“I told you I’d be back…”

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After a summer break full of dull-as-ditchwater technical woes, I’ve finally managed to restart my rusty old “Voynich News” blog (on Blogger) as the shiny new “Cipher Mysteries” blog (on WordPress). Although I’m most of the way through migrating the 200-ish old posts over *sigh*, what you’re reading now should (fingers crossed) be the first new post.

Incidentally, I’ve got a busy week coming up, with my big telescope article finally coming out in History Today – there’s plenty of media interest in it going on behind the scenes, so should be “interesting times”. I also have six book reviews on their way here (including Adam Mosley’s “Bearing the Heavens” and Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers”), as well as a whole heap of meaty historical cipher stuff to cover: but please bear with me while I get this new site straight – getting it all ship-shape again will take a few days…

In the meantime, you might enjoy the funny picture I put up on the Cipher Mysteries ‘about’ page… Enjoy! 🙂

Poisonous ink warning…

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Here’s a quicky news story from the Mysterytopia mystery news-clipping website.

Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who
wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to
toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors:
red.

So, if you do happen to get a chance to look at the VMs at the Beinecke, remember not to lick your fingers after handling pages with red paint on…

You may possibly remember a similar monks-dying-with-black-tongues-and-a-black-finger schtick from Umberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose”. Doubtless our erudite semiotics professor friend lifted the idea from a nameless footnote somewhere in his personal Borgesian library: but all the same, it’s nice to read about it for real, right?

Hidden Van Gogh painting…

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Here’s a nice little article showing how science and art history research can work together in a harmonious way: using high-intensity x-rays, a materials scientist and a chemist found an portrait hidden beneath Van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass”.

Incidentally, the webpage is #1 of a set of 7, most of which are a bit poor: but photo #6, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani with her ermine (though I think it’s actually a weasel) as captured by Pascal Cotte’s multispectral trickery, is quite cool. 🙂

"The Coso Artifact"…

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A few days ago, Voynich News started getting web visitors from the Hall of Maat, an alternative science website I’d heard of (but had never got round to looking at properly). And so I decided to drop by; and was very pleasantly surprised at its range of well-written articles, most of them skeptical takes on the kind of alt.history nonsense that typically bedecks the Internet.

Here’s a link to the article on “The Coso Artifact”, simply because the story (of how a modern object worth no more than “a couple of bucks” led to such an outpouring of tosh about ancient civilizations and even creationist takes on technology) amused me so much. But the rest of the site is good too – enjoy!

PS: just so you know, there isn’t much about the VMs on the site, with the brief exception of an interesting 2004 article by Mark Newbrook on linguistic revisionist histories.

"The Alchemy Guild"…

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Alchemy arguably dates back to Alexandria, and there are many alchemical manuscripts dating through to the 13th and 14th century (though Lynn Thorndike noted that the 15th century was something of a fallow period). However, the modern organization The International Alchemy Guild traces its practical roots back to what was going in 16th century Bohemia, specifically with the work of Wilhelm von Rosenberg (their spelling) in Cesky Krumlov.

The Guild has put together a nice little historical piece on their website linking a lot of the famous alchemical names of the time to this specific milieu (though doubtless Voynich historian Rafal Prinke would view it as a somewhat simplistic rendering): so you’ll see Rudolph II, Hajek, Dee, Kelley, Horcicky, etc all passing by in quick succession… Enjoy!

Review of "Inventing The Flat Earth"…

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It’s a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from?

In his fascinating (if all too brief) “Inventing The Flat Earth” (1991), medieval historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces the faulty arguments and ideologies across the centuries that contributed to this nonsense. As an immediate cause, he points to a small coterie of 19th century writers (specifically William Whewell (1794-1866) and John W. Draper (1811-1882)) who decided to start an agitprop war between “religion” and “science”, essentially by building opposing false idols of both “sides” and getting people angry enough about it to join in the fight.

For “religion”, the caricature they constructed was one of superstition and medieval backwardness: and what (thanks to multiple careful misreadings of the sources) could be more retrogressive than the notion of the flat earth? Disregarding the fact that just about everyone at that time believed in a spherical earth, Church or not. *sigh*

Yet for retrogressivity to be of interest as something to avoid, someone had (logically) to be promoting progressivity: Russell traces this back to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and to Jules Michelet, the last of which dubbed medieval scholastics “valiant athletes of stupidity” (hugely unfairly, of course).

But Jeffrey Burton Russell goes back further still: calling the Middle Ages “the Middle Ages” is a way of implicitly saying that it sat inbetween the (glorious) Classical Era and the (glorious) Renaissance – that it was a Tweenie era, that was more than just a bit disappointing and dull. And similarly with the Dark Ages, which would appear to have been so hugely disappointing that some extreme revisionist historians are trying to excise it completely!

Ultimately, Russell points the finger at Renaissance myth-makers: it was they who essentially invented the whole “medieval = rubbish” mythology which used to annoy Lynn Thorndike so much (though perhaps he should have been angrier with Alberti & his chums than with Jacob Burckhardt), in order to justify their own glory, as if fama was a zero-sum game. What did those Renaissance brainiacs ever do for us, eh?

Rewind to 1492, and the basic history is that Columbus never had to argue against a flat earth. His main point of disagreement was with those scientifically-minded people of the time who argued (completely correctly!) that his estimate of the distance East West to the Orient was far too low, and that he and his crew would die of starvation before they reached there. And they would have done, had another continent not happened to be in the way… but that’s another story.

Some may have heard of this book via the recent short article by Mano Singham (Phi Delta Kappan, 1st April 2007, available online) that was built almost entirely around a high-speed precis of Russell’s book: on HASTRO-L (2nd December 2007), Michael Meo criticized Singham’s presentation, but I think the inaccuracies there were in the summarizing, not in the original.

As far as the intellectual history goes, the seed of the myth/error seems to have been specifically sown by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus preface (not the one Osiander added!). There, he says:-

For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth’s shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.

Copernicus was trying to play to the Church audience here, as the spherical earth was so well-believed as to be a point of faith. Yet because Lactantius’ opposing view (of a flat earth) had been deemed heretical, the papacy ordered in 1616 that this passage be censored from Copernicus’ book – but this order came too late for the 3rd edition of 1617, and the subsequent edition came along only in 1854.

And so the final irony here is that if De Revolutionibus had indeed (as Koestler asserted) been “The Book Nobody Read”, the flat-earth myth/error might never have flowered.

Wilkins, Lib II, Cap X "Of subterranean lamps"…

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Having just bought a print-on-demand copy of John Wilkins’ book “Mathematical Magick: Or The Wonders That may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry“, I found that it was (mostly) placed online in 2006 as part of “The Mathematical and Philosophical Works of the Right Rev. John Wilkins“, (re-)published in 1802 – there’s a free version on Google Books, available for free download here. If you go to page 247, you can also see his 1668 essay on a philosophical language which D’Imperio mentions in her section 9.3 “Pasigraphy: Universal and Synthetic Languages”.
All the same, because I was interested in the “perpetual lamp” section of Wilkins’ “Mathematical Magick”, and the online text version was somewhat flawed, I thought I’d post a more usable/readable version here of Book 2 Chapter 10 (page numbers as per “Mathematical Magick”). PS: I like the animated statue story on p.237: it has a proper Indiana Jones feel to it! 🙂
[p.232]
C A P. X.
Of subterraneous lamps : divers historical relations concerning their duration for many hundred years together.

Unto this kind of Chymical experiments, we may most probably reduce those perpetual lamps, which for many hundred years together have continued burning without any new supply in the sepulchres of the Ancients, and might (for ought we know) have remained so for ever. All fire, and especially flame, being of an active and stirring nature, it cannot therefore subsist without motion; whence it may seem, that this great enquiry hath been this way accomplished: And therefore it will be worth our examination to search further into the particulars that concern this experiment. Though it be not so proper to the chief purpose of this discourse, which concerns Mechanical Geometry; yet the subtility

[p.233]
and curiosity of it, may abundantly requite the impertinency.
There are sundry Authors who treat of this Subjection by the by, and in some particular passages, but none that I know of (except Fortunius Licetus) [margin: Lib. de reconaitis antiquarum Lucernis] that hath writ purposely any set and large discourse concerning it: out of whom I shall borrow many of those relations and opinions, which may most naturally conduce to the present enquiry.
For our fuller understanding of this, there are these particulars to be explained:
1. οτι, or quod sit.
2. δίοτι, / cur sit. / quomodo sit.
1. First then, for the οτι, or that there have been such lamps, it may be evident from sundry plain and undeniable testimonies: Saint Austin [margin: De Civit. Dei. l. 21 cap.6] mentions one of them in a Temple dedicated to Venus, which was always exposed to the open weather, and could never be consumed or extinguished. To him assents the judicious
[p.234]
Zanchy. Pancyrollus mentions a Lamp found in his time [margin: De deperd. Tit. 35. De operibus Dei, part 1. l. 4. c. 12.], in the sepulcher of Tullia, Cicero’s daughter, which had continued there for about 1550 years, but was presently extinguished upon the admission of new air. And it is commonly related of Cedrenus, that in Justinian‘s time there was another burning lamp found in an old wall at Edessa [margin: Or Antioch. Licetus de Lucernis, l. 1. c. 7.], which had remained so for above 500 years, there being a crucifix placed by it, whence it should seem, that they were in use also amongst some Christians.
But more especially remarkable is that relation celebrated by so many Authors, concerning Olybius his lamp, which had continued burning for 1500 years. The story is thus: as a rustic was digging the ground by Padua, he found an Urn or earthen pot, in which there was another Urn, and in this lesser, a lamp clearly burning; on each side of it there were two other vessels, each of them full of a pure liquor; the one of gold, the other of silver. Ego chymice artis,

[p.235]

(simodo vera potest esse ars Chymia) jurare ausim elementa & materiam omnium, (saith Maturantius, who had the possession of these things after they were taken up.) On the bigger of these Urns there was this inscription:

[p.236]

Plutoni sacrum munus ne attingite fures.
Ignotum est vobis hoc quod in orbe latet,
Namque elementa gravi clausit digesta labore.
Vase sub hoc modico, Maximus Olybius.
Adsit faecundo custos sibi copia cornu,
Ne tanti pretium depereat laticis.

The lesser urn was thus inscribed:

 

Abite hinc pessimi fures,
Vos quid vultis, vestris cum oculis emissitiis?
Abite hinc vestro cum Mercurio
Petaesato Caduceatoque,
Donum hoc maximum, Maximus Olybius
Plutoni sacrum facit.

Whence we may probably conjecture that it was some Chymical secret,

 

by which this was contrived.
Baptista Porta [margin: Mag. Natural. l.12. c.ult.] tells us of another lamp burning in an old marble sepulcher, belonging to some of the ancient Romans, inclosed in a glass vial, found in his time, about the year 1550, in the Isle Nesis, which had been buried there before our Saviour’s coming.
In the tomb of Pallas, the Arcadian who was slain by Turnus in the Trojan war, there was found another burning lamp, in the year of our Lord 1401. [margin: Chron. Martin Fort. licet. de lucern. l.1 c.11] Whence it should seem, that it had continued there for above two thousand and six hundred years: and being taken out, it did remain burning, notwithstanding either wind or water, with which some did strive to quench it ; nor could it be extinguished till they had spilt the liquor that was in it.
Ludovicus Vives tells us of another lamp, that did continue burning for 1050 years, which was found a little before his time. [margin: Not. ad August. de.Civit.Dei, l.21.c.6]
Such a lamp is likewise related to

[p.237]

be seen in the sepulchre of Francis Rosicross, as is more largely expressed in the confession of that fraternity.
There is another relation of a certain man, who upon occasion digging somewhat deep in the ground did meet with something like a door, having a wall on each hand of it; from which having cleared the earth, he forced opon this door, upon this there was discovered a fair Vault, and towards the farther side of it, the statue of a man in Armour, sitting by a table, leaning upon his left arm, and holding a scepter in his right hand, with a lamp burning before him; the floor of this Vault being so contrived, that upon the first step into it, the statue would erect itself from its leaning posture ; upon the second step it did lift up the scepter to strike, and before a man could approach near enough to take hold of the lamp, the statue did strike and break it to pieces. Such care was there taken that it might not be stolen away, or discovered.
Our learned Cambden in his description [margin: pag. 572]

[p.238]

of Yorkshire, speaking of the tomb of Constantius Chlorus, broken up in these later years, mentions such a lamp to be found within it.
There are sundry other relations to this purpose. Quod ad lucernas attinet, illae in omnibus fere monumentis inveniuntur, (saith Jutherius). In most of the ancient Monuments there is some kind of lamp, (though of the ordinary sort): But those persons who were of greatest note and wisdom, did procure such as might last without supply, for so many ages together. Pancirollus tells us, [margin: De perdit. Ti o2] that it was usual for the nobles amongst the Romans, to take special care in their last wills, that they might have a lamp in their Monuments. And to this purpose they did usually give liberty unto some of their slaves on this condition, that they should be watchful in maintaining and preserving it. From all which relations, the first particular of this enquiry, concerning the being or existence of such lamps, may sufficiently appear.

"Voynich Manuscript": two words, two lies?

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While writing my MBA dissertation a few years ago, I spun off a short paper called “Justified True Belief: Three Words, Three Lies?“, where the abstract explained its title:-

Cornelius Castoriadis once famously described the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “four words, four lies”: here, I examine each of the three words of “justified true belief” in turn to see if that too might be based on a fatally flawed discourse. In fact, “three lies” turns out to be a little strong – but the evidence strongly points to “two-and-a-half lies”. We deserve better than this!

My guess is that Castoriadis, for all his pithiness, was ripping off Voltaire, who in 1756 wrote:

This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

So now, by applying the same pattern to the Voynich Manuscript, I’m extending the chain of ripping yet further. Just so you know!

What’s in a name? Wilfrid Voynich never called it “The Voynich Manuscript”: right from the start, he called it “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”. Which was a bit of a shame, given that it originally almost certainly had nothing to do with Roger Bacon.

However, because Voynich desperately wanted it to contain Bacon’s encrypted secrets, he was convinced it had to be medieval. It was in this context that he referred to it as a “manuscript”, because manuscripts are technically defined as being handwritten documents that predate the start of printing, which means 1450 or so. And so you can see that the word “Manuscript” in “Voynich Manuscript” presupposes a medieval document, or else it would have to be called “an early modern handwritten document” (which, for all its precision, is not quite so punchy). And worse, the range of dates it could sensibly have been made goes over this 1450 mark, so we have no real certainty to work from here.

As for “Voynich”: in one sense it should be “Wojnicz”, the book dealer’s surname before he ended up in London. But we sophisticated moderns should perhaps more sensibly name it after the Jesuit Villa Mondragone (where Wilfrid Voynich found it), or Johannes Marcus Marci (who inherited it and whose letter to Kircher travelled with it all the way to New Haven), or George Baresch (arguably the first obsessive Voynich researcher to be documented), or Sinapius / Jacobus de Tepenecz (whose erased signature still faintly remains on the first page), or even Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (who was said to have paid well for it).

All of this still rather panders to an implied need for naming, as if by giving it a name it somehow helps us understand its origins (it doesn’t, can’t, and won’t). It’s an itch we don’t actually need to scratch: we need to learn to be more comfortable about remaining in a state of uncertainty.

My dissertation was all about knowledge and uncertainty: the work I’ve done since then points to my own three-word definition for knowledge – “hopefully useful lies“. Calling this enigmatic object the “Voynich Manuscript” is indeed “two words, two lies” – but as long as we never forget that they are both lies, its name is a most useful tool.

Review of "The Dumas Club"…

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If (like me) you enjoyed Roman Polanski’s film “The Ninth Gate” (I happened to see it in a hotel room in New Haven, giving it a particular resonance for me) which I mentioned recently, you might think about reading the novel from which it sprang, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “The Dumas Club”.

Its main protagonist, Lucas Corso, gets described early on as a “book detective”: but he is closer to the romantic archetype of a charmingly ruthless European antiquarian book-hunter for which Wilfrid Voynich and Hans Kraus both felt nostalgic. Whenever short-sighted, boyish-looking Corso takes off his glasses and puts on his “innocent rabbit” face, everyone seems to give him what he wants: perhaps Wilfrid Voynich used much the same kind of trick, who knows?

But it’s not simply a cherchez-la-livre romance: there are two stories intertwined, one concerning various Spanish book-dealers’ passions for Alexander Dumas’ pulpy (but vastly popular) bestsellers such as “The Three Musketeers”; and the other about the three remaining copies of a mysterious 17th century printed book for summoning the Devil, written in heavily abbreviated/coded Latin and with nine Tarot-like drawings, and whose printer (Aristide Torchia) was supposedly burned at the stake for creating it.

Structurally, this reminds me a lot of the TV show “CSI” (the proper Las Vegas one), which typically fills its hour-long slot by telling two forensic detective stories (each roughly half-hour long), and leaving it as a point of suspense whether the two strands are connected or not. Lucas Corso struggles gamely to see the link, but ultimately none materialises in the way that he expects. Despite the reader’s (and Corso’s) sense of a buzzing conspiratorial coherency in the early few chapters, the book actually ends up more like two intertwined extended short stories (one horror, one literary) than a single majestic novel, which is a shame.

For the film adaptation, Polanski simply ditched the whole Dumas connection, and instead concentrated on the “Book of Nine Gates” half of the book – essentially, whereas he optioned “The Dumas Club”, he actually filmed “The Non-Dumas Club”.

Yet the first hundred pages are simply brilliant, inspiring, edgy, like peering anxiously through Montecristo cigar fug to make out the looming shape of an unknown menace. But then Perez-Reverte (quite literally) loses the plot: the writing disintegrates into a mess of intertextuality and clunky self-referentiality, with the novelist having Corso continually feel as if he is a character in a serial novel – essentially, in a remake of a Dumas novel. Whether that’s true or not, having it rammed down my, errrm, eyes so many times completely broke the spell.

One glaringly missed opportunity throughout is the aspect of whether the unidentified young girl (who takes the name “Irene Adler” from a Sherlock Holmes novel) actually exists, or is merely some kind of strange hallucinatory being, conjured up by Corso himself: a kind of “Dumas Club” meets “Fight Club”, if you like. Kudos to Polanski for picking up this angle more strongly in his film. Perhaps she had to physically exist in the book as a result of Perez-Reverte’s (I think wrong) decision to have to have one of the characters (Boris Balkan) as the storyteller. And so in the book, Irene’s ambiguity centres not on whether or not she exists outside Corso’ mind, but on whether for him she acts as a force for good or evil – an angel, succubus or demon.

All in all, I have to say that I really wish Perez-Reverte had found sufficient writing courage to take the horror through to its logical conclusion, rather than pull up short at the final hurdle. Though Polanski’s literary take on the novel was (perhaps necessarily) quite superficial, his filmic instinct to raise the stakes yet higher than the book worked fabulously well.

For the full literary effect, I’d recommend reading “The Three Musketeers” first, then “Twenty Years After”, then “The Dumas Club”, and then watching “The Ninth Gate” late at night, with the curtains drawn, and a bottle of Bols gin by your side. Enjoy!

Incidentally, looking at the book with my Voynich research hat on, it was nice to see Perez-Reverte pick up on things like “The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient… Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries” (p.202), and to have Torchia trawling around Prague for the cabalistic secrets of an unknown brotherhood (p.203). The uber-convoluted magic circle in the final chapter (p.312) is quite fun, too.

Of the three magic circles in the Voynich Manuscript, it is interesting that both sun and moon ones depict people holding bottles: here’s the left man from the “hidden moon” magic circle – the “S” in his face probably denotes “Septentrio” (i.e. North). I’ll write more about these another day: here’s a link to an earlier post I made on William Kiesel’s lecture at Treadwell’s. Suffice it to say that this picture might simply refer to water and hyssop, both used to purify magic circles for millennia… unless you know better?

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (& the Voynich Ms)…?

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Here’s a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the “Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries” exhibition at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005, but also (mostly) reappears in the Wikipedia page. (Which came first? I don’t know!)

Why flag Hájek at all? Jan Hurych once put up a page on him on his Hurontaria site, but (I thought) only as a piece of background research data. It’s true that as personal physician to Maximilian I (in Vienna) and to Rudolf II (mainly in Prague), Hájek would have vetted or commented on anything alchemical, astronomical, astrological or medical entering the Imperial Court prior to 1600. But might there be more to it?

If (as I do) you see a Northern Italian art history link in the VMs’ drawings, then Hájek’s Prague-Bologna-Milan-Prague travels probably jumps out at you too: so, please go on…

In the words of The Joker, “I like him already“. But, errrrm, what about the VMs, then?

“[…]Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolf II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript. […] Throughout his life he also published numerous astrological prognostics in Czech and that is why he was until recently viewed as an „occultist” rather than a great scientist.“

I think we can safely say that, apart from the absence of any actual evidence, Hájek is a great candidate manuscript carrier to add to the Voynich story, far better than Dee and Kelley. And what would make it even more poignant is that the pair of them visited Hájek’s house in Prague, which was (according to a fascinating 1999 post on levity.com by Michael Pober) “‘by Bethlem’, first mentioned in “A True and Faithful Relation’ p. 212, Prague 1584, 15th August.”

Might Hájek have owned the VMs, perhaps buying it during his time in Italy? It would be interesting to see his handwriting and marginalia commentary style, just in case there’s some kind of unexpected link between that and what we see in the VMs. I’ve asked Jan Hurych, but he hasn’t examined Hájek’s handwriting: so I’ll have to pursue this with the Czech libraries myself (more on that soon).

Given that Hájek translated Mattioli’s famous herbal into Czech, it is certainly interesting that the marginalia at the top of f17r appears to have been miscorrected to read “mattior”. I had always guessed that it was George Baresch who had done this – but perhaps it might have been Hájek instead? Something to think about, anyway…

“Hájek was in frequent scientific correspondence with the recognized astronomer Tycho and played an important role in persuading Rudolf II to invite Brahe (and later Kepler) to Prague. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time.”

 

“In 1554 he studied medicine in Bologna and went to Milan the same year to listen to lectures by Girolamo Cardano, but he soon returned to Prague, where he became a professor of mathematics at the Charles University of Prague in 1555.”