Rushkoff: Capitalism vs The Middle Ages…?

by ⋅ 4 Comments

First things first: I loved Douglas Rushkoff’s book “Coercion” (2000), and so have been looking forward to his upcoming take on corporatism “Life Inc” (due June 2009). But when I read his recent blog entry on the economy, I have to admit that my heart sank somewhat.

Rushkoff’s starting point there is that we working peons been playing a lose-lose game for the last five hundred years – that from the Renaissance onwards, capitalism was a Ponzi scheme expressly designed to make the rich richer while keeping the poor in their place.

Well, duh. This should only really be revelatory to those who have spent no time at all thinking about what money does, or who have perhaps spent too much time in the toxic companionship of economists (who studiously ignore the whole socio-political aspect of capital, preferring instead to look at flows of numbers). It’s why debasing the coinage has always been such a heinous crime – only kings and queens (oh, and central banks now) are allowed to do anything as foolish as that. And all of this is an issue that has been going on not just since 1500 or so, but for millennia.

OK, so control over money is perhaps the most raw expression of power going: but why try to pin the blame for all that on the Renaissance? Well… perhaps I ought to let you into a secret. To every modern historian’s ears, there are certain keywords and keyphrases that are a dead giveaway that someone has no real idea what they are talking about. My own list:-

  • Dark Ages (this was when, exactly? It depends who you ask, basically)
  • Middle Ages (a fiction humanists concocted to make themselves seem cool)
  • Renaissance (a fiction Jacob Burckhardt concocted to justify his research programme)
  • Leonardo da Vinci (a few good pictures but basically zero influence for centuries)
  • Rise and fall of civilizations (Spengler’s historical cycles that don’t really exist)
  • La longue duree (Braudel’s neat macrohistorical notion that doesn’t really exist)
  • Nazi (comparisons with the Nazis normally show that someone has lost an argument)

These are all historiographical cargo cults, too frequently venerated by historians simply by dint of the amount of historical graft that has been applied to them – and all too frequently appropriated by cultural writers in the way gullible Victorian historians all too often did to rig their own moral evidential votes, to falsely justify their pre-formed conclusions.

So when I hear Rushkoff talk of “a centralized economic plan [that] ravaged the real world over the past 500 years“, and that exclusive royal charters distorted the marketplace leading directly to modern hypercapitalism, please excuse me if I just don’t buy into it. Yes, such charters very probably fanned the flames of the War of Independence: but did they lead to Bear Stearns? No, I don’t think so.

And can it be true (as Rushkoff claims) that the cathedrals of the Middle Ages form some kind of glaring ‘elephant-in-the-room’ counter-example to modern global capitalism, in that many such cathedrals were financed by local merchants rather than by proto-robber-barons?

Actually, no again. These constructions are relics of what some might argue is the greatest Ponzi scheme ever confected: Purgatory. Many of these (literally) awe-ful monstrosities, then, were financed by the sale of indulgences to redeem yourself or your recently-deceased (but sinful) relatives: many were also built with tithed labour (as I recall). Basically, it was not some unspecified Renaissance financial model that killed them off, it was the Reformation, which saw selling indulgences in this way as morally depraved.

[As an aside, Pope John Paul II declared in 1999 that Purgatory was not actually a physical place, but rather a “condition of existence” – nice to see the Church moving with the times. Would Saatchi & Saatchi have instead suggested rebranding it as “Hell Lite”?]

Rushkoff also goes on about local currencies, the kind of thing anti-capitalists and collectives have been using for decades. What… like the pound, then? The US Dollar only has its place as a world trading currency because Far East countries have collectively made it so – and the day when that particular monetary ‘hegemony’ ceases can surely not be that far away. The view from outside New York is quite different, I’d say.

Just because I disagree with Rushkoff and I’ve got an MBA doesn’t make me an apologist for the system. In my opinion, the fundamental distortion in the system is the investment banks – how can you get sound advice from someone who benefits from any upsides to your trades but which has no exposure to any downsides? Future returns on investment get valued in the present relative to each other in terms of risk and reward (and investor appetite): but the investment banks gamed that system to the point that all that was important was volume. And let’s not even talk about the chillingly mad economics of IPOs either, or venture capitalists’ über-bubble economics.

Rushkoff loves the hacker counter-culture ethic, and plainly wants to catalyse other people into applying it to ever more mainstream parts of society: he wants us all to be culture hackers, which is not a bad thing. Yet I think the big question here is how corporates (our pension funds, basically) can get by without investment banks’ ever-morphing range of financial products – not hacking the markets, but hacking the marketplace. Get that right, and we all stand a bit more of a chance.

Voynich herbal page order…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Another day, another provocative (but good) question from my fellow contrarian Glen Claston (we’re both part of the Contraria diaspora):-

So Nick, since you’re one of those who think that the book was dropped and put back together haphazardly, you’d be the one to ask for evidence that the various quires you think are misordered are actually misordered.

[…] What about the first three quires? What do we consider physical evidence, and if a page is thought to be moved, what is the timeline evidence for that?

Now, being “moved” or “out of order” are subjective assignments, I realize. I prefer to look not for what might be supposed as the original collation, since we don’t really have much physical evidence on that, and it’s hard sometimes to tell what happened between one binding and another. “Order of construction” is a topic that most observations fit into, so perhaps that’s what I’m looking for here.

Given that we now have plenty of solid evidence elsewhere in the Voynich Manuscript of bifolios that are reversed, misbound, and rebound, I think we should start from a position of uncertainty – that is, rather than assuming that the current page order is basically correct, we should view that as a hypothesis and consider evidence both for and against it.

Yet as Glen knows well, the problem with the first three quires (Q1 to Q3) is that codicological evidence pointing back right to the original collation (and even to the original intention!) is decidedly thin on the ground. And he has presumably chosen these three quires because they are less problematic than Q5 to Q7 (which have both Currier Hand 1 and Currier Hand 2 bifolios mixed in together) and Q8 (which we agree seems to have been back to front when the quire number was added), though what he’s got against Q4 I don’t know. 🙂

So, let’s look at the codicological evidence (such as it is) relating to this hypothesis…

Pro #1: the light paint transfer and the stem ink transfer from f2v to f3r. These appear to be wet contact transfers without water damage. This seems to imply that those two pages have faced each other right from Day One. The similar handwriting supports this.

Con #1:  in Q2, the quire number downstroke overruns the bottom edge of the page but reappears at the bottom of  f46v (I checked this for myself at the Beinecke). This seems to imply that f46v was probably in either Q1 or Q2 at the time the first set of quire numbers were added (though it has ended up in a very much later quire).  The similar handwriting supports this.

Disputed #1: the heavy red paint transfers from f3r to f2v (which are aligned differently to the light paint transfer in the opposite direction), and from f5v to f6r. The dispute is over whether these paints (a) were added later [Stolfi, Pelling], or (b) were original but were transferred between pages later probably by water damage [Claston].

Disputed #2: the blue paint transfers from f3v to f4r, from f5v to f6r, and from f19v to f20r. Again, the dispute here is over whether these paints (a) were added later [Stolfi, Pelling], or (b) were original but were transferred later by an unknown bacterial mechanism triggered by minor water damage [Claston].

Disputed #3: there is (what appears to be) a diagonal line of red paint spatters crossing the central fold running between f10v and f15r, which makes it look as though this was the middle bifolio of a quire / gathering. However, what apparently conflicts with this is the set of contact transfers of the same red paint going from f15r to f14v.

Disputed #4: I also put forward a hypothesis (Curse, pp.52-57) that four or five of the bifolios with similar-looking vellum flaws might have come from a single skin – if this turns out to be correct, then because the bifolios involved ended up in different quires, it would go very strongly against the whole current-page-order-is-as-intended hypothesis.

[There are numerous other minor paint transfers which seem to coincide with water damaged areas; and there is also the minor matter of the wormhole in the first few folios of Q1; but for the sake of brevity I’ve omitted these.]

So, the current tally is that one piece of evidence seems to point to two bifolios’ having stayed together, while another piece of evidence seems to point to two bifolios’ being out of order – basically, an honourable draw. But could a few of the bifolios have stayed together even though many of the rest were basically scrambled? Yes – and that is the kind of fit-all-the-data “Middle Way”  intellectual historian’s answer I’ve been proposing for ages. 🙂

But really, I have to say that the bulk of  my impression of non-orderedness comes from a very different (but really quite hard to quantify) source – the writing itself. A good exercise is to print out all the herbal quires as bifolios and to then compare the various handwritings on them, to see which ones do / don’t match (particularly for all the Herbal-A pages). I contend that these only occasionally (such as in Q1) seem to flow at all in their current page order, even though the handwriting across both sides of any given bifolio is usually reasonably consistent with itself.

When I was writing the Curse, I believed that the original gatherings would have contained 5 or 6 bifolios: but three years on, I now suspect that 3 or 4 bifolios per gathering is a much more likely figure. Perhaps I should now revisit this whole puzzle and have another go at solving that particular “corner” of the million piece jigsaw?

The Voynich Christ…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Every night for months, Mary-Anne had pored over every shape, letter, figure, and line of the Voynich Manuscript’s 200+ enciphered pages, a pale brown vellum laptop glow lighting  up her flat until the small hours. The more she looked, the more she was certain the answer was “hidden in plain sight” just as cryptology experts always said, even if they themselves had no idea where to look or what to look for.

She, however, had a very special secret weapon, a righteous sword to slice through this cryptographic Gordian knot. It had come to her close to the Spring Equinox: at the very moment she had first seen the Voynich, she had had a searing headache accompanied by a vivid mental picture of Christ Himself on the Cross. For that briefest of instants, she felt like a blessed, cursed mystic, a modern St Hildegard of Bingen; and glimpsing something so wonderful, awful, and joyful changed her life beyond all measure.

In fact, Mary-Anne found herself transformed into a virtual nun, the first Blessed Sister of the Voynich – and with much holy codicology to focus upon. To mute the incessant noise of the world, she binned her mobile phone, left her answerphone permanently on (and never played the messages), and turned all her old friends away when they came knocking at her door. With every new day, her former life peeled just that little bit further away from her, a snake skin she no longer wanted or needed. She even shut the door on Joe and his flowers and love notes, never mind how much the “old her” had liked him.

Fast forward to November, and she had changed tactics, placing printouts of all the plant pages on the floor and spending time shuffling them around, looking for unexpected handwriting and colour matches.  Yet it was then that it struck her, might the Messiah be hiding there, for was He not the Tree of Life? On a constant adrenaline high and a sense of being desperately close to the end, she began working all night and forgetting to eat, leaving her weak and constantly retching. This, she rationalized, was surely the mystic’s lot – but she had no choice, for hunting down the Saviour inside the Voynich was the one true path that had been allotted to her.

And now tonight, late on Christmas Eve, with a pile of unopened Christmas cards blocking the flat door, the million-piece jigsaw had begun to come together. When she had finally remembered to add to the mix the herbal pages misplaced in the pharmacological sections, her months of fervent searching had finally revealed the key, the visual enciphering mechanism. She could now vividly see that the herbal pages, if you arranged them (just as she had done) in the correct pattern, formed a long-hidden picture of Christ crucified – exactly the same one as had first flashed into her mind’s eye all those months ago.

Having set up her webcam to record the perfect image of His suffering face laid out on the floor, Mary-Anne felt an odd glow inside her, and stood there gazing at the image that had been concealed for many centuries, appalled, amazed, aghast. And against all the meteorological odds, a light dusting of snow began to lightly fall outside her window. The time was ripe to show the world her amazing discovery – and how marvellous that that it was to be on Christmas Day.

But just as she set the live feed going, something suddenly wrenched around deep inside her – clutching her swollen stomach in dreadful pain, Mary-Anne collapsed on the floor, right on top of her reconstructed image of the Saviour. Great lurching waves of agony jerked and pinballed around her body. “My God!” she screamed. “I’m dying – help me!”

The Voynich webcam lurkers at first dismissed it all as a kind of performance art hoaxery: but after a few minutes, her very real pain was all too obvious – and she was too incapacitated to make it to the phone in the corner of the room. “M-A!“, one shouted, “I’ll call an ambulance – where do you live?”

Not long after, the watchers heard the crashing sound of policemen breaking down the flat door, followed by the paramedics’ shouting as they rushed swiftly in, scattering all her carefully arranged papers. And they took in every gory, magnificent detail, as Mary-Anne pushed and screamed and pushed and screamed and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

Wilfrid.

Glen Claston on binding…

by ⋅ 23 Comments

Nick: here’s another full-on guest post from Glen Claston, with a little bit of friendly banter from me in blue…

The different ways some little detail can be viewed is so much of the fun we have with the VMS.  Until supporting [or refuting] information can be found for either view, neither is more valid than the other; and indeed, we weigh the validity of one over the other based on common perception.

My view on the binding had to do with the placement of the quire mark, and as you see, I used a minimal amount of information to formulate an hypothetical scenario that may or may not be wrong.  I didn’t do this to be contrary, I did it to explain some of the things I’m seeing, and of course this may not be the right explanation, or only portions of it may be correct.  That’s sort of why it’s only an hypothesis.
 
What I need to do next is to search these pages for some evidence that either supports or refutes this hypothesis, and this is usually where one of my hypotheses falls out of my own favor and gets replaced with something else, something like Ernie’s common sense idea, which is the one I originally held until I had problems with the placement of both the foldout and the quire mark.  The good thing about it is that there is usually more information to be gathered from the pages – as Nick said, a million fragmentary clues…..

Nick: for example, I think we can still see some tiny original sewing holes along Glen’s secondary vertical fold on the nine-rosette page. Further, if you reorder Q8 with its astronomical pages at the back and insert the nine-rosette section, you rejoin the “magic circle” on f57v with the two other “magic circle”-like pages on the back of the nine-rosette sexfolio. And it may possibly be no coincidence that doing this happens to move the very similar marginalia / doodlings / signatures on f86v3 and f66v closer together.

But herein lies one of the major problems with this sort of research (and it’s only a problem to those who don’t recognize that everyone, including themselves, is prone to this type of thinking) – we tend to reason out large scenarios based on a minimal set of information, and when something doesn’t exactly agree with that scenario, we don’t modify it or throw it out.  I am no different in that when necessary, I tend to modify before discarding, but I admit that in 23 years of research, I’ve discarded almost everything but the most basic concepts numerous times.  It was only after the MrSids images were made available that I was able to revisit some old ideas and gain substantial ground in this endeavor… and even now, some things are still in the hypothetical stage.  But when you change one leg of an hypothesis that stands on only two or three, the whole thing usually comes crashing down with a thunderous sound – I can hear that sound from clear across the ocean on occasion. 🙂

Nick: that’s strange, I get to hear that same noise too from time to time, also coming across the same ocean. 🙂

To me it’s rather easy to demonstrate through parallel texts that the rosettes page is firmly a part of the astronomical discussion, and should be placed before the celestial part of that discussion, and I have a good deal of professional opinion, (historical and contemporary) that agrees.  The Astronomical discussion falls appropriately just before the astrological discussion and begins with the terrestrial portion of the astronomical discussion, so when the rosettes is placed back into its proper place, the terrestrial discussion precedes the celestial discussion and then transitions into astrology, as it should.  The book then falls into an order that is in line with the order of presentation given in the parallel texts and commentaries.  The book transitions from herbs to astronomical, and astronomical to astrological, on mixed bifolios, physical codicological information that establishes within reason that this particular order was chosen by the author him/herself.  This is the higher level of argument, since this is part of a theory that encompasses the entire content and original purpose of the manuscript.  That’s the general theory of relativity, but some other source of information is required to extract a specialized theory of relativity.  This requires a gathering and interpretation of the physical codicological information, not as easy as it appears.
 
We’re faced with the obvious fact that some bifolios and foldouts in this book are currently bound out of order, and some students have gone so far as to suggest that it looks like the pages were dropped on the floor and recollated randomly.

Nick: to be precise, I’d say that a few bifolios did probably manage to cling together despite being dropped 🙂 , but for the greatest part I don’t see much retained structure in Quires 2 through 7, in Q13, Q15, Q19 and even Q20 (if Elmar is right), while Q8 seems back to front and Q9 and Q14 are misbound. And I’m not 100% convinced by Q1 either!

To me it’s not that drastic, most things are in their category, if not their proper order, but the question of original collation has so much bearing on so many aspects of this study that it needs to be addressed in a very serious manner, and by that I mean the gathering of codicological evidence that can be molded into a working hypothesis or theory regarding the original construction and collation of the book.  Historical scenarios that are based on a great deal of codicological information have many legs to stand on, so they don’t topple simply because one ‘fact’ or observation changes or gets reinterpreted.  Ergo, collect all the codicological information possible, and collect it in one place so it can be easily referenced when trying to formulate hypotheses.  No, no one after D’Imperio has done that – Rene has tried on one level of the manuscript, but no one has collected all the physical observations into a single database.  Is this a task too large to be accomplished?  It’s done routinely in other scientific disciplines, why not here?

Nick: well… I did try to do precisely this in the ‘Jumbled Jigsaws’ chapter of “The Curse” to a far greater degree than D’Imperio was ever able to, but I would certainly agree that it would take 500 fairly specialized pages to begin to do the topic justice. 🙂

I give you an example of how much codicological evidence matters, and I’ll provide an example that only requires a slight modification in Nick’s hypothesis of multiple painters, an hypothesis I don’t accept on other evidence, but I’ll give an example that buys into his hypothesis nonetheless, just so I’m not viewed entirely as a “contrarian”.  There are three fresh-paint transfer marks near the bottom of f87v that come from the upper middle portion of f16v.  Don’t get all worked up at the distance between these pages, because we know (or at least I know) that the herbals and the pharmaceuticals were once connected.  The point of discussion here is that these offset transfers could not have taken place if these pages were bound before this red paint was applied.  Nick is able to modify his hypothesis to say that the binding was only at the quirization stage, and that these outside folios can lay on top of one another at this stage of binding when the paint transfer occurred.  That’s correct, that’s one scenario, and Nick only has to remove one leg of his hypothesis in order to accommodate this information – instead of being entirely pre-bound, now it’s bound only in quires.   That works for Nick, and frankly works for me until I find something that says it doesn’t.
 
But I draw something else from this that Nick doesn’t address, and that is that the same red pigment is present on the two pages, as well as on the foldout which contains f87r.  That leads me to a one-legged hypothesis that the guy went through his pages and painted one color, then went through again to apply another color, as opposed to our modern view of an artist who would paint in various colors simultaneously.  We’re not on different wavelengths in our thinking, Nick and I, we’re just liable to reach different conclusions based on the same information, and that because we filter the information differently.   You see, I have another category of research which includes unfinished drawings and paintings, and I see this through a different filter than Nick sees it.

Nick: I have no huge problem with the idea of someone applying paints one at a time. It would be consistent with my view that (for example) the heavy blue painter mixed his/her blue paint suitable for painting on paper (rather than on vellum) and rushed through the (already finally-bound) manuscript daubing it wherever he/she saw fit… only realising later that it hadn’t dried quickly enough, leaving a mess all over the facing pages.

The answer to such a simple question as to when and how the paints were applied may be more complicated than either Nick or I presently presume, and no matter what, we will both be modifying our opinions when the information is finally gathered and tabulated.  I assume at present that because so much of the painting falls into gutters, it was done unbound.  Nick thinks it was done pre-bound.  I see now that some specialized paints were an after-work, possibly quire-bound, possibly not, while the common watercolors had to have been applied in an unbound state.  Neither of us are entirely right, neither of us are entirely wrong, and there is more to be learned before the final tally can be made.  Choose this red pigment, is there at least one place where it could not have been applied after the manuscript was bound?  I don’t know, I haven’t done that study yet, the question has only recently arisen.  And what frakking bit of difference does this make anyway?  ;-{
 
It’s that hypothesis with only two or three legs thing again, that’s where this makes a big difference.  I get so irritated with the “multiple painter” thing I simply want to scream, simply because it introduces multiple and extraneous unproven human elements into an hitherto unresolved picture, without first following evidentiary procedure.  This particular fresh-paint transfer is in the A-herbal range, simply another connection between the pharmaceutical section and the herbal section, something I’ve been quite clear about – these were once connected.  Post-bound painting as Nick suggests means that I should find evidence that this red pigment was also applied to pages that are written in the B script, and applied at a time where the A’s and B’s were already bound together.  Does that evidence exist?  I’m good at lists of codicological evidence, we’ll see if it does or not.  And does Nick’s ‘quirized binding’ approach hold water against other evidence?  We’ll find out, and these things will be discovered through gathering and collating the codicological evidence available to us.  It’s a wonderful thing, that we have at our fingertips the information to do this in scientific fashion.
 
I remember the reaction on the old list when Nick and I went to logger-heads over something as apparently meaningless as blue paint, and that for me was what separated Nick from the pack in many ways.  It wasn’t the love of argument or the basic disagreement, but the fact that Nick was willing to study and research in support of his claim.  He was not a simple defender of his stance, he was an active participant in the argument, and though we both still disagree on this one point, the amount of new codicological information and rational thought generated in the course of this simple argument has never been exceeded in the history of VMS research.
 
I hope that this gives Emily and others some idea of why the simplest of observations can have the most profound impact in this line of research, and I welcome anyone that wishes to add to our base of knowledge, no matter how small.  Collaboration can be a great deal of fun, and it’s guaranteed to hone your perception skills.  When you start you’re going to get shot down a lot, just like a video game, but as you progress your impact will be much greater, just like a video game.  This is your chance to hone a set of skills you didn’t think you had.

D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma”, now a downloadable PDF!

by ⋅ 11 Comments

A highly surprising message just arrived here at Cipher Mysteries from our Chaocipher Clearing House chum Moshe Rubin:-

Is your readership aware that NSA has placed the entire text [of Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”] on its site?

I couldn’t find the link on your site so here it is!

This is a great find, highly recommended for all Voynich researchers – if you haven’t read it already, download it straight away! Having said that, even though it took me six attempts to download it completely (doubtless they were tracert’ing me to see if I just happened to be a terrorist, bless ’em), I did get it all in the end. But please let me know if this happens to get removed (which is always possible).

Incidentally, this is just one of a number of cryptological history publications the NSA has kindly made available on its website. The 2007 article by John Clabby on Brigadier John Tiltman (“A Giant Among Cryptanalysts“) is also well worth looking at (though not nearly so essential as D’Imperio, naturally).

Generic historical cipher mystery (short version)…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

“Get up, fool!“, barked Guillaume Imbert, the French Grand Inquisitor. Yet the Grand Master Jacques de Molay continued to lay on the prison floor, passively resisting to the end. “OK… that was your last chance, Templar scum. Guards – crucify him, and wrap him in a shroud which his bodily fluids will seep into, leaving a ghostly imprint which will quickly come to be believed an image of Christ Himself.”

There was a sudden rattling at the cell door, and a plainly-dressed Philip IV and his entourage swept in. De Molay opened a single swollen eyelid. “What, no bling today, Your Majesty? Pawned all the Royal Jewels, perchance? Presumably that’s why you’re planning to seize the vast Templar treasure trove… such a pity we’ve already hidden it in plain sight in a location known only to the author, his/her publisher’s marketing department, and Henry Lincoln.”

“No worries, Jackie-boy“, smirked the king, “I have already set in place my own sprawling conspiracy to retrieve it that will run for centuries – yes, even beyond the French Revolution and the first two World Wars upon which your man Nostradamus will write so eloquently.”

“Pah!” retorted de Molay. “Our Templar conspiracy has a two century headstart on your upstart Royalist conspiracy. In fact, we have well-drafted plans to go underground for seven hundred years only to reemerge as a 21st century ninja fighting force with a secret Gnostic terrorist agenda. Unfortunately, because I am illiterate, I could not read those plans, so torturing me to reveal them has been a bit of a waste of time so far.”

“You call that a conspiracy?” spat the gallic Inquisitor. “But how will you preserve the secret knowledge of Jesus himself at the heart of your anti-Church Templar initiation ceremony which 20th century novel-readers will hear so many versions of? Surely you will need some kind of heavily-enciphered Macguffin to transport dangerous heretical information that could change everything for heavily religious readers (if they happen to be particularly gullible) through time?”

“Yes, the Church wants to know that too“, exclaimed Philip IV, “for it is their fanatical agents who are going to be hunting it down for the next six centuries. Even if they are all in my pocket in Avignon at this particular point in history.”

The Grand Master paused menacingly, eyeing the two men. “Well… OK, then… seeing as we’re best mates an’ all that. We’ve already had our deepest, darkest secrets enciphered by a mad monk by the name of Roger Bacon, who cunningly disguised it as a herbal manuscript from two centuries hence, with instructions for it to be copied by Leonardo da Vinci when he’s born. Oh, and we’ve listed the 365 secret hiding places for the Templar treasure in an appendix at the back. Basically, it’s a bit like the Beale Papers, which we’ve got planned for the future too – good job we’ve already written the Declaration of Independence, eh?”

The King drew his once jewel-encrusted dagger and sharply held it at de Molay’s throat. “And does your idiot author really expect his/her readers to swallow all that guff, even if they are laying on a sun-kissed beach? Surely that’s enough to make even one brain cell want to strangle itself?”

Guillaume Imbert gently pulled the king’s arm back. “It worked for Dan Brown“, he hissed in the Royal Ear, “so nobody wants to mess with The Secret Formula“.

“Is this true, then, de Molay?” snarled Philip. “Is this the Secret Novel-Writing Formula enciphered in the Templar’s secret codex? Will it be Dan Brown himself who will decipher the so-called-six-centuries-hence ‘Voynich Manuscript’ and grasp the Templar money-making secret of writing Romance novels? You know, the secret of making unlimited money from home I see described in so many banner ads unfurled outside my palaces?”

But the Grand Master merely turned to face the king, slowly raised his hand in the ancient Sumerian symbol of defiance with his middle finger raised aloft to the sky, and proclaimed the secret Templar initiatory phrase later to be popularized by Priory of Sion Grandmaster Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli – “Prithee, sit on it, sire“. Plainly, some secrets are beyond all discussion…

Voynich Photoshop gags…

by ⋅ 8 Comments

Cracked.com is running a Photoshop contest – “The retarded Truth behind the World’s Greatest Mysteries”. Truth be told, my favourite entry is mrlarry’s tame dinosaur moving Stonehenge’s stones in its mouth. But there are a couple of Voynich Manuscript themed entries too…

voynich-sanchez-small
Sanchez’s competition entry (quarter size)

The VMs as drawn by a child? Sweet Photoshop technique, but probably not quite ‘retarded’ enough to win. The second entry is a bit like a hi-tech version of David N. Guy’s Voynich “Breakthrough” we saw a few days ago:-

voynich-danthegreat-small
Dan The Great’s competition entry (quarter size)

Yes, it does indeed read “With great haste he removed her underpinings. The hour of fornication was nigh.” Hmmm… perhaps the smart money’s still on the dinosaur. 🙂

Incidentally, the Voynichese (from f15v) appropriated here just happens to be the two lines where I think the author used a space transposition cipher (i.e. moving spaces around within the ciphertext) to hide the repetitive “or or or” and “or or or or” by writing them as “oror or” and “or or oro r” respectively [Curse, p.160]. 🙂  It’s also a bit odd that the first letter of the second line is rendered as EVA “l” – in Jorge Stolfi’s transcription, it’s weirdo #138, more like a malformed EVA “s”. Oh well.

Incidentally, John Stojko translated this same passage as “Why are you measuring the measure? The measure is the same.  Even after Great One, the bones will be broken. I am telling you. Relic should believe me. ” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether (Dan’s) Babel Fish’s “With great haste…” is better or worse, I couldn’t possibly judge such a beauty contest. 🙂

Is Dorabella a rotating pigpen…?

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Spurred on by a blog comment left this morning, I wondered whether the Dorabella cipher might actually (because of the symmetry of its cipherbet shapes) be some kind of rotating pigpen cipher, where you rotate each of the positions around after each letter. This would be a bit like a “poor man’s Alberti cipher disk”… just the sort of thing a self-taught cipher hacker such as Elgar might devise.

And so, I decided (being a programmer) to code it up. Of course, it didn’t appear to solve it (these things never do), but I thought I’d post my C code here anyway. Enjoy!

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
char dorabella[] =
 "BLTACEIARWUNISNFNNELLHSYWYDUO"
 "INIEYARQATNNTEDMINUNEHOMSYRRYUO"
 "TOEHOTSHGDOTNEHMOSALDOEADYA";
#define ELEMENTS(N) (sizeof(N) / sizeof(*(N)))
#define DORABELLA_SIZE (ELEMENTS(dorabella) - 1) // trim the trailing zero!
void dorabella_encipher(int c, int *row, int *column)
{
 if (c >= 'V')
  c--;
 if (c >= 'J')
  c--;
 c -= 'A';  // c now equals 0..23
 *column = c % 8;
 *row    = c / 8;
}
int dorabella_decipher(int row, int column)
{
 int c = (row * 8 ) + column;  // space inserted to stop smiley being inserted!
 c += 'A';
 if (c > 'I')
  c++;
 if (c > 'U')
  c++;  // c now equals 'A'..'Z'
 return c;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
 int i, j, c;
 int row, column;
 int step_size = 1;
 if (argc > 1)
  step_size = atoi(argv[1]);
 for (i=0; i<8; i++)
 {
  printf("C%d: ", i);
  for (j=0; j<DORABELLA_SIZE; j++)
  {
   dorabella_encipher(dorabella[j], &row, &column);
   column += i + (j / step_size);
   while (column < 0)
    column += 8;
   column %= 8;
   c = dorabella_decipher(row, column);
   printf("%c", c);
  }
  printf("\n");
 }
 for (i=0; i<3; i++)
 {
  printf("R%d: ", i);
  for (j=0; j<DORABELLA_SIZE; j++)
  {
   dorabella_encipher(dorabella[j], &row, &column);
   row += i + (j / step_size);
   while (row < 0)
    row += 3;
   row %= 3;
   c = dorabella_decipher(row, column);
   printf("%c", c);
  }
  printf("\n");
 }
 return 0;
}

Glen Claston on the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 13 Comments

[Here’s a guest posting from my friend, the well-known Voynich contrarian Glen Claston. Though he originally intended it as a comment to my recent post on Voynich Manuscript Quire 8 [Q8], it actually deserved a whole post to itself. I’ve lightly edited it to house style, and added a couple of pictures.]

Nick asked me to look at the blog, and though I don’t plan to be a regular poster, he’s going on about things that matter a great deal, so we need to examine them very carefully.

The [“ij”] mark at the bottom of f57v is in line with two other erased marks on folios, as well as erased symbols in Q1 and Q2 that Nick and I discussed some time ago. The original author apparently used a symbol system instead of a standard system, and much of his work has been removed. Quirization and foliation are not the work of the original author. I plan to publish this in a book entitled “The Curse of the Curse of the Voynich”. 🙂

f42r-folio-number-closeup
Voynich Manuscript f42r folio number

Rene Zandbergen also brings up an interesting observation about f42r, that the crystals appear to be on top of the foliation. Yes, I’m certain that is the case, but I don’t reach the same conclusion that Rene does in this regard. In the image above, the foliation clearly overlaps the drawing lines and the color pigment, but at the same time, this entire region is a section exposed to water damage, which might explain Rene’s observation of the crystals overlapping the burned-in ink. IF the pigment includes mineral salts as many commonly do, this would explain Rene’s observations, as they would have re-crystalized over the existing material. It would require a rather closer inspection to see if this is the case.

If Rene’s observation holds, there is indeed something seriously wrong with the Voynich, since foliation before coloration has a very dramatic implication on known VMs construction, and I for one would have to throw out years of research and start anew, as would many. I recall that I had issues with Rene before on “retouching” because these darker patches fell into areas that were also affected by moisture. As it happens, I do apologize much belatedly to Rene for suggesting that just because some of these didn’t match, his identification of retouching in the astrological section was wrong, when it proved to be spot-on. It was my fault for generalizing, and to say that we all make mistakes is not a good enough excuse, I owe it to myself and to the VMs to be as precise as possible.

[Nick: as far as the paints go, I think the consensus now is more that different paints were added at different times, though I suspect the “light painter” / “heavy painter” binary division may well prove to be far too simplistic – because of the large number of paints present, I can quite conceive that these might have been added by four or five later “heavy painters”.]

As far as the rosettes section [Q14] goes, Nick is suggesting here that Q14 belongs to Q8, and though I wouldn’t exactly state that in the way Nick has suggested, I entirely agree. The rosettes is a part of the astronomical discussion, so it’s not in its right place. A large folio can get ripped out rather easily, and be placed back in the book in random order. It’s an hypothesis, but is it testable?

It turns out that the rosettes contains a record that helps us place some items in order. There are tears in the unused fold of the rosettes, damage beyond what normal foldouts have seen, and these tears hold information. The quire mark only works if the rosettes was bound in this torn seam, and the foliation only works if the binding of this foldout is in its current place. That says that the maker of the quire marks was not the maker of the original foliation, that the foliation was a product of at least one successive binding. There are two distinguishable hands in the foliation, two successive bindings after the quire mark binder. Two inks that I can identify in the foliation bindings, and places where quire marks were added that weren’t there originally.

rosette-folding

[Nick: GC is proposing that the nine rosettes fold-out f86 was originally attached to the rest of the manuscript along the (now badly damaged) crease highlighted green (above), rather than along the crease highlighted blue. The shape of the whole codex is highlighted in red.]

It’s a complicated picture that needs a degree of clarification, but there is no way around the idea that the manuscript went through at least three bindings. The big question is – does any of these bindings reflect the original order of construction? The answer is a resounding NO.

Again I go to the rosettes for history, and I need only look on the back of the rosettes to see that the discussion includes the four seasons and the four winds. All my research into parallel texts says that this is the meterological part of the astronomical discussion, and belongs firmly in the astronomical section. This also says that the rosettes on the reverse is a meteorological mappa mundi, and read in that venue of comprehension it’s imagery becomes meaningful and schematic to other VMs imagery. It helps that one page in the first astronomical section [in Quire 8] exhibits similar damage to that of the original rosettes page, and Nick is right that the pages in this section appear to be inverted.

I’ve been through the whole range of arguments over the years, and I weary of argument that doesn’t move me forward, but this is a discussion that needs to be moved forward on several fronts, and I will follow this discussion with interest.

What I am seeing is that the quire numbers were placed on probably the first binding, but I’ve always been of the opinion that the manuscript existed unbound during much of the author’s life. I now have much more information to back up that idea, and as you know, I was once of the opinion that it was the author that first quirized, which is something I can now disprove in abundance. Order changes and shuffling I can’t comment on, but there is evidence that the author himself made some major changes, and these changes were substantially reflected on the first binding but the manuscript was not in a permanently bound condition when the author left off/died.

Rene for one would understand that in making these decisions, I’m weighing intelligent choice against mishap, and using a set of parallel texts on these subjects to determine which is which. One doesn’t even require these options in viewing the interlacing of herbal-a and herbal-b herbals. One does however, need to know why the herbal-a herbal pages were separated from the herbal-a pharmaceuticals and additional information stuffed in between, much of this in a different script. Herbal-a herbals are congruent with herbal-a herbals in the pharmaceutical section, the latter sometimes drawn on the same bifolio/foldouts as the pharmaceuticals, and as Nick and I discussed recently, there is physical contact information that ties them together in a time-line of construction. These are connected in multiple ways to the same time line, and the intervening information is connected to a separate time line, and the construction is a progressive construction, so could this have been the act of binder and not the author? Could this intelligent construction occur passively, and not actively? There’s an argument in there somewhere.

Grant for a moment that I don’t think the book was bound during the author’s life, and I am certain it was not bound before the drawings/text/ paints were added (it’s damned hard to draw, paint, and write all the way into bound gutters on so many pages – common sense observation, eh?). What’s just as important is when quire marks ceased and foliation began. Dee used bifolio quire markings in his book of 1562, and though page numbering was becoming popular in printed documents by this time, Dee chose not to use it, choosing a manuscript format instead. It’s a generational thing, and I feel that the foliation is at least 17th century. The quirization has a problem with dating as Rene pointed out, that it could be someone older that didn’t use the modern format, or it could have been someone before the modern format became prominent. The rosettes’ gutter damage however, says that there was a good deal of time between the quire marks and the foliation, because they couldn’t possibly have happened at the same time, and the quire marks are apparently a good deal older than the foliation.

Make of this all what you will! — Glen Claston

Caravaggio’s crushed fireflies…?!?!?

by ⋅ 2 Comments

The art world has recently been astonished (OK, “bemused and confused” might be a little more accurate) by a new claim emerging from the David Hockney / Secret Knowledge camp. Florentine art historian Roberta Lapucci has proposed not only that Caravaggio used lenses in a darkened basement room to project scenes onto his canvas (Hockney’s basic claim), but also that he applied a luminescent paste formed from crushed fireflies and white lead to the canvas to form a primitive kind of image fixing agent – a Renaissance precursor to what Hockney likes to call “chemical photography”.

Lapucci’s primary evidence is based on having found traces of “mercury salt” on some of Caravaggio’s canvases under X-ray fluorescence – yet she notes “That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the surface, in his primer.”

Also, it has to be pointed out that Caravaggio’s lack of preliminary sketches is only correlative evidence, not causative proof: while I have yet to see any passage by Giovanni Battista Della Porta (presumably in his Natural Magic?) that discusses the firefly-based paste (allegedly used in 16th century drama productions). All of which would seem to indicate that Lapucci’s hypothesis is well worth testing: but without anything approaching a smoking gun as yet.

Poor old Caravaggio: for centuries, his reputation suffered at the hands of art historians, who were almost unanimous in their sneering dismissiveness. Yet opinion swung right around, and his powerfully-lit (if a bit overwrought, truth be told) artworks are now routinely described as masterpieces. To me, whether or not he used lenses and chemical trickery to assist him is almost a secondary issue: whatever means he happened to employ to fix his particular sense of pictorial drama onto his canvases were well worth it.