Does the ‘Voynich = migraine’ theory make your head hurt too?

by ⋅ 37 Comments

In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two “dry migraine” attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps a meta-theory) to post about here…

In Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill’s book, they float the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript might possibly have been written by someone suffering a prolonged (months- or years-long) migraine attack; and point to the streams of stars and the repetitive series of nymphs as vaguely supporting (if far from smoking-gun causal) evidence. However, nobody (to my knowledge) really took the notion particularly seriously until German blogger Markus Dahlem decided to carry their conceptual baton a little further in the general direction of… Hildegard of Bingen.

Might the castle in the nine-rosette page actually be a representation of the Aedificium, the piously hallucinatory City of God drawn by Hildegard in her Zelus Dei or her Sedens Lucidus? Are the Voynich’s stars simply “showers of phosphenes” cascading wildly through Hildegard’s retinal circuits?

I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards … And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals… and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.

To me, the fact that Hildegard is discussed by both Charles Singer and Oliver Sacks is no more than an expression of her outlierness: she not only had the repeated experience of migraine auras, but also had the literary imagination to stitch that into her religious worldview. Basically, I’m pretty sure that there is almost no real chance that the author of the Voynich Manuscript was a migraine sufferer.

And besides, Hildegard drew square merlons in her City of God, not swallow-tail merlons. D’oh! 🙂

High class Voynich miscellany…

by ⋅ 10 Comments

Here are some piquant canapes to twingle your Voynich tastebuds, a bit like “Space Dust for researchers”.

(1) Gerry Kennedy has discovered that a deathmask of Wilfrid Voynich was taken, and that it still exists.

(2) Jackie Speel tells me that “in 1916 Wilfrid Voynich was involved in a friendly law case with the Lincoln Cathedral authorities over the ownership of one of their books he had acquired in good faith from another American dealer (The Times May 11, 1916 pg 4 refers). In the event he donated the book back to the cathedral.”

(3) Jackie also notes that Wilfrid Voynich’s British Museum (i.e. what is now the British Library) “ticket/renewal details still survive – he first joined on 19 October 1895 and the ticket was last renewed 29 November 1907.”

(4) Diane O’Donovan points out that “Chinese inks are high carbon”.

(5) While Ludi Price concurs that f1r’s “glyph 3 does look uncannily like yuan, the [Chinese] character for ‘first'”, the key problem with VMs Chinese theories is that “(spoken) Chinese in the 14th/15th century was completely different to modern Mandarin Chinese. It had more tones, more glutteral stops, and was more akin to modern day Cantonese than it is today. People who want to tackle a VMS as Chinese theory would need to approach it from a Classical Chinese standpoint, not a modern one.”

(6) Henry Berg has just published his own breathtakingly syncretic Voynich theory, and hacked it on as a link to the bottom of the Wikipedia page (shame on him). It’s a heady mix of Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular), Athanasius Kircher, Isaac Voss and even Shugborough Hall (no, I kid you not), with 17th century conspiracies and disinformation aplenty. Great fun for the the next Voynich pub meet: but little genuine chance of being a workable hypothesis, alas.

(7) On the diametrically opposite side of the color wheel, here’s a reasonably balanced (but, even so, frequently wrong) view of the VMs’ ciphertext, courtesy of Sravana Reddy and Kevin Knight, hot off the presses. Enjoy!

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?

Voynich Manuscript as storyboard…?

by ⋅ 1 Comment

A couple of VMs-related links for you today, one old and one new (but nothing blue, sorry): I thought I’d run them together for a bit of fun…

Back in January 2005, the Independent on Sunday ran a piece called “Nudes, triffids and the mother of all riddles“, a review of Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill’s book “The Voynich Manuscript: the unsolved riddle of an extraordinary book which has defied interpretation for centuries“. The writer – Scarlett Thomas, who Voynich News regulars will doubtless recognise as being the author of crypto-geeky NoLogo-esque Voynich-themed novel “PopCo” – colourfully described the VMs as like “a storyboard for an other-dimensional remake of Day of the Triffids“, and thought that the basic story of the VMs’ history “(which makes The Da Vinci Code seem like a slightly lame round of Hangman) would work in the hands of any authors.” The conclusion of her review was that Kennedy & Churchill’s book should be sufficient to bring the “beautiful, frustrating and compelling” VMs to the attention of the world.

Fast forward to last weekend (June 2008), and the Guardian’s book review section ran a short review by Steven Poole on “The Enigmas of History” (third piece down on the page) by Alan Baker. Though this covers a number of non-enigmas, the Voynich Manuscript does get a reasonable mention (I should hope so too!), with Poole describing the VMs as being “like a storyboard for The Matrix with annotations in an indecipherable language.”

Hmmm… two book reviews, both with Voynich storyboard metaphors… Perhaps, back in 2005, Scarlett Thomas was secretly hoping for her book to be optioned by a moneybags film studio (these things do happen, though not as often as novelists would like) and this guided her choice of words; and then Steven Poole (or indeed Alan Baker) happened to read her review.

Or is there a Voynich film lurking in the collective unconscious? Even though the story of the VMs may well be something that a “proper” historian could never sign off on, it may well be a set of bones that Hollywood screenwriters could happily boil up into a tasty filmic soup. Do you think?

As long as they don’t cast Tom bl**dy Hanks as a Warburgian-style secret historian again and they leave Jesuit priests right out of it (the VMs very probably predates the Society of Jesus by 50+ years!), I wish them luck! 🙂