As you’d expect, there wasn’t anything there of any great surprise or interest about the Somerton Man that you wouldn’t have picked up from even a cursory reading of Cipher Mysteries over the last few years. But the other person being interviewed – Fiona Ellis-Jones, who you may possibly remember as having been the host of the ABC’s five-part “The Somerton Man Mystery” podcast – did say one thing that I at least found interesting.
What she said (at 5:07) about the Somerton Man was this: that there were “three main theories: the love child theory; the fact that it could have been a black market racketeer; or perhaps a Russian spy“. Though this is basically rehashing her podcast tag line (“Was he a scorned lover? A black market racketeer? Or a spy?”), what struck me was that the whole black marketeer crim thing I’ve been pushing at for the last few years was suddenly in the top three.
Now, even though Fiona added that her own personal favourite theory was Derek Abbott’s whole love-child / spurned lover thang, it’s not exactly news that this has always seemed far too tidily romantic to me: all it’s lacking is a neat little bow on top, which is almost never how historical research actually works out. But the good news is that a DNA profile for the Somerton Man should make this the very first theory to be comprehensively disproved, all being well. :-p
As for the whole spy theory: apologies to John Ruffels etc, but if there’s an ounce of actual historical substance to that whole hopeful hoopla beyond “The Somerton Man is mysterious; spies are mysterious; therefore the dead guy must have been a spy“, I’ve yet to see it. Though it remains possible that the DNA match map will light up all across Russia, please excuse me if I seem less than utterly enchanted. Even vague familial DNA matches should be enough to rule out most of the exotic nonsense that some like to pass off as rock solid ‘fact’ (*choke* *cough* *cough*).
Moreover, if both those much-loved dominoes clatter to the floor, the question becomes: what other possibilities are we genuinely left with? Charles Mikkelsen (a favourite of Byron Deveson) remains ~vaguely~ possible, though it has to be said that Mikkelsen’s well-documented death at sea in 1940 does tend to spoil the party vibe there somewhat. Similarly, the 1953 death announcement for Horace Charles Reynolds that I (eventually) dug up doesn’t bode well for Somerton Man fans of a muttony disposition.
Might it be that the black marketeer theory might end up one of the very few realistic dominoes left standing before very long? Just thought I’d point that out… 😐
One Last Thing…
Something I noticed a few weeks ago was that even though I’ve posted 1490 blog posts on Cipher Mysteries since 2007-ish (originally as “Voynich News”), the times people have posted an actual link to anything I’ve posted are dwindlingly few. In fact, thanks to the magic of Google Search Console, I can tell you that Google knows of only 560 external links out there, many of which are repeated several times over. (“There may be many others but they haven’t been discarvard.“) Of those:
89 are from voynich.ninja (mainly to Voynich-related pages);
54 from blogspot.com blogs (most of which seem to be from numberworld.blogspot.com)
35 from wordpress.com blogs (e.g. Koen’s herculeaf, Diane’s voynichrevisionist, and a handful of Rich’s proto57)
20 each from voynichportal.com (thanks JKP) and voynichrevisionist.com (thanks Diane again)
19 from reddit.com
17 from scienceblogs.de (thanks Klaus)
12 from zodiackillerciphers.com (thanks Dave O)
…while everything else is in single digits. How, then, has anybody ever found out about the black marketeer theory? Beats me.
Oh, and in case you’re interested, Cipher Mysteries’ pages include 7740 solid outbound links: which seems to imply I link roughly 20x more often outwards than everybody else combined links inwards. Perhaps it’s just me, but that statistic seems a bit sucky.
For me, the way the Z340 was solved highlighted a number of issues:
It seems very likely to me that other long-standing cipher mysteries will also require collaboration between entirely different kinds of researcher
Hence I suspect that many are beyond the FBI’s in-house capabilities, and it will need to find a new way to approach these if it wants them cracked
The whole Big Data thing is starting to open some long-closed doors
With these in mind, here’s my list of what might get cracked next:
Scorpion Ciphers
The Scorpion ciphers were sent to America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh from 1991 onwards: we have copies of S1 and S5, but the rest are in the hands of the FBI. As you’d expect, I’ve blogged about these many times, e.g. here, here, here, and here. I also created a related set of seven cipher challenges, of which only one has been solved (by Louie Helm) so far.
To be honest, I fail to understand why the FBI hasn’t yet released the other Scorpion Ciphers. These are the grist the Oranchak code-cracking mill is looking for: homophonic ciphers, underlying patterns, Big Data, etc.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 8/10 if the FBI releases the rest, else 2/10
Beale Ciphers
Even if I don’t happen to believe a measly word of the Beale Papers, I still think that the Beale Ciphers themselves are probably genuine. These use homophonic ciphers (albeit where the unbroken B1 and B3 ciphers use a system that is slightly different from the one used in the broken B2 cipher).
Because we already have the hugely improbable Gillogly / Hammer strings to work with (which would seem to be the ‘tell’ analogous to the Z340’s 19-repeat behaviour), we almost certainly don’t need to find a different book
Given that Virginia is Dave Oranchak’s stamping ground, I wouldn’t be surprised if the redoubtable Mr O has already had a long, hard look at the Beale Ciphers. So… we’ll see what 2021 has to bring.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 2/10
Paul Rubin’s Cryptograms
A curious cryptogram was found taped to the chest of Paul Emanuel Rubin, an 18-year-old chemistry student found dead from cyanide poisoning near Philadelphia Airport in January 1953. As usual, I’ve blogged about this a fair few times, e.g. here, here, here and here.
The ‘trick’ behind the cryptogram appears to be to use a different cipher key for each line. Specifically, the first few lines appear to be a kind of “Trithemian Typewriter” cipher, where every other letter (or some such pattern) is enciphered using a substitution cipher, and where the letters inbetween are filled in to make these look like words. This is, I believe, the reason we can see words like “Dulles” and “Conant” peeking through the mess of “astereantol” and “magleagna” gibberish.
Right now, I’m wondering whether we might be able to iterate through thousands of possible Trithemian schemes to crack each individual line (e.g. lines 4 and 5 appear to share the same cipher key number).
The cipher keys appear to use security by obscurity (& terseness), so I suspect that these may well be defeatable. Definitely one to consider.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 4/10
Who was The Zodiac Killer?
Even if the Z340 plaintext failed to cast any light on his identity (as I certainly expected), surely a DNA attack must now be on the cards?
To my eyes, the murder of Paul Stine seems to me to have been the least premeditated of all the Zodiac Killer’s attacks, so I would have expected the crime-scene artifacts to have been a treasure trove of DNA evidence. But there are plenty of other claims for Zodiac DNA, so what do I know?
Anyway, I have no real doubt that there are 5 or 6 documentaries currently in production for 2021 release that are all racing to use DNA to GEDmatch the bejasus out of the Zodiac Killer. I guess we shall see what they find…
Nick’s rating for a 2021 breakthrough: 7/10with DNA, else 0/10
Who Was The Somerton Man?
2021 may finally see the exhumation Derek Abbott has been pushing for for so long; plus the start of a worldwide DNA scavenger hunt to identify the unidentified corpse found on Somerton Beach on 1st December 1948.
But after all that, will the mysterious man turn out to be Robin McMahon Thomson’s missing father; or a shape-shifting Russian spy; or a Melbourne crim whom everybody suddenly wanted to forget they ever met?
All the same, even if we do get a name and a DOB etc, will that be enough to end all the shoddy melodrama around the case? Errrm… probably not. 🙁
For what it’s worth, I would have thought that Robin’s father’s surname was almost certainly (Nick shudders at the obviousness) McMahon. I also wouldn’t like to bet against a Dr McMahon in Sydney (e.g. the surgeon Edward Gerard McMahon, though I expect there are others), but feel free to enlighten me why you think McMahon was actually a family name etc etc.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 breakthrough: 8/10 with an exhumation, else 1/10
Putting to one side the bombshell news that the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher has been cracked, the other big cipher-related event in December 2020 was that Clarkson / Hammond / May’s Grand Tour Special came to Madagascar. The idea was to see if they could (a) drive utterly mad cars around arguably the world’s worst roads without anyone actually lynching them, and (b) find pirate treasure by solving the cryptogram attributed to the French pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur.
That they managed (a) while continuing to flog their format’s dead horse(-power) probably surprised no one at all: but how did they do with (b)?
Is it a treasure map?
I have already blogged here about La Buse far too many times to mention. The short version is that the chances that the pigpen cryptogram widely attributed to him actually had anything to do with him are basically zero. Rather, it seems massively more likely that the cipher was concocted at least fifty years after his death, and that the plaintext was in fact some kind of medical recipe. And if it turns out that the pigeon hearts were simply an 18th century substitution for hoopoe hearts, my Spockian eyebrow would barely flicker.
So, is it a pirate treasure map, me (hoopoe) hearties? Not a hopoe.
What about the end five lines, then?
OK, I know that some (gullible) people think the final five lines sometimes seen added to the cipher make it sound like a right proper treasure map:
un bon verre dans l’hostel de le veque dant(S) le siege du diable r(Q)uarar(N)te siz(X) degrès f(S)iz(X) minutes deuz(X) fois pour celui qui le decouvrira juillet mil sept cent (T)rente
(…in English…)
a good drink in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat forty six degrees six minutes two times for the person who will discover it july 1730
A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat — twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes — northeast and by north — main branch seventh limb east side — shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head — a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.
And, more specifically, they sound more like the 1933 French translation of Poe’s story than Baudelaire’s 1856 French translation.
It therefore seems extraordinarily likely to me that the extra five lines were speculatively added to the cryptogram by a French person after 1933. Which was nice of them.
A Turkish Dog?
All the same, the Grand Tour research minions did do a fair bit of digging. They had James May mention a “Turkish dog” (“UN CHIEN TURQ” in the decrypted text), which has been flagged only in very recent years as a phrase used in the 18th century to describe the kind of hairless state that mangy dogs get into in hot countries. (In the above link, the researcher suggests the phrase should be read as “To make a Turkish dog eat well, throw some dry shit at it”, make of that what you will). Here’s a 1755 image from the BNF showing a real (but now extinct) hairless Turkish dog:
But ultimately, this was – like most of the world seen through the windscreen in the Grand Tour – just window-dressing for the car-themed light entertainment. Which, this time round, basically consisted of repeatedly covering James May (in his big-wheeled Caterham) in high-velocity Madagascan mud to make him swear.
Bless them, they’ve all come so far, yet have ended up where they began.
Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar?
It was correct of them to say (a) that La Buse tried to get himself a pardon from the newly-installed French authorities on Ile de France (Mauritius); (b) that he was captured in Madagascar; and (c) that he was hanged in 1730 in Réunion. So I think it was fair to say that they did broadly present his overall timeline right.
However, La Buse had (it has been widely written) settled down on the Seychelles, nowhere near Madagascar. He was also captured near Fort Dauphin (the main French colony on the island at the time), which was completely the wrong end of the island from the end the bumbling comedic trio drove their modded cars to.
Though La Buse had boarded the Compagnie des Indes’ ship “La Méduse” (1728-1731), it was merely as a pilot to steer it into Port Dauphin. Unfortunately (for La Buse), he was recognised by the captain (it is widely reported, which was presumably Capitaine Hyacinthe D’Hermite as per Memoires des Hommes), captured, and brought to Réunion. And from there to the gallows.
Also: the grave on Réunion that is supposedly La Buse’s isn’t his at all, it’s just a piece of much later tourist trappery. And Madagascar’s “Libertalia”? This is probably more fun as a computer game than as an historical source, so please don’t get me started on that pile of… conjecture.
So, What Really Happened, Then?
Most of the stuff written about La Buse seems to me to vastly overplay his importance as a pirate. Rather, he seems to have been bigged up by the same kind of French ‘historians’ who turned the dead bookseller Nicolas Flamel into some kind of undying alchemist. Flamel would, of course, be turning in his grave were he not still alive. Supposedly.
As to what actually happened with the treasure, I’m marginally more convinced by the account in Charles Grey’s “Pirates of the Eastern Seas” (Chapter XVII): “The pirates divided the plunder at St. Mary’s, besides the cash sharing about 42 small diamonds per man or in less number according to their proportion” (p.325). Grey finishes with Captain David Greenhill’s July 1723 report “that the pirate ship Cassandra was come into Portobello, and that the people have a free pardon for themselves and their goods, and were selling their diamonds and India goods when he came away” (p.329).
The fabulous treasures and chintzes the pirates took had (without much doubt) already been spirited back to Cochin (modern-day Kochi in Kerala) to sell to”their Dutch friends” (p.325). So this is almost certainly where the Flaming Cross of Goa was melted down and laundered, with most of the cash then spaffed on the normal mad carousing pirates specialised in.
Why? Being a pirate was a shitty thing: you expected to die young, because that’s how it normally worked. It’s just that life on board ‘proper’ ships was pretty shitty too, so why not go for the 10% odds that piracy might just work for you?
In some ways, I can’t really blame people for wanting all or any of the tongue-hanging-out-your-mouth La Buse treasure stories to be true. But in my experience, most of the stories attached to unsolved cryptograms tend to be simply historical backfill, campfire stories grafted on to help flog an uncracked cipher to the next sucker mug enough to buy it. And, in my opinion, La Buse’s cryptogram fits that template to a T.
Of course, the other scenario is where people use a bit of unsolved cipher mystery snake oil to help repackage tired old products well past their sell-by date. But that would never happen on Amazon Prime, would it?
Apparently it’s Voynich Art History trivia weekend here at Cipher Mysteries. First up is this and this, both prints of Master E.S.’s “The Visitation” that I found recently:
Master ES (German, active ca. 1450–67) The Visitation, 15th century German Engraving; sheet: 6 3/16 x 4 11/16 in. (15.7 x 12 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1922 (22.83.2)
Though classily executed, this is clearly (I think) in the same family as Diebold Lauber’s couples and the Voynich Manuscript Virgo roundel couple.
Ex Libris
I also stumbled upon this nice ex libris at the front of a book owned by Auxiliary Bishop Melchior Fattlin of Constance (1490-1548) (and show me a blogger who doesn’t get a guilty kick out of occasionally linking to catholic-hierarchy.org and I’ll show you a big fat liar):
While eerily reminding me of the Voynich Aries zodiac roundel, this also makes me wonder whether the surname “Fattlin” might have some goat- or sheep-related meaning etc.
Banderoles
The other thing I’m wondering about today is banderoles (aka “speech scrolls”). These started as ornate scrolls filled with text in drawings and paintings, more or less equivalent to modern speech bubbles (e.g. the former by the angel Gabriel, the latter by Garfield).
In the 15th century, these were a favourite of the Master of the Banderoles (active 1450-1475), who Wikipedia rather sniffily describes as a “crude” and “clumsy” copyist of Master E.S. and Rogier van der Weyden.
Why am I interested in banderoles? Because I can’t see anything that better describes the lines of text spiralling out both from the inverted T-O map and the wolkenband on Voynich Manuscript f68v3.
Codicologically, my suspicion here is that the drawing f68v3 came from was itself derived from a French (specifically Parisian) original, but that that predecessor had only had the four seasons’ banderoles added. The extra four banderoles seem to have been added here as an additional construction layer. That is, I suspect that if you looked under a microscope at the boundaries where the extra four banderoles join on to the wolkenband, you would see the marks where the wolkenband was drawn but then erased to add in the extra four banderoles.
Having said that, I haven’t yet found a single fifteenth century astronomical drawing with banderole-style annotation. Perhaps this is something we should be looking for.
Back in 2006, I argued (in ‘Curse’, pp.58-61) that a series of seven consecutive circular diagrams in the Voynich Manuscript’s Q9 (‘Quire 9’) and Q10 probably represented the seven ‘planets’ of traditional astrology / astronomy.
(Note that the wide Q9 bifolio had been incorrectly rebound at some point in the manuscript’s history, making this sequence far from visually obvious). My argument relied on these observations:
The page immediately preceding the set contains a rotated / inverted T-O map (representing the Earth) surrounded by a wolkenband (representing the heavens). Note: we now also know that this strongly parallels a drawing in a high-quality presentation manuscript by Nicolas Oresme.
The pages immediately following the set contain a series of zodiac roundels (that we now know seem to have been copied from a 1420s Alsace calendar).
The zodiac roundels also seem to be related to Vat Gr 1291, a copy of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, which I blogged about here.
One of the pages in the set contains a sun roundel (f68v1)
Another of the pages contains a large moon roundel (f67r1)
One of the pages has a 46-way radial symmetry, which eerily coincides with Mercury’s Babylonian 46-year goal year period. (Saturn has a 59-year period, Jupiter a 71-year period, Mars a 79-year period, while the octaeteris was where 8 Earth years correspond to 13 Venus years). It’s not proof that the roundel on f69r is linked to Mercury, but it’s a good start.
But now it’s 2020, and I’m wondering if I can now take this argument up to the next level. This is because some medieval / early modern astronomical manuscripts also contain a series of large circular diagrams corresponding to the seven classical planets. These are known as Theorica Planetarum manuscripts, and their circular diagrams are paper machines – that is, they are rotating volvelles duplicating the Ptolemaic epicycles long used by astronomers and astrologers to approximate the movements of the planets.
Hence the Theorica Planetarum Voynich Manuscript hypothesis is simply the suggestions that the set of seven consecutive circular diagrams in the Voynich Manuscript’s Q9 and Q10 might actually be (in some way) standing in for the circular paper machines in Theorica Planetarum manuscripts.
But to follow this research thread through to its logical end, we will need to know a lot more not only about Theorica Planetarum manuscripts (and their diffusion through Europe), but also about Ptolemaic epicycles, which is what the Theorica Planetarum models were trying to emulate.
Epicycles
In the pre-Copernican time period we’re interested in, the dominant belief (because all the rest was heresy) was that the celestial spheres rotated around the Earth in a perfectly circular manner. Bede’s De Natura Rerum depicted it thus:
Unfortunately, if you were an astronomer and tried to use this model to predict the movements of the wandering ‘planets’ (which back then included the sun and the moon), you’d be quickly disappointed. Because it doesn’t work. Not even close.
The most obvious thing that goes wrong is that planets often appear to be travelling backwards relative to how you would expect to see them move if they were rotating around simply (this is known as ‘retrograde motion’).
To fix this, the Greeks (specifically Hipparchus and Ptolemy) came up with a mathematical trick that instead modelled a planet’s movement as a smaller circle (an “epicycle”) attached to (i.e. offsetting from) a larger circle (a “deferent”). While not perfect, this was a step in the right direction.
Mathematically, you can think of epicycles as a kind of two-term Fourier approximation of a more complex function. And this trick was what astronomers and astrologers were still using more than a millennium later.
Oh, and there was a further trick: even if your epicycles are able to account for retrograde motion, the velocities of the planetary motion were still variable. And so Ptolemy added the idea of the equant, based on observations made by Theon (probably Theon of Smyrna), which offset the (virtual) place of observation to account for variable velocities.
Mathematically, this was a secondary kludge with no basis in anything anyone could point to as an actual reason. In fact, the whole idea of the equant annoyed Copernicus so much that it has been argued he came up with his whole heliocentric system simply to throw equants away.
All the same, the combination of Ptolemy’s equant and a deferent/epicycle per-planet pair proved to be a practical enough solution to the problem of predicting planetary motion, regardless of what Copernicus thought. 😉
Note that some (old-fashioned) astronomy historians asserted that more and more epicycles were added over the centuries to try to make the models better approximate the reality, but this is a myth. It’s true that Copernicus added an extra epicycle per planet, but this was because he was trying to get rid of that pesky equant. The two were essentially the same.
Clockwork Cosmoses
Putting the equant to one side, the epicycle/deferent values reduce to a discussion of ratios:
What is the ratio between the deferent period and the solar year?
What is the ratio between the deferent period and the epicycle period?
What is the ratio between the deferent radius and the epicycle radius?
If you know these values, not only can you calculate tables of planetary positions, but you can also build physical models – both volvelles and clockwork mechanisms.
Famously, the (pre-Ptolemy) Antikythera Mechanism used tricky gearing to model the moon’s anomalous movements. Incidentally, Freeth and Jones (2012) proposed an interesting reconstruction of the rest of the planetary movements in the AK by ‘scaling up’ its tricky lunar gearing.
However, because all other Greco-Roman models are lost to history (despite mentions in Cicero, no extant artefacts are known), we now have to fast-forward to the 14th century, and the Ptolemaic clockwork cosmos of Giovanni Dondi. His astrarium was much seen, described and admired, and in 1381 he gave it to Gian Galeazzo Visconti: it stayed in Pavia till at least 1485. (It seems likely that Leonardo da Vinci saw it). There are a number of modern reconstructions, such as this one which I once saw in Milan:
Helpfully, Giovanni Dondi described his astrarium’s inner workings in his Tractatus astrarii (Padova, Biblioteca Capitolare, Ms. D.39 and one other were by Dondi, but at least ten other manuscript copies exist). There’s a critical edition: Giovanni Dondi dall’ Orologio, Emmanuel Poulle (ed., trans.) (1987–1988) Johannis de Dondis Padovani Civis Astrarium. 2 vols. Opera omnia Jacobi et Johannis de Dondis. [Padova]: Ed. 1+1; Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Giovanni Dondi’s dial of Venus (fol. 12v)
From this, we know that Dondi designed his astrarium to function according to the 13th century Theorica planetarum of Campanus of Novara (more on him later) and the Alfonsine tables (circa 1272).
Might the Voynich Manuscript’s seven planet pages be not astronomical but simply a copy of the relevant pages of Dondi’s Tractatus astrarii? It’s very possible, but let’s not sink into the murky world of theories just yet. 😉
Theorica Planetarum Gerardi
Olaf Pedersen’s 1981 paper “The Origins of the ‘Theorica Planetarum” notes that the Theorica Planetarum specifically described the motions of the planets: and was much copied because other texts like the Sphaera of Sacrobosco were quite lacking in that respect.
The incipit was “Circulus eccentricus vel egresse cuspidis vel egredientis centri dicitur qui non habet centum suum cum centro mundi“: and Pedersen reports (in 1981) having more than 210 entries on his checklist of copies, which makes it almost as widely circulated as Sacrobosco’s Sphaera.
As to its author, it was widely believed to have been written by Gerard of Cremona (hence you’ll often see it referred to as Theorica Planetarum Gerardi). Regiomontanus called it by this name, though he was aware there was no proof that Gerard had written it – and by Regiomontanus’ time, it had become known as Theorica Planetarum Antiqua.
Pedersen himself came to no conclusion about who actually wrote this, but considered that he knew of nothing that “[invalidated] the assumption that it originated from the hand of a thirteenth-century author”. (p.122)
Campanus of Novara’s Theorica Planetarum
The next Theorica Planetarum to take the medieval stage was by Campanus of Novara (c.1220-1296), and was composed (1261-1264) at broadly the same time as the Theorica Planetarum Gerardi.
This was a very much more solid affair (without a number of the erroneous simplications the other Theorica had included), and included a description of how to make an equatorium. This is essentially a single mater (an astrolabe-like back disk), into which other disk-sets are inserted, one disk-set per planet. This would be cumbersome and impractical, though the equatorium article linked here says: “[I]t is however likely that Campanus envisaged an instrument of gigantic dimensions.”
There’s a critical edition of Campanus’ Theorica Planetarum by Benjamin and Toomer, which I’ve ordered a copy of from America (though I don’t expect it to come anytime soon).
There was also a tidied-up version of Campanus’ work from circa 1320, called “Abbreviatio instrumenti Campani, sive aequatorium” by Johannes de Lineriis (Jean de Linières or Lignières). I’m guessing that Benjamin and Toomer’s book covers this (but I’ll find out when it arrives).
Georg von Peurbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum
In many ways, Georg von Peurbach’s much-updated Theoricae Novae Planetarum (1454) was the last hurrah of the Theorica Planetarum genre. Regiomontanus (von Peurbach’s student) even went to immense expense to print his late teacher/mentor’s work in 1472.
Michela Malpangotto’s (2012) article “The Early Manuscripts of Georg von Peuerbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum” lists five very interesting early copies of the manuscript, dating from 1454 to the early 1460s:
Here, there are particularly strong relationships between the A/B/C copies, that make it look as though all three were created in 1454 in Vienna.
What About Gotha Chart. A 472?
I discussed this manuscript in my previous post, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t as yet know how this – and by implication the whole Profatius Judaeus thing – fits into the Theorica Planetarum landscape.
Volvelles or Equatorium Inserts?
So here’s one of the many problems to clear up. Campanus’ Theorica Planetarum describes an equatorium, i.e. a series of multi-layer circular inserts that slot into an astrolabe-like mater… not volvelles.
Moreover, even though Georg von Peurbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum was printed as volvelles in the 16th century (e.g. the LJS 64 copy I showed the video of before), I’m entirely unsure whether the transition to volvelles there was by Regiomontanus (Regiomontanus certainly had volvelles in his 1474 Calendar) or a later thing.
So, without reading a ton more stuff, I’m entirely unsure whether volvelles (as volvelles, not as equatorium inserts) were found in the Theorica Planetarum genre at all pre-1500.
But these are early days. I’ll blog more as things become clearer. 🙂
If, like me, you’ve been looking for a nice guide to illustrated manuscripts in the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg’s Cod. Pal. Germ. collection for a while, you’re in for a bit of a treat here. 🙂
German librarian / book historian Hans Wegener’s (1927) “Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der deutschen Bilder-Handschriften des späten Mittelalters in der Heidelberger Universitäts-Bibliothek” (which you can download from UB Heidelberg here) runs through a (mostly) chronological series of illustrated manuscripts from the library, discussing each one’s writer(s) and (usually unnamed) illustrator(s).
(For reference, the para at the top of its p.10 was where Hans Wegener asserted that the illustrator of Cod. Pal. Germ. 530 also drew the pictures for Staatsbibliothek Eichstätt MS 212, as I mentioned in my last post.)
The easiest way to view all the illustrations is to use UB Heidelberg’s HeidICON tool (there’s a link on the left of each CPG page). There, you can jump straight to a grid of illustrations in that manuscript, i.e. clicking on a thumbnail brings up the full-size picture on the right-hand side.
I went through all the drawings from 1400 to about 1470, and have pasted in some of the most interesting drawings. Enjoy!
Cod. Pal. Germ. 362 – Flore und Blancheflor [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, 1430-1440]
It’s not quite Stockfish vs LC0, but it’ll do nicely.
Cod. Pal. Germ. 324 – Dietrich und seine Gesellen. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1440]
It’s that couple again!
Here they are again!
Apparently Diebold Lauber’s Werkstatt invented the High Five
(The next five items form “Deutsche Bibel in 5 Bänden”.)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 19 – Die Bücher Mose, Josua und Richter [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1440] (not very interesting drawings)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 20 – Bücher der Könige und Paralipomenon I und IL [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1440] (also not very interesting drawings)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 21 – Die Bücher Esra, Nehemia, Tobias, Judith, Esther, Hiob, Psalter, Parabole Ecclesiastes, Cantica, Sapientia und Ecclesiasticus. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1440] (again, pretty dull)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 22 – Die Bücher jesaia, Jercmia, Baiiieli, Hesekiel, Daniel und die zwölf kleinen Propheten. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1440] (didn’t work for me at all)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 23 – Das Neue Testament [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1440] (nope, the whole set failed to press my buttons)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 300 – Megenberg: Buch der Natur. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, 1440-1450]
Cpg300 contains an old pair of friends, but some other stuff too:
Another image we’ve discussed before!
A crossbowman.
A mermaid, in the page of sea creatures.
Cod. Pal. Germ. 149 – Sieben weise Meister und die Chronik des Martin von Polen. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1450]
Wait… did they just put crowns and a bit of trim on the couple?
Yes, they added a beard to try to mess with your mind.
Wait, no, what?
Now this is getting just plain silly.
Apparently Diebold Lauber invented rock and roll too.
Cod. Pal. Germ. 339 – Parzival. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1450]
Wait, what? Did Diebold Lauber invent bromance too?
Cod. Pal. Germ. 137 – Martin von Polen: Chronik. [Werkstatt des Diebolt Lauber in Hagenau, Um 1460] (dull as ditchwater, unless you really like grinding your way through endless unconvincing drawings of popes)
More Other Stuff
Cod. Pal. Germ. 311 – Megenberg: Buch der Natur [Mittelrhemische Hs, 1450-1460] (Has a nice catoblepas)
Cod. Pal. Germ. 438 – Gedieht von den zehn Geboten, der Bulie, der Beichte und den sieben Todsünden. [Mitteldeutsche Hs., 1450-1460]
Cod. Pal. Germ. 344 – Gedichte (“Von dem Eilenden Buoben”, Spruchgedicht von der Minne und dem Pfennig und Spruchgedicht vom Streite zweier Frauen über Liebe und Leid der Minne) [Oberrheinische Hs, Um 1459]
They’re doing that hand thing!
Looks to have been adapted from the same source image as the previous drawing.
Cod. Pal. Germ. 60 – Deutsche Bibel, Brief des Juden Samuel, Ars moriendi. Legende des hl. Patricius und die Legende des hl. Brandon. [Oberdeutsche Hs, Um 1460]
Cod. Pal. Germ. 111 – Legende vom hl. Mauritius und Legende vom hl. Meinrat. [Schwäbische Hs., Um 1470]
Hans Wegener continues his book with CPG manuscripts from Ludwig Hennfflin’s Werkstatt, but this is now well out of our window of interest, so I’ll stop here. 🙂
From 1991 onwards, John Walsh – the well-known host of “America’s Most Wanted” – received a series of ominous and threatening letters signed “SCORPION”. Some of these contained a series of Zodiac-style homophonic ciphers: to date, only two of these have been released. Unsurprisingly, these are known as the “Scorpion Ciphers“: but none has yet been cracked.
However, there’s reason to believe (as I pointed out in 2017) that there are some specific regularities with the S1 (‘Scorpion #1’) ciphertext and even more so with the S5 ciphertext that we might be able to exploit. Even though both ciphers at first sight resemble the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers, the Scorpion’s seem to cycle between specific sets of homophonic symbols. In the case of the S5 ciphertext, the cycling seems particularly rigid, in that it cycles between 16 alphabets.
Cryptologically, the problem was that ‘traditional’ homophonic solvers (such as Jarlve’s excellent AZDecrypt) have no way to include extra cipher system constraints, regardless of how stringent they may be. For example, it would be a reasonable hypothesis that S5 uses only a single alphabet for each of its 16 columns: but this is not something that any current solver could use.
After a fair bit of thought, I came up with the idea of putting out a set of challenge ciphers using a completely rigid cycling homophonic cipher, to try to spark interest in solving this class of ciphertext. And so, also back in 2017, I posted up a page containing seven constrained homophonic challenge ciphers. Despite a shockingly high bounty of £10 being on offer for the best solve by the end of 2017, nobody managed to grab my cash.
Had I made even the longest challenge cipher far too difficult? Would nobody ever solve these? Despite my doubts, I remained reasonably confident some clever person would find a way in, sooner or later…
2020: Enter Louie Helm…
And so it was with great delight that I received an email this morning from Louie Helm, asking me to check his solution. As a recap, my challenge cipher #1 (neatly arranged into its five columns) was:
…which was completely correct! Fantastic work, well done!!! 🙂
(Extra crypto brownie points on offer for anyone who recognizes the – admittedly somewhat obscure – source of the quotation.)
Crypto-fans may well recognize Louie’s name as having been (along with Jarlve) one half of the recent pair of solvers of Klaus Schmeh’s 1000-bigram (and then even harder 750-bigram) challenge. And here’s Louie’s cool-looking photo:
I solved it with AZdecrypt v1.17 using my newest 8-gram model released a few days ago on Christmas. The only modification I made was adding 15 lines of code to restrict the solver to only use one homophone for each of the five columns. The solve for cipher #1 succeeded, but the way I modified the solver to do it is very inelegant since it can quickly lock high-scoring letters into place and then deprives the hill climber of further opportunities to test them in other arrangements. A more well-tuned version of this general solution would merely penalize (but not forbid) repeated letters in each column. This would allow the solver to evolve through a less jagged solution landscape and then still eventually arrive at a 1-homophone/column solution in the end. I predict this sort of modification would likely solve cipher #2 and beyond.
Although I used the column constraint (and it appears to have been necessary for a quick solve), the larger story here is probably the recent improvements to AZdecrypt and the release of 8-gram models in 2019.
For instance, if you simply ignore Nick’s constraint and use Jarl’s state of the art solver + his best n-gram file from 2018, you would have needed an 8 word crib to quickly decrypt challenge cipher #1:
But in 2019, Jarl moved away from his IoC-based solver to a more capable entropy-based one. This alone drops the required crib needed to solve the cipher down to 2-3 words:
And doing the same execrise with the n-gram models I’ve released during 2019 shows they progressed from needing an 8 word crib — down to just a 5 letter crib:
Note: These are just the cribs I got to work in under a minute using a completely unmodified version of AZdecrypt. It’s quite possible that any of us using either of the last two version of AZdecrypt + beijinghouse 8-gram files could have solved this since Oct 2019 simply by letting it run long enough.
So the real story here seems to be that to crack my first challenge cipher, the three things that were necessary were not only Louie Helm’s tweaks to AZDecrypt to exploit the column constraints, but also Jarlve’s huge improvements to AZDecrypt’s homophonic solver during 2019, along with Louie’s now very extensive 8-gram files.
I think this is a great result for Louie (and for Jarl too!), and I have nothing but admiration and applause for the pair of them. Rock and roll, guys!
The (Inevitable) Crypto Punchline…
Of course, challenge cipher #1 was (numerically) the easiest one, in that it was the longest of the set. So the big test will be to see how far through the list of challenge ciphers Louie Helm’s approach will (admittedly with a bit of tidying up) now be able to reach.
Interestingly, Louie immediately noted that my challenge cipher #2 presents some obvious-looking crypto weaknesses:
the 1st and 10th lines (of five symbols each) are identical
the 4th and 19th lines are also identical, and share three consecutive symbols with line #22.
He then speculates that it might be worth attacking these patterns in cipher #2 using common words or phrases such as “THERE” / “THOSE” / “I HAVE” / “IN THE” / “IS THE” / “IT WAS”.
Personally, I haven’t looked at the plaintexts since I enciphered them two and a half years ago (and I have no intention of doing so until such time as a proposed decryption arrives here), so I’m not going to be much help. 😉
The only information I’d add is that I took each of the seven short texts from completely different places: so knowing the source of “The object of my proposed work on cypher…” shouldn’t directly assist with the others.
But what I want to now say is: good luck, everyone! The game is afoot!
It’s that time of year when a Voynich researcher’s mind turns to life’s most important questions. Such as whether it is possible to use Father Christmas to decrypt the Voynich Manuscript.
For a start, it’s entirely possible that there is Christmas-related imagery hidden in plain sight in the Voynich Manuscript, but we’ve just been too distracted by the details to notice them:
Before I go any further, I should say that I do know full well that what we now think of as ‘Santa Claus’ was in fact a 19th century faux-historical mash-up of loads of other stuff, and that he originally wore green clothes (not red). But I would – as spin doctors now tell us all the time – say that, wouldn’t I?
All the same, it’s probably safe to say that we would have zero luck using a 19th century cultural crossover to decrypt a 15th century object. However, we might have more luck with the layer that preceded him – by which I mean St. Nicholas.
This might be interesting because the zodiac roundel drawings in the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘zodiac’ section bear a strong resemblance to the zodiac roundel drawings found in early fifteenth century Alsace calendars (specifically 1420-1430, it’s all in the sleeves and the necklines). Hence I think there’s a reasonably good chance that what we’re looking at there is some kind of calendar – and the most important details written on calendars were feast days celebrating local saints.
If this section is indeed some kind of calendar (and it’s still speculation, remember), there’s a decent chance it was arranged not by zodiac degree but by month. But what day did the year start on in the 15th century?
Back then, this was not universally 1st January, not at all. In fact, as Rafal Prinke pointed out in 2001 (I quoted him in 2009), the Venetian year instead started on 1st March, while the Florentine year started on 25th March. The reason this is relevant is that the first zodiac sign depicted on a Voynich zodiac roundel is Pisces, which (though it astrologically / zodiacally starts in late February) was typically associated with March. (We are sufficiently certain of the folio order that we can be sure Pisces came first.)
So let’s make today’s educated guess: that the Voynich ‘zodiac’ section is actually a calendar of feast days that starts on 1st March. (It might even be some kind of wonky Cisioianus, nobody knows.) Does that give us a Father Christmas attack on the Voynich Manuscript?
Well… it might do. On the page for (according to our guess) December (it has a Sagittarius crossbowman roundel drawing in the centre), there are thirty ‘labels’ (attached to the thirty ‘nymphs’). And one of these labels might just be saying St. Nicholas, right?
As an aside: to my eyes, there are plenty of annoying (or at least slightly unsettling) details on this page:
It seems that the labels were added in a different ink and by a different quill
It seems that most (but not all) of the nymphs’ breasts were added by that same different hand
Some of the nymph outlines were also updated with that same quill
There’s a particularly badly drawn barrel outline added behind the top-left nymph just outside the largest ring
There’s green paint contact transfer from the facing page BUT that would seem to imply that the now-missing folio immediately afterwards (Capricorn and Aquarius) was not there when the green paint was added. Which would seem to imply that the green paint (at the very least) was added some time (probably a century or more?) after the initial composition phase(s).
Sanctus abinde Thomas modo Nat Steph Jo Pu Thome Sil.
We can decode this syllable by syllable to reveal the list of feast days that the mnemonic was trying to help people memorize (with a little help from Grotefend’s 1891 “Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters“, p.35):
De-
cem-
ber
Bar- – Feast of St Barbara
ba
Ni- – Feast of St Nicholas
co
Con- Feast of the Immaculate Conception
cep
Et
Al-
ma
Lu- – Feast of St Lucy
Ci-
a
Sanc-
tus
Ab-
in
de
Thom- – Feast of St Thome Ap
as
mo-
do
Nat – Nativ. Domini
Steph – Feast of St Stephen
Jo
Pu
Tho- – Feast of St Thome Asp (St Thomas a Becket)
me
Sil – Feast of St Sylvester
What immediate emerges is that if we’re looking for St. Nicholas in the 15th century, his feast day was actually on December 6th, neatly sandwiched between St Barbara (December 4th) and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th).
Hence if the text on this page is some kind of Cisioianus mnemonic for December, we might hope to find labels in a sequence that looks vaguely like “Bar Ba Ni Co Con“. Now, I personally can’t see anything there that quite fits this pattern at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 😉
But, sadly, this is just about as far as St Nicholas’ Christmas sleigh can carry us into the speculative world of Voynich research. Happy Christmas to you all! 🙂
There are plenty of things about Edward Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher that rarely appear in the countless gosh-wow sites that feature it on the web. And arguably one of the biggest of these is its timeline.
1886: The Liszt Fragment
The earliest instance we know of where Elgar used the ‘Dorabella’ shapes to write something down was when jotting something in the left margin of a programme for a Liszt concert at the Crystal Palace (10th April 1886). The best quality image of this fragment appears on p.134 in Craig Bauer’s magisterial “Unsolved!”, which I reproduce here:
This contains a fair few repeated shapes, which would be good grist for the cryptanalytic mill were the fragment not so darned short:
Though Anthony Thorley claimed to have ‘decrypted’ this fragment in (or before) 1977 as “GETS YOU TO JOY, AND HYSTERIOUS”, this looks just plain wrong to Bauer (and to me). This is not only because none of the repeated letter usages line up, but also because it’s basically the wrong length (Thorley’s phrase is 25 letters long, while the fragment is made up of eighteen shapes plus a terminal dash).
If this Liszt fragment is a cipher, I’m sure Big Data people wouldn’t have to try hugely hard to build up a list of all 18-letter English letter sequences with the same aBCDeCfgBhiDCBijkl pattern. Perhaps looking for matches for the 13-letter stretch from BCD to DCB might be a productive exercise?
At the same time, it is tempting to wonder whether Elgar was using these shapes as some kind of idiosyncratic musical notation. However, even though the eighteen-glyph-plus-hyphen fragment appears in the margin beside an eighteen-note arpeggiated melody (Liszt’s “allegretto pastorale” motif, which appears as “an independent episode” according to the programme notes), it has none of its musical symmetry.
So: even though the Liszt fragments looks as though it really ought to be a simple cipher (and, moreover, a simple cipher that Elgar had without any real doubt used many times before), none of the claimed decryptions put forward for it make much sense. It’s possible Elgar was using his own brand of self-pleasing nonsense verbiage but… this is as far as we can get.
1897: The Dorabella Cipher
According to her 1937 book “Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation”, a young Dora Penny’s first met Edward Elgar on 6th December 1895. Elgar’s wife was an old friend of Dora’s stepmother, and so the couple had come to visit. Elgar and Dora talked, but not about music: rather, he wanted to know about Wolverhampton Wanderers (the club was close to the Penny’s house).
All the same, he did sit down at the piano in the drawing room before luncheon, where Dora turned over the pages for him. This proved to be a challenge, as “[w]hen it came to playing from his own manuscripts you often saw nothing but a few pencilled notes and a mark or two, when he was playing something tremendous – full orchestra and chorus perhaps“, though over time she did become “rather clever at it“.
Elgar first got to see a football match with Dora on 17th October 1896. He subsequently “was much taken with the names of some of the players – particularly Malpas. […] I have known him say when we met: ‘There you are. How’s Malpas?’ – a question I was not always able to answer.“
Her book reproduces a letter she received from Elgar with a distinctive red ‘E’ seal: all of which I think gives as close a representation of the likely content of the Dorabella Cipher as can reasonably be hoped for:
Forli Malvern March 4 [1897] Dear Miss Penny Here is some locomotive learning; so much nicer than mouldy music. Alice tells me you are warbling wigorously in Worcestor wunce a week (alliteration archaically Norse). I am very glad, but on second thoughts, as I have never heard you sing I am not sure: but perhaps some day if you are not rushing away I might arrange to show you over the Cathedral organ, K. John’s tomb and the Dane’s skin: (the Dane is dead). By the way I have taken to ‘die-sinking’ as a recreation: here on the back of this is my parcel-post seal: I have to register all my MSS & they will not give a receipt unless they are sealed: so I put this on that my works may be Esily distinguished. Kindest regards to everybody Believe me sincerely yours EDWARD ELGAR
The Dorabella Cipher is dated July 14 [18]97 and, if you haven’t already seen it a thousand times or more, looks like this:
This was “the third letter [Dora Penny] had from him, if indeed it is one“: so the March 4 letter was only one of two Elgar had previously written to Dora.
As to what the Dorabella Cipher says: I’ve previously (in 2013) speculated whether the first two words might be, just as with the March 4 letter, FORLI MALVERN. And the obvious suggestion that Elgar might have also included the phrase “How’s Malpas?” is entirely possible, though untested.
All the same, I’d point out that the general character of the glyph shapes seems to change on the third line. That is, the shapes lose their variety, and become visually monotonous, bland, repetitive, even dull. It’s as though Elgar kind of lost momentum, and stopped wanting to sustain the joke. Much as I have suggested with the famous unsolved Zodiac Z340 cipher (where the top half and bottom half have different statistical profiles / patterns), I do wonder whether we might be seeing two different things grafted together here, i.e. that the third line is quite different in nature from the first two. Just a thought.
Note: it was September 1898 when Edward Elgar first called Dora Penny “Dorabella” (as a quotation from Mozart’s Così fan tutte): so the one word we should not expect to see in the Dorabella Cipher is ‘Dorabella’.
1924 or later: the Marco Elgar Cipher
Yet another place where the rotating e/ee/eee letter-shapes appear in Elgar’s papers is where he uses it as a simple pigpen-style cipher:
This we can date as having been written not before 1924, because the plaintext refers to “MARCO ELGAR”, the name of Elgar’s beloved spaniel, and who was born on 27th May 1924 (a picture of his grave is here).
While the most obvious interesting thing about this it doesn’t work for the Dorabella Cipher, there is something about this sheet that gives me the impression that what Elgar is trying to do is to reconstruct his cipher system. It is hardly a coincidence, I would say (apologies to Thomas Ernst) that another phrase enciphered on this same page is “A VERY OLD CYPHER”.
Given the roughly thirty years’ difference between the Dorabella Cipher and the Marco Elgar cipher (and the absence of any other similar letter-shapes in Elgar’s generally quite well-preserved writings), perhaps it was something he amused himself with as a young man, but which he had by the age of about 70 (he was born in 1857) just plain forgotten.
Perhaps the circular shape on this page is some kind of E-based mnemonic (i.e. that the letters of the alphabet were arranged around), but which had slipped his mind. Certainly, you can see the letter E concealed in it without much difficulty, so perhaps that was part of the game?
Undated: The Cryptogram Card
Our final Elgarian cipher shapes first appeared in Craig Bauer’s “Unsolved!”. These are on a card marked “Cryptogram” (hence “The Cryptogram Card”), but are undated:
Though the writing is tiny, there are two main runs of eee-shapes: in the one just above the word “Cryptogram”, the triple curve shape rotates around, as if (as Craig points out) it is doing a gymnastic forward roll. In the run just below the word “Cryptogram, the three sizes of right facing ‘e’ appear in descending order, followed by the next rotation round. There are also a couple of cipher letters at the top.
What we see here are more like pen trials than cryptograms: so in almost all senses there’s really nothing of importance here.
Recent Dorabella Theories
Plenty of clever people – not just Eric Sams and Tony Gaffney – have already put forward their thoughts about (and their attempted decryptions of) the Dorabella Cipher. Needless to say, not more than one of them can be right at the same time. 🙂
But the list of attempts to explain it keeps getting longer. When Klaus Schmeh blogged about the Dorabella in 2018, one of the commenters (Thomas Ernst) put forward – at some length – his notion that Dora Penny might herself have faked all Elgar’s ciphers. This is an interesting suggestion: Dora certainly had full access to Elgar’s archives for decades, so clearly had opportunity – and I can see what he’s getting at when he draws a parallel between Dora Penny’s book and Bettina von Arnim’s (1835) “Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde”, which contains numerous stories about Goethe falsely adjusted to bring Bettina herself into the foreground (think of it as a kind of literary Forrest Gump).
But I think Ernst is being far too literal when he draws negative conclusions from the way that the post-1924 Marco Elgar page “A VERY OLD CYPHER” alphabet does not work for the Dorabella Cipher. His reasoning (unless I’ve misunderstood it) is that because the two are inconsistent, at least one is not genuine. And he then goes on to argue that if one is not genuine, there’s no reason to think that they are both not genuine.
I would agree that the two are indeed inconsistent. However, the rather different inferences I draw from the Marco Elgar page are that (a) in it, Elgar gives the impression that he was trying to reconstruct a cipher system he had used as a much younger man; and (b) there was some kind of underlying symmetry to the letter-to-glyph assignments in that cipher that he simply could not remember.
So, although there are good reasons we should all be aware of the inconsistency between accounts, Ernst’s move to a full-fat hoaxed-by-Dora theory seems somewhat pessimistic and extravagant to me.
As an aside, I think it would be a good exercise to analyze the Liszt Fragment and the Dorabella Cipher to see if they are consistent or inconsistent with each other (e.g. by comparing letter contact tables etc).
Another commenter (ShadowWolf) used the same Klaus post to put forward his/her own Dorabella decrypt (which, perhaps almost inevitably, involves a cipher-style first pass and a this-is-what-Elgar-really-meant-by-that interpretational second pass, Eric Sams-style):
Plaintext: PBS AFT DALYRENCE MEET B BECO YOUR IDEDTD ALWASE E STUNDER E THINC OLL OR IS IT HIS CH GUISE THNIC ABU IT ACOA
Message: Problems after dalliance meet is because your identity always a stutter I think all or is it his charming guise? Think about it acolyte.
In a similar vein, Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly recall that I posted about Allan Gillespie’s Dorabella Cipher theory back in 2013: his (somewhat hybridized) theory was that the plaintext began “ForlE Malvern Link”, the encipherment used a Vigenère cipher system, but (not entirely unlike Thomas Ernst’s theory) it had been “concocted by someone other than Elgar (possibly in the run-up to WWII when GC&CS were recruiting; possibly with Dora Powell’s connivance, more likely not)“.
Another Dorabella solver is Mark Pitt, a Cleveland police officer “with an MA in crime patterns” who has already had the oxygen of publicity in the Times, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Guardian (to name but four). Pitt has also claimed to have decrypted the Liszt fragment: his solution for both seems to be based around Schooling’s cipher that Elgar famously cracked, with the key “PRUDENTIA”. I suspect Pitt has a (not very active) Twitter account, but that’s just my hunch. A (paywalled) Telegraph article on him from early 2019 is here.
The Two Massey Observations
Finally, a very different take on the Dorabella Cipher has been put forward by Keith Massey in an 11-minute YouTube video from 2017 (but which I only stumbled upon recently), based on two very specific observations.
His first observation is that the Dorabella Cipher contains long sequences of glyphs where no two adjacent glyphs have the same number of loops. Specifically, the first line has a sequence with 12 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; the second line has a sequence with 9 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; while the third line has a sequence with 8 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; all three sequences are near the start of their respective lines. Massey’s control experiments (two of them, which one might reasonably argue is a little bit lightweight) each yielded a single maximum of only 5 or 6 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row. (A more Oranchek-esque researcher would surely have done the experiment by anagramming the Dorabella a billion times over, but I suspect the results would have been not wildly dissimilar.)
Massey’s second observation is that the Dorabella Cipher contains way too many pairs of opposed symbols (i.e. where a glyph is immediately followed by a glyph with its same basic shape but where that second shape is rotated by 180 degrees). Massey calculates that this should on average ~5.3 times for 87 characters, but it instead occurs 12 times.
If we assume all 24 shapes are equally likely to occur (which isn’t true) across the Dorabella’s 87 characters, the probability of 13 exact opposites occurring is ((1/24)^13)*((23/24)^(87-1-13)), which Google tells me is 5.1046414e-20 (i.e. about one in twenty billion billion). Again, a more realistic (i.e. Oranchakian) way of doing this would be to anagram the ciphertext billions of times and see how often twelve exact opposites occur (i.e. using the actual distribution rather than an ideal [perfectly flat] distribution). My prediction here is that the probability there would still be no higher than one in a billion billion, so I believe this too is likely to be a statistically significant result.
Massey thinks the final nail in the Dorabella’s cryptological coffin is that these two patterns don’t overlap: he believes that
Massey’s overall conclusion is that that Elgar created the Dorabella Cipher as nonsense text to resemble a ciphertext as a joke on Dora Penny, but that this nonsense text eventually escaped to become a joke on all of us.
Even if you disagree with the full strength of his conclusion, I suspect these two Massey observations will prove difficult for anybody proposing a simple MASC as a solution (albeit typically with an interpretational second phase) to satisfactorily account for what we see in the Dorabella Cipher.
Thoughts and Conclusions
I have to say that I’m very largely with Keith Massey here, insofar as he is pointing out statistical features of the Dorabella Cipher that are highly improbable. It is almost impossible not to see that these sit awkwardly with the traditionalist (one might call it ‘Samsian‘) reading of the cryptogram’s system as a pigpen-style simple substitution cipher applied to an idiosyncratic Elgarian nonsense-wonsense text. It would be good if Massey’s observations were to be confirmed in a more statistically robust manner, but I would be surprised if the actual results proved to be vastly different.
My own suspicion (just as in 2013) remains that the Dorabella Cipher may turn out to be a stegotext visually concealing a guessable personal message (e.g. “FORLI MALVERN”) rather than a cryptotext mathematically concealing a plaintext. And I believe this is far from inconsistent with Massey’s observations, though only for the left hand half of the three lines.
But even so, I’m really not at all convinced that his observations hold true for the Liszt Fragment, which I believe was written in the same “VERY OLD CYPHER” that Elgar was trying to reconstruct in the Marco Elgar page.
So there is perhaps still work to be done on a genuine Elgar cipher here, even if Massey has indeed managed to nail down the Dorabella MASC coffin (and all credit to him if he has!).
As I’ve said on Cipher Mysteries numerous times, I’ve been finding that my Voynich research is getting harder and harder to publish as blog posts. There’s a long stream of reasons: for example, research into the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels drawings…
…often overlaps existing research literature
…often relies on a literature fragmented across different languages
…often needs to include a literature review
…often refers to a cluster of related previous posts
…tends to be long form rather than short form
…is rarely complete in and of itself
Despite all these, I’ve continued trying to publish my research in blog form: but it’s not getting easier. Yet I very often find myself held to account over details in posts as if I had published a lead article in Nature. Really, it sometimes feels as though I’ve managed to get the worst of both worlds.
And so, going forward, my plan is to trial a quite different approach. Please bear with me, as I’m still trying to work out how to make this work in practice. This post is to try to describe my basic plan, and to provide a forum for your thoughts, comments and suggestions (if you’ll be so kind).
The World of Preprint Servers
There is a large number of preprint servers out there: the most famous one by far is the arXiv.org e-Print archive, which since 1991 has specialised in making preprints of scientific papers easily available on the web. (It now has more than 1.5 million papers, just so you know.)
What is not so well known is that there is also a small (but growing) set of humanities-focused preprint servers out there. These offer a route for preprint (and, increasingly, nonprint) articles to see the light of day.
If you have at all tracked the Voynich-themed brouhaha kicked up by Gerard Cheshire and his somewhat overoptimistic polywhatever linguistic papers, then you’ll probably have noticed that he published them on LingBuzz. Unsurprisingly, this is a linguistics-focused preprint server offering linguistics researchers the opportunity to post up pretty much whatever they like.
For historical code-breaking, the Cryptology ePrint Archive (courtesy of the IACR) seems to be a splendidly super preprint server (though I don’t know much about it). And for general research preprints that perhaps don’t fit big categories comfortably, CERN’s Zenodo seems full of promise (though, again, I know very little about it).
All in all, there now seems to be a preprint server suitable for whatever research you have in mind. So, as a general thing, this route seems to be becoming an effective way of getting articles-in-progress out there.
Openly Published Staged Preprints
You might ask “…but isn’t this just the whole Cheshire thing all over again?” Actually, what I’m doing here is advocating a completely different way of using preprint servers to publish research.
What I’m suggesting here is not to pretend that an article is complete (or even destined for full print publication in a non-existent journal, because that would be just plain stupid), but rather to openly embrace and accentuate the article’s ongoing lack of completion by publishing it via preprint servers in a staged manner, and flagging it as such.
Think of this as a way of serializing publication: or even of celebrating reaching research milestones within a research microproject by publishing a state of play update that anyone can read and comment on, or even possibly collaborate with and help develop further.
For example, a reasonable initial draft on a specific Voynich zodiac roundel topic might include a lightly annotated list of handschriften (including links to those few that are available online), an outline of a literature review, together with a first draft of a research hypothesis.
Similarly, a second pre-draft might include an attempt at extracting the relevant aspects of the literature, summarizing it, including some key images, and then trying to put it all into the outlines of an argument lined to an updated (and finessed) version of the research hypothesis. And so forth.
As for me, I don’t – as long as the stages are described honestly, and the process is made transparent (e.g. by including links to earlier drafts inside the draft) – see any downside to this for the research I do. In many ways, it would be a blessed relief to be able to publish along the way, rather than – tada! – with an ornate flourish at the end, like Arnold Rimmer saluting.
At the same time, I fully understand that some researchers (particularly historical cipher researchers, it has to be said) feel very protective and closed about the research they do, as if they expect to uncover a Pearl of Great Price any day now, and that this will inevitably trigger the start of an Immense Redemption Arc for them. But I can’t speak for those people.
My own position is simply that I’d rather publish stuff as I go (which is basically why I blog). However, I don’t like updating posts endlessly: even though some bloggers do this (some even edit comments to try to make every discussion seem to favour them after the fact), I find this practice both shoddy and indicative of a disgraceful lack of online netiquette. Still, each to their own, eh?
Stuck In The Middle (With You)…
As a researcher, it’s easy to flag how different aspects of blogs, journals, social media, print media, preprint servers etc don’t quite suit your purposes, or your style of research. But at the same time, it can be devilishly difficult to steer a path between them that does gives you what you want.
Perhaps I like the idea of openly publishing staged preprints because I’m at the stage in my personal research journey where I don’t feel concerned or threatened by the notion that someone may possibly waltz in and somehow ‘steal’ my entire research from under my nose. Alternatively, perhaps it’s because I like living life in the open. I don’t know: they’re all true.
An entirely parallel benefit is that someone might well look at a staged preprint and want to pick up the baton in some way: perhaps they already have expertise in or experience of a particular aspect of the field being covered, and would be happy to help hone the argument or whatever.
It may even be that some researchers prove better (Problematique-style) at constructing effective research hypotheses than in answering or resolving them. Further, it might be that openly published staged preprints open up ways of collaborating entirely different from the ones we are used to.
For example, if you were to approach an academic with a specific question about a particular literature they know about, surely it would be a huge assistance if your email to them included a link to a staged online preprint of where your research has managed to reach without their help. Surely this level of transparency and openness would be an entirely good thing?
