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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was the “Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus” really written by John Dee? I first saw this several years back, when I stumbled upon Joseph Peterson’s transcription of it on the Esoteric Archives website.

The link with Dee seemed (and still seems) to me to be spurious: even though he is mentioned right at the start of the text, for me the language, the drawings, the style, the thinking, in fact all of it fails to please as a match. But then again, the earliest copy (held by our old friend the Warburg Institute, MS FBH 51) is apparently 16th century, so would have been written while Dee was still alive. It’s a nice little mystery, I thought, though one which at the time I assumed few had any interest in.

However, I recently found a paper online by occasional Voynich mailing list member Teresa Burns published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (No. 12, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2007), called “The Little Book of Black Venus and the Three-Fold Transformationof Hermetic Astrology“. This fascinating little piece takes the reader on a journey around Dee’s conceptual world and how it might link in with the Tuba Veneris, all the way to a suggested link with the “Familists”, the Family of Love, and from there to an underground Dark Goddess movement.

There’s also an Appendix by Phil Legard, which provides a different (but resonantly similar) angle. Nicely, he discusses whether the invocations might be Trithemian-style steganography (Legard thinks not, but it’s good that this has been explored).

In the same issue, Terri and Nancy Burns also put forward a parallel translation of the Tuba Veneris – this is probably the place most people coming to it for the first time should start.

The next issue’s follow-up piece (by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns) is also online, called “The Little Book of Black Venus – Part Two Olympic Spirits, the Cult of the Dark Goddess, and the Seal of Ameth“. This tries to link the Tuba Veneris with Dee’s early book-buying expedition in Italy, and (though not so successfully, I have to say) with the benendanti of Northern Italy, which you may possibly have heard of in connection with Carlo Ginzburg’s fascinating book “The Night Battles”.

Finally, there’s a beautiful hand-crafted modern edition of the Tuba Veneris mentioned here (apparently based on the same set of articles) though its price of $189 may possibly be just a tad more than many people would spend on books in a year.

My opinion? Having absorbed all these articles, I’m now far more comfortable than I was before with the notion that the Tuba Veneris might well actually be by John Dee – it is dated 1580, which was before the whole Edward Kelley / angelic conversation farrago started kicking off, and placed in London. Yet I’m not taken by the Dark Goddess connection: though I appreciate the possibility, that’s a whole step further than I can take (for the moment, at least). Ultimately, I suspect that the Tuba Veneris will turn out to be in a very loose Trithemian-style steganographic cipher, perhaps for carrying a Familist message around Europe.

Hmmm… perhaps (pace Koestler & Owen Gingerich) someone will end up writing a book on it called “The Spell Nobody Cast”? Just a thought…

Day One of the Early Modern Research Techniques course was easy to write about, as was Day Two: but Day Three? Tricky…

If I close my eyes, the single image from it burnt into my retinas is of Charles Hope sardonically half-warning participants about the historical Class A drug that is archival research. Yes, he personally had partaken of it, and indeed fully inhaled; yes, truth be told he’d actually quite enjoyed it, and even become quite good at it; but being realistic, the chances that you’ll find anything surprising in any archives anywhere range from Slim Jim McThin to zero.

As to the other speakers, Charles Burnett was (as always) excellent value: I could happily listen to him all day. Ingrid de Smet was good, and… look, every lecturer was good, so that’s not the problem at all.

I’ll try to explain what’s been bugging me for a month – and why. You see, about halfway through my Master’s, a particular kind of critical faculty awoke in me that takes the form of an active intuition that (in effect) ‘listens in’. And so I get a parallel commentary on the subtext of what I’m reading: not “do I believe this (y/n)?“, but “to what degree am I comfortable accepting this account is psychologically representative?” In a way, this added non-binary dimension gives me a sort of novelistic insight into non-fiction, and helps me smell not a rat, but the degree of rattiness. You can see this same kind of thing at play in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderful history books (which is probably why I’ve got so many of them).

And the funny smell I sensed here wasn’t from the academics (who were all hardworking, insightful, pragmatic and great), but from the Warburg Institute itself. You see, for all the Renaissance pictures of obscure Greco-Roman deities filed upstairs, the biggest mythology stored there is about the usefulness of the Warburg.

What you have to understand about the Warburg Institute’s collections is that they were constructed as a kind of mad iconological machine by Aby Warburg for Aby Warburg to decode the secrets hidden in Renaissance art… but which were never there to decode. The Warburg Institute is therefore a kind of bizarre 1930s steampunk Internet, where every sub-page is devoted to the art history semantic conspiracy behind a different artefact (and the whole indexing is 50 years behind schedule).

As an analogy, David Kahn, with perhaps more than a hint of a sneer, calls the study of Baconian ciphers “enigmatology”: the study of an enigma that was never there. And “Voynichology” as often practised seems little different to Kahn’s “enigmatology”? (Which is why I don’t call myself a “Voynichologist” any more: rather, I’m just an historian working on the Quattrocento mystery that just happens to be the Voynich Manuscript).

In my opinion, “Renaissance iconology” (which Dan Brown fictionalized as Robert Langdon’s “symbology” in the Da Vinci Code, bless him) or indeed what one might call “Warburgology” is no less a failed thought-experiment than “enigmatology”, or indeed “Voynichology”: all share the same faulty methodology of requiring an hypothetical solution in order to make sense of something else uncertain.

But what of the man himself? For me, I see Aby Warburg’s quest as being driven by the desire to move (through his research) ever closer to touch Renaissance gods on earth, through the clues about their Neoplatonic Heaven they left hidden in their works. But now we see that they were instead just jobbing artisans with books of emblems tucked into their work smocks: life is disappointing.

Look, I feel an immense amount of goodwill towards the Warburg Institute and all the people who sail in her: but a large part of me wishes for the mythology that shaped it to fall into the sea. Perhaps the sincere search for a God or Goddess is simply a kind of displaced search for dead, absent or idolized parents in the noise of the world, not unlike Mark Romanek’s film “Static“: if so, I think it’s time we called off the search for Warburg’s parents.