eBay crystal sphere – bargain or scam?

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Why, lookie here. An eBay trader is selling a $999 crystal ball allegedly from a boarded-up Voodoo family estate. It says here that the ball was manufactured according to the “alchemic recipe” given in “Apocalypsis spiritus secreti” (by the Venetian Giovanni Battista Agnelli, a book best known from its 1623 printed edition, but John Dee owned a copy too).

And if that alone is not enough to get you wrench open your chequebook against your will, you’ll be signing cheques in your own blood by the time you’ve read the next bit, just in time for Christmas delivery (of course):-

They name Wilfrid Michael Voynich along with his London & New York book shops as being the source of & a number of text & artifacts [in this estate] which their financial records corroborate. They name him as being “met and turned” in Italy in 1898 & apparently had dealings with him until his death in 1931, and with his wife until the time of her demise 1960, whom by the way, they claim “was known to us prior to their marriage”. The timeline makes this LiDiex no more than eleven years old at the time of his “turning”. They name Voynich as their intermediary with the Jesuits of Villa Mondragone in 1912. Their journal entries concerning the “Black Robes” as they refer to the Jesuits & their acquisition of “ancient devices and texts” span decades & a number of articles from this estate have such attributes.

The “LiDiex” is some kind of multi-generational voodoo craftsman, in case you’re wondering. Continuing…

They claim this sphere is, “one of the fifty three made for our Mistress’ use by alchemic recipe contained in the text”, pertaining to their copy of a 16th. century text titled, the Apocalypsis spiritus secreti, by Giovanni Baptista Agnelli, obtained by the Jesuits that allegedly belonged to a John Dee in the 16th. century & obtained by them in 1912. Here again we urge you to research the names mentioned here.

The 1888 LiDiex “under guise” is alleged to have accompanied Voynich to Villa Mondragone in 1912 where he gained access to items in the Jesuit’s possession. Some were purchased, but others were stolen, such as two crystal spheres that had once been the possessions of John Dee which they burgled, replacing them with glass.

John Dee, Wilfrid Voynich, Villa Mondragone, Jesuits, alchemy, Agnelli, LiDiex, crystal balls? Fabulous, amazing, incredible… nonsense, I suspect. Caveat lector, never mind caveat emptor. But make up your own mind!

Other Kinner letters…

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Though the Dean at All Saints in the Citadel of Prague was one of the earliest people to mention the Voynich Manuscript (in two letters to his old friend Athanasius Kircher), poor old Godefridus (Gottfried) Aloysius Kinner of Löwenthurn hasn’t really featured much in the discussion so far.

In Kinner’s letter dated 4th January 1666, he mentions to Kircher that their mutual friend Johannes Marcus Marci asked after “that arcane book which he gave up to you“, which itself seems to mark Marci’s (rather more famous) letter to Kircher as genuine. Kinner also expresses cynicism about alchemy, judging it to be as “worthless” as judicial astrology has proved to be.

Kinner’s letter dated 5 January 1667 from the following New Year finds him still battling with asthma and a cough, and notes that even though Marci “has lost his memory of nearly everything“, he still “wishes to know through me whether you have yet proved an Oedipus in solving that book which he sent via the Father Provincial last year and what mysteries you think it may contain“. He also laments the recent death of Gasparus Schott.

Up until now, most Voynich-related archival search has been carried out by relentlessly trawling through Kircher’s obsessively overflowing (and increasingly well-documented and accessible) inbox. However, for all its interest, this is rather like hearing only one side of a phone conversation – there’s only so much you can reliably infer. I wondered: might there be other letters from/to Kinner out there, or perhaps even books (as these often contained copies of letters)?

A quick online trawl turned up some Kinner letters from 1664-1665 with Christiaan Huygens, reproduced in book V of his “Œuvres complètes”. Curiously, Huygens’ correspondence was published in 22 volumes (from 1888-1950!) yet doesn’t seem to get mentioned much (I ought to add it to my list of correspondence projects): presumably we’d be most interested in looking at “Tome Sixieme: Correspondance 1666-1669” (which I don’t think is online)…

The mention of the Jesuit Gaspar Schott in Kinner’s 1667 letter is also interesting: not only did Schott study under Kircher, he also (while a Professor at Palermo) corresponded with Guericke, Huygens and Boyle, compiling it all into the “Organum mathematicum“, a massive collection of novelties and things of contemporary interest… which Kinner helped edit. Such are the bonds which tie a community together.

Incidentally, the nine volumes of the Organum are: (1) Arithmeticus, (2) Geometricus, (3) Fortificatorius, (4) Chronologicus, (5) Horographicus, (6) Astronomicus, (7) Astrologicus, (8) Steganographicus, (9) Musicus. Of course, book eight might be the most interesting for Voynich researchers. 🙂

WorldCat lists other books by Kinner, such as his (1653) “Elucidatio geometrica problematis austriaci sive quadraturæ circuli“, and his (1664) “Stella Matutina In Medio Nebulae, Sive Laudatio Funebris“, but I somehow doubt that these will produce anything useful.

From all the above, it should be clear here that we are talking about an active community of people continually corresponding across Europe: and indeed, over recent decades letters have become perhaps the most fashionable form of historical documentation amongst early modern / Renaissance historians.

So, you would have thought it would be useful to find out if there is an archive somewhere that just happens to have more correspondence from Kinner, right?

However sensible an idea, this immediately runs into a brick wall: the lack of any kind of cross-collection finding aid for early modern historical correspondence. In fact, libraries’ and private collections’ programmes for scanning and indexing letters are decades behind the many (far more high-visibility) book-scanning programmes. Funding-wise, it seems that books are “sexy”, while letters are “unsexy”: but actually, ask working historians and you’ll find that this is just wrong.

My guess is that the right place to start such a quest would be Book VI of Huygens’ Oeuvres Complètes, to see if it says where Huygens’ correspondence to/from Kinner is held. It may well be that this points the way to more of the same, who knows?

UPDATE: thanks to Christopher Hagedorn’s exemplary persistence in the face of the BnF’s flaky servers, we now have a direct link to Book VI of Huygens’ Oeuvres Complètes. From this we can tell that Kinner’s correspondence seems to stop dead in 1667, the same year that Marci died. My guess is that perhaps this too marked the end of Kinner’s life (and the likely end of this avenue). Ah well. 🙁

“The statistics of meaning”…

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Here’s a teaser for a 2009 paper (from Significance, Vol. 6, No. 4., pp. 165-169) which some Voynich Manuscript researchers might possibly be interested in:-

How concentrated is the information in Darwin’s Origin of Species? How heavy a read is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall? Where does a great white whale fit in? And what on earth is the mysterious Voynich manuscript that has baffled scholars for centuries?Marcelo Montemurro and Damián Zanette look at words and the information they contain.

I have to say that I’m somewhat dubious that any practical lessons about information content can be explicitly drawn from Voynichese transcriptions, given the battles that continue to rage over whether it is a hoax, a lost (public) language, a personal (private) language, or a ciphertext [hint: it’s the last, but don’t tell anyone].

Implicitly, however, there’s a big lesson to be learned, which is: if you apply your favourite statistical tools to things you don’t understand even slightly, don’t be surprised if you get paradoxical or uncertain results. That is, rather than computer scientists’ favoured “Garbage In, Garbage Out“, a more accurate high level model would seem to be “Caviar In, Sh*t Out“. Oh well!

Austrian “The Voynich Riddle” documentary…

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ORF has just announced that its 45-minute Voynich documentary “DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL” (the Voynich riddle) will be broadcast on ORF2 (on Astra) at 21:05 on Thursday 10th December.

Well-known Voynich researcher René Zandbergen (who has been involved in the documentary’s production) has kindly passed me an English translation of ORF’s brief online description:-

The Most Mysterious Manuscript In The World.

It is the most mysterious manuscript in the world: a book written by an unknown author, illustrated with drawings that are as bizarre as they are enigmatic – and in a language that could not be deciphered by the best cryptographers in the world. No wonder that this manuscript even plays a role in Dan Brown’s new mystery bestseller “The Lost Symbol”. Since its discovery 100 years ago, the Voynich Manuscript has equally captivated both scientists and occultists. The breakers of the Japanese “Purple” code, physicists with modern computers or expert historians – they all tried their luck, but so far nobody could decipher the contents of this book. This documentary follows a new trail that could lead to the author, using the first ever forensic investigation of the book itself to try to break the secrets of this mysterious manuscript.

A documentary by Klaus Steindl and Andreas Sulzer.

OK… though it’s true that the VMs only gets namechecked in “The Lost Symbol”, and that it has attracted far more interest from novelists than it ever has from occultists, I (along with most other Voynich researchers, I confidently predict) can barely wait to see what they’ve come up with.

I really hope that Klaus and Andreas have managed to do a good job of (a) the history, (b) the forensic science, and (c) putting the two halves together in a coherent and persuasive way. Fingers crossed for them!

“Sous Le Manteau De La Nuit” (2007)…

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Though I’m not sure from the blurb whether it’s a literary detective story or a love story (it might well be both), Tristan Marechal’s (2007) “Sous le manteau de la nuit” definitely does feature the Voynich Manuscript. The protagonists accidentally discover a painting in the (Florentine, not Venetian) Galleria dell’Accademia’s reserve stock that just happens to contain some Voynichese lettering, and (presumably) everything leads on from there.

At least Dennis Stallings will have something nice to put on his Christmas list this year. 🙂

“Alien” cipher language…?

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Ever heard of Palo Alto CARET Labs? Nope, neither had anyone else until “Isaac” posted about his experiences at “PACL” in the mid-1980s as part of a team trying to turn “extraterrestrial technology” taken from “crash sites” into consumer goodies (such as a personal anti-gravity machine, apparently) for our sated materialist society.

So far, so mainstream UFO subculture: but what moves Isaac’s story into the A-list of recent UFO narratives is the set of lovingly-constructed images accompanying it. Some of these show machines (like a junkyard engine with neatly stencilled-on white lettering), while others are extracts from technical report “PACL Q4-86” (though why smuggle out a redacted version?) showing abstract representations of octal software / hardware with wonderfully obfuscated descriptions (e.g. “Isolated view of a three-node AB-type semaphore cascade, extending from an exterior vertex of an octal junction”).

isaac-caret-diagram

There’s a ton of online discussion of Isaac’s images, nowadays mostly centring on whether Adobe Illustrator or Adobe AutoCAD was used to create his pretty diagrams (I’d say Adobe Illustrator, with lots of text and element reuse to make it seem like more than it actually is).

Though I’m not a ufologist (“Men In Black” is about as close as I get), what I like here is his funky alien alphabet – equal parts Star Fleet and Japanese (Kana). For all Isaac’s talk that this expresses a ‘non-compiled alien symbolic programming language’ (yeah, riiiight), it closely resembles a European monoalphabetic cipher in the following basic ways:-

  • There seems to be an explicit numbering system
  • There seem to be a Romance-language-size character set
  • There seems to be a sharp language-like distribution to the symbols

Hence, I predict that the UFO hoaxer created a simple A-Z/0-9 alien font in Adobe Illustrator and just typed a load of technical-looking nonsense along lots of curved paths. For example, here are some of the number-like text fragments from various pages:-

isaac-caret-numbers

To my eyes, this gives the impression of someone cut-and-pasting nonsense numbers – I’d predict that the shapes either side of the repeated string on the left are ‘(‘ and ‘)’ respectively (they reappear in matched pairs elsewhere in the diagrams), that the left pair of strings each reads “(5604)”, and that the other two strings encipher ’12’ and ‘160’. Note that I’m guessing those leading digits are 1’s, on the basis that Benford’s Law probably also holds true on alien worlds. 🙂

If you’re interested in trying to crack this for yourself, feel free to download pages 119, 120, 121, 122, and 123 from Isaac’s Fortune City pages, and see how far you can get. Good luck! 🙂

Occulto TV’s Voynich Manuscript intro…

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Apparently, what the world really, really needed was Occulto TV’s Italian YouTube video introduction to the VMs hosted by Micky Bet. So isn’t it just a huge piece of luck that’s this is what it just got? Here’s Micky with Wilfrid Voynich (he’s the one with the glasses). Scorchio!

MickeyBet

In case you didn’t know, Micky also appears on Naked News, where her write-up says:

Micky Bet was born and raised in Milan. 29 years old with working experiences in show biz and broadcasting. Joins the Naked News team in may 2008. Friendly face and impeccable diction that recalls the Italian TV anchors of the 80-s. She has a special tattoo that the members of Naked News have discovered. She loves to spend her holidays in Sardegna. You can see her in almost all our segments of daily news, gossip, show biz. She likes specially football and once said that she would love to dedicate time to segments like automotive. She has decided to join Naked News because she considers it as “the most unique experience of her life”. 

You see, I told you the VMs had a link with Milan. 🙂  Enjoy!

The Secret History of That Which Is Secret…

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If you accept the basic notion that the Voynich Manuscript is both (a) very probably a genuine (if perhaps rather convoluted) cipher, and (b) mostly rational, then you run into the issue of what kind of sensible stuff lies beneath – in other words, its “secrets”. All the same, how sure are we that our modern notion of “secrets” is anything like the Early Modern / Renaissance notion of “secrets”? However tempting it may be, back-projecting what we think and know now onto what people thought and knew several centuries ago is very often significantly wrong – in fact, this is one of the major sources of historical errors.

For example, I would argue that the original meaning of “secrets” has become progressively diluted by a centuries-long barrage of religious and political propaganda dressed up as conspiratorial claims. Perhaps the best-known example of this is the polemical vitriol directed against the Jesuits from around 1600 onwards (less than a century after the Society of Jesus was formed), and which even now finds expression in contemporary works – Dan Brown’s fumbling portrayal of Opus Dei machinations in The Da Vinci Code is essentially 17th century anti-Jesuit propaganda dressed up in 20th century garb.

Going back further still, Carlo Ginzburg attracted both bouquets and brickbats (in roughly equal measure) by suggesting that the stories told about witches by the Inquisition bore many striking resemblances to the stories told in previous centuries about Jews (poisoning wells, etc). None of these stories had any basis in reality – yet ultimately they are the sources that people rely upon when they talk about the suppression of heresies.

Somewhere along the line people progresssively forgot that this was just political propaganda, and the notion of the ‘Big Heretical Secret That Must Be Hidden By Any Means’ started to assume centre stage. I defy anyone to point me to any Big Heretical Secret that was in any way cryptographically concealed. (Note that (a) the jury is out on the Rohonc Codex; (b) if the Turin Shroud does turn out to be a genuine artefact brought back from the East by the Knights Templar, it would be ultra-orthodox rather than ultra-heretical; and (c) don’t even think about raising the so-called Bible Code).

(Of course, this is the point where some like to counter that the Big Heresy that was concealed must be So Very Big that we’re automatically blinded to it by our politico-historico-religious acculturation. To which I reply: even though my eyes are wide open, I continue to see nothing even remotely close.)

In actuality, every single Early Modern secret I’ve come across to date is simply what we would nowadays call a “trade secret”. Whether the trade is respectable (paint-maker, apothecary, glassworker, optician, architect, engineer, metalworker) or not (alchemist, necromancer, perpetual motion maker, perpetual light maker, empiric, politician 🙂 ), what they wanted to keep secret was “how to” procedural knowledge.

Roger Bacon’s statement that one should “not cast pearls before swine; for he lessens the majesty of nature who publishes broadcast her mysteries” stands firmly on the rock of esotericistic mystification implicit in the well-known “Secretum Secretorum“: but in my opinion this primarily referred to veiling the (supposed) secrets of natural science from those living outside Academe’s leafy vale. And in the end, this particular bubbling tureen of fringe knowledge reduces down to a small bowlful of alchemists’ trade secrets.

The whole “Secret History of Secrets“, then, comes down to one thing: rather than being heretical, they were useful – that is, not ideas to change or topple religious worldviews, but ways to help people do things.

In this general vein, here are a couple of nice Renaissance trade secrets I’ve noted recently. Firstly, a report that some Venetian paintmakers or painters seem to have added finely ground glass to their paints, presumably to try to produce a luminous effect; and secondly, that Antonello da Messina may have been the missing link / roving master that brought oil painting secrets from Van Eyck to Venice (where all the other painters got it from). Incidentally, Giorgio Vasari alleged that Van Eyck was both a painter and an alchemist (which I didn’t know): and in fact there is a whole mad literature hunting for alchemical symbolism in Van Eyck’s work… not my kind of thing, sorry.

Every Voynich Book Ever Written (Condensed)…

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As my plane reached New Haven in Chapter One, I began to realize that this “Voynich Manuscript” mystery was going to be a tough nut to crack. And when the first of my idealistic (but fruit-loop) cryptographic allies got ritualistically murdered by the end of Chapter Two, it was clear that the stakes were higher than an NBA star’s dandruff. Yes, it’s true that a succession of unconvincing experts blowing huge Wikipedia chunks filled Chapters Three through Ten, but by then it was painfully clear that only I could Save The Whole Darn World from the Strange Dateline Doom Curse someone had described and mysteriously encrypted 500+ years ago. So, I simply settled down to enjoy the gallop across a gaudily rich set of world mystery locations while various centuries-old rivalries played themselves out. Then, at the breathlessly cinematic set-piece ending, I Finally Saved The World From Itself (thanks mainly to my keen historical & psychological insights). Thank goodness I didn’t have to stick to the facts or it would have been a really dull read – hooray for the VMs and its lack of evidence! 🙂