Could the world ever really be ready for my enciphered sexy Jewish limerick? Having mulled over the punchline for this for a couple of months, I think I’ve finally nailed it. Happy deciphering! 🙂
A randy professor from Haifa
Wrote all his love letters in cipher
“Ven I look in your eyes,”
He would rhapsodize,
“J’n tdiuvqqjoh uif lojti pgg Njdifmmf Qgfjggfs!“
Here’s a tiny crypto puzzle for you from the award-winning Adrenalini Brothers cartoon series. There, the three eponymic death-defying stunt brothers (Xan, Enk, and Adi) speak a language called Réndøosîan (sample phrase: oofa vamy bakeesh = “you can’t get anything right“): of course, this is simply a trick animation companies use to avoid localization costs (as with Pingu). However, whenever you see writing on screen, it’s not Rendoosian (sorry, “Réndøosîan”) but ciphered English. So what does the following (from “Box of No Return”, a Houdini-esque escapology skit involving a sealed box, a crane, and sharks) say? You’ll probably never guess, even if you live to be 199…
Actually, that’s a little bit too small to read comfortably: so here’s a larger version of the same page:-
OK, OK: seeing as I’m actually a pussycat rather than a cryptographic sadist, here’s the vaguely Voynichesque cipher key (or rather, as much of it as I could reconstruct from the intros to the flash cartoons, which is why there’s no F, Q and Z *sigh*):-
Deciphered it all yet? You like, yes? If so, here’s the next page for you to decipher, too… Enjoy! 🙂
Incidentally, here are some direct links to the first ten Adrenalini Brothers Flash episodes from 2002: these open in a normal (resizable) browser window, so you can enjoy them in all their full-screen glory (recommended!):
1 – High Dive of Doom,
2 – Ocean of Terror,
3 – Volcano of Venom,
4 – Monster of Mayhem,
5 – Wings of Destiny,
6 – Box of No Return,
7 – Slopes Of Peril,
8 – Joust of Glory,
9 – Cannon of Chaos,
10 – Tightrope of Triumph
“Yahzaa!” 🙂
Readers of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” will doubtless remember (if you made it though to Chapter 12, *sigh*) the parallels I drew between physical architects (such as Antonio Averlino / Filarete, of course) and software/cipher architects: both achieve their design ends using a kind of “intellectual structuring” means. But might there be even closer links?
Concealment through architecture is an old story: one might think of priest holes, for example. Famously, Francesco Sforza constructed hidden passageways and staircases in the Corte part of the Castello di Porta Giovia in Milan to allow him to come and go as he pleased (see Evelyn Welch (1995) “Art and Authority in the Renaissance”, pp.205-207): countless other castles have secret tunnels and passageways along this same general theme.
Novels, too, like to reprise this idea: I’m just finishing “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell (2007), whose Bard-esque historical scavenger hunt makes liberal use of architecturally-concealed bits (though perhaps echoing Nic Cage’s “National Treasure” rather more than was strictly necessary for the plot, I’m sad to say).
But I was delighted to find out that real life still trumps most fiction: an obsessive architect called Eric Clough designed a truly remarkable $8.5m house on Fifth Avenue in New York, with layer upon layer of clues, tricks, mechanisms, puns, crosswords, ciphers (even a skytale!), panels and salamanders (!) for the owners to discover over a period of months and years. It’s a marvellous (if slightly mad) story, one I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Don’t forget to click on the 15-photo slideshow at the left: this has close-up pictures of many of the puzzles. Very cool!
PS: speaking of architectural ciphers, my sister once told me about an architect who had his house made backwards, so he could watch TV. But I might have misheard her. 🙂
Do you fancy a little personal journal with a front cover loosely inspired by the VMs (the plant at the top of page f18r, to be precise)? If you do, someone called “Black Pepper” has put her design on CafePress… just in case you have $14 to burn. Alternatively, here’s a Voynich Manuscript-themed screensaver from Amaranth Publishing for a mere $2.
And here’s Thomas Maska’s Avallaen font, inspired by Voynichese lettering: he made it for his conlang [constructed language], also called Avallaen, supposedly “spoken by approximately 35 million people on the northern end of Escerna, a massive volcanic continent in the N’ra Teoi (Great North Sea).” I quite like the way the digits are formed from gallows with different numbers of bars. Oh, and don’t forget, ägloinniyüvoih pōvlen üevs erüs.
Onwards to the fine arts: and I’d have liked to show you an image of Danielle Rante’s mixed-media drawing called “Voynich Secret History” here (this won the 2008 Ohio Arts Council Professional Award), but she didn’t return my email. Oh well!
And there was a 2005 piece similarly called “Voynich Secret History” (though this was a 4-5 minute film by artist Katherine Parker). Her interests include:” the redemption of kitsch, archetypes, and Märchen (German fairytales)“. Yes, I’d say most of the stuff that’s written on the VMs does read like almost-unredeemably-kitsch German fairytales, so perhaps she’s touching on a deeper truth here. 🙂 Her description of the film is that “Dormant plants, winter snow, steam, and drawings based on the Voynich Manuscript are metaphors for latent, hidden and lost knowledge“. All of which sounds rather pleasant, & perhaps one day I’ll see that too…
Enjoy! 🙂
I try to pick up on everything VMs-related out there, and I liked comics as a kid (Marvel not DC, if you’re askin’): so it came as a nice surprise to find the Voynich Manuscript popping up on the edges of the comics world.
According to this page on his own website, satirical graphics novel author Steve Aylett placed the VMs “in the Juice Museum” (a location in “The Velocity Gospel”, #2 in his Accomplice series), as well as “in Eddie Gamete’s library in Slaughtermatic“. Sadly, thanks to H.G.Wells, David Bowie, Peter Frampton, Topper Headon, and Aleister Crowley, Steve’s unlikely to ever make it into the list of Five Most Famous People From Bromley: but I’m sure he’ll do OK for himself all the same. 😮
Another comics blogger has the VMs on the brain, mentioning it in a nice little article on the rediscovery of a full-length print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (it mentions the funky Superman’s Metropolis story, too), as well as in an article on its own.
But then again, I suppose the Codex Seraphinianus is very much like a graphic novel in its own odd way, and that’s arguably not so very far from the VMs: if you can’t read the text, all you have left is the pictures, right? John C commented that the Codex Seraphinianus “most closely resembles European fantasy works like those one sees from Roland Topor and various bande desinée artists“: but to be honest, I’m pretty sure that Serafini was simply trying to appropriate (and undermine) the visual tropes of instruction manuals, rather than align himself with any art movement or style.
Finally (and apropos of nothing, I just thought you might like it), here – courtesy of yesbutnobutyes.com – is a classic Captain America frame, that got terribly, terribly lost in the translation to, erm, English. Enjoy!
Having spent many years in that industry, I always find it quite nice to see computer games people appropriating the Voynich Manuscript. But as games get more visually “realistic” (or, rather, foolishly detailed), their reliance on conceptual props ever diminishes: so I wondered whether Charles Cecil‘s Broken Sword III – which comes over a bit like a traditional text adventure that just happens to be rendered in 3d – would be the last such game.
Yet some are still thinking about Voynich-themed games. Here’s some concept art from Swedish (but Australia-based) games artist Micael Nyberg called “Wilfrid Voynich & The Grand Multiplier” – click on the image to see a decent resolution scan.
In these days of commercial mega-games corporations and marketing-driven games, will this ever see the light of day? Probably not. But do I like it? Yes! 🙂
If you haven’t seen Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out.
It’s now reasonably well-known that the book’s strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it’s a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski has posted some observations here, but I think it’s fair to say nobody yet has the foggiest idea how to go about trying to read it. Oh well!
Incidentally, there’s even a ballet based on it!
Here’s a nice bit of craft by someone called “iisaw” (Eric Coyote Elliott), who’s made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website – click on the picture there for a detailed view.
As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA font) when etching enigmatic script on his enigmatic instrument. He writes:-
This “Cosmolabe” is a prop for a movie. The fifteen circular symbols on the front represent different worlds and the signs on the outer rim are components of magical runes used to travel between the worlds. The instument itself is a way to calculate which runes need to be used for opening gates between specific places.
Cool! What’s also nice is the way that it mirrors many of the circular diagrams in Quire 9. As to the text, I can see “qoksheedy” (which only appears on f108v) there, though the phrase it is in does not: so it looks to me like he’s done a nice job of simulating Voynichese, possibly even better than Gordon Rugg’s grilles ever did. 🙂
The Voynich Manuscript meme continues to tap at our cultural windows, asking politely to be let in from the rain. And sometimes people do…
For example, here’s a knitted squid sitting on a copy of Gawsewitch’s “Le Code Voynich” (don’t be put off by the LiveJournal 14+ age warning, it really is a knitting page).
Over at evilbore, Eric P is getting cross about how the VMs is sneaking in under the cultural radar: “What’s caused this subconscious societal permeation of this obscure text?” he asks, before linking to Voynich News (good call!)
Or alternatively, here’s someone called Malcolm starting a game of Lexicon based around a (fictional) deciphering of the VMs. Lexicon is an RPG where players take on the role of cranky scholars building a faux Wikipedia (one letter at a time, hence the name) around a fictional world, while trying not to cite themselves. Errrm… just like the real Wikipedia, then. 😉
Norbert R. Ibanez has posted up some thoughts on the VMs in ‘English’ (with a PDF you can download): though his ideas may be basically OK, I don’t like his automatic translator much. 🙁
And finally, I’ve had some visitors from a posting about my VQ (“Voynich Quotient“) page put up on the Yog-Sothoth forums (dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu players). One poster mentions “Keeper’s Companion Vol. 1, p.63“, where it presumably links the VMs to the Necronomicon: add that to the ever-growing web of Voynich references out there.
Here’s a nice Voynich-themed oddity from the much-frayed edge between C.P.Snow’s “Two Cultures” of art and science.
A contemporary painter called Shardcore explores the history of science by painting famous scientists and historical scientific objects: and was so entertained by the notion that Ethel Lilian Boole – the daughter of the famous logician George Boole – came to own the Voynich Manuscript (she married Wilfrid Voynich, of course) that he decided to paint a picture celebrating it: and you can see the result here, together with a time-lapse recording of the painter as he painted it.
In Voynichological circles, this connection is old news: the website of my old Voynichian chum Jeff Haley is called The George Boole Fanclub, for precisely this reason. Incidentally, I have spent five years trying not to think of Julian Clary’s former life as The Joan Collins’ Fan Club (terrible, but surely better than “Gillian Pie-Face”?) whenever I see this, but as yet without success. Perhaps in another five years, when Julian Clary has become as horribly mainstream as Jim Davidson (sorry, but that’s how showbiz works)…
The quotation which adorns the picture is from George Boole: “Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought“. Which is nice. But it this true of Voynichese?