Announcing “The Blitz Ciphers”…

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A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I’ve called them “The Blitz Ciphers”, but they’re probably much older than the 1940s…

They were handed down to the discoverer’s nephew (the present owner), who now finds himself caught between a desire for relative anonymity and a desire to know what they say. So far, he has been good enough to release three tolerably OK photos from a much larger set he took: but will these be enough for us to crack their cipher?

[Of course, despite the story’s plausibility, I have to point out that this might conceivably still be a hoax designed to make cryptographic fools of us: but if so, it’s such a classy job that I really don’t mind. 🙂 ]

Description

Generally, the Blitz Ciphers’ writing appears to have been added in two hands: a larger, paler, more calligraphic presentation hand, and a smaller, darker, tighter annotation hand. While the presentation hand serves to establish the content and layout structure, the annotation hand is restricted to supplementary paragraphs and additional short notes apparently explaining key letters or terms.

Broadly speaking, the text on the first page (the ‘title page’, above) seems to have been laid down in three sequential phases:-
* #1: the circular ‘boss’ / ‘plaque’ and the two large paragraphs – large presentation hand, brown ink, quite faded in places.
* #2: the third large paragraph at the bottom – mid-sized annotation hand, brown ink.
* #3: the annotations to the other paragraphs – small-sized annotation hand, darker ink.
This general construction sequence seems to hold true for the other pages too.

The second page we have contains two curious diagrams: one a drawing of an octagon (though note that there is a square missing from the lines connecting all the vertices of the octagon), and the other an abstract tree-like representation of something unknown.

Our third page contains a large “John Dee”-like 20×20 square table, where each grid square contains individual cipher letters. The table has an array of red dots gridded within it, where each of the 16 internal red dots is surrounded by a letter repeated four times in a 2×2 block. Red dots near the sides all have two dotted square characters on the edge beside them, apart from a single one near the top right, suggesting a possible copying error. There is also a single correction (near the top left of the 20×20 table) made in the presentation hand.

The support material appears to be handmade paper (I don’t have access to them to look for a watermark, sorry!), while the inks for the two hands appear to be quite different. Though I can’t prove it, I suspect that the larger presentation hand was written using a quill pen (suggesting genuine age or some kind of ceremonial presentation aspect) while the smaller annotation hand was written several decades later with a metal nib. They could possibly have been written by the same person using different pens, but differences between the two hands argue against this.

My initial dating hunch was the first layer could well be 16th century and the second layer 17th century: but having said that, the whole thing could just as well be much more recent and instead have been deliberately written in that way to make it appear ‘venerable’ and old-looking. (More on this below.)

The Blitz Cipher Alphabet

The letter forms are clear, distinct, and upright: the presence of triangles, squares and circles and various inversions perhaps points to a cryptographer with a mathematical or geometric education. It’s closer to a demonstration alphabet (designed for show) than a tachygraphic script (designed for repeated large scale use). Here’s the provisional transcription key I’ve been working with:-

Despite some apparent ambiguities in how to parse or transcribe the various cipher shapes used, the fact that the 20×20 table has only a single letter in each cell is a fairly strong indication that each table cell contains a single cipher glyph, suggesting that about 50 distinct characters are in use. The text has a language-like character frequency distribution, with “:” [E] being the most frequently used character (the “tilted Jupiter glyph” [B] and the “joined-up-II glyph” [D] are #2 and #3 respectively). The “Greek phi glyph” [S] often appears at the start of lines and paragraphs.

I’ve shown all this to some cipher historians and codebreakers for their early reactions. Glen Claston notes that “the alphabet is based on the types of symbols used by astrologers, with a few I recognize as alchemical symbols“, though – inevitably contrariwise – I suspect this might well be a coincidence arising from the simple shapes and symmetries employed. Peter Forshaw suggests parallels with some geometric cipher shapes used in Della Porta’s “De furtivis literarum notis“, though Tony Gaffney similarly cautions that such “shapes were very common back then, the numerous ‘ciphers of diplomatic papers’ in the British Library are full of them“.

The Blitz Cipher System

As with the Voynich Manuscript, the peaky frequency distribution probably rules out complex polyalphabetic ciphers (such as Alberti’s code wheel and Vigenere cipher): yet it doesn’t obviously seem to be a simple monoalphabetic substitution in either English or Latin (but please correct me if I’m wrong!)

Unlike the Voynich manuscript, however, I can’t see any obvious verbose cipher patterns significantly above chance: so the main techniques left on the cryptographic smorgasbord would seem to be:
* a homophonic cipher, like the Copiale Cipher (but if so, the encipherer didn’t flatten the stats for “:” [E] very well)
* a nomenclator cipher (i.e. using symbols for common words, like “the”, “Rex”, or “Mason” 🙂 )
* an acrostic / abbreviatory / shorthand cipher.

All the same, there are some intriguing patterns to be found: David Oranchak points out that “‘SBDBlDMDBl’ is an interesting sequence, since it is length 10 but only consists of 5 unique symbols.” I suspect that the presentation hand uses a slightly different enciphering strategy to the annotation hand, which possibly implies that there may be some kind of homophone mapping going on. The fact that there is also an annotation applied to a single letter [c] on the title page may also point to a nomenclator or acrostic cipher.

Personally, I’m intrigued by the circular ‘boss’ at the top of the title page: this has three letters (C, M and E) calligraphically arranged, i.e. the two dots of the colon have been separated above and below the M. To my eyes, this looks suspiciously like a cryptographic conceit – might it be the case that “:” (E) is in fact a kind of letter modifier? For example, it might encipher a repeat-last-letter token (if the text had a lot of Roman numbers), or perhaps a macron-like “overbar” superscript denoting a scribal abbreviation (i.e. contraction or truncation). Something to think about, anyway!

As for the plaintext language: if this was indeed found concealed in an East London cellar, English and Latin would surely be the main suspects, though Tony Gaffney tried Latin and couldn’t find any kind of match.

Blitz Cipher Theories & Hunches

If you’re expecting me to start speculating that these documents were from a 16th century Elizabethan secret society frequented by John Dee and/or William Shakespeare, sadly you’ll be quickly disappointed. Similarly, though I concur heartily with Glen Claston that these genuinely intriguing ciphertexts may well ultimately prove to be high-ranking 18th century Mason or Freemason ciphers, it is just too early to start saying. We simply don’t know as yet enough of the basics.

What I personally have learned from the tragically fruitless, long-term debacle that is Voynich Manuscript research is that speculative theories are almost always a hopeless way of trying to decipher such objects. Hunches are cool and useful, but they need to stay restrained, or everything goes bad. Please, no theories, let’s try to crack these using the proper historical tools at our disposal!

Alchemy decoded, finally…?

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Like many people, I’ve always vaguely wondered how the alchemical ‘code’ worked: that is, how the abstruse (and indeed playfully indirect) language of alchemy mapped onto actual things and processes in the real world. Even though the early 20th century saw a succession of natural philosophers and historically-minded empirical physicists who attempted to decode the rather confused alchemical canon, a century later the quest to reveal meaning in its alembics, retorts and green lions seems somewhat quaint to most people.

And so it is with great pleasure that I can point you to a modern document that I suspect may well have done just that (to a certain degree, at least). The Book of Aquarius‘s 56 chapters claim to reveal the answer to many long-standing open questions about alchemy, perhaps none more central than: “What Is The Stone Made From?”

You may, as I was, already be generally familiar with some of the puzzling and paradoxical riddles around this mysterious prime material, a number of which the Book of Aquarius’s anonymous author gleefully quotes in Chapter 14:-

“This Matter lies before the eyes of all; everybody sees it, touches it, loves it, but knows it not. It is glorious and vile, precious and of small account, and is found everywhere.” The Golden Tract Concerning the Stone of the Philosophers, by An Anonymous German Philosopher, 16th – 17th Cen. (?)

“Know that our Mercury is before the eyes of all men, though it is known to few. When it is prepared, its splendour is most admirable; but the sight is vouchsafed to none, save the sons of knowledge. Do not despise it, therefore, when you see it in sordid guise; for if you do, you will never accomplish our Magistery—and if you can change its countenance, the transformation will be glorious. For our water is a most pure virgin, and is loved of many, but meets all her wooers in foul garments, in order that she may be able to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy.” The Fount of Chemical Truth, by Eirenaeus Philalethes, 1694 AD

“When you shall be acquainted with the causes of this disposition you will admire that a Matter so corrupt should contain in itself such a heavenly like nature.” Verbum Dismissum, by Count Bernard Trevisan, 15th Cen.

“Our substance is openly displayed before the eyes of all, and yet is not known. […] our water that does not wet the hands.” The New Chemical Light, by Michael Sendivogius, 17th Cen.

“There is something which everyone recognizes, and whoever does not recognize it will rarely, perhaps never find it. The wise man will keep it and the fool will throw it away, and the reduction comes easily to the man who knows it.” A Magnificent and Select Tract on Philosophical Water, by Anonymous, 13th – 17th Cen. (?)

What, then, is “our water”, this curiously familiar substance that is openly displayed everywhere (for Sendivogius was no fool) and that does not wet the hands, yet the fool will see it as corrupt and discard it? The book’s rather surprising answer: urine. In fact, to make the Philosopher’s Stone, you should – it claims here – start with a litre of early morning urine, and progressively reduce it down in a sequence of stages over a period of months.

Now, even though I happen to think (for example) that Fulcanelli was a literary hoax (however highly cultured and well-informed) and that almost all alchemical texts after Michael Sendivogius fall closer to a kind of gold-crazed Ponzi scheme, I do actually find a lot of the information presented in the Book of Aquarius deeply satisfying and historically sensible (well, up to chapter 30, anyway).

[And in fact chapter 31 on perpetual lamps also covers a lot of interesting historical material collected by Ellen Lloyd I hadn’t previously seen, even though I’d blogged about them here, here and here before. It has to be said, of course, that Lloyd’s assessment that these are “alien technology” may well turn out to be a tad strong. But I digress!]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “omg this works” or anything: but rather, that the book’s surprising rationalization of how alchemy was supposed to work within its historical context does chime well with an awful lot of what I’ve read and thought about the subject over the years.

If you want to know more, or even fancy trying to use urine to create your own Philsopher’s Stone, I should perhaps point out that there’s a reasonably active online forum of people trying to do just this. Though I personally doubt that Nicolas and Peronelle Flamel are lurkers there, perhaps the Comte de Saint-Germain occasionally drops by for a chat, who knows? Eternal life can be such a bore… 😉

A Beautiful Infinity…

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There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand…

* * * * * *

The Brazilian girl’s plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely notice a curious mélange of hard-to-pin-down antique odours: spirit of hartshorn, hepatic air, green vitriol, all distinct yet merging awkwardly between one another, like jelly and ice cream in a child’s pudding bowl. They both feel the nausea slowly roll over them, but neither thinks to raise the alarm, as the aqua tofani weaves its dizzying, nauseous, near-fatal spell on them both. Of course, we don’t intend killing them: tonight’s sacred mission is one of life, not death.

Our filter masks firmly in place, we silently ease out of the concealed block behind the disabled toilets and past the sabotaged air-conditioning unit. The girl’s preparation has been good, for there is no klaxon, no lights, no alarm: following her confident lead, I guide the wheely bag carefully past the two tumbledown security-suit mannequins and onwards through the exhibition. Looking ahead, always ahead, we glide swiftly past countless Ouroubos-filled stands and up the wheelchair ramp to the locked glass plinth in the arena’s central raised area – yes, to the book. Or rather, to ‘The Book’.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the diamond-edged ring we made together over the shimmering orange dawn-lit fire on the mountainside: looking in her eyes, I take it and slide it quickly onto my middle finger. The girl – is she young, or old? Suddenly I can’t tell any more – nods, flicking her renegade, emptily-hungry eyes at me, and deftly touches my shoulder, her fingertip feeling for all the world like a butterfly landing and quickly gently launching itself away, far away into the curious half-light. On cue, I turn my attention to the security glass, and carefully use the hard-edged symbol of our union to etch its front face with four good-size concentric circles.

The hall is starting to fill, now: our small army of alchemists is emerging one by one from their hiding places behind occult bookstalls, beneath pagan stall covers and carefully-positioned wizard cloaks, each with a red or yellow hood and a surgical mask tightly fastened down, just as she had specified. As the last of the twelve completes the circle around us, I step sharply forward and punch the ring’s diamond tip right at the centre of the design. The glass buckles a little, yet doesn’t quite give way – No, I think, something is wrong, and for an instant a cloud of burnt cinnamon doubt swirls around me, enveloping me in the riptide of fears I’ve worked so hard to suppress these past three years.

Yet perhaps sensing my edginess, the alchemists start to clap and chant, and before long I feel their resolve coursing through my veins. The bull in my soul charges forward and I punch, punch, punch the toughened glass until it starts to yield to my attacks, and its etched central circle finally gives way. Impatiently, I widen the glassy gap with my bare hands just enough to remove the book and to raise it over my head in triumph, tersely spattering its centuries-rigid vellum cover with my blood as I do so. The alchemists swoop in too to hold it aloft and to turn it to The Page, that one, marvellous page we have been waiting to see all our lives.

I look over to the girl: she nods once again and I bring out the ceremonial firebowl from the bag. Adam – dear, ever-reliable Frater Adamus – deftly removes the page with his pocket knife, folds it to shape, fills it with regulus of antimony, and ties up its gathered top using aqua vitae-impregnated handmade blue twine from his workshop. We are all trembling now, for everyone (even Baresch) was right – the Philosophers’ Stone is indeed hidden inside The Book: yet this is neither a metaphorical truth nor a pharmacological truth, but instead a literal truth. For once you have – as we have, over so many decades – worked to decode its carefully layered and allusive visual symbolism, the Voynich’s pages form a map spiralling in on itself… all pointing to one place, the single slightly-thicker-than-average vellum herbal bifolio inside which the tiny fragments of Stone were sealed all those centuries ago. We, then, are its 21st century liberators, its alchemical revolutionary freedom front: all we have to do now is light the blue touchpaper, and see the long-promised fireworks. And this ceremony marks the end of alchemy’s epic struggle, the chequered flag at the finishing line of two millennia of The Work. My queen nods once more for me to step forward with my lit taper, so that we can all make the ultimate step – beyond History, beyond pain, beyond Time itself. And I do, but…

* * * * * *

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand… In this moment, I don’t know if I’m living forever or dying forever, if the girl is really human or some selfish dark spirit that is guiding me I know not where. Am I releasing her or creating her? Is she part of me or am I part of her? A flash from the the burning vellum page suddenly lights up our faces and I lay down beside her on the floor, the alchemical king and queen finally together, just as the Ancients foretold. A fire alarm finally goes off, its sprinklers lurch into action with a indoor cloudburst, but it is all too late, far too late, the Stone is here, The Stone Is Here! For all the burning, twisting sensations, we know for certain that the Stone is merely giving us a taste of ultimate Death to deliver its promise of ultimate Life. Yet though the colours in its flames are more intense than ever now, so too is the agony: I turn to the girl and see the same things I’m feeling reflected in her sprinkler-soaked face, and as we hold each other tightly I know it is both the end and the beginning, and our eternal future together lies in and beyond the Stone…

* * * * * *

Why on earth, mused the firemen, policemen, and paramedics, would anyone have gone to the trouble of placing all those strangely-posed lifelike statues in the middle of the hall? And why was just a single page missing from the precious Voynich Manuscript, on a rare two-day loan to this alchemy conference? File it under ‘M’ for ‘mystery’…

Some online herbals…

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Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.

Antonio of Florence translation…

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Jan Hurych has very kindly emailed in a translation of the short piece of text I uncovered relating to the 14th century Prague apothecary Antonio of Florence. With a few minor style tweaks, here it is:-

The restoration of gothic painting in the house U Lilie [“By Lilly”] no. 459/1, Malé náměstí [“The Little Square”] 11.

During the 14th century, this house played host to a number of Italian apothecaries, such as Angelus of Florence who arrived in Prague in 1346. It was he who founded – at Emperor Charles IV’s suggestion – the botanical garden in Jindřišské ulici [“Jindrisska street”] in Prague’s Novém Městě [“New Town”] district, where the main Post Office is located today. In 1353, Angelus (who would later own the neighbouring house) lived at no. 459/1a, today called “Rychtrův dům” [Rychter’s house]. The business was continued by his maternal cousin Matthew of Florence. The first record referring to the house ‘U Lilie’ is from 1402 when it was already called that way and housed Rudolph’s pharmacy [no connection to the Emperor! j.h.] In 14th century the pharmacy was owned by Onofrio of Florence who sold the vineyard “Na Slupi” [“at the pillars”] to the apothecary Antonius of Florence, the owner of the neighbouring house no. 459/I, now part of Rychter’s house – apparently at that time these two houses were connected together.

Because I can tell that you’re simply desperate to see what this looks like from space, here’s a Google Maps link. Isn’t it amazing that we can put such a high-powered geographic database to such trivial uses? And as far as “Na Slupi” goes, Wikipedia’s page on Prague’s New Town says that “The slopes and plateaux east of Na Slupi street and south of the Augustinian convent were merely vineyards and extended green spaces.”

Jan is convinced that this is indeed probably the specific alchemical Antonio de Florence we were looking for. He also notes:

In the 14th century, Emperor Charles IV brought many Italians in Bohemia – he knew Italy well, he was fighting there with his father John de Luxemburg, the one who fought Edward at Crecy and died there ( the Black Prince was said to take his coat of arms in his honor as his emblem).

Incidentally, while reading up on 13th and 14th century Bohemia, I stumbled across Wikipedia’s page on King Ottokar II of Bohemia, son of (the arguably more famous) King Wenceslaus. Ottokar II’s bitter (but ultimately successful) rival for the Imperial throne was Rudolph of Habsburg. The two were later commemorated by Dante as being locked in amiable discussion beside the gates to Purgatory. What I found fascinating was that this is presumably also why Rudolph II named his pet lion “Ottakar” – to commemorate the political jousting between (the victorious) Emperor Rudolph I and (the subdued) Bohemian king Ottokar II. Of course, I could be wrong but… this does have a certain ring of truth to it, wouldn’t you say?

The secret history of “Antonio of Florence”…

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I’ve just received (directly from the author, thanks!) a copy of Vladimír Karpenko’s admirably thorough 1990 AMBIX paper on the “cesta spravedlivá” pair of manuscripts. From his analysis, it seems very much as though these are both genuinely 15th century and (just as Rafal predicted) entirely unconnected with the VMs. Oh well! 🙁

Even so, the secret history of the mysterious “Antonio of Florence” (whose alchemical presence lurks behind this whole constellation of documents) is something which nobody seems to have tried to piece together in any substantive way. Of course, my particular interest in this lies in whether it has anything to do with Antonio Averlino of Florence (1400-ca.1469), whose libro architettonico (1455-1465) demonstrated familiarity both with books of secrets and with alchemical concepts (fol. 102r), and whose life prior to 1433 is largely unknown.

Right now, here is how the evidence sits:-

(1) As far as the alchemical background goes, the first two Latin works of Bohemian alchemy appeared circa 1400, attributed to “Johannes Ticinensis” – “Processus de lapide philosophorum” and “Aenigma de lapide“. Though both are now lost, German translations of them appear in the (1670) “Drei vortreffliche chymische Bücher des Johann Ticinensis, eines böhmischen Priesters, Antonii Abbatia, eines der Kunst erfahrenen Mensch und Eduardi Kelläi, eines weltberühmten Engländers, Tractate“, and in the even less snappily-titled (1691) “Johannis Ticinensis, eines Böhmischen Priesters/ Anthonii de Abbatia, eines in der Kunst erfahrenen Mönchs/ und Edoardi Kellaei eines Welt-berühmten Engländers vortreffliche und ausführliche chymische Bücher; Allen der geheimen und Hohen Kunst-Liebhabern zu Nutz und merklichen Unterricht in Teutscher Sprach übergesetzt/ und herausgegeben durch einen/ der niemahls genug gepriessenen Wissenschaft sonderbaren Befohrderer. Mit einer Warnung-Vorrede wider die Sophisten und Betriger“. (Neither is currently available on the Internet, I believe). This really should be the starting point for any study of Bohemian alchemy.

(2) In the first half of the 15th century, a Bohemian by the name of Jan z Lazu was noted (in several documentary sources) as having been skeptical about alchemy. Bohuslav Balbin (“Balbinus”) mentions two of his lost works: “zlato blato” (“Gold – Mud”?) and “aurum luttini” (I can’t read that final word satisfactorily, so please say if you know what it is supposed to say). Wraný (1902) “Geschichte der Chemie und der auf chemischer Grundlage beruhenden Betriebe in Böhmen bis zur Mitte des 19.Jahrhunderts” summarizes what (little) is known about Jan z Lazu. Not consulted (though Rene Zandbergen has apparently seen this).

(3) In medieval Bohemia, Northern Italian ore prospectors (known locally as “Vlach” or “Wallach”)  often kept their secret notes in books known as “Wallenbuch”. According to Wraný (1902), the earliest Wallenbuch dates to 1430 and is attributed to “Antonious von Medici”. Of course, after 1945 Breslau became Wroclaw, which is why I don’t yet know where this intriguing-sounding Wallenbuch is. Not consulted (though the two Wroclaw academic libraries here and here are where I’d start).

(4) In the last few days, Daniele Metili very kindly left a comment here on Cipher Mysteries noting a hitherto unremarked “Anthony of Florence” reference. Noted in Kristeller’s famous “Iter Italicum (Alia Itinera I)”, Olomouc State Archive manuscript #349 (described on pp.133-134 of this scan of J. Bistricky, M. Bohåcek, F. Cåda, “Seznam Rukopisu Metropolitní Kapituly v Olomouci,” in Ståtní Archiv v Opave, Pruvodce po archivních fondech III [Pruvodce po statních archivech XIV; Prague, 1961]) is a collection of late 15th century alchemical works (“Varia praecepta alchimistica in latina et germanica lingua”), one of which is entitled “Fixatio argenti magistri Antonii de Florencia probata per Johannem de Olomucz discipulum eius“. Not consulted (but very intriguing, nonetheless). Who was this Johannes of Olomouc? Though the generally-best-known “John of Olomouc” from the 1400s was a Hussite burned alive in 1415, this seems unlikely to be connected at all. Might this person (as Rafal Prinke suggested) have instead been Jan z Lazu?

(5) 1457 “cesta spravedlivá” manuscript (supposedly by Antonio of Florence’s Czech servant) was composed.

(6) After 1606 (and probably before 1610, I’d guess), a document commenting on the “cesta spravedlivá” was written, presumably in Prague and close to the Rudolfine Imperial Court.

(7) According to Zibrt (thanks Rafal!), in 1611, two versions of the “Tractatus I. de secretissimo philosophorum arcano, II. de lapide philosophico” were printed in Prague. These were attributed to Jan z Lazu, who claimed (in one of the versions) to have been a follower of Antonio of Florence. This same printed edition was later noted by Bohuslav Balbin (“Balbinus”). Jan Hurych believes that this was (or was derived from) an original 15th century work, which is certainly possible.

(8) In 1613,  the same small book was reproduced in “Theatrum Chemicum” volume IV.

(9) Around 1704, what I call “the Leopold copy” was executed: this included copies of the “cesta spravedlivá” manuscript, and an “observationes quaedam…” text (which seems to have been based on an earlier document (marked (6) above).

What is going on here? I think it is important to note that nowhere in the cesta spravedlivá is any explicit connection made with Jan z Lazu – the connection with him only seems to have been made after 1600 or so. This, however, would depend on whether the alchemical manuscript upon which the 1611 books were based was genuine or fake – I’m not sure if this question has been asked. Could it be that the two people genuinely linked here were actually “Antonio of Florence” and “John of Olomouc” (as per the Olomouc manuscript), but that circa 1610 somebody guessed (wrongly?) that John of Olomouc and Jan z Lazu were the same person, and so felt the need to construct a secondary, nationalistic alchemical work to fill in the large gap between the two?

There’s a really great paper waiting to be written here (though probably not really enough for a dissertation), trying to answer one question: how do all these fragments relate to one another?

But there may yet be an even simpler answer: here’s a reference [pp.71-72] to a Prague apothecary from circa 1400-1420 called “Antonius de Florencia” that I dug up. Someone with better access to the archival sources should be able to work out precise dates for this person, as he would seem to be a far more local (and likely) candidate for the mysterious alchemist at the heart of this story:-

Restaurování gotické malby v domě U Lilie čp. 459/I, Malé náměstí 11 Ve 14. století si bydlení Na Malém náměstí oblíbili lékárníci, zejména italští. Roku 1346 přišel do Prahy Angelus de Florencie, který založil na pokyn Karla IV. bota- nickou zahradu v Jindřišské ulici na Novém Městě pražském, v místě dnešní hlavní pošty. V roce 1353 pobýval v Praze Augustinus de Florencie, lékárník a budoucí vlastník vedlejšího domu čp. 459/Ia, nyní zvaného Rychtrův dům, v jeho živnosti po-

kračoval sestřenec (bratranec z matčiny strany) Matěj z Florencie. První zmínka o domu U Lilie pochází z r. 1402, kdy již nesl dnešní pojmenování a byla zde Rudol- fova lékárna. Ve 14. století vlastnil lékárnu lékárník z Florencie Onoforio, od kterého zakoupil vinici na Slupi lékarník Antonius de Florencia, který byl majitelem vedlej- šího domu čp. 459/I, dnes součást Rychterova domu; oba objekty byly patrně v té do- bě spojeny.

Incidentally, looking at a modern map, I’d guess (so please correct me if I’m wrong!) that “Laz” is actually the town of Łazy in Upper Silesia (southern Poland), a good way away from Olomouc. Hmmm… could it be that the town of “Łazy” was some kind of verbal inspiration for the Icelandic children’s TV show Lazytown? Of course, that’s a thoroughly stupid (if not “rotten”) question – but I thought it would be fun to be the first one to ask it. 🙂

Chrysopoeia versus Mythopoeia…

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Fingers on buzzers for a quicky historical quiz: name these three historical characters and the unusual link they share…

  1. A 13th century speculative English monk
  2. A 14th century Parisian bookseller (and his wife)
  3. A 15th century Bohemian disbeliever in alchemy

How did you do?

The first one’s easy, particularly for Voynich Manuscript devotees – it’s the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. The second one’s also pretty easy, especially for Harry Potter fans – it’s Nicolas Flamel (and his wife Peronelle). The final one is next to impossible (unless you just happen to be Czech) – it’s Jan z Lazu (whose name has come up here in recent days). But what fine historical filament connects these three very different people?

The simple answer is that they were each declared to be famous alchemists long after their death, with their printed alchemical works well-read across Europe. Bacon’s supposed “Speculum Alchemiae” was translated into English in 1597; Flamel similarly first made the transition from obscure Parisian bookseller to noted “alchemist” in the late 16th century / early 17th century; and even though Jan z Lazu is recorded as having been “lucky to get away alive” when he told ex-Empress Barbara Celska (1390-1452) that the alchemy she was practising in Melnik (post-1441) was “fraudulent”, yet suddenly around 1611 printed works appeared in Prague attributing great alchemical secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone to him.

However, the more complex answer is (I think) that in each of these three cases alchemy was falsely attributed to the person in the decades around 1600 in order to further nationalistic quasi-historical purposes. Hence, the actual purpose of many alchemical texts from this period is not so much chrysopoeia (“gold-making”) as mythopoeia (“myth-making”) – people perceived that there was a pressing political need for an historical English / French / Czech alchemist to have existed, and so pressed existing historical figures into service. It might not make a lot of sense to us now, but that’s how it definitely worked way back then.

Incidentally, when in 2008 I asked the alchemy expert Adam McLean about Flamel-themed pseudo-alchemy, his response was well-nuanced and thoroughly helpful when considering this whole genre:-

Although contrived they are not "fakes" in the modern sense, rather
they are attempts to reconstruct the past, by devising an object
apparently emerging from a personality they wished had existed.
PS: J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a poem called Mythopoeia in 1931 (even before The Hobbit was written!), which certainly touches on a lot of themes eerily familar to both alchemy historians and cipher mystery aficionados. Voynich list-member Anthony was sure that Tolkien had seen positive rotographs of the Voynich Manuscript, which gives the following few lines an added resonance:-
[...]
and as on page o'erwitten without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
and endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
[...]
Yes! `wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!

Otakar Zachar’s (1899) “The True Path of Alchemy” book…

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Today’s Cipher Mysteries post comes from long-time Voynich researcher Jan Hurych, who very kindly agreed to go through Otakar Zachar’s (1899) monograph on the “Cesta spravedliva v alchymii” (“The True Path of Alchemy”) manuscript by Antonio of Florence dated 1457. Here’s what Jan found…

* * * * * * *

While Otakar Zachar’s name is now generally unknown, he appears to have been connected with various Czech National Museum archivists who he mentions in his book, and so was probably a known historical scholar.

His book is basically a commentary on (and a modern Czech translation of) the manuscript “Cesta spravedliva v alchymii” dated 1457, and which was written in the old Czech medieval language. Though its title translates as “The Right [or righteous, or just, or correct] Way in Alchemy” , it is not about travel 🙂 but rather about the alchemical methods and recipes written therein.

Zachar claims he saw the Czech original (or rather a copy, as explained below) in the National Museum (and which should today be in the National Library): however, becasue I was not able to reach that, I will describe only what is in his book, namely in his conclusion (from p.95 onwards). He also quotes some Latin text taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 (starting at its page 129r) that relates to this same manuscript, but which dates from around after 1606.

Zachar claims that the book was written by the Czech servant of an Italian alchemist called Antonio di Firenze (Florence) and was then hidden somewhere (in Bohemia?). In 1606 (an interesting date!) it was discovered – a hearsay, Zachar admits – by a doctor of medicine (perhaps Czech?) who recognized its value and brought the book to Jerusalem (apparently personally). After the doctor’s death, the book was hidden again (where, in Jerusalem? Or back in Bohemia?) and then rediscovered. Zachar studied the manuscript for several months and copied its text verbatim for his own book (the original text was written on parchment in black ink, with only its chapter headings in red).

The manuscript describes four methods for making gold:-

  1. A bottle of elixir provides gold in value of 30 marks
  2. A cheaper method, providing only gold “fluviatile”, that cannot stand fire
  3. An improvement on method #1
  4. Since gold above (the result of all three methods) contains sulphur, this method is a new way by which the “Veneris” [note that “Venus” is normally the alchemical codeword for “copper”] can be removed

Zachar thinks that #4 is the real secret, and that Antonio and other Italians in Bohemia were looking for a special kind of sulphur, say a “secret sulphur” as it was called in old Czech. Zachar wonders where in Bohemia they were looking… Incidentally, here he calls Antonio “Venezian” (benatcan) so was he from Venice and not from Florence as Zachar said at the beginning? Apparently this was only Zachar’s slight mistake. He also mentioned that “Czech ways” were not as advanced as Italian ones. He noted that some passages in the manuscript were erazed – these passages interested Zachar most, but the erasure was too good for him to read past – he apparently did not have Wilfrid Voynich’s dark room! 🙂

Zachar believes that the Czech manuscript is only a copy of some original – why, he does not say. Also, nothing more is known about Antonio’s servant (who wrote down this manuscript). As for “1457”, that could well be when the original was written, the copy could have been much younger [my comment, j.h.].

So the book – or its history only? – must have been known in the 17th century while the good doctor was still alive, since the book was then in Jerusalem and hidden again after his death.  Of course, all this could have been merely the history of the original manuscript, while what Hanka found in Bohemia was a copy (though exactly when he did was never noted) which may never have travelled to Jerusalem and back again. 🙂

All in all, Zachar’s book does not describe the Voynich Manuscript, but another book entirely. Whether  Antonio himself ever wrote any book, especially the one we now call the VMs – we cannot tell. The Czech manuscript is of course solely concerned with alchemy – no zodiacs, no stars, and no bathing beauties!

* * * * * *

To make things even more complicated, Zachar claims the book reached the National museum via Mr. Vaclav Hanka, who was (in)famous for the discovery of two historical Czech manuscripts (Zelenohorsky, disc. 1817 and Kralodvorsky, 1818). Both of them are today generally considered as fakes, written from nationalistic motives – even though Hanka was an expert on Medieval Czech langauge, he apparently made a number of linguistic mistakes there. 🙂 Zachar confirms he saw the manuscript being first mentioned in 1825 (Jungman’s book History of Czech Literature) but he also quotes some  of the above history, from the copies of some alchemical works dating from the 1600’s. He unfortunately omits to say how he found out (or worked out) that they described exactly the same manuscript. 😮

Hanka himself  lived from 1791 till 1861 and from 1819 onwards he was an archivist in a Czech museum. After his discovery of those two manuscripts, they became the subject of the largely popularized nationalistic “Battle Of The Manuscripts” which lasted right up until the end of the 20th century. The quarrel split the Czech nation (which back then was under the control of the Austrian Empire) into two groups: passionate defenders and passionate rejectors. The battle later subsided and while it never fully stopped, today most people think both manuscripts were just frauds. That is not to say the old “Cesta spravedliva” definitely comes from the workshop of Hanka (and his friend Linda), but the almost-perfect medieval Czech language might just be a gentle giveway…

“The True Path of Alchemy” is *not* the VMs…

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A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that “The True Path of Alchemy” is not the VMs (confirming Rene’s suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny resemblance to the VMs was, shall we say, rather less than 100% accurate. All the same, the affair is not completely closed just yet…

The manuscript of “The True Path of Alchemy” currently lives in the National Museum Library in Prague (though it doesn’t appear in any of their online catalogues). The first person to write about it in any detail was Otakar Zachar, whose 112-page 1899 monograph “Mistra Antonia z Florencie Cesta spravedlivá v alchymii” is available online (you can download it as a set of six 20-page PDFs). As an aside, “Otakar” was the name of Rudolph II’s pet lion, whose death in 1612 was (reputedly) seen as a portent of Rudolph’s own death later that year. Just so you know! 🙂

Zachar’s monograph contains (facing p.47) only one rather underwhelming scan of the original manuscript’s text: click on the following cropped & enhanced thumbnail to see a larger version:-

TruePath-f22v-f23r
“The True Path of Alchemy” f22v and f23r

Unless I’m hugely mistaken (no laughing at the back), the True Path appears to be written not in Italian or Latin but in Czech / Bohemian in an apparently 15th century hand, with the folio numbering in a standard 16th century hand.

Zachar also includes (facing his page 24) an image of a flask with a crown, which unfortunately appears as a near-black page in the scan (though you can just about resurrect it using fairly heavy image enhancement):-

TruePath-flask
“The True Path of Alchemy”, flask with a crown

According to note 43 on this webpage, a more up-to-date article on the Ms by V Karpenko appeared in Ambix 37, 61 (1990), which I shall try to read. Karpenko mentions that the ms contains 13 questions for telling whether an alchemist is false. Presumably #1 is: “does he/she claim to be an alchemist?” 🙂

As to attribution, one webpage I found seems to claim that the manuscript was actually written by Jan z Lazu (A.K.A. “Laznioro”, reputedly the first Czech alchemist) [the claim appears here as well]: but as my Czech extends no further than occasional words such as “rukopisu” (manuscript), I couldn’t say whether that relates to authorship, translation, or adaptation. Perhaps my Czech mate Hurychnioro will have a look and tell me how badly I’ve got it wrong. 🙂

I then went hunting for the MS reference in the scans of the National Museum Library’s card index, where Zachar’s book merits five cards (is that five copies? or five cross-references?): the card annotations mention “86 J 121”, “Schiller 294”, and “Zeyer 1977”. However, even though “86 J …” appears to be a plausible-looking shelfmark for the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze, searching for “86 J 121” in the Manuscriptorium returned no hits. Oh well!

Rene Zandbergen also very kindly sent over the GIFs absent from the voynich.nu site: unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious mention of the “True Path” there. Really, to identify any manuscript in the Kunstkammer inventory (whether the True Path or even the Voynich Manuscript!), you’d need to know how it was bound (i.e. whether the cover was red or white leather etc) and what else was bound in with it. Zachar and/or Karpenko may well have included this information, of course, but I’ve yet to get quite that far. 🙁

And so… back to Bolton, where this all started.

If you compare the basic factuality with Bolton’s floridity, I think you’d have to conclude that the two don’t quite gel:-

  • “1475” – should have been 1457 (d’oh!)
  • “beautifully illuminated” – though there are some pictures and illuminated letters, from the poor quality of the handwriting I’d be fairly surprised if they were “beautiful” per se
  • “rare” – given that it’s the only extant copy, perhaps we’ll give Bolton the benefit of the doubt on this one 🙂
  • “couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language” – the jury’s out, as Karpenko seems to gives the impression that the text is a touch more rational than most alchemical texts. All the same, an alchemy text that’s not exceedingly obscure is probably a fake, so perhaps this is just Bolton being tautologous. 🙂
  • “library of Wresowitz” – Rafal Prinke highlights a good-sized 1855 article on Czech alchemy by Ferdinand Mikovec in the periodical “Lumir”, which says that Vaclav Vresovec z Vresovic (d. 1583) bequeathed his library (containing various alchemical mss) to the town council of Mala Strana in Prague. However, even though linking “The True Path” to this collection would be a good guess, I saw no mention at all of Counsellor VVzV in Zachar’s monograph, so I’m a little skeptical…
  • “high price” – without any textual source, this may well be another Boltonian ’embellishment’, let’s say. 🙂

Despite my obvious disappointment that the True Path hasn’t turned out to be an early sighting of the Voynich Manuscript, I remain optimistic that it might yet turn out to be linked with Filarete. For example, 1457 is a perfect match for when the Florentine claimed to have been collecting and writing his little books of secrets in his (ample) spare time. It may well be that nobody to date has thought to examine “The True Path of Alchemy” specifically with a Filarete hypothesis in mind – might there be some textual ‘tell’ hidden in there? There’s only one way to find out…

Finally, Zachar includes (pp.91-95) a decent chunk of Latin taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 that relates to this manuscript. Thanks to the online magic of Manuscriptorium, I can see that these Observationes quaedam circa suprascriptum processum Bohemicum appear on pages 129r to 153r, and that they were written at the beginning of the 17th century (the text specifically mentions “1606”). Later on I’ll ask Philip Neal if there’s anything hugely interesting there – though the chances are quite small, you never know until you look!

Earliest archival reference to the Voynich Manuscript…???

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A vast constellation of curious books revolves around the hazily uncertain core of the Voynich Manuscript: as with most things, some are outright good, some are just plain bad, while most live in a mixed-up zone in the middle.

Henry Carrington Bolton’s (1904) ” The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II” is a poster-child for that mixed-up zone – equal parts fact and fiction, Bolton’s oeuvre contains more than a dash of both historical sense and hysterical nonsense. Though it does go on to cover many varied aspects of Rudolph’s court, the first half of it amounts to a greatest-hits compilation of the credulous alchemical mythology surrounding John Dee’s Bohemian adventure – “Now That’s What I Call Bohemian Alchemy #1“, if you like. 🙂

However, for all the hallucinogenic tableaux he conjures up via the shewstone of his historical imagination (and for all the brazen liberties he takes with the facts), Bolton clearly did go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate his Ikea mansion out a lot of, well, basically good stuff. Hence the reader (though often deeply suspicious) finds hundreds of genuine factual nuggets embedded into the walls of the proto-scientific passageway Bolton has tunnelled through the Rudolfine era.

So, my question to you is this: is the following particularly shiny nugget (pp.37-38) gold or lead?

[...] when conversation was interrupted by the
entrance of Martin de Rutzke, bringing with him a beautifully
illuminated and rare manuscript rescued at the dispersal of
the library of Wresowitz, who was reputed to have been a
successful experimenter. The work was entitled "The True

Path of Alchemy," and was written by Antonio of Florence
in the year 1475; being couched in exceedingly obscure and
mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black
art, it was particularly admired by Rudolph who ordered his
treasurer to pay the high price demanded for it, and instructed
his librarian to add it to his valuable collection.

For a start, this “beautifully illuminated and rare manuscript… couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black art” bought by Rudolph for a “high price” does sounds terrifically like the Voynich Manuscript as described by Dr Raphael Mnishovsky (according to Johannes Marcus Marci in 1665).

Furthermore, even if I just happened to have a time machine in my shed I could barely have engineered a more blatant archival link between Rudolph II and a mid-Quattrocento Florentine called “Antonio”. (Note that Antonio Averlino is reported by Giorgio Vasari to have died in Rome around 1469, but given that there is no documentation to support or refute this, 1475 is entirely possible.)

As far as the book’s 16th century provenance goes, Wolfgang von Wresowitz died on 21st March 1569, while Bernhard Wresowitz died in 1571, and presumably the alchemical “library of Wresowitz” Bolton mentions was dispersed not long after: Rudolph moved his court to Prague in 1583, but it would probably take someone like Rafal Prinke to trace the Wresowitz alchemical library connection any further.

All in all, the big research question then becomes: did Bolton just make up this whole thing (the document name, author name, date, price, and provenance), or was he reporting something he found while trawling relevant books for intriguing-sounding alchemical stories? He comments elsewhere that he made use of the books by Czech historian Josef Svatek (1835-1897), so perhaps that’s one place to start.

Normally, the first proper place one would look for this would be the 1607-1611 Kunstkammer inventory drawn up by miniaturist Daniel Fröschl, as described in detail in Rotraud Bauer and Herbert Haupt’s (1976), “Die Kunstkammer Rudolfs II“. Unfortunately, the relevant gifs have long disappeared from the voynich.nu Bauer-Haupt page, so doing this will probably require someone (i.e. probably me) to spend a day at the library. However, I should also caution that, because Rudolph II may well have presented the same book to Sinapius around 1608 when he gave him the “de Tepenecz” title (i.e. while Fröschl was drawing up the inventory), it is entirely possible that it may not appear there – so, absence of evidence there would (as ever) not be evidence of absence.

However, the problem with this is that Fröschl’s inventory was completely unknown to historians until the middle of the twentieth century, and hence was unknown to Bolton: so, whatever Bolton’s source for this story, the one place we can be sure it didn’t (directly) come from is that inventory.

But all the same: if not there, where on earth did Bolton happen to read about “The True Path of Alchemy“? If we could answer that question, we might well be able to find out about the Voynich Manuscript’s very early history… definitely worth a closer look, I’d say… 🙂

PS: quick reminder not to forget the London Voynich pub meet at 5pm tonight!

PPS: thanks to a high-speed reply from Rafal Prinke, it now looks as though this is not (after all) the Voynich Manuscript (which is a shame, but what do you expect if you rely on Bolton?) – and possibly closer to a chicken nugget than to a gold nugget. Even so, expect a further post on this shortly! 😮