Pater Castell and the Voynich Manuscript, reviewed…

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About a month ago, I mentioned here that there was an upcoming episode of “Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell” with a Voynich theme. Well… this aired on ZDF on 5th November 2009, and (with a tip of the hat to Michael Johne’s voynichlupe blog) here’s a link to the “Das Voynich-Manuskript” episode online so that you can watch it yourself.

It’s one of those programmes where the main characters are pretty much so well-defined that you don’t actually need to understand German to make sense of what’s going on. The only bit that I didn’t quite get is how Pater Castell used the page from the book from the school library to decipher the note on the noticeboard (yes, Charles, it does sound like a text adventure).

Having gone to a boy’s school myself (though since it went fully co-ed, Brentwood’s most famous ‘old boy’ is now Jodie Marsh, horror of horrors), I have to say that the most implausible bit of the episode was the way that the sexy Münchner detective Marie Blank walked around the school in tight white jeans without any of the sixth formers giving her a second look. Oh well… artistic licence, I s’pose.

For maximum Voynich spotter points, have your copy of “Le Code Voynich” open to page f52v, and observe the nine vaguely fern-ish leaf-swirls rolling over as they branch off a single vertical stem – though quite why Pater Castell mumbles “Kabbalah” to himself as he looks at this page is a little beyond me (sorry, but to my eyes it doesn’t resemble the Ten Sephiroth at all). For what it’s worth (typically £9.95 + p&p), I suspect that this page is a late “A” page, and was part of the Voynich author’s transitional phase which used the ‘A’ language  and fake plants to represent other things – in this case, a fountain.

f52v-comparison

One question that bugged me throughout the episode was… whom exactly did the main character remind me of? It took me right until the end to work out the alchemical wedding from whence Pater Castell (played by Francis Fulton-Smith) seems to have sprung…

segal-joly-fultonsmith

Yes, he’s the offspring of Steven Seagal and Dom Joly. Watch it for yourself and see if you agree.

And finally: structurally, “Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell” reminded me of another well-known TV series which  combines two strong main characters’ arbitrarily flying around in a light aircraft with blocky expositions of things that are mysteries to its (admittedly slightly younger) viewers, all sweetened by a bit of light drama. I’m referring, of course, to “Come Outside” (1994), featuring Lynda Baron (as Aunt Mabel) and her clever dog Pippin – a far more rounded role than her appearances on Eastenders as Jane Beale’s mum. (Though I d-d-doubt Arkwright would accuse Nurse Gladys Emanuel of being anything but fully rounded.)

For reference, Pippin’s the one without the goggles. Actually, “Come Outside” is a sweet little series for kids, and I hope it continues to be shown until at least the year 2999. 🙂

Voynich Manuscript “cosmic wormhole” theory…

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After extensively meditating on the mysterious star-disk often depicted behind Christ’s head, Wayne Herschel suddenly realized that…

The Christ story probably involved a ‘gold plate’ that was given to Judas by The Christ and it most likely had a secret inscription on it that would show the star map of the sacred lineage of our ancestors.

So… whatever happened to that gold plate and its secret inscription? Wayne believes that he has uncovered a drawing of it in the Voynich Manuscript’s astronomical section:-

The images on the manuscript depict nymphs – souls travelling the cosmos through cosmic wormholes and records of plants that are probably not of this world.

Yes, “cosmic wormholes” (he had previously posted about this here). He continues:-

On one special page [f68r3] it depicts the sacred cross with all the missing detail Wayne was looking for. It had the star secret and a face Sun star at its centre. It has a cluster of seven stars and a little line as if signifying a path of travel to the Sun star very near to the Pleiades, as already discovered by Wayne in many other ancient civilisations!

Here’s Wayne’s vivid illustration of what he sees when he looks at f68r3 (slightly reduced in size from the image on his site, but I’m sure you get the gist):-

Grail-small

But beware! Discoveries this powerfully convincing are all too easy for rival ideologies to appropriate for their own twisted counter-factual historical narratives:-

A New age group ‘Silver Gate’ has already threatened that they will plagiarise and be promoting Wayne’s Voynich findings as well as all of his star map findings and falsely adjust all of them to make it fit their movement, hoping their followers will not know it is altered.

I don’t know what to say. I’ve now seen literally hundreds of Voynich theories in this same general vein, and it is logically true not only that they can’t all be right, but also that they can all be wrong. The secret history of Christ, Judas, John the Baptist, the Pleiades, Orion’s Belt, Voynich, cosmic wormholes, New Age plagiarists… I think I need to lie down in a darkened room until the crushing headache this has given me starts to abate.

Just be grateful that I read all these pages so that you don’t have to. 🙂

Untweetable Voynich Manuscript limerick…

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Alas, sometimes the limitations of Twitter are all too apparent. The follow-up to my previous VMs limerick simply refuses to be shoehorned inside the 140 character limit:-

A dodgy bookdealer called Wilfrid
Hotly denied he had pilfered
Or hoaxed, faked or shammed
His “Book Of The Damned”
(That he’d bought off a geezer in Ilford)

Alternatively…

Did the Emperor purchase “The Voynich”
For 600 ducats of coinage?
Perhaps he had hoped
It described a strange soap
That would cure his mysterious groin itch!

Ah well, perhaps blogs aren’t so bad after all! 🙂

Nick’s Voynich Manuscript limerick…

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I’m not really getting on with the whole Twitter @nickpelling thing. I try but… it just seems to have all the downsides of texting (apart from a slightly nicer keyboard). Here’s today’s tweet, though:-

The Voynich Manuscript
Is something someone ripped
Off guys who died
Then placed inside
A cryptographic crypt!

Other people have probably written almost exactly the same limerick before. But who cares? It is what it is! Enjoy! 🙂

“Decoding the lost symbols” mini-conference…

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Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on “hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets”, hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book “Decoding The Lost Symbol”…

OK, I’m sure you’ve rumbled the secret already: that it’s basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox’s book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers doing their thing (and not a cipher mystery in sight, as far as I could see). I’m sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy this, but I personally won’t be red-eyeing over to the West Coast for this. (But please leave a comment here if you do happen to go.)

All of which does raise the question of whether I should organize my own proper cipher mysteries / secret histories conference (not to promote a book, but just to have some fun) and where. After all, there are plenty of nicely evocative places in Ye Quainte Olde Londonne Towne that I could hire for the day at less than staggering expense, and finding places to put speakers up should be straightforward. The kind of stuff I’d expect it to cover should come as no big surprise:-

  • The Voynich Manuscript
  • The Rohonc Codex
  • John Dee’s secret history (a perennial favourite!)
  • Rosicrucianism and Alchemy
  • Historical code-breaking – a practical guide
  • Armchair treasure-hunting / Treasure maps / The greatest (real) treasures never found
  • Panel: “Renaissance Symbolism – True or False?”
  • The Secret History of Renaissance Astrology
  • The Phaistos Disc (possibly)
  • (…and so on)

Would that be your idea of a perfect day out? Feel free to tell me what’s missing from the agenda!

1926 Budapest crossword suicide…?

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Here’s a blog I found today (“Alan’s Mysterious World”) with an odd story embedded in a brief history of crossword puzzles.

Apparently, in 1926 a Budapest coffee house waiter committed suicide, leaving a blank crossword puzzle as an explanation. According to this page, a note with it said: “The solution will give you the exact reasons for my suicide and also the names of the people interested.” The police asked the public if they could help solve it, but I can’t find any reference to anyone’s having solved it.

Honestly, am I really the only person who wants to see that crossword puzzle?

Update: we now know that this really happened – here’s a 2013 update on the whole crossword suicide story.

“Das Voynichmanuskript aus pharmaziehistorischer Sicht”…

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Here are two German papers (from 2007 and 2008) by Dr. Michael Mönnich on the Voynich Manuscript I stumbled across a few months ago, both of which place it within the context of the history of pharmacy:

Pharmazeutische Aspekte im Voynich-Manuskript.
In: “Drugs and medicines from sides of the Atlantic Ocean”
38th International Congress of the History of Pharmacy, Seville, 21st September 2007

Das Voynichmanuskript aus pharmaziehistorischer Sicht
In: Geschichte der Pharmazie 60 (2008), Heft 1/2, S. 9 – 14.

Dr Mönnich works at the Karlsruhe University Library (his homepage, his publications): I contacted him to ask if he had electronic copies of these articles he could email through for review here. He replied…

Unfortunately the article did not appear in an electronic form, so I could provide only photocopies, and it is in German. Then, I do not intend to publish anything on the Voynich in the near future.

So… if any Cipher Mysteries readers have access to a decent research library and are not put off too much by the idea of reading pharmacy history papers in German, please feel free to have a look at these and tell us all what Dr Mönnich’s particular VMs angle is. Thanks! 🙂

The Two Guillaumes (Rondelet and Pellicier)…

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Earlier this year, I proposed that the VMs might possibly have brought by Guillaume Pellicier from Venice to Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier, and listed a short bibliography of titles that would be worth consulting to check this out. A few days ago, I found one of them on the Internet:

Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier, ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542, publiée sous les auspices de la Commission des archives diplomatiques par Alexandre Tausserat-Radel (1899).

Usefully, pp.700-704 of this contain an (admittedly fairly terse) inventory of Pellicier’s personal library of 332 books. However, only one of these sounds even remotely like a candidate for the VMs:-

Hospitalières de Montpellier, Fonds de l’Hôpital général, B. lU; copie.
323. Liber de astronomia., gr., script.,continens lib. XX

Unfortunately, Pellicier seems amply Greek-savvy not to have misdescribed the VMs as a “greek” text, so this seems rather like a dead end. Oh well!

pp.710-721 contains the text “Vita Guillelmi Pellicier, episcopi Monspeliensis, ad virum eruditissimum Bernardum Monfalconiuiu, Benedictinum“, which includes a little bit about Pellicier’s book-buying on p.713 (penultimate paragraph).

As an aside, it’s also possible that had Rondelet acquired the VMs by other means, a quite different fate might have befallen it. According to this 2006 aricle on Clusius (p.95):- 

Rondelet himself became very worried after the arrest of Pellicier, and according to Joubert, secretly burned those books in his own private library which he thought might land him in trouble with religious inquisitors.

All of which defensive biblioclasm brings to my mind the underground “Bibliotek” memorial in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, located exactly where the infamous Nazi book burnings began – this was nicely evoked near the end of Alan Cumming’s recent BBC Four documentary on the film Cabaret. The plaque reads: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”

Upcoming Spanish and German Voynich novels…

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A couple of upcoming Voynich Euro-novels for your brief attention: firstly, the Spanish “El caso Voynich” (i.e. “The Voynich Case”) from Argentinian writer and columnist Daniel Guebel. Though references to it seem to have been temporarily removed from Guebel’s website, it appears to be based on contemporary-ish Voynich research, and may even include some VMs images. Due out next month (November 2009).

And secondly, “Engels Fall” (i.e. “Fallen Angels“ “Angel’s Fall” or “Angel’s Case”) by Helena Reich has a qualmless secret society leaving a trail of corpses across Prague, each with a tarot card signature… might a mysterious order of alchemists hold the missing pages of the VMs? Prague Post reporter Larissa Khek (the heroine of Reich’s earlier book “Watery Grave”)  is determined to find out [etc, etc]. Due out in two months’ time (December 2009).

“Don’t pay the Illuminati”… :-)

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Don’t blame me, I was vaguely interested to see what the top ranking Google search results for “conspiracy” were, when I just happened to glance sideways at the topmost Google Adwords advertisement:-

Don’t pay the Illuminati
Loan or credit card over £5,000?
We can write it off for free

In spite of myself, I very nearly snorted with laughter.  Bless ’em and their keyword sniffing ways, bless ’em all.