Coming soon to your TV: “The Voynich Channel”?

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Stephen Chrisomalis, “anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy” (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released “Numerical Notation: A Comparative History“), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) “WILLIAM FREAKIN’ SHATNER“.

Chrisomalis seems pretty well clued up on the structural properties of Voynichese (which is nice to see), but somehow omitted any mention of whether the documentary makers asked him about the VMs’ curious quire numbers (“abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals”, technically speaking), which appear to be a unique historical feature of the codex. I mean, he is Mr ‘History Of Numbers’, right? D’oh!

No more significant details about the documentary itself as yet… but given that documentary makers are excited enough to be wheeling in Captain Bloomin’ Kirk, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript has suddenly become the lowest-hanging fruit upon the giant TV tree of enigmas. Expect a blizzard of TV Voynich documentaries to air around December 2010 – OK, perhaps not quite enough to make up an entire “Voynich Channel“, but a relatively cornucopic amount nonetheless. 🙂

Hmmm… the image of countless documentary teams being scrambled worldwide to film the VMs brings to my mind Nina Hagen’s #1 “99 Luftballons“, whose lyrics hinge on the idea that a set of toy balloons could trigger a nuclear armageddon. When does reaction become overreaction?

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

🙂

Pre-1450 German Voynich possibility…?

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The recent Austrian Voynich documentary gave a nice clear radiocarbon dating (1404-1438 at 95% confidence) for the vellum, and finished by suggesting (based on the swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle) a Northern Italian origin for the manuscript. But I have to say that as art history proofs go, that last bit is a little bit, ummm, lame: it’s a single detail on a single page, that might just as well be a copy of a previous drawing (or a drawing of a description, or an imaginary castle) as a real castle.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of sensible art history reasons to suspect Northern Italy 1450-1470, for example:-

  1. Swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle are reminiscent of those on many Northern Italian (and Southern Italian, too) castles of the 14th and 15th centuries
  2. The rendering of the sun faces on f67v1 and f68v1 are reminiscent of the Visconti sun raza, most notably as per  in the Milan Duomo’s “Apocalypse” apse window (1420), so arguably point to a post-1420 dating
  3. Voynichese seems to be a more advanced version of those ciphers in Sforza / Urbino cipher ledgers that have the same verbose ‘4o’ character pair
  4. Handwriting is strongly reminiscent of Milanese “humanist” hands circa 1460-1470
  5. Dots on ‘pharma’ glassware (f89r1 and f89r2) are strongly reminiscent of post-1450 Murano glass decoration
  6. Decoration on barrels / albarelli is most reminiscent of 1450-1475 Islamic-influence maiolica
  7. The kind of baths apparently depicted in the balneo quire became most fashionable in Italy between 1450 and 1490
  8. The costumes and hair styles of the many Voynich ‘nymphs’ have been dated as belonging to the second half of the 15th century (and typically dated later rather than earlier)
  9. Parallel hatching only appeared in Florence in 1440, and in Venice (and elsewhere in Italy) from about 1450 onwards, before giving way to cross-hatching from about 1480 onwards.
  10. (etc)

But Northern Italy 1404-1438? Actually, apart from the first two above (which I have to say are probably the least persuasive of all), the evidence falls away to almost nothing, rather like an oddly disturbing dream fading away as you wake up in the morning.

But what about Germany circa 1404-1438? After all, Erwin Panofsky thought a German origin most likely (though perhaps he took a little bit too much notice of Richard Salomon’s readings of the marginalia), and there’s a touch of Germanic influence in the “augst” marginalia month name for the Leo zodiac page. Others have suggested Germany over the years, most recently Volkhard Huth (though I somehow doubt it’s Jim Child’s pronounceable early German, or Beatrice Gwynn’s left-right-mirrored Middle High German, while Huth’s 1480-1500 dating now seems a little adrift as well).

Art history links with Germany are thin on the ground in the Voynich Manuscript: it’s a (very) short list, comprising the general stylistic similarity between the VMs zodiac’s central rosettes and early German woodblock calendars, and the recent (but very tenuous) cisioianus comparison with f67r2: Panofsky also pointed to Richard Salomon’s reading of some clumps of marginalia as German, and to the fact the VMs eventually surfaced in Prague… but this is all pretty optimistic (if not actually hallucinatory) stuff. Basically, you’d need to do a lot better than that to build up any kind of plausible case. (Though I don’t know if Volkhard Huth added any new observations to this list).

But one thing that emerged since I wrote my parallel hatching history page is that the technique actually seems to have emerged in Germany before it appeared in Florence. I mentioned that there was a German master engraver known as “Master E.S.” (also known as the “Master of 1466”), who produced a number of hatched and cross-hatched pieces in the period 1450-1467: and I was content with the generally accepted art history notion that the technique probably spread northwards from Florence to Venice and Germany at roughly the same time (i.e. 1450).

However, the problem with this presumed ‘Italy → Germany’ model is that there was another German engraver (“Meister der Spielkarten”, “The Master of the Cards“) who was active (1425-1450) a generation or so before Master E.S., and who includes fine parallel lines in his work, most notably in the oldest known set of copperplate playing cards (1440). Anyone who wants to read up on this should probably rush to get themselves a copy of Martha Anne Wood Wolff’s 1979 Yale PhD thesis “The Master of the playing cards: an early engraver and his relationship to traditional media”. (Please let me know if you do!) Alternatively, you might well find things of interest in Martha Wolff’s paper “Some Manuscript Sources for the Playing Card Master’s Number Cards” , The Art Bulletin 64, Dec. 1982, p.587-600.

Of course, I don’t think for a moment that The Master of the Cards’ clear line and nuanced material rendering has anything directly to do with what we see in the VMs. Rather, it just seems worth noting that the existence of parallel hatching in the VMs is consistent with a post-1420 origin if German, with a post-1440 origin if from Florence , or a post-1450 origin if from elsewhere.

Was vellum stored flat, folded or cut…?

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Sometimes the biggest issues can hinge on the smallest questions.

It seems that, from Rene Zandbergen’s recollection of this week’s press conference, the Voynich Manuscript’s inks and paints are merely consistent with its vellum’s radiocarbon dating. Naturally, for the ‘smoking gun’ brigade, that alone is insufficient proof to rule out any later dates for the creation of the VMs. The argument against consistency goes that the VMs could have been made decades later, if not centuries… as long as you are happy to accept the putative existence of a über-sophisticated and determined reconstructionist hoaxer producing a simulacrum of something that never actually existed in the first place, producing language-like text by means as yet unknown. 🙂

Even though I’m sometimes painted as the ‘solo voice of the Voynich mainstream’ (unpick that knot!) which would seem to place me in diametric opposition to such “Matrix”-like simulatory claims, I am actually sympathetic to many key aspects. For example, Barbara Barrett has argued passionately for a 12th century date for the VMs, and I can quite see how a lot of the VMs’ visual content does appear to her to match many of the tropes and techniques of the period: from my point of view (and taking the dating evidence into account), the VMs does seem to contain some kind of post-1400 “appeal to antiquity”, insofar as it appears older than it is.

But I came to that position for other reasons. For me, the key statistical and palaeographic evidence that independently led me there came from the “aiiv” and “aiir” letter-groups, which very closely resemble medieval [quire + folio + side] page references, but whose usage statistics are completely inconsistent with their being page references. I find it basically impossible to believe that this pattern arose simply by chance: in fact, in a tricksy (but logical) writing system as spare and tight as Voynichese, I strongly argue that this can only have been by deliberate design. And so I would say that there is an appeal to antiquity built right in to the cipher alphabet’s construction – a kind of “quasi-historical covertext conceit“, if you like.

Hence, I am receptive to the idea that the Voynich was in some way constructed to appear older than it actually was: and so the suggestion that the maker bought in old vellum to help “sell” that idea would fit naturally into this whole misdirection. So I can’t honestly say that this isn’t (to at least some degree) the case here – the whole furore over the Vinland Map is an example of how the same forensic science looking at an artefact from the same period can remain contested for decades.

Unfortunately, this means that radiocarbon dating is therefore only part of the codicological story, and we need to take a slightly wider view of the evidence in order to move things forward. I think the right question to be asking is: if the vellum was made [possibly much] earlier than it was used, what physical processes happened to it inbetween times… and can we test for those (either by their presence or their absence)?

For example, was vellum stored flat, folded, or cut?

  1. If vellum was stored cut, then we should test the age of the extremely unusually-shaped Q9 sexfolio or the nine-rosette page, because these would have had to have been made specially.
  2. If vellum was stored folded, then I suspect that this would leave stress lines along the fold marks that would be visible under X-ray on the larger sheets.
  3. If vellum was stored flat, then I suspect that this might lead to a difference in physical properties of the two sides – the uppermost might have “aged” more from greater physical exposure?

The issue here is that I strongly suspect that vellum was in almost all cases stored cut: whenever I have read about caches of old vellum appearing, it is in the form of cut sheets. This would seem to match the three-stage business process used to make leather in the later Middle Ages, for which my source is the account of the Barcelonan leather trades in p.97 of James Amelang’s fascinating “The Flight of Icarus” (1998):-

First […] were the blanquers (in Castilian, curtidores), who purchased raw hides from butchers or from livestock brokers in the countryside and took the initial steps to convert them into leather. The next stage of preparation was presided over by the assaonadors (Cast. zurradores), who curried or dressed the skins the blanquers partially processed. At the far end stood various individual trades which specialized in finished products ready for sale: cordwainers […], embossers, makers of saddles, harnesses, reins, gloves, and parchment, and, above, all, shoemakers and cobblers.

Amelang goes on to point out that the most economically powerful group were the blanquers, because of “the higher capital requirements of their wholesale dealings in hides and other supplies, including sumac, alum […] and other dressing products”.

To me, what this means is that medieval parchment makers had probably always eked out a fairly marginal existence: furthermore given that paper had become so affordable (and was becoming ever cheaper), the mid-Quattrocento parchment trade must have been pretty much dying on its feet. Hence, I really don’t see parchment makers themselves holding large stocks of uncut parchment for decades: rather, I would expect to see caches of cut parchment sitting around on shelves or cases in monasteries and administration centres.

Hence, I would argue that the key test here would be what the dating was for any of the unusually shaped pages, because these would most likely have had to have been made specially for the VMs. Hopefuly we will find out soon which particular four bifolios were tested…

Richard Rogers’ Voynich theory…

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Earlier this year, I was contacted by a 58-year-old US Army / Navy computer programmer from North Carolina: he claimed to have solved the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, and wanted me to post details on my Cipher Mysteries blog, but without revealing his identity.

Yesterday, however, Richard Rogers went public with his claims (which is why I can now say his name): here’s a picture of him (from the same Havelock News article):-

RichardRogers-small

With degrees (it says here) in “ancient history, languages and computer science”, he originally used Voynichese to benchmark some anti-fraud pattern recognition software he had been developing, believing (courtesy of Gordon Rugg’s various publications, I’d guess) that it was what he calls “manufactured” (i.e. hoaxed) text. As an aside, his software was built around Benford’s Law (specifically, Hal Varian’s 1972 take on it), a logarithmic distribution law which has similarities with (the rather more familiar) Zipf’s Law.

However, when (to his great surprise) the software reported back that the Voynich Manuscript did actually seem to contain meaningful information, he found himself being rapidly drawn into the VMs’ tangled research web.

So far, this is all a straightforward techy “call to adventure” narrative: but where it goes from here is a bit odd. It took me ages to even begin to understand what he thinks he can see in the VMs – and I’m still miles off understanding why it might be so, as well as how he made the leap from (a) grasping that there is meaningful content, to (b) seeing how that meaningful content actually works. Which is why every time I tried to post about this, I’ve ended up giving up halfway through: but now he’s gone public, I guess I’ll have to complete the job as best I can…

Here’s how it all starts.

Rogers believes that Voynichese letters express a kind of symbolic language (which he calls “proto-sentential logic” or “sententional propositional calculus”) for encoding secret shapes (which he calls “runes” or “runic glyphs”), a bit like an encrypted Renaissance Logo driving a turtle trapped inside a 5×5 grid. He calls this system “Runus”.

Runus-Part-1

He calls double-leg gallows “staves” (red text in the diagram) and single-leg gallows “stakes” (blue background in the diagram): these are “key to navigating the manuscript”, insofar as (if I’ve understood it properly) Runus expressions always contain these staves/stakes (or sometimes [EVA d]) in the middle.

Finally, here are the seven specific Runus rules Rogers believes Voynichese expresses (his descriptions not mine):-

  • “RULE 1: Each line is an independent, stand-alone action. There is no punctuation because none is needed.
  • RULE 2: All Rule-Oriented Expressions (ROE) are non-mathematical algebraic ‘draw & copy’ operations based on a 5X5 numbered solution grid.
  • RULE 3: Draw operations always assume a horizontal top to bottom, left to right sequence unless modified by a functional character (i.e. a shape flag, left, right, top, bottom, etc.
  • RULE 4: ALL ROA encapsulate one of eight turnstiles (sometimes 8 is applied as a turnstile)
  • RULE 5: The eight turnstile shapes are broken into positional sets of functions. These are:
  1.  
    1. Two stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the left set.
    2. Four stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the right set.
  • RULE 6: Runus is a Rule-Oriented Expression (denoted by a the Greek rho, below). It is a coordinate system used to build a Rune character.
  • RULE 7: The meaning, interpretation, and function of Runa – and the shapes they describe(RO), are very dependent.”

Here’s another of Rogers’ diagrams that might possibly help explain this:-

Runus-Part-2

Just in case you glazed over halfway through the above (I’m not saying you actually did, but you certainly might have done), we should perhaps move swiftly on to look at a specific example of how Rogers thinks Voynichese works:-

[EVA odaiin] is translated as “Focus on the 3X3 square immediately adjacent to the left of the center position”.

From his Runus diagrams…

  • [EVA o] = “left side”
  • [EVA d] = “centre position”
  • [EVA a] = “right side”
  • [EVA ii] = “a count of 2”
  • [EVA n] =”horizontal grid line counter”

According to his Runus rules, this appears to denotes a horizontal line drawn from the left side of the centre position across to the right side with a horizontal grid line count of two. But that’s about as far as I can usefully take this.

Here’s how Rogers annotates the first line of f1r into five individual Runus expressions. The “turnstiles” are red, “directional modifiers” are blue, while numbers (“grid coordinates”) are in pink:-

Runus-Part-3

Here, ROE 1 says “Starting in Quadrant 1, in the DIRECTION Of the Right Half, DRAW a DEEP CURVED LINE from top to bottom“, while ROE 2 says “DRAW a SHALLOW CURVE from BOTTOM TO TOP, facing the RIGHT“. Put these two together and you get a “moon”. Rogers believes that the mysterious shape at the top right of f1r is the image described by the the first few Voynichese lines of f1r – and hence this acts as a kind of enciphering test.

Just as with the biliteral cipher I discussed yesterday, there’s certainly elements of steganography and verbose cipher at play here, lending an air of cryptographic plausibility. However, “Runus” does seem an enormously complicated piece of symbolic machinery to encrypt what are ultimately just shapes – a bit like using a Difference Engine as a shop till. And given that I personally don’t buy into the notion (however breathlessly expressed by conspiratorial iconologists) that any shapes are intrinsically heretical, or even that any particular shapes were intrinsically believed to be heretical, the whole proposed exercise of encrypting heretical shapes would seem to me to be both futile and improbable. Sorry, but that’s how it looks from here.

Also: I simply can’t see how Rogers got from pattern matching software to Runus – to my mind, there’s an inherent “chalk and cheese”-style gulf between the two. Though I can see the start-point and the end-point, I can’t see any logical reasoning that might step between the two. Yes, I can see that the “i” / “ii” / “iii” characters might in fact be Roman numbers (though even that I somewhat doubt, given that they resemble medieval page numbers so closely): but that’s about as close as I can get.

Rogers has tried to back up his “Runus” research with more conventional historical research, and “speculates that the manuscript was written by three generations of the Longhi Family in Italy, Martino Longhi the Elder (1534-1591), Onorio Longhi (1569-1619) and Martino Longhi the Younger (1602-1660).” However, I’m also somewhat skeptical of this, given that (a) the VMs appears to have 15th century marginalia, (b) the VMs appears to have had an Occitan owner in South-West France circa 1500, and (c) if the VMs was indeed bought by Rudolf II, that would have been prior to 1612, at which point Martino Longhi the Younger was 10 years old.

Of course, in the absence of any widely agreed decryption of even a single word, it’s almost impossible to disprove any assertion anyone makes about the Voynich Manuscript: and naturally, it is this rich loam of uncertainty that helps Voynich Theories to flourish so much. But now I have to go and lie down – my head’s hurting from all that proto-sentential calculus, just like it did every other time I tried to write it up. 🙁

The latest date for the Voynich Manuscript…

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In 1931, John Matthews Manly (who was very sharp, both historically and cryptologically) pointed out that the Voynich quire numbers were written in a 15th century hand – you can tell this from the characteristic ‘4’s, ‘5’s, and ‘7’s. To be precise, even though a fair few of the VMs quire numbers appear to have been added later (most obviously the numbers for Q19 and Q20, but also those for Q6 and Q7) for reasons as yet unknown, the bulk of them are indeed 15th century.

unusual-quire-numbers
The four quire hands, from The Curse of the Voynich (2006) p.17

What isn’t widely known is that there is also a (quite different) 15th century hand in the marginalia. Even though some people like to dismiss the hard-to-understand writing on the back page of the VMs (f116v) as merely “pen trials” or “doodling”, I think you can look past the codicologically tangled mess to see that the earliest (faint) hand has distinctively 15th century letter-shapes, as underlined in green here:-

ahia-maria-annotated

Whatever all the other words on f116v happen to read (and people will no doubt continue to debate that for a fair while yet), I’m pretty sure that this faint (but apparently unemended) section reads “a + ma+ria“, and that it is (from the distinctive shape of the three ‘a’ characters) written in a 15th century hand, one quite different from the quire numbers.

What does this tell us? Given that the Voynich Manuscript almost certainly turned up in Rudolf II’s Imperial Court in the first decade of the 17th century, and assiduous archival trawling has turned up no definite earlier reference to it, I believe that this points to two main scenarios to choose from:-

  1. [Real] It’s a genuine mid-15th century object.
  2. [Hoax] It’s a (probably late-)16th century fake, designed to resemble a genuine mid-15th century object.

To which I would further add that Voynichese is apparently designed to look like an enciphered 14th century herbal (i.e. written in a medieval simple substitution cipher, with medieval herbal illustrations, and medieval page references), even though the parallel hatching and handwriting are both 15th century in style. All of which suggests three scenarios to consider:

  1. [Real] It’s a genuine mid-15th century object designed to resemble an enciphered 14th century herbal.
  2. [Clever Hoax] It’s a (probably late-)16th century fake, designed to resemble a genuine 15th century object designed to resemble an enciphered 14th century herbal.
  3. [Dumb Hoax] It’s a (probably late-)16th century fake, designed to resemble an enciphered 14th century herbal, but with a number of 15th century details included by mistake.

All the same, is it really the case that one individual late-16th century hoaxer / faker was sophisticated enough to add multiple 15th century hands to the quire numbers and back page? Well… possibly: but it should be no surprise that I think the historical odds are very much against it. Your mileage may vary, of course.

(As an aside, it has recently been suggested that the VMs might have come from around 1300 (and I shall soon be posting about Patrick Lockerby’s series of VMs-related posts): but the presence of parallel hatching in the VMs would seem to be a strong indication that even 1400 would be too early a date.)

Unusual quire numbers, revisited…

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A fascinating email just arrived at Cipher Mansions from Tony Gaffney, our virtual cryptologer-in-residence at the British Library. While looking at BL Add. MS 39660 recently, he noticed a set of dates for ten popes written in an unusual mixture of Roman numbers and Arabic numerals (“an9 pm9” = “annus primus“, and “ufq3” = “usque“):-

That is:-

  1. cclxxxij
  2. m cclxxxiiij
  3. m cc lxxxx
  4. m cx ij
  5. 1 40 viij
  6. 1 4 10 an9 pm9
  7. 14 12
  8. 14 17 ufq3 1430  an9 pm9
  9. 1 431 ufq3 1446
  10. 14 46 ufq3 1455

According to the BL’s bibliographic description, this was written on paper in Italy, with the later popes added not before 1455: while Tony adds that the “v” in the fifth date “is written in the old style of a backward sloping b“, hence a 15th century hand. All of which gives us a basic prediction for where and when we might expect to find this unusual kind of mixed Roman / Arabic numbers: Italy in the second half of the 15th century. Examining BL Add. MS 39660 even more closely may to help us be more specific: but that’s a job for another day.

The presence of “pm9” here is particularly heartening, as this is precisely what is used for the quire number in Q1 of the Voynich Manuscript. Intriguingly, Tony notes that the “cc” pairs in the first three dates are ligatured at the top, just like the EVA “ch” glyph, though he has previously seen this in the 14th century Royal MS 12BXXV f.283 (which is a “table converting Arabic & Latin numbers“). And furthermore, he adds that “in the fifth [date], we have not only a combination of Arabic and Latin numbers but the 4o is the Voynich EVA qo linked!!“. Of course, that might just be a coincidence, but even so…

Voynich Summer Camp, transcript of session #1…

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For the recent Hungarian Voynich summer camp, I offered to do a couple of IM sessions over Skype, both of which seemed to go down very well. I thought many Cipher Mysteries readers might enjoy going over the transcript, so here it is (lightly edited for house style, as usual, and with after-the-event section dividers to make it not quite so unwieldy). I’ll be posting the Sagittarius spreadsheet mentioned here to the the blog very shortly, have no fear! 🙂

Note: Skype IM session on 27/08/2009
vc = “voynich camp”
NP = “Nick Pelling”

o. Introduction

[19:01:42] vc: Thank you very much for the possibility.
[19:01:57] NP: No problem – may I ask who is there this evening?
[19:02:41] vc: We are currently five pople but we are six and tomorrow we will be seven.
[19:02:50] NP: five is fine 🙂
[19:03:11] NP: Do you have names, or are you Devo?
[19:03:19] vc: Two linguists, and 3 geekz.
[19:03:46] NP: I’m not sure who would win the fight. Best to work together.
[19:03:57] vc: Zsolt, Ancsi, Norbi, Miklos, Anna, Andris.
[19:04:13] NP: OK, got it. Where shall I begin?

1. Page Reference Discussion

[19:04:49] vc: can you speak about your own theory about the seem to be page links?
[19:05:29] NP: OK – the apparent page references
[19:08:00] NP: Large medieval documents were bound into quires, and the quires were numbered
[19:08:16] NP: But for centuries, people used letters rather than numbers
[19:08:21] NP: a b c d e etc
[19:08:46] NP: folio numbers were then given in roman numerals for that quire
[19:08:50] NP: i ii iii iv v etc
[19:09:11] NP: The side of the page was also given, with r for recto, v for verso
[19:09:57] NP: So, for centuries people referred to page numbers pimarily in tiny little letter patterns of the form: air, aiv, aiir, aiiv, aiiir, aiiiv
[19:10:38] NP: Few people nowadays (apart from codicologists) bear this in mind, but this was the primary way in which books were structured circa 1400
[19:11:22] NP: So, if we were to look at the VMs through the eyes of someone living 500 years ago, the aiiv / aiir patterns would immediately jump out a t them as being page references.
[19:12:05] NP: Specifically, page references to the first bound quire of a book (for there is no bir biv biir biiv pattern in the VMs)
[19:12:30] NP: So, you might say, what if these are indeed page references to the first quire?
[19:13:09] NP: Well… if they are page references, they’re quite strange ones: references to recto (r) pages would then be vastly outnumbered by references to verso (v) pages
[19:13:51] NP: Ultimately, it comes down to a paradox of vision – we’re presented with something that *looks* like page numbers, but which does not have the statistical profile of page numbers. How can that be?
[19:14:26] vc: We are listening, go on
[19:14:36] NP: Once you start saying “well, these are only designed to resemble page numbers”, then you’re into the realms of cryptography and steganography
[19:15:36] NP: I think that the presence of these non-page-number page numbers is a persuasive reason to look for cryptographic solutions in preference to linguistic solutions
[19:15:43] NP: But then…
[19:16:13] NP: You have to ask the question, what are these non-page-number page numbers actually doing? What is their function?
[19:16:43] NP: When I went to the Beinecke in May 2006, I spent an hour looking at a single page of the VMs trying to work it out.
[19:16:58] NP: f38v
[19:17:32] NP: I had borrowed a magnifying glass from the front desk and went over every aiiv-style pattern on the page, over and over again, looking for a clue
[19:17:46] NP: And then I noticed it, one tiny piece at a time
[19:18:15] NP: And in the two years since, I’ve fleshed it out into a complete story of how they came about, and why they have the shape they do.
[19:19:20] NP: In the first phase, the author wrote a simple “v” shape and added a carefully placed dot above the row of i’s. This indicated one of the Arabic numerals 1-9 (I think)
[19:19:55] NP: However, after that early Herbal A phase, the author revisited it and thought it was too obvious, and so added scribal flourishes.
[19:20:20] NP: These loops start from the dot, go up and around, and rejoin the unflourished “v” shape at the top right
[19:20:54] NP: In the Currier B phase, the author used a completely different way of enciphering numbers (but using the same aiiiv family pattern)
[19:21:13] vc: Yes, we can see it in Psp
[19:21:26] NP: So, you can see the layers of development of the cipher over time. Voynichese wasn’t a static system, it was an evolving system
[19:22:13] NP: The problem with using statistical tools on Voynichese is that the system moves over time, which is why it is important to apply tests to each phase in turn
[19:22:21] vc: That’s why you are so eager about to reconstruct the original binding order…….
[19:22:32] NP: That’s one of the reasons, yes
[19:23:02] NP: Mainly it comes back to the evolution of the cipher, though. By tracking the evolution, we can perhaps find a way into it
[19:23:08] vc: because the question arises – why one can observe this on 38 v first?
[19:23:37] NP: I chose the page because it was clearly written and had plenty of aiiv patterns on to work with.
[19:23:54] NP: Some herbal pages are clear but don’t have much text
[19:24:50] NP: I suppose one of the cutting edge research things I’d like you all to come away with from this is the idea that the Voynich grew and developed
[19:25:13] vc: Is it observable on other pages? for example, on a page written by another Currier hand?
[19:25:14] NP: It was not a “fait accompli”, a huge static thing.
[19:25:24] NP: Only on Currier A pages
[19:25:31] NP: Hand 1 pages
[19:25:40] vc: Hmmm…
[19:25:58] NP: On Hand 2 pages, the “v” flourish is written in one go, but takes a number of shapes
[19:26:11] NP: I think that the Arabic numeral is enciphered using those shapes
[19:26:17] NP: Look for yourself
[19:26:41] NP: I should say: “the v and the scribal flourish are written together in one go”

2. The vertical column on f49v

[19:27:15] vc: Speakin’ bout arabic numerals, have you checked with your own eyes on the real thing F49v?
[19:27:20] NP: yes
[19:27:27] NP: not original
[19:27:31] vc: There are arabic numbers on the left margin.
[19:27:40] NP: Yes, 16th century Arabic numerals
[19:27:52] NP: Yet the quire numbers have 15th century Arabic numerals
[19:28:09] vc: It seems on the reproductions that they are about the same color and style as the Voynichese letters nearby
[19:28:10] NP: Doesn’t add up, unless the f49v letters were added later
[19:28:19] NP: They’re pretty close, but they’re not the same
[19:28:28] vc: 🙁
[19:28:44] NP: It fooled Brumbaugh – he erected a huge theory on that alone
[19:28:54] vc: Next Q from us:
[19:29:22] vc: Then how would you interpret these single character lists on the left of some pages?
[19:29:56] NP: (1) Page titles
[19:30:00] NP: (2) cipher keys
[19:30:02] NP: (3) both
[19:30:05] NP: (4) neither
[19:30:07] NP: 🙂
[19:30:10] vc: XD
[19:30:46] vc: …So you were able to turn the original pages with your bare hands?
[19:30:49] NP: Oh yes
[19:30:52] vc: Jeez…
[19:31:00] NP: They were clean
[19:31:01] NP: 🙂
[19:31:20] NP: Seriously, the Beinecke loves people to look at its books
[19:31:36] NP: But they do insist you take your tinfoil hat off at the door
[19:32:26] NP: Actually, I looked at the VMs for three whole days, which was extremely generous of them, and that was much appreciated

3. Steganography or cryptography?

[19:32:20] vc: Right. So: (we haven’t read your book…yet) Steganography or cryptography?
[19:32:30] NP: Both
[19:32:55] NP: It is a cipher that has been disguised as a language
[19:34:05] NP: One of the back-end ciphers (the verbose ciphers I blogged about earlier today) turns a dense, information-rich series of tokens and turns it into an information-sparse language-like entity
[19:34:21] NP: XYZ –> BABEBI
[19:34:33] NP: is a trivial example
[19:34:57] NP: where X –> BA, Y –> BE, Z –> BI
[19:35:38] vc: Right -we have just thinking about the same conception.
[19:35:44] NP: This gives the apparent CVCVCV behaviour that makes the VMs seem so language-like
[19:35:56] vc: Just to reveal some of our works —
[19:36:03] NP: ok…
[19:36:14] NP: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/08/27/voynich-cipher-structure
[19:37:36] NP: And here’s a test I did in 2003, so I’m pretty consistent: http://voynichcentral.com/users/nickpelling/pairs.gif
[19:37:45] vc: We will definitely read your article later…
[19:38:41] NP: And here’s the article I couldn’t find earlier: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/06/06/the-voynich-cipher-for-code-breakers
[19:41:27] vc: Ok, we have just made a quick look on them for some of us have’nt seen these before.
[19:41:49] NP: There’s lots of good stuff on my blog. Lots!
[19:42:06] vc: The author knows 🙂
[19:42:25] NP: I wouldn’t post it if it wasn’t good. 😉
[19:42:42] NP: You should see the stuff I don’t post! ;-o
[19:42:57] vc: We downloaded your whole blog and copied it to identical CD’s

4. Occitan sources?

[19:43:17] vc: Ok. Next q:
[19:43:36] vc: About the Occitan language.
[19:44:06] vc: Where does the info on the month names come from?
[19:44:30] NP: Jorge Stolfi asked a load of Occitan researchers back in 1997
[19:44:46] NP: There’s a page on it, it’s certainly in the 1997 vms-list archive
[19:45:29] NP: Here’s this week’s post on it: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/08/22/jaume-deydiers-livre-de-raison
[19:45:36] vc: hmm…
[19:45:53] NP: Basically, the closest match was with Toulon Occitan
[19:46:05] NP: But with a bit of German thrown in (for “augst”)
[19:46:26] vc: (also: “may”)
[19:46:36] NP: But is it maij or may?
[19:47:41] NP: However, it’s very likely that the Toulon Occitan was merely one person (Jaume Deydier) so it’s a bit of a small sample to be doing inferences from
[19:48:17] NP: Unless anyone knows better, there aren’t that many written examples of pre-1600 Occitan to be found anywhere
[19:48:34] NP: And spelling was a bit of a fluid thing back then, too
[19:48:58] vc: yes, our lingusist here told us 🙂
[19:49:03] NP: I’ve just read a book on artisan autobiographies, and many artisans deliberately spelt things how they sounded
[19:49:22] NP: a kind of anti-academic independent spirit

5. Voynich Marginalia questions

[19:50:27] vc: Do you think that the marginalia and other features written with latin alphabet originate from more than one person?
[19:50:40] NP: Yes, but perhaps not in the way that you might think
[19:50:51] vc: ?
[19:51:03] NP: The problem with the marginalia is that they have Voynichese embedded in them
[19:51:18] vc: This is not a problem. 🙂
[19:51:36] NP: Well.. you’ll see why it might be…
[19:51:48] NP: If you look at f17r under an ultraviolet black lamp, there’s a piece of Voynichese tacked on the end
[19:52:04] NP: it reads: oteeeolair
[19:52:28] NP: Rene Zandbergen independently observed it earlier this year, so I didn’t just imagine it
[19:52:30] NP: 🙂
[19:52:48] vc: Do one usually have a portable ultraviolet black lamp when you go to the Beinecke? 🙂
[19:53:00] NP: Luckily they have one behind the desk you can borrow
[19:53:06] NP: I left mine in the car
[19:53:07] NP: 🙂
[19:53:36] NP: Similarly, there’s Voynichese embedded in the f116v marginalia
[19:53:48] vc: But that can be seen.
[19:54:02] vc: It would be really nice if they could be used as cribs
[19:54:23] NP: That’s what Newbold thought…
[19:54:37] NP: But why can’t we read the marginalia on f116v?
[19:54:47] vc: Yes… Why?
[19:55:10] NP: I think the answer is that successive owners have emended (altered incorrectly) the text, trying to rescue fading words
[19:55:52] NP: And so f17r, f66r, and f116v have all been rescued but worsened
[19:56:44] NP: Unfortunately, the Beinecke’s scans aren’t good enough for us to be able to do forensic uber-restoration on these
[19:56:56] NP: I’ve tried, though, believe me I’ve tried
[19:57:25] vc: We have consulted with a hungarian medieval scholer who suggested that text on the 116v is actually a prayer or something like that in the realm of magic
[19:57:31] vc: a rune
[19:57:38] NP: Well, a prayer is close
[19:57:46] NP: ahia maria
[19:57:51] NP: + + +
[19:57:57] vc: the characters like + as separators justifiy this theory.
[19:58:00] NP: yes
[19:58:35] NP: However, if you look at the “rescued” letters at the beginning of the same line, you can see the contrast with the faded “ahia maria” letters
[19:58:57] vc: He said that this is usual at medieval spells. At these places one might draw a cross in the air. how is it said in english?
[19:59:20] NP: the same, probably “trace a cross shape in the air”
[19:59:33] NP: “trace out a cross shape in the air” probably better
[19:59:49] vc: As Catholics still do
[20:00:16] NP: It could be a prayer, or a curse, or a spell (protection?) or anything
[20:00:52] NP: Remember that the boundaires between magic and liturgy in the 15th century was painfully thin – both were usually carried out by broadly the same people.
[20:01:17] NP: See Richard Kieckhefer’s book “Forbidden Rites”, recommended
[20:01:19] vc: (What is lighter than a witch? A stone perhaps? Or a duck?)
[20:02:00] NP: I’m getting that sinking feeling
[20:02:47] NP: necromancy, charm, spell, prayer – pretty fluid lines between them all
[20:02:58] vc: Whatever the main language of the spell, the last words seem to be in german. What is your opinion about this?
[20:03:31] NP: I think that this was probably added by the first obsessive Voynichologist (who just happened to be German)
[20:03:34] vc: (The duck comes from Monthy Python and the holy Grail…)
[20:03:39] NP: Georg Baresch
[20:03:44] NP: 🙂
[20:04:17] NP: I think it was probably Baresch who is responsible for most of the attempted rescuing of the marginalia
[20:04:32] vc: So you are saying that this last page is from at least 2 or 3 hands?
[20:04:39] NP: But it was Baresch who ensured that it got passed down to us, so we should be grateful to him
[20:05:03] NP: Yes, but on top of each other rather than side by side
[20:05:20] NP: Blow the page up and look again at the varying density of the ink and quills
[20:05:33] vc: We will certainly do that.
[20:06:34] NP: Also, put the various marginalia side by side to scale (all blown up), it’s an interesting viewpoint
[20:06:53] NP: Print them out at A1 scale – huge!

6. About the Hungarians…

[20:06:59] vc: We still have a lot of questions… do you still have some time?
[20:07:14] NP: I have about half an hour now
[20:07:50] vc: Great.
[20:07:51] NP: but I’d like to rest my fingers for five minutes – so, please, tell me what you each think of the VMs (one sentence each, please!)
[20:09:22] vc: (Miklos): Hi. I personally think that this is a kind of constructed language or maybe a written glossolalia.
[20:10:04] NP: it’s still 100x more rational than believing the moon landings were faked 🙂
[20:10:26] NP: even if it is wrong. 🙂
[20:12:57] vc: We are by the way started our searches on a few different pathes. One group is investigating the mythological context of the drawings with girls (if there’s any). The geekz are rather trying to draw some consequences using the digram and trigram entropies, and comparing our results with various 17th century documents, on different languages (and even as exotiic stuffs as Tamil and Hebrew)
[20:13:29] vc: On the other hand
[20:14:23] vc: we’d like to produce some “grammar” here, as well, so, we decided (similarly as Stolfi did it once) to look at the distributions of different words.
[20:14:26] NP: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/06/18/q13-and-voynich-balneology-sources
[20:14:58] vc: If we concider the first words in the herbal the names of the plants, than maybe that could bring us somewhere.
[20:15:22] NP: There have been many grammars proposed over the years – though I would strongly caution you to treat Currier A and Currier B separately, as the language changed along the way
[20:15:56] vc: Also, we are comparing the Hungarian flora with the drawings, and meanwhile with other old herbals (e. g. ashmole codex). We also about to address a hungarian herbelist in this topic.
[20:16:22] vc: Sure, we’d like to treat the two couriers differently.
[20:16:29] NP: Have you seen the “De Aqua” Voynich theory that was posted to YouTube last month? Its German author has invested a lot of time trying to identify the plants depicted. http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/08/24/de-aqua-voynich-theory-on-youtube
[20:16:48] NP: Erm, don’t shoot the Currier 😉
[20:16:49] vc: Not yet, but we are most curious about it
[20:17:20] NP: If you can read German quickly, there’s plenty of interesting stuff (but a lot of filler too)

7. The f1r paragraph “titles”…

[20:18:13] vc: You can see on f1r that the text is separated to 3 paragraphs.
[20:18:54] vc: Each paragraph ends with some words flushed right.
[20:19:06] NP: Yes… and let’s not forget what John Grove called “titles”, short pieces of text appended to the bottom right of the paragraphs
[20:19:14] vc: is it possible that these are quotations?
[20:19:20] NP: could be anything, who knows?
[20:19:43] NP: As an aside, I should say that the word “possible” sets my teeth on edge
[20:19:50] vc: quotations and the name of the persons who said them
[20:19:58] NP: Probably not
[20:20:28] vc: Not matches with the age?
[20:20:28] NP: My prediction is that they are section titles
[20:21:09] NP: book 1 – agriculture
book 2 – astronomy
book 3 – water
[20:21:10] NP: etc
[20:21:24] vc: hmmmmm
[20:21:43] NP: I would also predict that they relate to the first phase of the VMs’ production
[20:22:20] NP: because the final object has many more sections
[20:22:27] NP: they’re also in A, not B
[20:22:44] NP: but you don’t have to believe me
[20:23:13] NP: I don’t have a gun to your heads
[20:23:28] NP: 🙂

8. Plaintezt language?

[20:23:29] vc: Personally what do you think abozt the plaintext language and the plaintext alphabet length?
[20:23:48] NP: Plaintext language: Italian.
[20:24:05] NP: Maybe German, but if pressed I’ll stick to Italian
[20:24:24] NP: Plaintext alphabet length: just normal, nothing fancy
[20:24:41] NP: I do, however, think that there is something quite special about the enciphering
[20:24:54] vc: namely?
[20:25:21] NP: I think that it was enciphered on wax tablets using a combination of shorthand (to compress it) and verbose cipher (to expand it), such that the overall size of the text matched the original

9. Copy or original?

[20:26:11] NP: I think that there is evidence that the original layout and manuscript features were duplicated, even though the text was enciphered – and so I think that each line of ciphertext corresponds to a line of plaintext
[20:26:23] NP: key evidence for this:-
[20:27:13] NP: (1) the fake vellum hole on f34r – this is a hole that was made in the vellum to copy a a hole that was present in the original copy
[20:27:58] vc: (VBI index of this very feature of your theory?)
[20:28:01] NP: (finding a page number for you…)
[20:28:09] vc: Sorry, could’n miss that one
[20:28:51] NP: (2) f112 has a space on the right hand side. I think that this was a vellum flaw in the original, which was faithfully copied as part of the enciphering
[20:29:35] NP: 10000 VBI points! Ding ding ding!
[20:30:12] NP: Look up close at the hole on f34 – it was rubbed through the vellum, but why?
[20:30:53] NP: Sergio Toresella suggested that the author rubbed through the vellum in some kind of sexual frenzy, but I think he may just have got that wrong
[20:30:55] NP: :O
[20:31:31] vc: VBI index of THIS one is not small.
[20:31:38] NP: Plenty of people have proposed that the VMs is some kind of copy – I just added in some other evidence to say what kind of a copy
[20:31:57] vc: Yes, We have the same opinion.
[20:32:15] vc: It can’t be done in one iteration.
[20:32:28] NP: Essentially, that it’s an enciphered copy but one retaining many aspects of the original layout
[20:33:12] NP: There are also a number of places (particularly in Q13 and the pharma section) where you can see two layers…
[20:33:36] vc: Checkin’…
[20:34:38] NP: f77v (the house at the top)
[20:34:57] NP: f79v (the woman in the pool)
[20:36:39] NP: f88v or the page next to it (curious two-layered spherical jar)
[20:37:13] NP: Sagittarius page – the top left nymph and her odd barrel
[20:37:22] vc: So how these two layers point to the original layout?
[20:37:33] NP: I also think f57v was written in two or more passes
[20:37:50] NP: It’s hard to tell what to think
[20:38:26] NP: What I *suspect* is that there is an odd game of expressing and hiding going on here
[20:39:06] NP: I don’t honestly think that most of the water nymphs have any function apart from distracting your eye from what is really going on on the page
[20:39:22] vc: Mhm

10. The Sagittarius spreadsheet…

[20:39:30] NP: The zodiac nymphs’ poses probably do encode some kind of information, though
[20:40:06] NP: I’m sure a page full of naked women was probably even more distracting to the eye 500 years ago
[20:40:23] NP: talking of which…
[20:40:31] NP: I have a spreadsheet you might like to see
[20:40:41] vc: Sure
[20:40:50] NP: It’s taken from the Sagittarius page of a 14th century manuscript
[20:41:15] NP: and it might just contain basically the same data that is enciphered on the VMs’ sagittarius page
[20:41:42] NP: would you all like to have a look?
[20:41:53] vc: YES
[20:42:06] vc: Take a Y! an E! an S!
[20:42:25] NP: I heard you the first time. 😉
[20:43:27] NP: I should mention that what you have here is an annotated version of a scan of a photocopy of an old b&w photograph that is copyrighted by the Warburg Institute
[20:43:57] NP: I added in the red lines to try to reconstruct the table.
[20:44:24] NP: Which means “please don’t post this on the internet or I’ll get busted”
[20:44:21] vc: Ok, we are seeing the reference. Now what?
[20:44:33] NP: Now, here’s the clever bit
[20:45:00] NP: What the table is encoding is an astrological table per degree.
[20:45:00] vc: ok… won’t post
[20:45:45] NP: That is, each of the 30 degrees has a specific planet, fortune, gender, unlucky day assigned to it
[20:45:58] vc: aham
[20:46:32] vc: so if i transform it into circles, I basically get something very similar semantically to the VMS astro circles?
[20:46:48] NP: Theoretically – the tricky bit is working out how that mapping works
[20:47:32] NP: What it needs is a bunch of clever people looking at it and throwing around ideas for a couple of days
[20:47:49] NP: Which I why I thought of you lot 🙂
[20:48:25] vc: I think we are getting your suggestion. 🙂
[20:48:58] vc: Psp: rectangular to polar
[20:49:20] vc: my very first idea
[20:49:21] NP: The other tables didn’t align half as well as Sagittarius, so it would introduce too much uncertainty into the range of maps to choose from
[20:49:24] vc: of course it’s just me
[20:49:33] vc: Ok, ok
[20:49:42] NP: I think… it might not be the answer
[20:49:52] NP: …but it’s a start 🙂
[20:50:20] NP: Sagittarius is interesting because all the nymphs are facing right
[20:51:02] NP: If there is stuff being encoded in poses / clothes / accessories… look for crossed legs, outstretched arms, arm behind hip
[20:51:15] NP: head-dresses, stars
[20:52:21] NP: Incidentally, I think most of the breasts on the page were added in the second phase.
[20:53:11] NP: However… it may be that the breasts from the first phase (I can barely believe that I’m typing this as a sentence) encoded some kind of information. So you might usefully look for breasts that weren’t added later. :O
[20:53:33] vc: (VBI)
[20:53:50] NP: Bearing in mind that the author seems to have a predilection for adding dots in the first phase and hiding them later
[20:53:55] NP: VBI 100000!
[20:53:59] NP: off the scale
[20:54:12] NP: But… look at it for yourself, and make up your own mind
[20:54:29] vc: ROTF
[20:54:52] NP: At least you have something to compare with the page that nobody else (apart from me) has seen in the last 550 years
[20:55:04] NP: Real data (even if does have drawn on breasts)

11. Finishing up…

[20:55:41] NP: OK, team Voynich Budapest
[20:55:50] NP: I have to go now
[20:56:03] NP: I hope you’ve all broadened your view of the VMs
[20:56:12] NP: And not been exposed to too much VBI
[20:56:22] NP: 🙂
[20:56:23] vc: Thank You very much indeed for the most fruitful conversation.
[20:56:36] vc: Not enough i must say
[20:56:46] NP: Plan A is to return for a second session on Sunday
[20:56:55] NP: Is that correct?
[20:57:11] vc: Yes
[21:01:06] NP: Right – good luck, everyone & talk with you on Sunday!
[21:02:02] vc: Ok, all the best until then
[21:02:06] NP: byeeeeeee
[21:02:13] vc: bye 🙂

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

by ⋅ 3 Comments

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!

“De Aqua” Voynich theory on YouTube…

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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! 😉

Wikipedia, XKCD and the Voynich Manuscript…

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One of Google’s more interesting experimental engines is Google Trends: this aggregates data on keyword searches, to let you compare the relative popularity of different keywords over time: for example, “Paris Hilton” and “Star Wars” are (Google-wise) just about as popular as each other. From the graph, you can see that interest in Star Wars spiked up in May 2005, which Google guesses (correctly) was from the Star Wars film opening: while the Paris Hilton volume spiked somewhat when she left jail in June 2007. This reveals other non-obvious search aspects, such as the apparent cargo cult worship of Ms Hilton in Indonesia and Mexico. 🙂

But I digress.

For the graph for “Voynich”, Google Trends’ algorithms gamely suggest to the SciAm 2008 online re-release of Gordon Rugg’s 2004 article (marked “[A]”) as a possible cause of Voynich interest (but this is plainly wrong). The twin peaks actually correspond (a) to a surge in Voynich interest in France caused by Jean-Claude Gawsewitch’s (2005) “Le Code Voynich”, and (b) to the (2009) Voynich gag in webcomic XKCD.

google-trends-voynich

If we look solely at the June 2009 numbers, the scale of the XKCD peak is even clearer: Google search traffic for “Voynich” apparently spiked by more than 50x over baseline traffic levels. Whoosh.

google-trends-voynich-June-2009

This massive XKCD spike is what lies behind the battle raging in the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript Talk page. On the one hand, you have Wikipedia editors who think the Voynich page is basically OK (yes, there used to be a section on VMs in popular culture, but it got culled over a year ago) – and on the other, you have an army of vociferous XKCD fans who think that there should be at least some mention of XKCD squeezed in there, surely?

I think it’s important to point out that neither side is entirely blameless in this dispute. Wikipedia editors deliberately use its neutral voice and juxtaposing header templates as a way of fusing (achingly) high and (shudderingly) low cultural references together under a banner of supposed universality: though this syncretism helps to differentiate it (as a project) from traditional encyclopaedias, nobody involved is quite sure whether ultimately to privilege high or low culture – both are important at different times and for different reasons.

Similarly, the XKCD fanbase (which seems centred on Seattle, according to Google Trends?) has done itself no favours by the large number of inane troll-like edits attempted on the Voynich page. And none of them has so far really explained (in the Discussion page) why it is they collectively feel the urge to stitch XKCD’s web of cultural referentiality into Wikipedia’s fabric. From the outside, it certainly looks like a kind of drive-past L337 grafitti being daubed on Wikipedia’s walls: if there is a genuine point to the whole activity, I’ve yet to find it.

Ultimately, I suspect that the basic problem is that there is no consistently useful dividing line between high and low culture: when you have Wikipedia pages on Immanuel Kant and Brian Cant (and every silly cant inbetween), who’s to say where to draw it?

Finally, a brief Wikipedia aside. A fair while ago, someone (I’m pretty sure it was “Syzygy”, Elmar Vogt’s Wikipedia editor nom-de-plume) very kindly added a mention of my ‘Averlino’ theory to the Wikipedia Voynich page. I’m pleased that it is mentioned there, because – unlike a lot of theories – I did try hard to produce a working hypothesis consistent with the facts, rather than blatantly defying them (which seems to be the norm some days, sadly). Even if you happen to disagree with it, it does at least have the merit of pointing towards a sensible template: I’m quite sure that, if not Averlino, the real author will turn out to be remarkably similar.

Yet Elmar’s description of my theory wasn’t hugely accurate: and so I thought I ought to take the opportunity to correct and update the final two sentences. Just in case anyone is tempted to revert the changes, here are links to the research I’ve published since “The Curse of the Voynich” to back it up:-

If Pelling is right, then the manuscript is enciphered with an extremely convoluted cascade of methods, mixed together to make the resulting cipher text appear to have the properties of an unknown medieval language (such as consonant-vowel pairing, folio references, etc).

I discussed this archaic language covertext in more detail in this recent blog post. And also:-

He claims most of the non-zodiac marginalia were originally added by the document’s author(s), but have ended up unreadable because of incorrectly-guessed alterations superimposed by multiple later owners.

Recent posts on the mystery of the VMs’ unreadable marginalia (for why should they be unreadable, given that marginalia are normally added to explain or remind?) are here and here: but most of the discussion is still relatively unchanged since The Curse.