Review of Enrique Joven’s “The Book of God and Physics”…

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(I’ll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don’t have star ratings & I’m not one to hide what I’m thinking, so this connection shouldn’t affect the following in any significant way.)

A thing I hear again and again from Cipher Mysteries readers is that they just aren’t into buying novels: for the most part, they’re non-fiction addicts hooked on the subtle adrenaline rush of research and who mostly feel bemused (and possibly even slightly alienated) by my fiction reviews. What, they say, can we possibly learn from a novel?

My angle on Voynich novels has never really been that of a lit crit: which is possibly just as well, it ought to be said, because most are little more than medium-boiled airport novels. Rather, I’m interested in how the idea of the Voynich Manuscript (and/or other historical cipher mysteries) is perceived and passed on by non-Voynich-researchers. Do novelists and/or their research assistants just read the Wikipedia page and make up the rest (as per the basic ‘lazy writer’ stereotype), or do some of them actually engage with the VMs, with the messy Voynich research process, and perhaps even – shock horror – with the historical evidence?

To be honest, few VMs novelists give the impression of their even having reached halfway through the Wikipedia page (however understandable that is), while a surprising number give a strong impression of having relied on even less helpful VMs information sources (such as “The Friar and the Cipher”, ugh). Even in this glorious era of Internet research, the ancient ‘GIGO’ rule (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) works the same as it ever did. *sigh*

Yet Enrique Joven falls squarely into the engagement camp with his novel “The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, in that he has plainly done a lot of reading on the subject and is even well aware of the Voynich mailing list. His fictional treatment of the Voynich mystery is also pretty much the first one I’ve read that treats Jesuits in a fairly sensible, non-tokenistic way (doubly impressive given that his protagonist is a teacher at a Jesuit school), and he constructs his narrative around the VMs’ thrice-APODed page f67r1 and the astronomical sparks showered over the Imperial Court by the tense relationship between Brahe and Kepler (a subject I happen to know a fair amount about).

Yet curiously, the limitations of Enrique’s book arise not from the cipher or from the history, but instead from his treatment of those (fictional) Voynich mailing list members his protagonist gets caught up up with, many of whom apparently suffer from multiple-(virtual)-personality disorder. Now, I’m no great fan of the Voynich mailing list as it has become (has any genuinely useful research appeared there in several years? I don’t think so), and it is true that some listmembers post under deliberately false or whimsical names, as if they were secretly emo teenagers. But to make this aspect so central to the story has all the feeling of a false modern mythology, a kind of ‘Hollywood Internet’ where Everyone (apart from the straight-as-a-die protagonist) Is Online In Order To Hide Some Important Aspect Of Themselves That Will Be Revealed Later In The Plot.

That aside, Joven writes pretty well – and it was a pleasure to read a Voynich book where the Long-Hidden Secret Power It Contains is in fact not About To Destroy The World As We Know It, where the main character is not a charmlessly bionic version of Anthony Grafton, and where there are neither hordes of competing three-letter-agencies nor quasi-mystical Church-backed Conspiracies all fighting each other for ownership of the VMs’ boringly heretical secret.

Long-time (if not actually long-suffering) Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly point to my high opinion of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum and Lev Grossman’s Codex (both of which have much the same kind of ambitions and restrained execution as Enrique’s book) as correlative evidence that I’m down on Voynich airport novels: but actually, given that Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” is still firmly my #1 (why don’t Voynich novelists ever read this first?) on the Big Fat List, it really is all a matter of personal taste. OK, I still think Enrique’s publishers should have dug deep inside themselves to find the sense to keep the rather nice original Spanish title “The Castle of the Stars” (which actually chimes nicely with the story on many different levels, while also being pleasantly reminiscent of the linguistic hack “The astronomer married a star”), but then again it is what it is, and perhaps a clunky title alone isn’t enough to make or break a book these days.

One slightly odd coincidence is that just about the time that the paperback version came out recently, an entirely new Voynich theory came out (courtesy of P. Han) linking Tycho Brahe and historical supernovae to the VMs by way of China (but more on that another day). All of which just goes to show that there really is, errrm, nothing new under the sun, and that the boundary between historical hypothesis and fictional supposition can be surprisingly thin!

Isaac Casaubon’s “Ephemerides”…

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I wonder if anyone has ever looked at Casaubon’s letters and his monumental diary (called the “Ephemerides”, and written in Latin) with a Voynich-informed eye?

Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was regarded as one of the most learned men in Europe: and what is perhaps interesting to us (and that I didn’t know until a few days ago) is that though he started his career at the Academy of Geneva, he worked for a while at the University of Montpellier (1596-1598), before moving on to Lyon (1598-1599) at which point he was summoned to Paris by King Henry IV. In fact, though Dee researchers know him for his pursuit of John Dee’s papers, Casaubon only lived in London from 1610-1614 (and he couldn’t actually speak English), while Dee himself had died only in 1608 or 1609 (depending on who you ask).

Casaubon’s Latin correspondence (“Casauboni epistolæ, insertis ad easdem responsionibus“) was printed in Rotterdam (1709), while his Ephemerides were printed somewhat later (1850). Though I don’t think there is a critical edition of the Ephemerides available (nor indeed a translation, sadly), there are online editions of his letters here (I),  here (II), here (III), here (IV), and here (V), courtesy of the University of Mannheim.

OK, I’ll freely admit that the chances of anything turning up from this are small (Casaubon doesn’t really seem the type to gossip about a mysterious unreadable herbal that was doing the rounds). But because (given the VMs’ apparent links with Southern France / Savoy I’ve blogged endlessly about) we’d perhaps be more interested in 1596-1599 when he was in Montpellier and Lyon, you never know! 🙂

Voynich chicken scratches…

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As a Voynich Manuscript marginalia cognoscente, I’m always alert for new angles on the various incidental marks apparently added by its later owners. So, when Tim Tattrie left a comment about the “chicken scratch” marginalia on my recent Voynich-frontiers-circa-2010 post, I thought it was probably time to revisit them here.

Tim’s query was whether anyone had pursued the initials scribbled on f66v and f86v3: he noted that these were “clearly the same downward swept doodle of two or three letters (h?r), and because it is repeated in two folios, leads one to speculate its the initials of either the author, or an owner.” This almost exactly echoes what Jon Grove said on the Voynich mailing list (11 Sep 2002), that “It seems to consist of three connected downstrokes followed by a longer upstroke with a loop and final flourish, almost like ‘wR’ but not quite. It’s certainly not a random scribble. If it is a signature or monogram then it might help to establish dates and/or locations for the MS. ” To which Dana Scott replied at the time: “Notice that the single line ‘signature’ in f66v is essentially the same as the top line ‘signature’ in f86v (there are some differences to the right of each line).”

OK, so let’s look at them in all their hi-res glory. Firstly, the chicken scratches on f66v:-

And now here are the chicken scratches on f86v3. Palaeographically, I think this is much more interesting, because you can see what looks like a scribal line ending stub (in red), and lots of places where the quill has opened up under pressure in different directions (in blue). Some years ago, I suggested that these scratches might be an ink blot transfer of Georg Baresch’s signature, because if you rotate and flip them you can see letter-sequences that vaguely resemble “g///g”:-

However, there is a codicological nicety to consider here, which is that if you reorder Q8 (Quire #8) to place the astronomical (non-herbal) pages at the back, and also follow Glen Claston’s suggestion by inserting the nine-rosette quire between (the reordered) Q8 and Q9, what you unexpectedly find is that the f66v and f86v3 chicken scratches move extremely close together. If this is correct, it would imply that the doodles were added very early on in the life of the VMs, probably earlier even than the fifteenth-century hand quire numbering (and hence probably early-to-mid 15th century). And this would rule out Baresch by a couple of centuries or so. 🙂

But I have a possible bombshell to drop here. If I once again rotate and reverse the f86v3 chicken scratch, this moves the ornate scribal line-ending to the start, implying that it was the start of a line. Following the lines through from there on a Retinex-enhanced version of the page, I now suspect we know enough to separate out the letters one at a time:

If I’ve got this correct, then the letter sequence here is:-

  • (blue) “S“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (red) “i“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (orange) “m“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (purple) “o” / “n” / “t” [though it’s not entirely clear which]

So, something like “Simon”, then. What is particularly curious is that I have elsewhere suggested that the top-line marginalia on f116v reads “por le bon simon sint” in what I suspect was the handwriting of either the original author or someone very close to him/her. If that is right, then we can piece together a little bit of the VMs’ early 15th century provenance: that what we are looking at here is the ink blot signature of someone named (something close to) “Simon Sint”, who was very possibly the person to whom that original author gave the manuscript. Though it’s hard to be sure, this person may well be the same one who added the earliest set of quire numbers (which I called “Quire Hand 1” in The Curse)… but we’ll leave that issue for another day, that’s probably quite enough wobbly inferences for one post! 🙂

OK, as explanations go it’s not 100% convincing as yet, but all the same it’s a pretty joined-up historical hypothesis that could (and indeed should) be codicologically tested, which is more than can be said about most speculative VMs theories. I’m pretty sold on the idea that this is telling us we should be looking for someone (possibly a monk) in Southern France / Savoy called something not too far from “Simon Sint” circa 1450, and that this is his signature (i.e. he cared so little about the VMs that he used it as blotting paper, shame on him). Jeez, how specific do I need to be? 🙂

A Beautiful Infinity…

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

* * * * * *

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

Some Voynich short stories…

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For a change, here are some links to short-ish Voynich stories not actually written by me. 😉

Mataoaka has posted up two chapters of “Infernobella’s Adventures: the Voynich Manuscript” you might enjoy. Here’s Chapter 1, and here’s the (only-just-posted but fairly short) Chapter 2 – if you want to read more, tell the author to write some more! And yes, capturing “moonlight in a box” would indeed probably be easier than solving the VMs. 🙂

Secondly, here’s a link to Google’s cache of a nice little short story called “Ganthua” – though this only briefly name-checks the Voynich Manuscript, I rather like its characters and its oddly religious narrative spirit, revolving as it does around an implausibly large creature’s appearing on the beach on day and attracting a curious cult following. I don’t know why the author deleted his “Bit Gild” blog – if you happen to know him, tell him I liked Ganthua! More, please! 🙂

Codes on film!

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I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an “easy in”. Just saying “code” conjures up…

  • Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really)
  • Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of ‘The Secret’)
  • A central McGuffin that is small enough to be concealed, smuggled and fought over in hand-to-hand combat in an implausible (often underground) location
  • Highly motivated central character(s) who, though technically prepared for the challenge, rapidly find themselves out of their depth in every other sense
  • (and so on)

Do you need to know much more than the title to construct the film poster? No wonder film companies like codes so much! I’m immediately reminded of Mercury Rising (which I saw again recently, and sort-of enjoyed), but also the 2010’s The 7th Dimension which is just being premiered. Personally, I tend to avoid films where any of the main characters are billed as “hackers” like the plague, but then again that might be because I’m a computer programmer by trade – if I was a dentist, perhaps I’d have done the same for Marathon Man, who knows? 🙂

Anyhow… an historical cipher-themed film I’m genuinely looking forward to is The Thomas Beale Cipher, a short animated film by Andrew S. Allen that has already premiered and should be out on the international festival circuit during the rest of 2010. Details are (probably deliberately) sketchy right now (for example, the YouTube sampler video for the film has been withdrawn), but there is a Facebook page to whet your appetite a little – I’ll let you know of any screening dates.

Not quite so high on my list of upcoming historical code films to look for is The Ancient Code, to be distributed by Warner Brothers. This has apparently been in production for a couple of years, and gives every impression – from the fairly PR-centric set of materials on the website – of being a set of talking heads talking their heads off about different aspects of holism, surrounded by faux-psychedelic video editing effects. It’s true that the film-makers have  assembled a fairly, well, eclectic set of heads to do their talking thang: but it’s hard to see how Nick Pope, Tim Wallace-Murphy, Philip Gardiner, and even Johnny Ball (the former children’s TV presenter who you may recall attracting some criticism in late 2009 for his particularly colourful denial of climate change) amount to a gigantic hill of gravitas re ancient wisdom and codes concealed through the ages. But all the same, I’ll continue to try hard to swim against the tide of unconvincingness the film seems to be sweating from every pore, so wish me luck in that endeavour. 🙂

And finally… clicking onwards from The Ancient Code’s not-so-ancient website leads us neatly to Philip Gardiner’s upcoming The James Bond Code, which struggles valiantly to connect Ian Fleming’s (anti)hero James Bond with alchemy and gnosis (apparently via voodoo and numerology). There’s even a fan music video based on the book, which frankly even I’m struggling to grasp any kind of rationale for. Doubtless there’s some kind of film optioning angle going on here too. Honestly, would anyone apart from a rather fevered PR hack call this “The Thinking Man’s Da Vinci Code“? [Nope, not a hope, sorry.] But all the same, there you have it, so feel free to add it (or not) to your own personal list of, errm, ‘hysterical historical hypotheses’, along with Gavin Menzies’ 1421 & 1434, Edith Sherwood’s “Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Voynich Manuscript” theory, etc.

Visually mapping Cusanus and Bessarion…

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As I mentioned here recently, I’ve been trying to grasp the structure of the humanist community of astronomers / mathematicians orbiting around Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome… but so far haven’t found any definitively useful books on the subject. Thony Christie has a nice article here, and there’s a book on 15th century Viennese astronomy here (for Regiomontanus and Peurbach), but sadly not a great deal else that rises far above Wikipediaesque factoids.

All the same, here’s the connection map I’ve put together: it’s far from complete, but it’s probably a decent enough starting point. Doubtless you’ll note plenty of familiar names!

Map of the community around Nicholas of Cusa and Bessarion

Also, I found a nice blog post containing pictures of Bessarion: mirroring his life-long interest in astronomy, the Greek epitaph on his tomb (below) says “I, Bessarion, raised this tomb to hide my bones; my soul will seek the stars whence once it came.” Not particularly religious for a Cardinal, perhaps, but I like it all the same!

The greek epitaph on Cardinal Bessarion's tomb

David A. King’s Regiomontanus acrostic theory…

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Though Professor David A. King is best known, academically speaking, for his detailed study of astrolabes, I first ran across him via his epic (2001) tome “The Ciphers of the Monks” (summarised here): there, what happened was that one particular 14th century astrolabe from Picardy had some markings in an unusual number system first devised by Cistercian monks, and – like the proper devotee of historical arcana he assuredly is – King began collecting all the occurrences of that system he could find, which culminated in his book on the subject. There’s also a nice paper here on how the same number system was also used for tallying / gauging wines in the late Middle Ages.

All of which provides a suitable introduction to King’s most recent excursus beyond mainstream astrolabe history, because for this too the herald for his ‘call to adventure’ was an astrolabe with unusual markings on it (this time, an angel and an apparently acrostic dedication). But this second astrolabe also had a remarkable provenance – that Renaissance king of astronomers Regiomontanus had constructed it and presented it to his patron Cardinal Bessarion. Once again, David King set out to try to uncover the meaning of an astrolabe’s curious engravings – but his research journey carried him onwards to the artist Piero Della Francesca, right at the heart of the Renaissance project…

The angel part of the astrolabe engraving looks straightforward enough (note the parallel hatching on the top wing-edges, the trendy crosshatching in the background, the mid-Quattrocento “^” for “7” in the 60/70/80/90 sequences, and the early-Quattrocento ‘4’ shape at the bottom):-

Similarly, the dedication looks straightforward enough too at first glance (note the looped early-Quattrocento ‘4’ in 1462):-

 SVB DIVI BESSARIONIS DE
CARDINE DICTI PRAESI
DIO ROMAE SVRGO IO
ANNIS OPVS :~ 1462

King translates this as: “Under the protection of the divine Bessarion, said to come from the cardo, I arise as the work of Ioannes in Rome in 1462“. But the clever part, King believes, is that Regiomontanus’s slightly clunky Latin manages to cleverly conceal a number of additional messages to his new patron Bessarion:-

Here eight hidden vertical axes of an acrostic contain all sorts of hidden messages that would have especially pleased the Cardinal once he had figured them out: references to himself and his rank, to Regiomontanus, and to an old Byzantine astrolabe that he had shown to the young German. The angel is Bessarion, but not the Cardinal. There are several plays on the Latin word cardo, meaning “hinge, axis or pole”. In brief, two astrolabes come together in one, two poems, two languages, two Bessarions, two men who used the name Ioannes, two places, Rome and Constantinople, all come together in one.

Ummm… eh? It’s just a dedication, isn’t it? When I first looked at it, all I really noticed was the word “DEI” vertically hidden at the end: but Professor King thinks that the wobbly spacing and stretched letters indicates that there is much, much more going on here. However, it has to be said that after it was auctioned by Christies in 1989, precisely the same evidence was used to argue that it was “suspicious”, and that it even might be a “19th-century fake”: so be aware that we are now entering the kind of is-it-a-cipher/is-it-a-hoax territory that should be eerily familiar to Cipher Mysteries readers…

The other thing you need to know is that Bessarion also owned a spectacular Byzantine astrolabe dated 1062, which also had “:~” on one of its engraved bands of text: King agrees with Berthold Holzschuh that the two astrolabes are connected in some way, and that perhaps part of the reason for Regiomontanus’ presenting it to Bessarion in 1462 was to mark the 400th anniversary of the making of the magnificent Byzantine astrolabe.

So, let’s take a deep breath and dive deep into King and Holzschuh’s acrostic world, to see if his theories hold water (or if they sink like a stone)…

Firstly, Holzschuh suspects that the primary secret message held here emerges if you reorder the words to mirror the start of the Greek text on the Byzantine astrolabe:.

SVB BESSARIONIS PRAESIDIO
SVRGO
IOANNIS OPVS DICTI DE CARDINE DIVI
ROMAE 1462

…which (because the Latin word ‘cardo’ means hinge or axis) he translates as “Under the protection of Bessarion, I arise in Rome in 1462 as a work of Ioannes explaining the rotation of the universe“. He also notes that the angel’s fingers “point to 4 and 8 hours on the horizontal scale of the markings below it, suggesting we should look for eight items in the four lines of the epigram“. The eight vertically hidden messages he highlights look like this:-

(Note that this is adapted from p.12 of David King’s Regiomontanus theory webpage, but that the DEI ESIO (‘ESIO TROT‘, surely?) acrostic ringed in red was mislabelled VIII).

Now, I have to say that I really am particularly impressed with the acrostics marked I (SVB CD ANNIS) and VIII (1062 / 1462), in that these not only tie in neatly with the “:~” on Bessarion’s 400-yearold Byzantine astrolabe, but also nicely explain (a) the curious starting position of “SVB” on the top line and (b) why IOANNIS is split over two lines. However, sorry to be a dreadful cipher party pooper but I don’t actually buy into a single one of the other acrostics suggested, nor into any of the hundreds of tenuously complex patron saint / birthday / symbolism / IO / 1407 / golden section etc arguments that are used to support them. No, not even the angels’ fingers.

To my eyes, the astrolabe’s acrostic angle does tell a hidden story: that Regiomontanus presented this to his patron in 1462 with a silent nod to the 400th anniversary of Bessarion’s Byzantine astrolabe. Perhaps there’s even “DEI” hidden on the right (though this seems way too prosaic and straightforward for the needs of King’s complicated exegesis). However, I honestly don’t see any evidence of anything else hidden in the message that is beyond pure chance, i.e. that you could not also extract from just about any other Latin inscription of comparable size and date.

Hence, I just can’t make the giant leap over to the second plank of King’s narrative, which connects Bessarion’s patronage of Regiomontanus (as expressed in the 1462 astrolabe) to Piero Della Francesca’s epic painting “The Flagellation of Christ“, which Martin Kemp (1997) rightly described as “sumptuously planned”. This single work has caused more art history ink to be spilled in vain than perhaps any other painting (yes, even more than the Mona Lisa): King tabulates (pp.23-24) over forty subtly nuanced theories about who the various characters represent, before adding Berthold Holzschuh’s (2005) theory to the list – that the bearded man at the back being whipped is Cardinal Bessarion, and that the man in red at the left of the foreground group is Regiomontanus.

Nope, sorry – this theory doesn’t work for me either. There’s maths and geometry aplenty in Piero’s work, sure, but I completely fail to see how it links to Bessarion and Regiomontanus on any level. Perhaps my idea of what constitutes evidence is just too limited, or maybe I’m just too stupid to grasp how these two objects do really form part of a vast Renaissance patronage fugue. 🙁

If, however, you’re still intrigued by all this, there’s a nice set of slides on King and Holzschuh’s theory here: and a 2007 book by David King on the subject, with the snappy title Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas – From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation of Christ” (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner) that you can buy on Amazon, though be warned that even a second-hand copy is a hefty £120 (yes, really!) Enjoy!

The Chaocipher got Slashdotted!

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The Internet is a strange thing, a virtual photographer’s jacket crammed with countless pockets of enthusiasts. For example, you beautiful cipher mysteries fans circulate within one bijou (but nicely-appointed) pocket, while the massed legions of Slashdot fans have a Tardis-style hyperzoom lens pocket all of their own. But… what would happen if these two worlds collided?

A chance to find out came in December 2009, when Edith Sherwood’s The-Voynich-Manuscript-was-made-by-Leonardo-da-Vinci-so-it-was website got picked up by Slashdot. From the 4900 overspill visits Cipher Mysteries got at the time, I estimated that she must have had “(say) 30000 or more” visits. This was probably about right, because in the few days since the same thing happened to Cipher Mysteries last weekend, its visit counter has lurched up by 38,000+. The onslaught started on Saturday night, when at its peak the Cipher Mysteries server was getting a new visitor roughly every second. By late Sunday, however, the story had finally slid off the bottom of the Slashdot front page (which only ever lists the ten most recent news items), at which point the tsunami turned into merely a large river. 🙂

According to the server logs, my Slashdotted Chaocipher page was read in 132 countries (USA 52%, Canada 8%, UK 7.5%, Australia 5.4%, etc), while US Slashdotters were mainly from California, Texas, New York, Washington, followed by another long tail. And OK, I know it’s a biased sample, but it was nice to see Internet Explorer in less than 8% of the browsers. One long-standing stereotype did fall by the wayside, though: there was a relative absence of trolls leaving snarky comments. Might Slashdot be *gasp* growing up? 😉

Actually, the nicest thing about the whole episode for me was that Moshe Rubin’s brother in Florida was unbelievably impressed when he saw Moshe’s name pop up on Slashdot. I know it’s only a small thing, but I’m really pleased for the guy, he deserves credit for his hard work and persistence bringing the Chaocipher out into the light.

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Some quick follow-up thoughts on the Chaocipher…

It strikes me that Byrne’s neologism “Chaocipher” was remarkably prescient for 1918, because the whole idea of “chaos theory” – as per Wikipedia, “the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions“, AKA ‘the butterfly effect’ – had not long before that been started by Henri Poincaré. The French mathematician had shown that the classical three-body problem sometimes yielded tricksy outcomes that never converged (i.e. to a collision) nor diverged (i.e. to increasing distance from each other), but where the three bodies were somehow trapped in a dynamically constrained yet utterly mad-looking (OK, he actually said ‘nonperiodic’) manner. Yet after this promising beginning in the 1880s, the ‘chaos’ concept’s journey onwards was a particularly arduous (and non-obvious) one: even though people noticed the signatures of this odd behaviour in many different contexts, they had no comfortable vocabulary to describe it until well after Benoit Mandelbrot and Edward Lorenz in the 1960s.

And so I find it neatly uncanny that the Chaocipher appropriates the “chaos” word 50 years earlier than it should, while at the same time exactly demonstrating the properties that contemporary mathematicians now ascribe to it (i.e. “deterministic chaos”). As the cipher’s twizzling steps subtly mangle the order of the letters on the two rotors, both the error propagation and the cipher system complexity sharply ramp up over time, in a (quite literally) chaotic way: to my eyes, Byrne’s Chaocipher is no less artful and pleasing than any Mandelbrot set I’ve ever seen. However, because its mechanism was not disclosed until this year (2010), it is perhaps best thought of part of the secret history of applied chaos: by way of comparison, the earliest paper on “chaotic cryptography” I’ve found was Baptista’s “Cryptography with chaos” in Physics Letters A (1998) [mentioned online here].

So, it might be that as the full story behind the Chaocipher emerges from Byrne’s papers, we’ll discover that he cleverly applied Poincaré’s and Hadamard’s ideas to cryptography: but – between you and me –  I somehow doubt that this is what really happened. In my mind, there’s something both ham-fistedly mathematical and deviously mechanical about the Chaocipher, that makes its mongrelly combination of Alberti’s cipher wheel and movable circular type something that could (in principle, at least) have been devised any time since about 1465. All the same, I think that the single aspect of the Chaocipher that most makes it resemble an out-of-place artifact is that it is a pure algorithm made solid – a bit like a programming hack devised by someone who had never seen a computer. Perhaps programming is closer to carpentry than we think!

Without doubt, the Chaocipher lies just outside the rigid mathematical confines of the cipher development path laid down by the sequence of crytographers since Alberti: and so for me, the most inspiring lesson to be learned from it is that genius need take only a single step sideways to become utterly unrecognizable to the mainstream. Thinking again about the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher, might that too merely stand a single conceptual step beyond our tightly-blinkered mental range? Furthermore, might that also ultimately turn out to be part of the same secret history of applied chaos? It’s certainly an interesting thought…

The Chaocipher revealed!

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“The Chaocipher” is a devious cipher system invented in 1918 by John F. Byrne: allegedly, it was so complex that nobody could crack his challenge ciphertexts (even with the plaintext to refer to!), yet was so simple that its mechanism was claimed to comprise only two rotating disks small enough to fit in a cigar box, and could be operated by a ten-year-old (admittedly a diligent, determined and well-practised one) to encipher and decipher texts.

Hence, the Chaocipher’s long-standing mystery revolved around three questions:

  1. Was the Chaocipher for real? (i.e. could something so simple really produce such tricksy ciphertext)?
  2. Was it more secure than, say, the Enigma machine?
  3. More to the point, is the Chaocipher actually an unbreakable cipher?

As of a few years ago, only three people knew the Chaocipher’s secrets – John Byrne Jr (the inventor’s son), and two Cryptologia editors (who saw it in 1990 but were sworn to silence). Yet as Chaucer noted, time and tide wait for no man (not even Cryptologia editors) – so there was a very real (and growing) possibility that the secrets of the Chaocipher might somehow get lost forever.

Hence last August, Moshe Rubin – who CM readers may well recall as the zesty Israeli software / crypto guy who not long before had set up the Chaocipher Clearing House website – decided to try to contact John Jr before it was too late, and so cold-called his way through the list of Byrnes living in Vermont. Before long, Moshe found himself in contact with Patricia Byrne (John Jr’s wife) from whom he discovered the sad news that her husband had passed away a year or two previously.

However, because Pat Byrne was already looking for a buyer for her husband’s cryptological material, Moshe put her in contact (via David Kahn) with David D’Auria, the chairman of the National Cryptological Museum’s Acquisitions Commitee. Somewhat surprisingly, after a couple of months Pat Byrne very generously decided to donate the whole set to the NCM, a terrific gesture which I (for one) highly appreciate (and I hope that you do too!)

And so it came to be that Moshe Rubin found himself allowed what he describes as “preview access to some of the material“.  Although he found that the precise setup John Byrne Sr had employed was not immediately obvious from the material to hand, Moshe burnt a load of midnight oil (is elbow grease more or less inflammable?) before finally managing to reconstruct the original algorithm in all its subtly obfuscatory glory.

Just as Byrne had described, his Chaocipher used two rotors (with the plaintext alphabet on the right rotor and the ciphertext alphabet on the left rotor) BUT with both alphabets altered slightly (let’s call this process ‘twizzling’, for want of a better word) after processing each letter. I’ve hacked together a 30-second Chaocipher animation on YouTube to try to demonstrate Byrne’s twizzlification…

Rather than go through the fine details here, I’m happy to refer you to Moshe’s detailed (and very readable) description of the process here: the only significant difference between my video and his text is that because the rotors mesh (and hence physically rotate in opposite directions to each other), the numbering sequence on each rotor is reversed relative to the other – i.e. even though #1 is at the top of each rotor, #2 and #3 proceed clockwise on the right (plaintext) rotor but anticlockwise on the left (ciphertext) rotor. Whereas in his text, both numbering systems run in parallel to each other (which might confuse you, it certainly confused me a little).

Of course, the obvious practical weakness of the Chaocipher is that any errors in enciphering, transmission, and deciphering get near-irreversibly propagated through the rest of the message: which probably makes the whole system too fragile to use in wartime, however cryptographically secure it may be (and, answering the second question above, I suspect that it may well prove to be more complex than Enigma, for it really is quite a fiendish system).

But is it (practically) unbreakable? Well, the obvious answer would be that if it has now been released into the wild, you’d have thought someone in a three-letter-agency (or GCHQ, naturally) would have worked out a clever way in. However, I’m not 100% sure that has happened yet… so, interesting times.

All credit to Moshe Rubin, then, for his persistence and hard work bringing this cipher mystery into the light: he has a Cryptologia paper coming up, and plenty more work to do over coming months (or years?) fleshing out the behind-the-scenes story from the stack of Byrne’s papers now in the NCM. It’s a fascinating slice of cipher history, and I wish him the very best of luck with the inevitable book and selling the movie rights! 😉

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Update: I’ve added a follow-on Chaocipher post here, discussing the intriguing parallels between the Chaocipher and chaos theory…