The Voynich Manuscript’s paragraph stars, explained…?

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I’ve long wondered about what’s going on in the Voynich Manuscript’s final (and, many think, ‘boringest’) quire, Quire #20: I summarized a lot of current Q20 research here last month. But just what Q20’s paragraph markers – whether they turn out to be stars, comets, or flowers – are remains a mystery… basically, why are they there at all?

You see, because each star sits at the start of a paragraph and (as Elmar Vogt helpfully pointed out) many are arranged on pages in what seem to be repetitive x-o-x-o-x-o patterns, it seems fairly safe to conclude that these are mostly decorative, and hence there is probably nothing much “written in the stars”. Of course, anyone who desperately wants to go a-huntin’ for a biliteral ciphertext hidden there is more than welcome to try (go ahead, feel free to knock yourself out), but I don’t honestly think you’ll squeeze much juice out of that lemon, sorry. And wipe that sour look off your face, OK? 🙂

Yet even so, the brutal fact remains that the paragraph stars are there: and given that pretty much everything else in the VMs mutely screams of carefully-executed disguised intention, I think we should expect there to have been a perfectly good reason for their existence, however mundane that might actually be. So probably the best question to be asking is: what function (however minor) could these stars be performing? What did they help the author(s) do?

Until a few days ago, this was pretty much the brick wall my chain of reasoning had hit: but then I read an interesting post by Rich SantaColoma on the ‘weirdo’ red glyphs on f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript). In particular, Rich points out the striking similarity between the first “bird glyph” (the first symbol of the second paragraph in the VMs) and marginal paragraph markers in some 16th Century Spanish manuscripts, the Codex Mendoza [1541/2], the Aubin Codex [started in 1567] and the [probably fake!] Codex Cardona, while in the comments to Rich’s page, Ernest also mentioned the Codex Osuna [1565] and the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.

Ultimately, Rich’s reasoning comes down to this: in these Spanish manuscripts, the glyph is simply a decorative “Y”-shape, short for “Ydem”, which is used in lists pretty much the same way as both “item” and “ibidem” (which we still use in its differently-shortened form “ibid.“), so it seems reasonable to infer that this is what’s happening  on f1r of the VMs too.

All fair enough: but regardless of whether Rich’s idea turns out to be right or wrong (and it’s desperately hard to build up a really convincing case on a single instance of a single shape), what struck me most was the parallel between the paragraph stars and these similarly itemized lists. (But no, I’m definitely not proposing that Q20 is a Powerpoint presentation from the Renaissance).

So… might each star simply be an embellished / disguised “y”, short for (say) “ydem” / “ytem” / “idem” / “ibidem” / “item”? Actually, I think yes: look at the following picture (which contains all the paragraph stars from f104v), and I’ll show you how I think the “y” was hidden in the first four stars (highlighted in bright red), make up your own mind for the rest:-

Now tell me the second best explanation for these! And yes, I do know that some of the (probably later) pages in Q20 have tail-less stars, but the basic hidden-in-plain-sight steganographic conceit was probably getting a bit boring by then, 300+ stars later. 🙂

Voynich Quire 20 notes…

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Though the Voynich Manuscript has many unusual and interesting sections, arguably the most boring of the lot is Quire 20 (‘Q20’). This comprises a thick-ish set of six text-only bifolios (though with a central bifolio missing), where just about every paragraph has a tiny drawing of a star/flower/comet shape attached to it.

Tally all these up, and you find that Q20 as it now is has between 345 and 347 stars (two are slightly questionable). This is intriguingly close enough to the magic number 365 for some researchers to have speculated that this section might actually be an almanack, i.e. a one-paragraph-per-day-of-the-year guide. It is also close enough to the similarly resonant number 360 for some (and, indeed, often the same) people to speculate whether the section might be a kind of per-degree astrology, i.e. a one-paragraph-per-degree judicial astrological reference. If neither, then the general consensus seems to be that Q20 is some kind of secret recipe / spell collection (there were plenty of these in the Middle Ages).

Yet the problem with constructing an explanation around 365 stars, as Elmar Vogt pointed out in a 2009 blog post, is that Q20 ticks over fairly consistently at about 15 paragraphs/stars per page, and we have four pages missing from the centre: hence we would expect the grand total to be somewhere closer to 345 + (15 x 4) = 405, which is far too many. Of course, the same observation holds true for 360 per-degree paragraphs too.

You could try – as Elmar subsequently did – to start from a count of 365 (or indeed from 360) and hold that as a constraint to generate plausible codicological starting points (i.e. by answering the question “what kind of ordering could be constructed that would be consistent with 360 or 365 starred paragraphs?”). However, you quickly run into the problem that the marginalia-filled f116v looks very much as if it was originally (as it now is) the final page of the quire, which (in my opinion) is also supported by the large, final, unstarred paragraph on f116r, [which, incidentally, I predict will turn out to hold the most informative plaintext of the whole book, i.e. stuff about the author]. And if you accept that f116 was indeed probably originally the end folio, then you run into a bit of a brick wall as far as possible shufflings of Q20 go.

All the same, here’s an interesting new angle to consider. Cipher Mysteries reader Tim Tattrie very kindly left a comment here a few days ago, pointing out that the rare EVA letter ‘x’ appears in 19 folios – “46r, 55r, 57v, 66r, 85r, 86v6, 94r, 104r, 105r, 105v, 106v, 107v [NP: actually 107r], 108r, 108v, 111r, 112r [NP: ?], 113v, 114v, 115v” – which he wondered might suggest a possible thematic link between Q8, Q14 (the nine-rosette fold-out) and Q20. However, what particularly struck me about this list of pages was that (remembering that f109 and f110 form Q20’s missing central bifolio) every folio in Q20 has an ‘x’ except for the first folio (f103) and the last folio (f116), which are of course part of the same bifolio.

Could it be that the f103-f116 bifolio was originally separate from the rest of the Q20 bifolios? Even though f116v looks as though it really ought to be the back page of the quire, I have always found f103r a very unconvincing first page for a quire – with no introduction, no title, no ornate scribal scene-setting, to my eyes it seems more like a mid-quire page, which is a bit of a puzzle. In fact, of all the Q20 starred paragraph pages I’d have thought the strongest candidate for quire-initial page would be f105r, courtesy of its overelaborate split (and dotted, and starred) gallows, as per the below image. Just so you know, f105r also contains two of Q20’s four ‘titles’ (an offset piece of Voynichese text), one on line 10 and one on its bottom line, the latter of which crypto crib-fans may well be pleased to hear that I suspect contains the title of the chapter – “otaiir.chedaiin.otair.otaly” (note that the two other Q20 titles are to be found on f108v and f114r).

Interestingly, Tim Tattrie then pointed out that “f103 and 116 are linked as they are the only folios in Q20 that do not have tails on the stars“: which (together with the absence of ‘x’s) suggests that they were originally joined together, i.e. as the central bifolio of a quire. All of which suggests that the original layout of Q20 may have been radically different layout, with the f105/f114 bifolio on the outside of (let’s call it) ‘Q20a’ and the f103/f116 bifolio on the outside of ‘Q20b’, and all the other Q20 bifolios in the middle of Q20a.

Picking up where Elmar left off before, this is where almanack (365-star) and per-degree (360-star) proponents would somewhat enthusiastically ask how many stars this proposed Q20a gathering would have originally had. Because f103 has 35 stars, and f116 has 11 stars, Q20a has (say) 299 stars across five bifolios. Add in the missing f109/f110 bifolio, and the answer is terrifically simple: extrapolating from Q20a’s stars-per-paragraph figure, we’d expect the original quire to have had (299 * 6 / 5) = 359 stars – hence the likelihood is that Q20a contained some kind of per-degree zodiac reference, most probably along the lines of Pietro d’Abano’s per-degree astrology.

Having said that… the figures are extremely tight, and if the missing bifolio instead mimicked the f108/f111 bifolio (which, after all, it ended up physically next to in the final binding) rather than the overall section average (which may also be slightly lowered by the 11-per-page average of f105), it would have closer to 72 stars rather than 60, which would then bring the 365-star almanack hypothesis back into the frame. It’s a tricky old business this, nearly enough to drive a poor codicologist to drink (please excuse my shaking white cotton gloves, etc).

There are various other observations that might help us reconstruct what was going on with Q20a/Q20b:-

  • Helpfully, Elmar documented the various empty/full star patterns on the various Q20 pages, and noted that most of them are no more than empty-full-empty-full-empty-full sequences, with the exception of “f103r, f104r and f108r”, which he interprets as implying that they were probably originally placed together.
  • f105v is very much more faded than all the other pages in Q20, which I have wondered might have been the result of weathering: if f105 had been the outer folio of an unbound Q20a, then it could very well have ended up being folded around the back of Q20b by mistake for a while early in the life of the Q20 pages, which would have put it on the back page of the whole manuscript.
  • I still believe that the gap in the text in the outside edge of f112 was no more than a vellum fault (probably a long vertical rip) in the page in the original (unenciphered) document from which Q20a was copied, but that’s probably not material to any bifolio nesting discussion.
  • The tail-less paragraph stars on f103r seem slightly ad hoc to my eyes: I suspect that they were added in after the event.
  • The notion that Q20 originally contained seven nested quires (as per the folio numbering) seems slightly over-the-top to me: this seems a bit too much for a single mid-15th century binding to comfortably take.

What are we to make of all this fairly raw stream of codicological stuff? Personally, I’m fairly sold on the idea that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with f105r the first page of the first gathering (Q20a) and f116v the last page of the last gathering (Q20b). Placing all the remaining bifolios in Q20a to get close to the magic numbers of 360 and 365 is a hugely seductive idea: however, such numerological arguments often seem massively convincing for a short period of time, before you kind of “sober up” to their limitations, so I think it’s probably safer to note the suggestion down as a neat explanation (but to return to it later when we have amassed more critical codicological information about the Q20 pages).

Perhaps the thing to do now is to look at other features (such as handwriting, rare symbols, letter patterns, contact transfers, etc) for extra dimensions of grouping / nesting information within the Q20 pages, and to look for more ways of testing out this proposed Q20a/Q20b split. Sorry not to be able to come to a definitive conclusion on all this in a single post, but with a bit of luck this should be a good starting point for further discussion on what Q20 originally looked like. Tim, Elmar, John, Glen (and anyone else), what do you think? 🙂

Update: having posted all the above, I went off and had a look at all the ‘x’ instances in Q20 – these seem to have a strong affinity for sitting next to ‘ar’ and ‘or’ pairs, e.g. arxor / salxor / kedarxy / oxorshey / oxar / shoxar / lxorxoiin, etc.

Elmar’s new Voynich marginalia page…

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Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his “Voynich Thoughts” website of the Voynich Manuscript’s teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger’s notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I’m sure you want answered is: how did the boy Vogt do?

Well… it’s immediately clear he’s thorough, insofar as he stepped sequentially through all the word-like groups of letters in the major Voynich marginalia to try to work out what each letter could feasibly be; and from that built up a kind of Brumbaugh-like matrix of combinatorial possibilities for each one for readers to shuffle to find sensible-looking readings. However, it also has to be said that for all of this careful (and obviously prolonged) effort, he managed to get… precisely nowhere at all.

You see, we’ve endured nearly a century’s worth of careful, rational people looking at these few lines of text and being unable to read them, from Newbold’s “michiton oladabas“, through Marcin Ciura’s mirrored “sa b’adalo No Tich’im“, and all the way to my own [top line] “por le bon simon sint…“. Worse still, nobody has even been able to convincingly argue the case for what the author(s) was/were trying to achieve with these confused-looking marginalia, which can easily be read as containing fragments of French, Occitan, German, Latin, Voynichese (and indeed of pretty much any other language you can think of).

And the explanation for this? Well, we Voynich researchers simply love explanations… which is why we have so many of them to choose from (even if none of them stands up to close scrutiny):-

  1. Pen trials?
  2. A joke (oh, and by the way, the joke is on us)?
  3. A hoax?
  4. A cipher key?
  5. Enciphered text?
  6. Some kind of vaguely polyglot text in an otherwise unknown language?

How can we escape this analysis paralysis? Where are those pesky intellectual historians when you actually need them?

I suspect that what is at play here is an implicit palaeographic fallacy: specifically the long-standing (but false) notion that palaeographers try to read individual words (when actually they don’t). Individual word and letter instances suffer from accidents, smudges, blurs, deletions, transfers, rubbing off, corrections, emendations: however, a person’s hand (the way that they construct letters) is surprisingly constant, and is normally able to be located within a reasonably well-defined space of historic hands – Gothic, semi-Gothic, hybrida, mercantesca, Humanist, etc. Hence, the real problem here is arguably that this palaeographic starting point has failed to be determined.

Hence, I would say that looking at individual words is arguably the last thing you should be doing: instead, you should be trying to understand (a) how individual letters are formed, and (b) which particular letter instances are most reliable. From there, you should try to categorise the hand, which should additionally give you some clue as to where it is from and what language it is: and only then should you pass the challenge off from palaeography to historical linguistics (i.e. try to read it). And so I would say that attempting to read the marginalia without first understanding the marginalia hand is like trying to do a triple-jump but omitting both the hop and the skip parts, i.e. you’ll fall well short of where you want to get to.

So let’s buck a hundred years’ worth of trend and try instead to do this properly: let’s simply concentrate on the letter ‘a’ and and see where it takes us.

f116v-letter-a

To my eyes, I think that a[5], a[6], and a[7] show no obvious signs of emendation and are also consistently formed as if by the same hand. Furthermore, it seems to me that these are each formed from two continuous strokes, both starting from the middle of the top arch of the ‘a’. That is, the writer first executes a heavy c-like down-and-around curved stroke (below, red), lifts up the pen, places it back on the starting point, and then writes a ‘Z’-like up-down-up zigzaggy stroke (below, blue) to complete the whole ‘a’ shape. You can see from the thickness and shape of the blue stroke that the writer is right-handed: while you can see from the weight discontinuity and slight pooling of ink in the middle of the top line exactly where the two strokes join up. I think this gives us a reasonable basis for believing what the writer’s core stroke technique is (and, just as importantly, what it probably isn’t).

f116v-letter-a-analysis

What this tells us (I think) is that we should be a little uncertain about a[4], (which doesn’t have an obviously well-formed “pointy head”) and very uncertain about a[1], a[2], and a[3] (none of which really rings true).

My take on all this is that I think a well-meaning VMs owner tried hard to read the (by then very faded) marginalia, but probably did not know the language it was written in, leaving the page in a worse mess than what it was before they started. Specifically: though “maria” shouts original to me, “oladaba8” shouts emendation just as strongly. Moreover, the former also looks to my eyes like “iron gall ink + quill”, while the latter looks like “carbon ink + metal nib”.

Refining this just a little bit, I’d also point out that if you also look at the two ascender loops in “oladaba8″, I would argue that the first (‘l’) loop is probably original, while the second (‘b’) loop is structured quite wrongly, and is therefore probably an emendation. And that’s within the same word!

The corollary is simply that I think it highly likely that any no amount of careful reading would untie this pervasively tangled skein if taken at face value: and hence that, for all his persistence and careful application of logic, Elmar has fallen victim to the oldest intellectual trap in the book – of pointing his powerful critical apparatus in quite the wrong direction. Sorry, Elmar my old mate, but you’ve got to be dead careful with these ancient curses, really you have. 🙂

The Voynich’s alphabet and steganography…

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Having examined many historical ciphers over the last few years, I’d say that there are only a handful of ways in which individal ‘cipherbets’  (i.e. “cipher alphabets”) are typically constructed. The big fallacy is to think that people building ciphers are only concerned with a need for long-term message security, when actually there are plenty of other important short term needs they have to attend to, such as: ease of construction, usability, speed of deciphering, aide-memoires, etc. Broadly speaking, these needs express themselves in the following aspects of the cipher alphabet:-

  1. Symmetrical – where the letter-shapes are based around a geometric / symmetrical pattern
  2. Incremental – where the cipher alphabet is adapted from a pre-existing cipher
  3. Practical – where the letter-shapes are optimized for speed of writing
  4. Stylistic – to give an overall effect of looking exotic / strange / occult / ancient
  5. Mnemonic – where letter-shapes contain associative reminders about the plaintext letter
  6. Steganographic – where letter-shapes hide visual hints as to the plaintext shape
  7. Deceptive – where letter-shapes vary in subtle ways to hinder transcription / decipherment
  8. Distracting – where letter-shapes are constructed to resemble a different type of text

Apart from ‘pure’ symmetrical ciphers (such as the various pigpen and Masonic ciphers, or indeed Edward Elgar’s Dorabella cipher alphabet),I would say that most cipher alphabets tend to present a blend of only two or three of these, which you can sensibly read as reflecting the most pressing needs of the encipherer. As brief examples, you might note that many of the Sforza ciphers were primarily [incremental + practical] (and occasionally stylistic, such as the 1464 cipher for Tristano Sforza), while I’d predict that Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 will turn out to be [mnemonic + stylistic].

What, then, of the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher alphabet? Of course, the hope is that if we can classify its cipher alphabet, we might be able to “read” the needs of its encipherer.

The first thing to note is Steve Ekwall’s extraordinarily specific claim about the four gallows shapes: he asserts that these four shapes (and their four ‘ch’ strikethrough versions) specifically depict the eight folding states of the deciphering paper key – basically, that these are mnemonic. While that would make a lot of sense, debating that in sufficient detail is something I’ll take on another time.

Regardless, my position on the Voynich Manuscript’s alphabet is simply that it is a tour de force of cipher construction technique, insofar as I think you can see traces of symmetrical, incremental, practical, stylistic, steganographic, deceptive and distracting aspects (which, curiously enough, would make Ekwall’s mnemonic the only one missing from the list). Here they are in more detail:-

  • Symmetrical
    The four gallows shapes exhibit an explicit structural symmetry – one leg or two legs, one loop or two loops.
  • Incremental
    The four strikethrough gallows look to have been developed from an earlier (probably less secure) cipher system based purely on the four simple gallows. I also suspect that the “e / ee / eee / ch / sh” letter-shapes represent vowels, and that they were in some way incrementally adapted from a variation of the “dots for vowels” ciphers used by some medieval monks.
  • Practical
    The Voynich Manuscript’s letter-shapes have been consciously constructed for ease and speed of writing, far more so than typical cipher alphabets of the time.
  • Stylistic
    I would argue that the overall form of the alphabet has been designed with older (non-cipher) alphabets in mind – that is, that the stylistics of the letter-shapes was deliberately chosen to resemble an archaic (but lost) alphabet.  Note (mainly for Elmar Vogt): I do not therefore believe that the Voynich Manuscript was meant to resemble an enciphered medieval herbal, but rather that it was meant to ressmble an unenciphered herbal written in an archaic (but lost) language. I fail to see how this makes it unlikely to be smuggled past Venetian border guards… but that’s an argument for another day!
  • Distracting
    As I argued in The Curse and elsewhere on this blog, I am convinced beyond any doubt that the “aiir” and “aiiv” cipher letter groups in the VMs are specifically meant to resemble medieval page references (i.e. “a ii v” denotes “[quire] a, [folio] ii, v[erso]”), but that this is meant to distract contemporary eyes from looking in detail beyond that.
  • Deceptive
    I believe that the actual Arabic numbers enciphered by the “aiiv” family are to be read from the shape and position of the final flourish of the “v” – and that whereas the (earlier) Currier A pages used a system based on the position of the flourish, the (later) Currier B pages used a system based on the shape of the flourish. This would also point to incremental cipherbet change during the overall writing process!

There is one further one to discuss – steganographic. If you stare at the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher alphabet long enough, I contend that you will (eventually) grasp the logic underlying most of the letter-shapes (as per the discussion above). However, you are still left with a few odd “spares” (such as “4o”, “8” and “9”) that don’t fit into the symmetric families and groups described above. What is going on with them?

In The Curse, I argued (based on the statistics) that “4o” was probably encoding a word-initial abbreviation sign: what I now think is fascinating is the notion that the letter shape for the “4” might also be steganographically hiding a horizontal stroke, as an aide-memoire to the decipherer.

Similarly, I argued (also based on the statistics) that the “8” shape and the “9” shapes were probably encoding word-middle and word-final abbreviation signs (respectively): similarly, I think that these are steganographically hiding a curved half-loop at the top of each of them, the typical mid-Quattrocento sign denoting contraction and abbreviation. I’ve marked these hidden strokes in red below:-

qokedy-highlighted

Actually, I suspect the author might possibly have given a little bit of the game away on page f2r, via a slip of the pen: para 2 line 3 word 1 is “4oP9” with a curved contraction half-loop added over the “o”, which I think might well denote a contraction of “4o” + “oP” + “9”. But that, too, is another story. 🙂

All in all, I’d say that if the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher system turns out to have broadly the same degree of subtlety and roundedness exhibited by its cipher alphabet, then no wonder it has remained unbroken for centuries. It has not only the Everest of cipher systems, but also the Rolls Royce of cipher alphabets!

Voynich newsbites…

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News arrives from the New Journal Magazine at Yale (via Jeff Haley on the Voynich Mailing List and Elmar Vogt’s Voynich blog, thanks to you both!) that “two outside specialists” at the Sterling Memorial Library have been “analyzing the pigments in [the Voynich Manuscript’s] ink and carbon dating a tiny sample of its vellum“. Hooray!

Though Yale was perhaps spurred on to do this by the documentary that is currently being made, it is not clear whether the lack of results or details published as yet is because of some arrangement-to-withhold with the film-makers, or perhaps because the results are so astonishing that it’s taking ages to write them up. 🙂 Hopefully we’ll find out soon…

The 2009 Kalamazoo medieval congress continues apace (until tomorrow) – did anyone see Angela Catalina Ghionea’s Voynich plant presentation? I should perhaps comment here that her ongoing dissertation topic “The Occult Origins of European Science” seems hugely ironic to me, given that I view a lot of Renaissance & modern occult practices as being built on top of misunderstood proto-science – so if I was writing a dissertation, it would be on the “The Scientific Origins of European Occultism“. But which of us, then, is the contrarian? 😮

Finally… after a period of domain transition, my compellingpress.com site is now back online: there’s still a small boxful of copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” sitting in the corner, all awaiting owners. 😉

Quire 20 folio ordering…

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Elmar Vogt’s blog has just thrown one of his interesting Voynich Thoughts into the air (or should I say “the aiiir”?).

Having patiently tabulated all the paragraph stars in Q20 back in 2006 (it’s a kind of Voynich researcher rite of passage, I did much the same thing in 2002), and classified them into “hollow” [-], “dotted” [o] and “massive” [x], Elmar now notes a repetitive pattern: that most star sequences simply alternate between hollow and dotted, i.e. o-o-o-o-o-o-o-.

Yet because the stars on f103r (which was very probably the original first page of the quire) are heavily embellished, he tentatively concludes that “the writer/painter started off somewhat artistically ambitious, but […] got bored and decided to simply take turns between hollow and dotted stars.”

Elmar then points out that “the only pages significantly deviating from this pattern are f103r, f104r and f108r“, and (the logical chap he is) suggests that this might have been caused by the bifolios within the quire being scrambled before the folio numbers were added, i.e. that f103 and f104 (currently the first two folios of the quire) could well have originally been immediately followed by f108 (currently the sixth folio of the quire). All very sensible – but this, just as with every other page ordering hack that’s been proposed over the years, would need additional corroboration from physical evidence, such as handwriting continuity, ink continuity, quill bluntness continuity, coding system continuity, contact transfers, vellum cuts and folds, vellum thickness mapping, etc.

In some ways, this gives me a bit of a weird feeling: I spent years working basically alone on precisely this kind of marginal codicology, but now Glen Claston and Elmar Vogt are both on pretty much the same case. Circa 2005, my point of departure was that the folio numbers and the quire numbers were just plain wrong, and that it simply has to be easier to try to decipher the VMs in its original page order than in its present “anagrammed” (or rather “folio-shuffled”) state.

Even so, we’re attempting to reconstruct the original page-order with our eyes nearly shut: we still need someone to take a huge lateral step sideways to amass a sufficient amount of physical evidence to make any significant progress – but unfortunately the painstaking process of debating one marginal blob at a time is all we currently have open to us. Oh well!

Jens Sensfelder crossbow article…

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Elmar Vogt just posted a page with scans of René Zandbergen’s translation (from German to English) of Jens Sensfelder’s (2003) short article on the crossbowman in the Voynich Manuscript to his blog: but as I had the original HTML [though no pictures] lurking on my hard drive, I thought I ought to post it here as well (as they say in the Caribbean, is nice to be nice).

So here, for the benefit of infinitii and others, is Jens Sensfelder’s crossbow article. Enjoy!

Elmar Vogt’s new Voynich blog…

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Apart from Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich blogosphere has been far too quiet of late. Even Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Das Voynich Blog” is, despite some intriguing posts in the past, fairly subdued.

And so it is a breath of fresh air to see a new blog from an old friend: long-time Voynich mailing list member Elmar Vogt has recently started up his Voynich Thoughts blog. Elmar has already posted a whole heap of nice snippets, such as the German Wikipedia entry’s comparison of the plant on f56r with drosera intermedia (which I mentioned here and here), a nice comparison of the Sagittarius archer with a drawing in a 15th century woodcut, as well as a circa-1450 head-dress comparison with a zodiac nymph.

Part of me really wants him to put these fragments into context – for the Sagittarius page, for example, how it was suggested long ago that the zodiac motifs might well have largely been copied from a (probably 14th century?) German woodcut calendar; a discussion of the Sagittarius archer’s (probably 14th century and fairly rustic) crossbow; plus a wider comparison of the crossbowman’s headwear with (say) the 15th century “turban” / chaperon as depicted by Robert Campin and Van Eyck.

Yet another part of me simply wants Elmar to fill his blog with that thing he does so very well – which is to use his keen logical eye and pleasantly acid German wit to be entertainingly tart about Voynichological nonsense. Wherever contemporary haruspicators pop up to read their imagined stories into the VMs’ well-scanned entrails, I’ll always be delighted to read Elmar’s commentary.

Trivia time: it’s no great secret that software developer Elmar has long contributed text edits to Wikipedia (such as its VMs page) under the monicker “Syzygy“: but what is perhaps less known is that, as a fan of the Atari ST, he chose this as a homage to the company Atari – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney used “Syzygy Engineering” for their original company name.

Hmmm… I’m not sure he’d be much impressed by the two computer games I wrote for the ST: 3D Pool and Loopz. Oh well!  🙂