D eye-candy – but through it, he could visualize the internal ebbs and flows of opinion within the self-organizing communities.

To be precise, he alone could now see that a trillion trillion mad theories had somehow been whittled down to just two dominant positions – hoax theorists versus Leonardo da Vinci theorists: and with roughly eight million drones on each side of the argument, it couldn’t have been more polarized (or more bitter). What was acutely worrying was that, because the hoax drones were centred on the US while the Leonardo drones were centred in Europe, they were starting to physically mobilize against each other.

First to strike had been the hoax drones, knocking out several European Internet backbones, trying to disrupt the Leonardo drone communities’ lines of communications – but the Vinci-ites had then mounted a surprise attack on the GooglePlex, disrupting the hoax drones’ main information spigot. When Django tried to get the word out what was going on, both sides reduced his Internet access to a dribble – and even overrode the automatic locks on his doors. He and his family were trapped in their mid-town apartment, helplessly watching as Fox News told the world of the bizarre terrorist cyber-war going on, updated every fifteen minutes.

And with the Western world on the brink of a kind of cryptographic Armageddon, the pattern in his laptop was now changing again – but what would happen next? Django could see that the swirling clouds of pixels were morphing from a figure-eight arching around the two strange attractors into a single perfect loop of opinion – that the Voynich Manuscript was Leonardo da Vinci’s incredible hoax. Finally, the computers had spoken their collective mind – and as the sixteen million paranoid silicon bots agreed on a single, wretched, stupid theory, the whole project juddered to an awful, stagnant halt.

Once again, he tried shutting the project down: but this time round, it actually seemed to want to die, to embrace the silent darkness of non-existence. Django collapsed onto the carpet just as sixteen million screensavers all went black, as all the mad minds he had brought to life came to believe they had reach a tentative peace in their programmatic hearts, by somehow converging on a deeper truth.

(Never mind that it was a crock.)

A Voynich “breakthrough”? Hmmm…

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Maldon-based David N Guy recently posted some pictures to the n3ta.com “Misfits” forum, to show everybody there what the Voynich Manuscript really says. Somewhat surprisingly:-

And I said to mother that she need not
cry but she could not stop her
tears because of what she had seen.
“Bryan of The Crossing Sea! His face will
haunt me until I die” she cried. And
then she died. I laid her body between
the lilies and watched her sink beneath
the waters of the lake. I vowed revenge

You know, apart from being written in biro in modern English above some Voynich-y plants (oh, and aside from being crap), this really does have quite a lot to commend it as a Voynich theory. It even has the obligatory made-up-word-that-springs-naturally-from-the-decryption (“ubb”, but perhaps best not to speculate too much on what that means) you see so frequently in Voynich theories.

Hmmm… too bad I haven’t got a spare lifetime to read through DNG’s other 56,295 posts to the n3ta.com forum, I’m sure there would be some other gems in there. Oh well! 🙂

Update: David has also posted a copy of this to his goaste.cx website. And why not?

Nostradamus quatrain cipher…?

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In retrospect, it all seems bleakly inevitable: that enigmatologists would move on from the lardy Bacon-stuffed margins of Shakespeariana to find new hunting grounds. Personally, I thought Nostradamus scrabbled pretty hard to find rhymes for his verses, but a new book claims these were all just a cover story, and that it was no more than an enciphered journal.

“Rise to Consciousness” (2008) by Michal Deschausses claims to decipher the truth hidden in Nostradamus’ work, allegedly revealing a story about “one strong woman” in the far future who seems to resemble… Michal Deschausses?

I-1
Some publishers will assist with offering the knowledge in this Century. In pure reason they will rush her through it. The bout the year of her death secures vast knowledge through the age and the verses will release facts which people will hardly believe.

Could it really be that Nostradamus’ quatrains (strictly speaking, “vers commun”) enciphered a “multi-lingual” secret message? Or is it simply the case that you can, just as Leo Levitov famously did for the Voynich Manuscript, “decipher” just about any given text-like thing into an entirely parallel “polyglot oral tongue”, a stream of Romance language fragments from which you can read basically any message you like?

For reference, Nostradamus’ Century 1 Quatrain 1 is probably an “evocation of the Delphic Oracle, after Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum“: and goes like this:-

Estant assis de nuict secret estude,
Seul reposé sus la selle d’aerain:
Flambe exigue sortant de solitude,
Faict prosperer qui n’est à croire vain.

The two are connected, errrm, how? Anyhoo, because Michal Deschausses has been good enough to include her deciphering methodology as an appendix, I’ll probably end up buying a copy and having a look. But having seen Levitov’s book, I won’t be holding my breath.

Now… we’ve had hundreds of years of people claiming that Nostradamus’ verses predict every d&mn thing in the news, from the end of the world, to war(s) in Iraq, and even (most recently) to Barack Obama and his running mate:-

Born of obscure and dark family,
Of white and black of the two intermixed.
The dark one biding his time,
Before the Empire changes.

But… hold on a minute: “Born of obscure and dark family” is a line from Century V Quatrain 84, “Of white and black of the two intermixed” is a line from Century VI Quatrain 10, “The dark one biding his time” appears just to have been made up, while “Before the Empire changes” is a line from Century I Quatrain 43.

So, Nostradamus bloggers have supposedly got themselves excited about three lines moved waaaaay out of context with a filler line added in to form a supposed verse about Obama. Oh, really?

OK… let me try for myself, restricting the search to a high-speed sleective scan through Century I:-

Lost, found, hidden for so long an age,
In the future by headless idiots
That which shall live without having any sense
submerged, killed, dead through brainless idiocy

Profoundly predictive, don’t you think? 😮