Alternative Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page…

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Here’s what I think the Voynich Wikipedia page ought to look like. Enjoy! 🙂

* * * * * * *

History of a Mystery

Once upon a time (in 1912) in a crumbling Jesuit college near Rome, an antiquarian bookseller called Wilfrid Voynich bought a mysterious enciphered handwritten book. Despite its length (240 pages) it was an ugly, badly-painted little thing, for sure: but its strange text and drawings caught his imagination — and that was that.

Having quickly convinced himself that it could only have been written by one particular smart-arse medieval monk by the name of Roger Bacon, Voynich then spent the rest of his life trying to persuade gullible and/or overspeculative academics to ‘prove’ that his hunch was right. All of which amounted to a waste of twenty years, because it hadn’t even slightly been written by Bacon. D’oh!

Oh, so you’d like to see some pictures of his ‘Voynich Manuscript’, would you? Well… go ahead, knock yourself out. First up, here’s some of its ‘Voynichese’ script, which people only tend to recognize if they had stopped taking their meds a few days previously:

A nice clear example of Voynichese

Secondly, here’s one of the Voynich Manuscript’s many herbal drawings, almost all of which resemble mad scientist random hybrids of bits of other plants:-

Finally, here’s a close-up of one of its bizarre naked ladies (researchers call them ‘nymphs’, obviously trying not to mix business and pleasure), in this case apparently connected up to some odd-looking plumbing / tubing. Yup, the right word is indeed ‘bizarre’:

voynich f77v central nymph Q13 and Voynich balneology sources...?

Did any of that help at all? No, probably not. So perhaps you can explain it now? No, I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, none of us can either. *sigh*

Back to the History Bit

Anyhow, tucked inside the manuscript was a letter dated 1665 from Johannes Marcus Marci in Prague, and addressed to the well-known delusional Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Marci’s letter said that he was giving the manuscript to Kircher both because of their friendship and because of Kircher’s reputation for being able to break any cipher. The manuscript seems then to have entered the Jesuit archives, which is presumably why the Jesuit college near Rome had it to sell to Wilfrid Voynich several centuries later, just as in all the best mystery novels.

But hold on a minute… might Wilfrid Voynich have forged his manuscript? Actually, a few years back researchers diligently dug up several other 17th century letters to Kircher almost certainly referring to the same thing, all of which makes the Voynich Manuscript at least 200 years older than Wilfrid Voynich. So no, he couldn’t have forged it, not without using Doc Brown’s flux capacitor. (Or possibly the time machine depicted in Quire 13. Unless that’s impossible.)

Incidentally, one of those other letters was from an obscure Prague alchemist called Georg Baresch, who seems to have wasted twenty or so years of his life pondering this curious object before giving it to Marci. So it would seem that twenty lost years is the de facto standard duration for Voynich research. Depressing, eh?

So, Where Did Baresch Get It From?

Well… Marci had heard it said that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had bought the manuscript for the ultra-tidy sum of 600 gold ducats, probably enough to buy a small castle. Similarly, Wilfrid Voynich discovered an erased signature for Sinapius (i.e. Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, Rudolf II’s Imperial Distiller) on its front page. You can usefully assemble all these boring fragments of half-knowledge into a hugely unconvincing chain of ownership going all the way back to 1600-1610 or so, that would look something not entirely unlike this:-

Which is a bit of a shame, because in 2009 the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum was radiocarbon dated to 1404-1438 with 95% confidence. Hence it still has a gap of roughly 150 years on its reconstructed CV that we can’t account for at all – you know, the kind of hole that leads to those awkward pauses at job interviews, right before they shake your hand and say “We’ll let you know…”

Hence, The Real Question Is…

Fast-forward to 2012, and Wilfrid Voynich’s manuscript has ended up in New Haven at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yet many Voynichologists seemed to have learnt little from all that has gone before, in that – just as with Wilfrid himself – they continue to waste decades of their life trying to prove that it is an [insert-theory-here] written by [insert-historical-figure-here].

If repeatedly pressed, such theorists tend to claim that:
* the ‘quest’ is everything;
* it is better to travel than to arrive; and even
* cracking the Voynich might somehow spoil its perfect inscrutability.
All of which, of course, makes no real sense to anyone but a Zen Master: but if their earnest wish is to remain armchair mountaineers with slippers for crampons, then so be it.

Yet ultimately, if you strip back the inevitable vanity and posturing, the only genuine question most people have at this point is:

How can I crack the Voynich Manuscript and become an eternal intellectual hero?

The answer is: unless you’re demonstrably a polymathic Intellectual History Renaissance Man or Woman with high-tensile steel cable for nerves, a supercomputer cluster the size of Peru for a brain, and who just happens to have read every book ever written on medieval/Renaissance history and examined every scratchy document in every archive, your chances are basically nil. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Honestly, it’s a blatant exaggeration but near enough to the truth true: so please try to get over it, OK?

Look, people have been analyzing the Voynich with computers since World War Two and still can’t reliably interpret a single letter – not a vowel, consonant, digit, punctuation mark, nothing. [A possible hyphen is about as good as it gets, honestly.] Nobody’s even sure if the spaces between words are genuinely spaces, if Voynichese ‘words’ are indeed actual words. *sigh*

Cryptologically, we can’t even properly tell what kind of an enciphering system was used – and if you can’t get that far, it should be no great surprise that applying massive computing power will yield no significant benefit. Basically, you can’t force your way into a castle with a battering ram if you don’t even know where its walls are. For the global community of clever-clogs codebreakers, can you even conceive of how embarrassing a failure this is, hmmm?

So, How Do We Crack It, Then?

If we do end up breaking the Voynich’s cipher, it looks unlikely that it will have been thanks to the superhuman efforts of a single Champollion-like person. Rather, it will most likely have come about from a succession of small things that get uncovered that all somehow cumulatively add up into some much bigger things. You could try to crack it yourself but… really, is there much sense in trying to climb Everest if everyone in the army of mountaineers that went before you has failed to work out even where base camp should go? It’s not hugely clear that even half of them even were looking at the right mountain.

All the same, there are dozens of open questions ranging across a wide set of fields (e.g. codicology, palaeography, statistical analysis, cryptanalysis, etc), each of which might help to move our collective understanding of the Voynich Manuscript forward if we could only answer them. For example…
* Can we find a handwriting match for the marginalia? [More details here & here]
* Can we find a reliable way of reading the wonky marginalia (particularly on f116v, the endmost page)? [More details here]
* Can we find another document using the same unusual quire numbering scheme (‘abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals’)? [More details here].
* Precisely how do state machine models of the Voynich’s two ‘Currier language’s differ? Moreover, why do they differ? [More details here]
* etc

The basic idea here is that if you can’t do big at all, do us all a favour and try to do small well instead. But nobody’s listening: and so it all goes on, year after year. What a waste of time. 🙁

A Warning From History

Finally: I completely understand that you’re a busy person with lots on your mind, so the chances are you’ll forget almost all of the above within a matter of minutes. Possibly even seconds. And that’s OK. But if you can only spare sufficient mental capacity to remember a seven-word soundbite from this whole dismal summary, perhaps they ought to be:

Underestimate the Voynich Manuscript at your peril!

Now ain’t that the truth!?

“Between Vellum and Prague” seminar session…

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I’m just starting to put together my talk for the upcoming Voynich centenary conference. The session is provisionally titled “Between Vellum and Prague”, with a summary along the lines of…

“The Voynich Manuscript first pinged on the cultural radar in Prague circa 1600, yet its vellum has recently been radiocarbon dated to the first half of the 15th century. So… what happened inbetween? Nick Pelling has long been intrigued by this wide-open question, and in this session presents a summary of a wide range of codicological evidence that holds the promise of answering it.”

In many important ways, I don’t care much for Voynich theories (not even my own): the important thing for me has long been developing an evidence base that we can use to eliminate bad theories (long-time Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall various times I’ve ranted about Popperian ‘falsification’, Karl Popper’s notion that theories are there to be knocked down, not puffed up).

But what would such usable ‘evidence’ look like? Mainstream history as currently practised is predominantly based on close reading of original documents within the context of large bodies of parallel evidence – even Art History falls within this methodology, as it places tiny observed details within an overall historical canon of evolving technique and materials.

The Beinecke’s splendid scans have enabled us to closely read the original document’s surface, so in some ways we’re halfway there: but as for “the large bodies of parallel evidence” part of the equation, we have at the same time too many and too few such bodies to choose from – by which I mean too many possible, too few probable.

As a result, the Voynich Manuscript remains an uncomfortable topic for historians, because even after a century of study it resolutely resists being pigeonholed within any cladistic strand or tradition. Basically, it is this core uncertainty about its internal nature and external tradition that dissuades many academics from wading too deeply into the Voynichian swamp… and frankly, I don’t blame them, because you’d need a wetsuit, not wellies.

It therefore seems much more prudent to me to go hunting for evidence than for yet more speculative theories. However, you need to have a really clear research question in mind when you do it, or it is likely that your efforts will be for nothing. For me, the best questions by a mile all relate to the Voynich Manuscript’s life before its apparent appearance at Rudolf’s Imperial Court in Prague: and so the class of evidence to look for is that which helps to bring out this otherwise invisible history.

As a result, I’m not hugely worried about things such as letters hidden in Voynich plants except insofar as they suggest links between the Voynichese hand and the marginalia hand. Similarly, the parallel hatching used in some of the drawings is not in itself important except for the way that it apparently directly conflicts with the radiocarbon dating (and indeed it would seem we have various 15th century hands in play, as John Matthews Manly noted over 80 years ago, which would seem to stop any kind of 16th century theory dead in its tracks).

The Voynich’s unusual quire numbers are puzzling too, and perfectly consonant with a mid-to-late 15th century dating. Yet frustratingly nobody has yet discovered a single example of another document with the same abbreviated longhand Latin ordinal numbering scheme: finding even one document using that same numbering style would surely open up a fascinating door into the manuscript’s early past.

But personally, I think there’s a high chance that the final page (f116v) marginalia will turn out to be some kind of scrappy French Secretary Hand, with “michiton oladabas” perhaps even saying nichil or even nichil obstat. The top marginalia line of f116v could also be a dedication or note to a “Simon Sint”, it’s hard to tell. These offer such tangible promise of connecting the Voynich to real people or places, yet so many speculative readings have been proposed that it’s all too easy to just ignore them.

And yet all the same, perhaps the richest vein to tap has been the raw internal codicology of the Voynich drawings themselves. If we could only find some ingenious way of connecting pages together (comparing DNA fingerprints of different bifolios, multispectral scans of inks or vellum, mapping the varying thicknesses of pages along their edges, etc), we could make a really great stab at reconstructing the original page order.

As examples, I discussed Q9 (“Quire 9”), Q13 and various out-of-order herbal pages at length in “The Curse of the Voynich”, while I’ve also discussed Q8 and Q20 here (as well as Q20’s paragraph stars), and indeed on Glen Claston’s thoughts on the nine-rosette foldout Q14 as well the ‘chicken scratch’ marginalia on its back.

But as should be apparent from the constellation of links strung through the preceding paragraphs like fairy lights, this remains an utterly fragmented research area. In each individual case, I can tell a speculative story about what I think happened to the manuscript to leave a particular set of details in the curious manner we find them arranged today, but I’m completely aware that that’s simply not good enough, even if I do try to take the totality of evidence into consideration at each point.

All the same, I continue to be of the opinion that it may not be to everyone’s tastes but studying the Voynich Manuscript’s codicology is pretty much as good as we can get – that finding historical parallels for individual drawings or indeed matching the roots of individual plants will never be enough to snip through its Gordian knot. Finding out what happened is the most pragmatic stepping stone back in time we have – so we should try harder to make what we have solid enough to step on, right?

London Rare Books School 2012 – including a session on historical ciphers…

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Just so you know, I’ll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants’ exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted 🙂 , it has a stellar line-up of tutors covering a great diversity of subjects and eras: it’s a splendid thing, that almost anybody with a wide-ranging interest in history would benefit from (really, it’s a snip at £600).

My section, covering the early modern growth of ciphers, codes and shorthand, is provisionally titled “Writing for privacy, secrecy, brevity and speed“. The tentative session summary runs like this:-

“This session discusses many of the ways in which writing systems have been adapted to meet secondary needs such as privacy (cryptography), secrecy (steganography), brevity (shorthand) and speed (tachygraphy). It uses examples ranging from antiquity through to the 17th century. It also discusses practical issues of transcription and decryption that historians and researchers may well need to tackle if presented with an unusual historical text. It concludes with discussion of some well-known unbroken historical ciphers.”

Over the next few months, I’ll be assembling (both physically and conceptually) the source material for this, and so will blog here about various aspects as they take shape. One particular thing that has already struck me is that few people grasp the difference between privacy and secrecy: for example, what happens in a marital bed is private (i.e. not public, but condoned – it’s ok that others broadly know that it’s going on, even though they don’t know the precise details), while a spouse’s illicit affair is secret (not public, but condemned – knowledge of its existence is what needs to be concealed, far more than the precise details).

This also (roughly speaking) helps conceptually differentiate between cryptography (private writing) and steganography (secret writing): with crypto, the core model is that others know of a crypto-text’s existence but are technically unable to read it, while stego’s core model is that people aren’t even aware of a stego-text’s existence [even if they can see the document carrying it], and so aren’t even trying to read it.

How does this help us? Well, my position on the inscrutable Voynich Manuscript has long been that its drawings (such as its plants and nymphs) are intended to misdirect and distract us, rather than to inform us: it is therefore at least as much a stegotext as a cryptotext. Hence using industrial-strength statistical tools to try to cryptologically crack its crabby carapace is probably futile: ultimately, Voynichese is an array of simple ciphers carefully folded inside a steganographic blanket, much as Brigadier John Tiltman said decades ago, and it was designed for showing as much as for concealing. Something to think about.

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to giving my session, and may even see one or two of you there!

Nick’s (possibly new) Great Pyramid theory…

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While musing on the Great Pyramid’s four mysterious narrow shafts for my last cipher post, I was struck by an entirely different explanation for them. Since then, I’ve read through a whole load of web-pages (I know, I know) and haven’t yet seen anything similar, so I thought I’d share the idea with you all, see where it leads. Please feel free to tell me if I’m reinventing a wheel or talking nonsense, I really don’t mind. 🙂

To quickly recap just about everything important about the Great Pyramid (aka the Pyramid of Khufu, or his Greek name Cheops) that I know…
* The Great Pyramid was constructed on top of a pre-existing hillock.
* All the rooms and passages in the Great Pyramid lie in (broadly speaking) a single vertical plane.
* The lowest chamber is an unfinished underground chamber carved into the hillock.
* The next highest chamber is known the “Queen’s Chamber”, though there’s no evidence a queen (or indeed anyone else) ever used it.
* The highest chamber is known as the “King’s Chamber”, and contains a large (but poorly finished) sarcophagus.
* The King’s Chamber has five large cavities above, thought to protect it against being collapsed by earthquakes.
* The King’s Chamber has two narrow shafts that extend diagonally upwards to the exterior of the pyramid.
* The Queen’s Chamber has two (originally concealed) narrow shafts that go sideways for about two metres and then diagonally upwards, but don’t obviously go to the exterior of the pyramid (i.e. where all the robot crawlers have gone a-trundling)
* The Queen’s Chamber lies immediately below the pyramid’s central axis, but the King’s Chamber is offset to one side.

Your Intellectual History challenge here is to explain the function of the two narrow shafts in the Queen’s Chamber. Here’s my answer:-

I suspect the Great Pyramid was built in two major stages of ascending grandeur / pharaonic megalomania. That is, I think that the Queen’s Chamber was to the originally planned pyramid as the King’s Chamber is to the final pyramid. For the following image, I’ve taken a West-facing CAD image from Rudolf Gantenbrink’s exemplary website, inverted its colours, shrunk it and overlaid an arbitrarily-placed missing “virtual inner pyramid” outline in red:-

That is, I suspect that the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft terminates early because the pyramid itself was planned to terminate early, perhaps either at something like the red line I mark, or indeed directly at the current end of the shaft itself. Hence, it might be that what is beyond the “door” is simply the second stage of construction, the “outer virtual pyramid” if you like: the shaft stopped roughly where it was supposed to, but the construction plans changed around it.

Why, then, was the Queen’s Chamber’s northern shaft any different? My suspicion is that the south end of the pyramid may have been built up first, with the north end lagging behind. Then, when the construction plans changed, the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft was left (quite literally) high and dry.

Alternatively, it could be that an earthquake during the first phase of building made it clear that the Queen’s Chamber was not going to be strong enough to survive the centuries in the way originally intended. Hence the decision may have been taken to add extra blocks to the North and South walls (if not the East and West walls as well), bringing the walls roughly two metres inwards. This could be why there is a two-metre horizontal section at the start of the Queen’s Chamber’s two shafts: that they were built diagonally up from the original walls, but that the walls were then thickened (for whatever reason): the shafts were similarly extended horizontally with the walls.

With all this in mind, I think I should note it’s entirely possible that Khufu’s pyramid may have originally started life as a smaller in-progress pyramid being built for (say) one of his predecessors, who intended to be interred in the (originally larger) Queen’s Chamber: but that Khufu’s architects saw the opportunity of extending it all into an humungous des res fit for a king (or, rather, Pharaoh). So, the burning question is: might the Great Pyramid ultimately turn out to be the loft extension to end all loft extensions? Just a thought! 😉

Announcing “The Blitz Ciphers”…

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

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

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

Description

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blitz Cipher Alphabet

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

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

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

The Blitz Cipher System

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

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

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

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

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

Blitz Cipher Theories & Hunches

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

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

Alchemy decoded, finally…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secret history of “Xmas” (the word)…

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Where, you may ask, does that annoying word “Xmas” come from? Is it just a linguistic marketing ploy to get a blunt message across in fewer letters? Well… yes, sort of. But perhaps not quite in the way you think…

In English, we write “Christ”, but his name was originally “Χριστος” [Christos] in Greek – for according to Thomas S. McCall, “there is no evidence that the Gospels were written originally in any other language but Greek”. Yes, I know, parts may possibly have been written in Aramaic, but all the same they seem to have made the transition to Greek very quickly.

Fast forward to 324 CE when the newly-converted Emperor Constantine the Great (indeed, he of Constantinople fame) was inspired by a dream – as some chroniclers would have us believe – to modify his army’s labara (errrm, the standards soldiers carried into battle) to [presumably] display its allegiance with Christ. This intersecting “chi-rho” (Χ-ρ) shape was a favoured propagandist accessory for Constantine, appearing on his helmet as well as many coins of the period. My point here being that “Χρ” was used right from the start as an abbreviating shorthand, though for Constantine arguably more for political reasons than for religious ones.

Once again, fast forward to 1100 CE when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle mentioned “Xp̄es mæsse” where the rho was superscripted with a scribal ‘macron’ (or, more precisely, a horizontal overbar) to indicate contraction of the following syllable). OK, this isn’t exactly “Merry Xmas” yet, but you can at least now see where this is headed.

With the introduction of printing, using “X” as a shorthand for “Christ” started to accelerate. Remembering that the 15th century fell in the historical shorthand lull between the mad proliferation of early medieval Tironian notae and the start of modern shorthand (with Bright’s Characterie in the late 16th century), and you can see why “X” was frequently used by early printers as an abbreviation for Christ. From that same general abbreviating period came Mr Ratcliff of Plymouth, who aggressively hacked away at the Lord’s Prayer thus:-

Our Fth wch rt n hvn ; hlwd b y Nm
Y Kgdm cm Y wl b dn n rth z it s n Hvn

All in all, if you’re looking for a way to write “Christ” quickly and precisely, rest assured that “X” marks that particular spot, and has done for nearly two millennia. And in case you still think “Xmas” is a little bit, errrrm, ‘Asda’, do please consider that Coleridge (1801), Byron (1811) and Lewis Carroll (1864) all happily used the word (so says Wikipedia, though I slightly doubt that it appeared in any of their canonical poems, nonsense or otherwise).

Curiously, the predictive texting on my vintage-2010 mobile doesn’t deign to recognize “xmas”, which is surely just anti-historical snobbery on the part of T9’s English dictionary compilers. Yet even now X still abbreviates for quite a few different “Christ” soundalikes:
* florists despairing at the length of the word “chrysanthemums” write “xanths”;
* electronics engineers have long written ‘xtal’ for “crystal (oscillator)”; and
* Christina Aguilera sometimes writes her name as “Xtina”, bless her sort-of-dirrty little tush. “X/bike”!

Love or loathe the word, it seems that we’re stuck with Xmas. I just wish you all a happy one! 🙂

Green Voynich pools? I really don’t *think* so, sorry. :-(

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I’ve had it suggested that to entertain a popular audience, a Voynich Manuscript documentary should showcase a live reenactment of its naked ladies bathing in green muddy slime. In this film-making scenario, the cameras could linger longingly on their most interesting period features, which (I can only presume) means their hair and makeup. Doubtless it would look great in HD, etc. But where does this mad desire to be so gratuitously populist come from? “Voynich” already gets over 600,000 hits on Google – not as many as Justin Bieber, sure, but it does have far more hair styles to choose from. 🙂

[As an historical aside, the apparent presence of medicinal baths in the manuscript arguably gives it a terminus ante quo of around 1500, because that is when people began to blame those same baths for contemporary ills such as syphilis. Just so you know!]

Personally, I suspect that – for the most part – naked women are used in the Voynich as some kind of cryptographic / steganographic ruse to get people’s decrypting brains either to shut down completely or to open up too far to be useful: a systematic misdirection trick, drawing your attention away from where the real information is held on the page. But that’s another story for another day…

Anyway, a Voynich paper is currently being prepared by Lincoln Taiz and Saundra Lee Taiz: this revolves around the idea that (what they call) the “dominant” presence of the green pools with the water-section nymphs indicates that Quire 13 should receive, like the early herbal sections, a botanical interpretation. Specifically, they suggest that this section of the VMs might be based around various questions posed by Nicolaus of Damascus (who lived 2000 years ago) in his book De Plantis, and that its green paint leitmotif simply represents chlorophyll… and so on.

As with all Voynich theories, they might conceivably be right … but if they are, I suspect it will turn out be for quite the wrong reasons. You see, if you go to the trouble of reconstructing parts of the folio order for Quire 13 (and, generally, try to untangle the Voynich Manuscript’s codicological skein), you discover a number of curious things:-

  • The quire numbers were added after being misbound
  • The original quires almost certainly had no quire numbers
  • Quire 13 was originally painted in a (now faded and patchy) blue colour
  • The green paint was added much later, right on top of the blue paint

As direct visual evidence, I’m completely certain that the two pages (f78v and f81r) below originally sat right next to each other in the alpha state of the manuscript – there are numerous symmetries to be seen in the layout, design, shape. Yet on the left page, you can see where the (original) blue paint was added, while the right page has the same blue paint but is also overpainted with heavy green paint. I’m (furthermore) quite sure that the green paint was added after the quire numbers were added, and so were almost certainly not added by the original author (and, I’d add, probably not even in the same century as him or her).

Voynich Manuscript, f84v placed next to f78r

I also – along with Glen Claston – suspect that Quire 13 was constructed in two separate phases (GC calls these “Q13b” and “Q13a”), and that the balneology-themed part (Q13b) probably came first, with the trickier (and more conceptual?) water-themed part (Q13a) later. Overall I don’t see any botanical theme at all in either section, and so can only read the Taiz’s hypothesis as a plausible (but almost certainly wrong) guess based on a single visual element – a layer of green paint that was absent from the manuscript’s original state.

To paraphrase Rene Zandbergen slightly, success in Voynich research comes not from guessing well but from consistently avoiding bad mistakes. Sorry, but it seems very much to me as though this particular thesis is not destined for success. 🙁

10 rules for making a (proper) Voynich documentary…

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With 2012 – the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich’s 1912 purchase of his subsequently-eponymous manuscript – inching ever closer, we will doubtless soon see a broad international wave of quick-turnaround documentary makers sniffing around its margins, snuffling for pungent historical truffles in the florilegial undergrowth of the Interweb.

If, dear reader, that thumbnail profile just happens to describe you, then here’s what you need: a brief guide on how to make a worthwhile Voynich Manuscript documentary that should continue to earn you money for years, regardless of whether its secrets somehow (and, frankly, against the run of play) get cracked in the meantime. Follow these basic rules, and I think you should do OK…

  1. The first rule of Voynich Fight Club is: evidence kicks theories. Don’t get tempted by fancy/fanciful hypotheses, just stick to the evidence – simply because it’s brilliant, confusing, paradoxical, splendidly detailed and evocative evidence. Sorry to point it out, but if you think Voynich theories are more fun than Voynich evidence, you’re probably the wrong person to be making the documentary. It’s a million-piece jigsaw, and everyone loves intricate puzzles!
  2. Don’t allow your own theories about the Voynich to guide you in any way whatsoever: they’re almost certainly wrong, and will just get in everyone’s way throughout production. And don’t trust Wikipedia to inform you (because it won’t)!
  3. The Voynich’s post-1600 history is worth no more than three minutes of anyone’s viewing experience. Don’t bother with overdressed period reconstructions of Rudolf II’s court, Sinapius, John Dee, Edward Kelley – by their time, the VMs had probably already had ten or more owners, none of whom showed any sign of their being able to read a word.
  4. Keep in mind at all times that there is no external pre-1600 evidence linking the VMs with anything, anyone or anywhere – yet radiocarbon dating indicates that the manuscript is 150+ years older. The only evidence we have to help us bridge that gap is hidden inside the manuscript itself – its pages, its inks, its design, its accidents, its execution, its forensic inner life.
  5. Hence, as early as possible, get high-calibre international experts on board to focus on the only two issues that really matter:-
    * codicology (How was the VMs constructed? What was its original state? What happened to it since?); and….
    * palaeography (What language are the marginalia written in? What do they say? What do the Voynichese letter shapes tell us? What structural similarities does Voynichese share with 15th century abbreviating Northern Italian scribal shorthands?)
  6. Once you have top-end experts on board, make friends with the Beinecke as quickly as you can. Go there; engage with the curators. Dismiss all theories (specifically don’t talk about alchemy or heresy, either would make you look speculative and foolish), while showing an appreciation of the limitations of the current evidence, and an active desire to improve academic knowledge.
  7. The viewer’s guide – the historical narrator – should be someone who can dive deep into a roiling mass of multi-faceted, heterogenous evidence and yet emerge the other side smelling of roses, all the while managing to make the (apparently contradictory) subject matter clear and accessible. An intellectual historian, in other words.
  8. Your challenge, therefore, is to produce a documentary that merges cunning forensic vision with big-brained intellectual history – essentially, “CSI: Voynich” meets Anthony Grafton. Can you do this? Really?

OK, it’s no big secret that the above basically describes the Voynich Manuscript documentary I’d really like to make. But all the same, I’d be utterly delighted if anyone else stepped up to the line (and in any language). But… will anyone ever do this? I’m not so sure… 🙁

PS:  I lied about there being ten rules – you’ll have to make up the last two yourself. 😉

“Naked Science” Nat Geo Voynich documentary…

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Last week  (3rd February 2011) saw the US premiere of “The Book That Can’t Be Read”, the long-awaited National Geographic channel airing of the recent ORF documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Though it prominently features the benign beardiness of everyone’s favourite Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen, for a pleasant change the star of the show is undoubtedly the manuscript itself, with the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s acquiescence to radiocarbon dating of the vellum the shining jewel in the Austrian documentary makers’ crown. If you missed it, it’s showing again shortly (10th February 2011, 4PM): it’s a fairly up-to-the-minute introduction to the VMs, so you should definitely fetch a mid-sized bag of toffee popcorn and settle down on your sofa for this one.

Interestingly, I don’t know if they significantly re-edited the programme for an American audience, but I was pleased – no: delighted, actually – to see some scans of the manuscript the film researchers had taken dotted among the set of low resolution Voynich promo photos on the NatGeo webpage (all © ORF). For example, slide #11 has the infamous erased signature on f1r (the frontmost page of the manuscript), which – with a bit of low-impact Gimp-fu – looks like this:-

Voynich Manuscript f1r, "Jacobj a Tepenece" signature, uv, enhanced

Voynich Manuscript f1r, erased signature

Having long ago slaved to produce not-quite-as-good versions of this from the RGB scans, it’s a pleasure to finally see this in its non-visible ultra-violet glory: to my eyes, it reads “Jacobj à Tepenece / Prag”, but I’ll happily defer to palaeographers working from higher resolution scans.

Slide #12 contains another UV scan, this time of my personal favourite piece of Voynich marginalia – the tiny letters at the top of f17r. Despite its ridiculously low resolution, what should be clear from the image (again, slightly Gimp-enhanced) is that the Voynich letters at the end (“oteeeol aim”, as per The Curse of the Voynich pp.24-25, 30) are an integral part of the writing, just as I claimed when I first saw them in 2006. The point being that if you accept that, then it becomes very likely that this and (by implication) the “michiton” marginalia on the end page were added not by a later owner, but by the encipherer of the VMs himself/herself. All fascinating stuff that, in my opinion, cuts deep to the heart of the VMs’ historical nature, but I’d be a little surprised if the documentary has been edited to cover it.

Voynich Manuscript, f17r marginalia, uv, enhanced

The "meilhor aller" marginalia from f17r of the Voynich Manuscript

Finally, the last photo of immediate interest to Voynich researchers is slide #13, which shows a close-up of the exposed quire bindings (i.e. with the manuscript’s cover partially removed). This kind of view offers a lot of information that you can’t normally see, because the bifolios are so firmly bound together that you can’t get at all close to the sewing holes in the spine of each quire – which is good for conservation, but bad for codicology.

Voynich Manuscript binding, close-up

View of the Voynich Manuscript's binding

Here, the features that particularly intrigue me are the faint writing on the inside cover (bottom left arrow); the non-continuous line of marks across the quire spines (mid-right arrow); and the many redundant sewing stations (needle holes from earlier bindings, indicated by short red underlines). These inexorably point to the manuscript’s complex reordering and rebinding history, i.e. where its quires and bifolios have danced a complicated quadrille over time to end up in their final order. What I don’t really understand is why codicologists don’t have entire conferences devoted to the Voynich Manuscript, because to my eyes it is surely the Everest of codicology – a complex, multi-layered artefact whose secret inner history can only practically be revealed through prolonged, collaborative, non-textual forensic analysis. And yet it’s only me who seems to have published anything substantial on it!

Anyway, set your PVRs to stun record and let me know what you think of the Naked Science documentary. Hopefully the documentary makers will now celebrate the occasion by releasing more information,data and photos on the Voynich Manuscript that they took during their research (hint: high quality versions of the above three images would be a very good start)!