The Oera Linda Book: a right proper hoax, I say…

by ⋅ 21 Comments

I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough to cover both historians posing as outsiders and outsiders posing as historians. 🙂

Yet probably the most dispiriting thing about nearly all the novel freethinking theories thus constructed (by either camp) is how boringly similar they tend to be, oxymoronifying the phrase “free thinker”. Did Alberti really write the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? [Hint: no.] Was Leonardo da Vinci really a Grand Master of the [insert made-up name] Secret Society? [Hint: also no.] Read (as I have done) a fair few of these and you’d rapidly come to the conclusion that most trains of thought out there run along well-oiled rails, with nary a point in sight. Point-less stuff, indeed.

Of course, if you try to revisit something / someone particularly well-documented, you face a dauntingly uphill challenge from the start: which is why oddly nebulous objects and obscure people attract the most attention (from both revisionist camps) – because for these, there’s that much less that needs to be explained away from the start before you can really go to town & have some fun.

In this general vein, here’s a nice (2000) article by Mark Newbrook from The Skeptic magazine (it’s on pp.42-47), which brings together literally dozens of fringe historical revisionist communities (Velikovskyists, Saturnists, Afrocentrists, Dravidian- / Mayan- / Latvian- / Hungarian- / Basque-/ Etruscan-centred histories of language, Dogon, etc) to highlight their common traits – most of which seem to centre on a misplaced faith in the fallacies of eighteenth-century linguistic / etymological thought. It has to be admitted that the devotion shown to following through these mad ideas is sometimes quite extraordinary. Did Jesus on the Cross really cry out in Mayan? [Hint: don’t even go there.]

It’s no great secret that most hypotheses floated to explain the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, and the Phaistos Disc match this overall template (i.e. of a simple linguistic misunderstanding taken to massive lengths). Even when top-drawer outsiders (David Icke, Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna etc) throw their lizard-skin top hats into the ring, the same tired old rabbits limp out… ‘Roger Bacon‘, ‘it’s the aliens wot dunnit‘, ‘hoax!’ and so forth.

Of all these , though, it is the “hoax” theorists that are stupendously annoying – not because they happen to be right or wrong (which is another question entirely), but because for the most part they use the idea as a kind of intellectual trick to sidestep the entire evidence corpus, preferring instead to revel in schadenfreude, poking fun at other researchers as they lock intellectual horns with the mute rhinoceros of meaninglessness (and lose the battle, of course).

In all these cases, the correct question to be asking is simply what kind of material, physical evidence would amply demonstrate the presence of a hoax – merely proving the possibility of a hoax (as Gordon Rugg famously tried to do for the Voynich Manuscript in 2004) is both hard work and vacuous. Or, if you prefer to stick with Popperian falsification, how can we actively disprove the notion that artefact X is ancient?

And so it all swings round to a resoundingly 19th century hoax, the Frisian Oera Linda Book (which I picked up on from Lady Goodman’s blog page). This describes all kinds of odd things (such as “Atland”, a 17th century revisionist Atlantis), and claims to have been written in 1256, but copied from texts some of which dated back as early as 2194 BC. Errrrm… “zeker niet, mevrouw“, methinks.

If you absolutely have to sample its purple faux historical prose, there’s an English translation here. To me, it all reads like a ‘worst-of‘ compilation of creative writing courses’ historical modules: but perhaps you’ll find some hidden depths there to which I’m blind. But is this a hoax? [Hint: for sure!]

The wisdom of a crowded forum…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple – hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse seems to have gone dramatically downhill over that same period.

I used to believe that everyone’s contribution was potentially worthwhile, because anyone might see a connection that helps to unlock a door: but this inclusive liberal viewpoint isn’t tenable any more, basically because you have to be able to read the VMs’ pictures in a pretty sophisticated way to get even close.

The curious rubbed-through hole on f34r/f34v of the Voynich Manuscript

Even for the very brightest, there are numerous traps to fall in: such as Sergio Toresella’s belief that the hole rubbed through the tree-trunk-like thing on f34r signals the mad scribe’s sexual frustration (it would require a great deal of work to rub such a neatly arranged hole through vellum). Perhaps Sergio is right (he’s extremely close in almost every other way): but this presumes a very specific kind of irrationality – and so the observation relies very heavily on the hypothesis to validate it, which is a kind of circular argument.

All of which colours my reaction to Zachary1392’s post on the Facepunch Studios forums: when looking at the same hole rubbed through on f34r/f34v, he sees it as a representation of female genitalia. Which (having then thought about it some more) he then concludes we should perhaps worship, as part of a Voynich religion.

In some ways, it’s an optimistic moment: a very sophisticated opinion informed by Sergio Toresella’s lifetime of studying medieval herbals, being duplicated by some amusing forum troll. But it’s also a pessimistic moment, because it gets us nowhere: “Greeman” on the same forum similarly points out:

Haha it was probably some shmuck from 600 years ago who thought;

“I bet if I write some crazy letters and draw some real fucked up stuff on a book someone will find it years later and totally freak out.”

It worked, you all got trolled from an Ancient Pothead.

Good Game.

While “Trogdon” helpfully suggested that, because one word looks like “crop” (EVA chol), the VMs might instead be a Photoshop tutorial. And Draicia thinks the whole thing might be a viral advertisement (but for what? Another Dan Brown novel? Have book publishers suddenly evolved?)

I think that all this forum chatter demonstrates something quite basic: that Linus’ Law sucks for things you can’t easily decompose. Reductionism is such a fundamental tenet of scientific thought that nobody even thinks to mention it these days – but the awkward dizzying truth is that to get started on difficult problems, scientists actually have to actively exercise their scientific imagination to generate novel decompositions (which may or may not be right), within which the hard slog of execution can be split up amongst a virtual cloud of volunteers / academics /  workers. Hence string theory, etc.

Linus’ Law fails for the VMs because nobody wants to sign up to any apparently mad theory before committing any serious amount of effort to testing it. But the truth underlying such an odd object will most likely appear somewhat alien (if not outright demented) to our present day minds – and so any person proposing the hypothesis is naturally expected to do all the hard work of proving it.

The sad thing about the VMs is that we do now have a collection of basic art historical facts and observations which tell us broadly where and when the VMs came from: but these point to so prosaic a subset of answers that almost nobody wants them to be true. Far more interesting to put your trust in David Icke’s, Dan Burisch’s, or Gordon Rugg’s brand of alternate history: they’re scientists, aren’t they? (Errrrrrrm…)

Put it all together, and I think the wisdom of the crowded forums perhaps points to the antithesis of Linus’ Law: that if enough people help to trample on every suggestion, nothing is simple. Or perhaps even simpler: given enough troll eyeballs, everything becomes worthless junk. Oh well. 🙁

Aliens & Dinosaurs…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

My son likes to invent new toy stories formed out of other toys’ favourite bits: and so you get an Alien Pirate Dinosaur Rocket Car 6000 with Laser-Powered Misher-Masher Crab Claws (and so on). Actually, I’ve met computer games designers who work in broadly the same way, so there’s obviously some kind of pattern going on there.

But now I’ve found an awesome story, straight out of the Dan Burisch / Kirk Allen / John Titor alt.scifi universe, that completely trumps even this.

For several years, Victor Martinez has been running a website called serpo.org to facilitate (so the story goes) the release of classified alien-related documents from “Project SERPO“, under which a team of 12 astronauts apparently flew to (and returned from) Zeta Reticuli to visit the “Eben” world. Ohhhhkayyyy…

For example, SERPO release #29 describes the fabulous alien “Yellow Book” (which displays edited highlights from the history of the universe in your mind for as long as you can watch, but then goes back to the start), which is presumably what Dan Burisch (?) thought was being depicted in the VMs’ pharma section (below, with and without the blue paint):-


(I should also point out that, according to serpo.org, proponents and opponents of SERPO’s existence seem mired in an endless tape-loop of bickering, while UFO boards seem possibly even more confused than normal about this.)

But none of that matters, as SERPO release #30 (that emerged only a few days ago) has a unique quality of demented genius to it that I think makes it stand head and shoulders above the rest: and so I thought I’d share. 🙂

What is now claimed (quite independently of all the Zeta Reticuli alien stuff) is that a UFO was found in 1968 during a dig, buried within 150 million year-old rock strata: its diameter was 45 feet, it had two badly decayed 5-foot-tall aliens inside, and two small dinosaurs they had taken with them. There: I’ve used “aliens” and “dinosaurs” in the same sentence – I feel like a child again, it’s a liberating experience. 🙂

Martinez’s anonymous source then goes on to describe the spacecraft’s mysterious rock-like alien power source (but which didn’t work, of course) and the mysterious “star map” they found there too (but which nobody has been able to decipher or decode). Amazing, incredible stuff: but…

…it’s patently a crock. There would be no “star map” to decode: that’s the kind of flawed retro detail a 70 year-old delusional would insert. In fact, I would hazard a guess that 1968 had particular significance for that person: probably the year that their disturbing mental episodes started to take overl their life. The ‘alien ship’ found buried in 1968 then might well symbolically represent their pre-psychosis personality, buried under layers of delusion: while the whole story is – in a very Kirk Allen kind of way – a kind of proto-therapy, a cry for help. “Rescue and understand the aliens” then becomes a shorthand for “rescue and understand me“.

The point I’m trying to make is that even the oddest, maddest things have a human subtext, which we have a kind of moral duty to try to decode, however imperfectly: though psychiatrists and novelists instinctively understand this, the rest of us sometimes forget.

The "John Titor" phenomenon…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

I recently mentioned an online Voynich-mentioning novel by Benjamin Kerstein called Josef6 (which you can read here), pointing out various parallels with the Dan Burisch story.

I’ve since had a nice email from Benjamin, who mentions that he was more directly inspired by a real Internet story, known as the John Titor phenomenon. This concerned someone posting to a time travel website between November 2000 and end-March 2001, claiming to be a time-traveller coming back in time from 2036. There’s a well-known Unix date issue in 2038 (not entirely dissimilar to the whole Y2K nonsense), and “Titor” claimed to have come back to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer to debug some code.

But who was this “John Titor”? The punchline here is that an Italian TV documentary (“Voyager – Ai confini della conoscenza“) from 19th May 2008 pointed the finger at computer expert John Rick Haber, brother of Larry Haber – the owner of all commercial rights concerning John Titor, and the only person who claims to have confirmed Titor’s existence.

Now that’s what I call a proper hoax. 🙂

The Voynich Manuscript – Who Cares?

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

I’ve been debating giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript at Treadwell’s, but I keep coming back to the same problem – what angle should I take?

For me, while its content is occulted (“hidden”), it’s not really an occult object per se. (Well, apart from the magic circles, and they were pretty mainstream natural magic circa 1450). And it’s neither religious, nor sacrilegious, nor nonsensical, nor a conspiracy, nor a hoax.

In short, if some well-meaning rationalist has stripped away the terror, the fantasies, the heresies, the necromancy, the madness and the delusion, would anyone want to hear about that which remains – an object that is just ordinary (albeit extraordinarily well disguised)?

And similarly: in the whole process of re-writing my book, the hardest chapter to tackle has been (and continues to be) the very first chapter: yet in the first edition, this was the easiest (probably because it was mainly a high-speed roll-call of the VMs’ post-1600 history).

These days, I’m reluctant to waste any of my readers’ time on any of the could-be might-be nonsense that most VMs writers (such as Kennedy and Churchill, D’Imperio to a large degree, and the Wikipedia entry almost entirely) tend to fill their entire works with. Rather, my interest lies in the dogged hunt for the-thing-that-the-VMs-is, whatever it turns out to be – and that’s the quest I want to take my readers on, too.

And so in the revised first edition, Chapter 1 will have almost no pussyfooting provenance, but will instead launch straight into the very specific art history evidence that places the VMs at a certain place and time – Northern Italy circa 1450.

And so in many ways, I’d like to run my talk just about the art history of the VMs (like a try-out of Chapter One) – but in other ways, perhaps I should talk about the VMs’ curious cultural channelers (such as Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna, Colin Wilson, David Icke, and so on) whose streams/dreams sometimes tend to hog this blog.

I can’t do both at the same time – but which should I do? What do you think?

More Dan Burisch Voynichification…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.

Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone trying to understand Burisch’s claim, by asserting things such as “The Voynich Manuscript may provide clues to the shape and function of items found in the YSC cells, spooled material“. No, you’re absolutely right: it means nothing to me either.

Other discussion boards have whole bunches of people saying Dan Burisch is a fraud, though with occasional rambling posters popping up to defend him:-

From the website ‘world mysteries’ concerning the Voynich document we read in an except from Dr. Levitov: “There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; the innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis’ mantle.” The fate of the the Cathars resembles that of the Knights Templar, does not the dualism of the former also receive a modicum of redemption in the restoration of the latter?With Dr. Burisch’s background in microbiology, the Voynich ‘botanical illustrations’ were child’s play, and the astrological designations had already been previously noted as corresponding to the Milky Way Galaxy, and by conversion of linear transformations into ‘diagrammatic notation,’ the determinant of the matrix was solved. ‘As above so below’ was not, in this case, a spiritual derivative, it was simply and starkly a ‘spacial’ one.

Ohhhh dear: if a novelist tried to get away with froth like this, he/she would get taken apart. There is no Milky Way link, there is no microbiology, there is no Cathar link, there is no Templar link, there is no matrix (spatial or otherwise), there is no religion, no gnosis, no dualism. The Voynich Manuscript being summoned up here is an imaginary one, a heretical MacGuffin for a potboiler that never quite got written.
In many ways, I get a sense from all this of a deeply tragic situation, of a bright (but disturbed) person grasping at anything they can find on the glittering, shallow surface of Net knowledge that might just explain (however temporarily) their personal pain, the loss they feel: but it never does, and their pain never goes away.
I have no idea if that person is Dan Burisch or someone else: and in most of the important ways, it really doesn’t matter. John Manly was right in detail but not in scope: more than simply a blank cryptographic screen to project ideas and emptions upon, the VMs is actually like a magnet for unhappy PhDs, a sandpit for them to play out their make-believe stories of intellectual redemption. By doing this, they can “rescue” someone from historical oblivion whose frustrated life-experience somehow chimes with theirs: all of which amounts to a kind of intellectual displacement activity directed at the past when they should be putting the effort into their own lives in the present to save themselves – but perhaps that’s too emotionally hard for them to do.
Perhaps I’m no less guilty (with my reconstructed story of Antonio Averlino “Filarete”) as Levitov, or Rugg, or any of the other 20+ Voynich theories out there. I don’t feel unhappy: but I can at least see that maybe I was hoping for redemption in some other way. In my defence, all I can say is that I at least tried my best to let the manuscript do the talking… and hope that this will in the end prove to be enough to move the history forward. Isn’t that as good as it gets?
As a (frankly slightly spooky) postnote on the whole Dan Burisch affair, there’s an online novel (with a bit of a Voynich thing going on) posted to a blog that you might well find fascinating. It’s called “Josef6” by Benjamin Kerstein, and deals with a claimed time-traveller from the future posting messages to an online community, and all the cultish madness that follows on.

The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics
— those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. The
frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating
talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century.

 

Sounds familiar, Burisch fans? Though it’s not strictly a Voynich novel per se, I really quite enjoyed it (and even donated $5 to the author via PayPal for posting it up). Recommended! 🙂

Yet more on Dan Burisch…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

As ever, the Dan Burisch story (which I blogged about here and then here) continues: in an earlier round of the RPG, Burisch apparently (according to Arizona-based “7Vials” in this post) revealed that the secret held by the Voynich Manuscript “detailed the spontaneous creation of DNA through the use of sound.” OK… though I have to admit this makes me think of the Spitting Image Roy Hattersley puppet, and his spontaneous creation of spittle when talking.

Meanwhile on yet another “Eagles Disobey” forum, “Caspa” wondered whether there might be a link between Dan Burisch and George Baresch (yes: neither of them can read the VMs). And there was me thinking that it was only Jacques Derrida and his ilk who did that kind of punning stuff. *sigh*

But wait – Caspa has also posted up some explanatory Voynich pictures in the middle of a list of “Document Links”. These are from “Dr Marcia McDowell” (another recurring player in the whole Dan Burisch saga) and dated 2006. As always, make of them what you will…

First up: the EVA fragment “oteos” by the curious box at the top of f102v2 (above, with and without blue paint) is claimed to represent “The Orion Cube (Yellow Book)“, though I have to say it looks a bit like a pop-up toaster to me. The claim is that, if you look really carefully (the hypnotic trick phrase used by all secret visual histories), the two tiny dots above the “c”-shaped letter ~kind of~ turn the gallows character into a “R”, which ~if you squint a bit~ makes the word look like “Orion”. (And, of course, there is that whole modern Hancock / Bauval mythology about Orion and the pyramids to tap into). Probably nonsense, but all the same, hurray! Someone is bothering to look really closely at the VMs! 🙂

Next: a picture that supposedly details “Lotus Research” in the Voynich Manuscript. According to Caspa here, “the inset is a photograph taken through Dan’s microscope of a DNA swirl from Lotus. The background is from the Voynich manuscript.” (Actually, it’s f16v with red muted). Errrm… is this saying that Roger Bacon had a microscope? Wasn’t that refuted 75 years ago?

Finally: another picture picking out the EVA word “taror” from f107r, which apparently encodes (reading right-to-left) to the word-pattern “[s/z].[o].[q/r].[a].[p/t/h]“, i.e. perm any 1 of 2x2x3=12 to find the word you want (sorap? zoqah? etc). Well… Dan Burisch posted just now that the right answer is neither Sorat (as per this page, scroll-down to “Sorat” and “Sorat-Science”), nor Sorah, nor Zorah: but instead “none of them“. Apparently, this is because “this book should never have been written, as its writer supposed the future was to be ‘as such’ before it happened. ” And that, Burisch says, is “a no, no!” Of course it is – bless his tangled little tenses.

If you still want to read more (which is possible, but perhaps a little unlikely), there’s an additional post here which may or may not answer all your Voynich-related questions about Burisch, J-Rods etc etc.

UPDATE: More Dan Burisch Voynichification…

More on Dan Burisch…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

A month ago, I posted up a blog entry about Dan Burisch’s claimed decryption of the Voynich Manuscript, which a surprisingly large number of people have since read (my blog entry, not the decryption). Burisch claimed that an alien called “#3-15” held by the secret organization known as “Majestic” (presumably an updated version of Majestic-12) had decrypted the VMs, and that its plaintext turned out to be a message from the far future placed in the hands of Roger Bacon 700 years ago about the amazing inventions Dan Burisch has yet to make in the near future: but that whole decryption has been placed in “File 21” somewhere in Europe, and you can’t see it, sorry.

As odd arguments go, this is a thing of curious beauty. Let’s see: an alien (who you’ll never meet) held by the (alleged) modern inheritors of a secret organization (most of whose founding documents appear to have been forged) has decrypted a (probably 15th century) cipher document, revealing that it was written down in (a mangled & ciphered) Hebrew by Roger Bacon (in the 13th century), to whom the actual content was passed from the far future, and which concerned the (yet-to-happen-but-surely-must-be-soon) inventions and discoveries made by Dr Dan Burisch, except that you can’t see the decryption apart from four (frankly rather wobbly) words. Fantastic or fantastical? You decide.

Putting on my historical hat… if (like me) you read papers on Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico, you often run into very similar problems trying to parse what is being said. Though Averlino’s libro is on one level a kind of encrypted autobiography, it simultaneously functions both as an allegorical novel and as an historical-novel-within-a-novel. Which is to say that readers constantly have to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what is contructed. Would a modern librarian place such a book in fiction or non-fiction?

Of course, Averlino was not crossing those kind of artificial boundaries, because they had not yet been drawn up. Early Renaissance thought was very fluid, very undifferentiated: perhaps the humanistic conceit of trying to gain eternal fama (fame) through their works made sense because the rigid scientific constructions of time we now rely upon had not yet been put in place – perhaps the distant past and remote future somehow felt closer then than they do these days.

In those terms, maybe Dan Burisch’s conception of time is so, errm, alien to us in that it is, rather like Averlino’s, quite undifferentiated and continuous in a vaguely pre-scientific way: a kind of sci-fi reprise of the early Renaissance mind. Perhaps Burisch somehow experiences past and future events all overlapping and concertinaed together, like a kind of strange temporal synaesthesia. Or perhaps he’s just mad, who knows?

Anyway, we have an update on the story. According to a message apparently from Dan Burisch forwarded yesterday to The Golden Thread BBS, “the policy of the Eagles Team [is now] not to comment on the contents of the Voynich Manuscript“, because “it contains such dangerous information, going to prison or being executed would be preferable to disclosing it“. Furthermore, “When I said to you [Fran?] the annotations to Folio 21 [“File 21”?] were not dangerous, I meant it in the context of you seeing it. I never intended you to post it. I apologize to you for the miscommunication, and to the public about the cryptic nature of this post. With this, that is the way it must FOREVER stand.” Which presumably means he won’t post anything more on the subject of the VMs: a shame, as I’d like to know what it said.

The Internet is a strange place: these days, you can tell people think something is interesting not when you find a hundred banal blog entries pointing to it, but rather when you discover that it has been appropriated as a plot element in several online alternate-reality role-playing games. In those terms, the whole Dan Burisch saga to me most resembles neither a conspiracy nor a pathology, but instead a kind of fat-rulebook sci-fi RPG played out between a small group of dungeon masters and the opposing team, “the public”. Roll that octahedral die one more time, baby…

UPDATE: Yet more on Dan Burisch…

Dan Burisch & the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Have you ever lifted up a stone in the woods and found something icky you really wished you hadn’t seen?

Or, in our modern ‘armchair explorer’ days, have you ever clicked confidently onto a website where, errrm, oh deary me, oh no, that’s not, you can’t… (you get the basic idea)?

Unfortunately, the point of being a blogger (or indeed any kind of writer) is that you document the odd things you see so that other people can decide whether to seek them out for themselves (rare) or to avoid them like the plague (far more common). Which means that bloggers have a vaguely journalistic obligation to follow any given story right through to its logical endpoint, wherever that may happen to be.

Now, even though once upon a time I worked on an “X-Files” computer game, I freely admit that I don’t actully know much about UFO lore. The closest thing on my bookshelf is Nick Cook’s thought-provoking “The Hunt For Zero Point“, but that’s more about odd terrestrial flying objects than alien ones per se. Which, as will become rapidly clear, made the story of Dan Burisch and his claimed decipherment of the Voynich Manuscript even more ‘out there’ to me than most things I tend to run into.

On the surface, it’s all straightforward enough. Burisch thinks the VMs is by Roger Bacon, who apparently wrote it in a kind of disguised / dyslexic Hebrew lettering. The text direction, as you’d expect from Hebrew, runs right-to-left (though, oddly enough, Burisch needed a mirror to read it). Line 17 of f35v has a Voynichese EVA fragment “daiin.dain.chkaly.choly“, the last three words of which are transcribed halfway down the page here (presumably by Burisch?) as “dain mkaly(e) moly(e)“, deciphered right-to-left as “elom el akim niad” – “everlasting God will establish knowledge“. Of course, add the missing “daiin” back in and it should probably read “everlasting God will establish knowledge knowledge“: but that’s normal for this kind of claimed VMs decipherment.

As an aside, Googling for “elom” returns links to (1) “the personification of the moon among southern Hebrews“, and (2) “Eloms were short, stocky, bipedal sentients, with a thick pelt of oily, dark fur, native to the frigid and mineral-rich desert planet of Elom” on the Elom entry in the Wookieepedia, an online Star Wars wiki. Further down in Google’s search results, the (real) Wikipedia entry also notes that Elom is “a tribal ewe name meaning “god loves me” or “loved by god”“. It is hard not to get the feeling from this that someone is either (a) being somewhat impressionistic with their supposed translation, or (b) having a Star Wars-themed laugh at the expense of UFOlogists. [In the following, I presume (a) to be true, but sadly there’s no obvious reason to discount (b) at all.]

Burisch’s claimed decryption reprises, just as you can find countless times in the museum of failed Voynich solutions, a large number of by-now-oh-so-familiar motifs of pathological enigmatology: selective transcription, Roger Bacon, mirror writing, disguised Hebrew, confusing and repetitive text, selective dyslexia, arbitrary anagramming, religious / liturgical / Gnostic plaintexts, arbitrary / optimistic / free-form translations, etc. So far, nothing hugely unexpected, then.

But dig a little deeper and things quickly gets bizarre, even by the historical standards of Voynichianity. Burisch claims to have been given the key to solving the VMs by “#3-15”, the keyname of an alien (“J-Rod”?) visitor/prisoner held at Area 51 by Majestic, the secret organization for whom Burisch allegedly worked. The remainder of the decryption was placed in “File 21” (held in Europe somewhere?), and described Burisch’s future discoveries (about ‘Looking Glass’? Man-made stargates? The “Ganesh” particle?) that he has not as yet made. The whole Burisch affair revolves around conspiratorial claims of time-travelling aliens meddling with human affairs and how 4 billion people may well die (in 2012?) as a result of the immense explosion of a manmade stargate, or possibly of the natural stargate on “Frenchman’s Mountain” where some Voynich lettering can allegedly be found carved in the stone.

Now, I’m in no way qualified to judge on this kind of end-times stuff (after all, who is?). But purely as far as Burisch’s claims about the Voynich Manuscript go, I have to say that I’m quite sure they’re a load of nonsense. The VMs is a historical artefact that was demonstrably constructed more than a century after Roger Bacon’s death, the word patterns don’t match Hebrew (or any other known language), the left-right direction of writing doesn’t match Hebrew, the strongly-structured letter patterns within words don’t show any signs of dyslexic-style anagram transposition, and I would predict there is an overwhelming (>99.9%) probability that the Hebrew-style pattern that was found on part of one line on f35v could not be found duplicated in more than 0.05% of the Voynichese corpus as a whole – and in any case, such fragments would very likely not make syntactical or semantical sense as a meaningful sentence. Right now I’m not even hugely convinced that the four words “elom el akim niad” can be contorted to mean what they are claimed to mean.

I’m all for novelists’ appropriating the VMs for their books (though it’s actually a far harder trick to carry off than most seem to realise): but when this kind of “kooks and spooks” looking-glass world tries to claim the VMs as one of its own, it’s hard to find a point of mutual accommodation. Sure, the VMs was mysterious enough 30 years ago for Terence McKenna to be intrigued by it: but we’ve come a long way since then, and it’s now merely an historical curio right on the cusp of mainstream thought.

Perhaps if the decrypted contents of “File 21” come out into the open, we’ll all fall back in stunned amazement (before fleeing as far away from any of the stargates as we can). But until that day… sorry, but I’ll have to admit to not being a believer.

UPDATE: More on Dan Burisch & the VMs