Nick Pelling online radio interview with Red Ice Creations…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things Voynich… and an hour later I eventually ran out of steam. 🙂

Pretty much all the fashionable VMs research topics you’d expect to me to crank out – Wilfrid Voynich, John Dee, Rudolf II, Rene Zandbergen, Sinapius, Newbold, dating, TV documentaries, the nine-rosette page, page references, the evolution of Voynichese, cipher history, Trithemius, Leon Battista Alberti, unbreakable ciphers, intellectual history, books of secrets, Brunelleschi’s hoist, enciphered machines, Voynich Bullshit Index, Quattrocento intellectual paranoia, patents, even quantum computing! – get covered, so there should be something there for nearly everyone. 🙂

And if that’s not enough for you, Red Ice Radio has a 45-minute follow-on interview with me in their member-only area: this covers cryptology, intractability, alchemy, Adam Maclean, hoax theories, Gordon Rugg, Cardan grilles, postmodernism, astronomy, astrology (lunar and solar), calendars, Antonio Averlino / Filarete, canals, water-powered machines, (not) the head of John the Baptist, Alan Turing, Enigma, Pascal, the Antikythera Mechanism, Fourier analysis, Ptolemaic epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Kryptos sculpture, Tamam Shud, Adrenalini Brothers, steganography, copy vs original, wax tablets, even al-Qaeda!

OK, I’m not a professional broadcaster, and it’s all impromptu (so there are a handful of pauses), but it does bring plenty of Voynich-related stuff that’s appeared here over the last 18 months together into a single place. Enjoy!

The Voarchadumia & John Dee…

by ⋅ 12 Comments

Once upon a time (in 1518), a Venetian called Giovanni Agostino Pantheo put himself into hot water by writing a work on alchemy (the Ars Transmutationis Metallicae). Yet essentially unrepentant, he went on to publish (in 1530) a further book on alchemy called the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam: this was largely a reprise of his 1518 book but dressed in additional historical garb for an air of antiquity and authority. Yet given that his word “Voarchadumia” was a mash-up of Hebrew and Chaldean (meaning something vaguely about making gold), it has to be said that Pantheo’s take on history was probably no less spurious than his artificially-constructed title.

Still, the Voarchadumia covers languages, alchemy, metallurgy, and various other topics: intriguingly, the well-regarded alchemy expert Adam McLean is currently working on a translation of it, and plans to be finished by the end of this year. Probably because it is currently only in Latin, the Voarchadumia seems to be one of those books which people often claim to have read, but which in fact they have only read about. Which makes it fertile soil for the weed-like seeds of misremembered half-stories to flourish in…

For example, the two most-repeated tales about the Voarchadumia concern its influence on John Dee: in one, Dee’s (1564) Monas Hieroglyphica symbol allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia, while in the other, Dee’s Enochian alphabet allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia. Are these true?

Well… it’s certainly true that Dee had his own copy of the Voarchadumia (which is now in the British Library, complete with Dee’s annotations!) However, having just gone through a scan of a 1550 edition of Voarchadumia, I can say that the first story seems just flat wrong (though please tell me if the symbol appears in a different edition!), while Dee’s angelic alphabet (though note that Dee didn’t actually call this “Enochian”) similarly fails to make any obvious appearance there.

Even so, what does appear on leaves 15v and 16r in Pantheo’s Voarchadumia, however, is an alphabet attributed to Enoch (“Antiquiores autem hi:& concessi Enoch“, to be precise) which has many visual similarities to Dee’s Enochian in its stroke structure and stylistics… even if none of the actual glyphs does actually match. Saying that the two are the same would be an easy mistake to make if you weren’t being careful.

A further angelic alphabet (marked “Angelicum“) appears in James Bonaventure Hepburn’s (1573-1620) early 17th century Virga Aurea, which contains 70 secret or ancient alphabets: Adam McLean discussed this alphabet in The Hermetic Journal in 1980, and even translated the (tiny) amount of text on the engraving depicted beside it. Even Athanasius Kircher subsequently wrote on angelic languages!

But angelic languages first appeared prior to the Voarchadumia, both in Trithemius’ Steganographia Polygraphia (where the prototypical stylistic blend of Arabic and Ethiopic lettering common to these Angelic Alphabets seems to have emerged first) and in Agrippa’s three Coelestis, Malachim, & Transitus Fluvii alphabets – according to Wikipedia, the Transitus Fluvii alphabet first appeared a decade before Agrippa (you may also have seen this in the Blair Witch Project!) It has been claimed that Pantheo formed the Voarchadumia’s second alphabet by munging together these three Agrippan alphabets, with fairly sensible historical reasoning, I’d say.

All in all, it should be clear that Dee did not invent the idea of an angelic or Enochian language – but then again, neither did Pantheo. And furthermore, I don’t believe that angelic languages were common in Dee’s time – though this runs contrary to the Wikipedia Enochian page, which cites Tobias Churton’s [very enjoyable] book “The Golden Builders” as support (but I can’t find any substantial reference there at all). My own reading of the evidence is that the notion of talking to angels in their own angelic language (for that was their purpose) was no more than a marginal, post-rationalized (if affectedly pious) Renaissance reworking of the kind of nigromancy still widespread in the Trecento and Quattrocento.

And so for me, the central issue about Dee is whether he was using the notion of angelic language in a fully necromantic sense (as modern occultists believe, following Aleister Crowley et al), or in a fully steganographic sense (pace Trithemius and possibly Agrippa), or perhaps some kind of epistemologically-confused mix of the two. This is hugely tricky and contentious, because it goes right to the heart of Dee’s entire Renaissance project – i.e. was he scientific or occult? Did Casaubon really have any right to label Dee a Faustian conjuror?

What do you think?

What is a ciphertext?

by ⋅ 9 Comments

Essentially, a ciphertext is a piece of text where the individual letters have been transformed according to a rule system – substitution cipher rules replace the shape of the letters (as if you had just changed the font), while transposition cipher rules manipulate the order of the letters.

THIS IS A CIPHER —> UIKT KT B DKQIFS  (substitute each letter with the one after it in the alphabet)

THIS IS A CIPHER —> SIHT SI A REHPIC (transpose the letters, writing each word back-to-front)

So, as long as (a) you know [or can crack!] the rules by which the “plaintext” (the original unenciphered text) was transformed, and (b) those rules can be played out in reverse, then you can decipher the ciphertext.

OK so far… but if you’re looking at historical ciphers, there’s a problem.

Prior to 1400, transposition ciphers were extremely rare, partly because words themselves were rare. Many documents were written without spaces – and without spaces, where do words begin and end? Effectively, this meant that in-word transposition ciphers (such as reversing syllables, as the Florentines Antonio Averlino and Leonardo da Vinci both used) would only happen in those few places (such as Florence) where people had a modern concept of what words were. A well-known modern example is “Pig Latin“, a (20th century) humorous in-word transposition cipher: and there’s the 19th century “loucherbem” in French, too.

Round about 1465, these flowered into some kind of complex system (by an unknown practitioner, and now apparently lost forever): Alberti, writing in Rome during 1465-1467, mentioned a number of ideas for a complex transposition system, though he recommended his own cipher wheel in preference to them.

Yet after 1500, these basically disappeared into the historical footnotes of cryptographic works. What replaced them (circa 1550) was the “rail-fence” Renaissance notion of transposition cipher: this was instead grounded in the print-centric culture of movable type. This saw messages as sequences of characters tick-tocking away to a metronomic beat (i.e. one per tick), and transposition ciphers not as a way of disrupting word contents, but instead as a way of disrupting (& subverting) the metronomic pulse of letters – a very different beast indeed.

THIS IS A CIPHER --> ISTHAY ISYAY AYAY IPHERCAY   (Pig Latin cipher)

THIS IS A CIPHER ---> T I I A I H R    (Railfence cipher)
                      H S S C P E X

It is this latter (16th century) two-dimensional transposition cipher that is widely used in modern cipher-systems, not the late medieval ‘anagrammatical’ transposition cipher.

cipher-timeline

Older histories of cryptography tended to situate all these cipher techniques within what I call a  “progressivist mythology” – the mistaken notion that every new idea not only flows out of all previous ideas, but also improves and refines them. In practice, of course, that’s not how things work : many brief local flowerings of ideas (basically, all the cipher varieties marked in italic above) made almost no impression on contemporary cryptographic practice. Even Vigenère’s autokey cipher (taught on every modern cipher course) did not get picked up by cryptography practitioners for more than two hundred years!

And now for the punchline of this post: if you discard the progressivist mythology, the range of possible local enciphering strategies for a given ciphertext is sharply constrained by the date and position of a document.

I argue that the Voynich Manuscript ciphertext is likely a prime example of this: its internal evidence dates it no earlier than 1450 and no later than 1470 – right at the time of the brief flowering of the kind of syllabic and interline transposition ciphers mentioned by Alberti in his De Componendis Cyfris (1467).

And so, if we seek to apply “pure” modern substitution cipher analytical techniques to something built around an unknown transposition cipher system, we would surely fail to make any sense of it – and this is, I believe, what has happened in the case of the VMs… why it has remained a “cipher mystery” for so long.

John Dee’s "Tuba Veneris"…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

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…

"Is this feeling an eternal flame?"

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

A quick pop-cultural aside: the song “Eternal Flame” was written by hugely successful American songwriter Billy Steinberg with Tom Kelly and Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles). The inspiration for the song came from an eternal flame seen by Bangles’ bass-player Michael Steele burning at Gracelands in Elvis Presley’s memory, as well as from one at a Palm Springs synagague Steinberg had seen when very young. Though “Eternal Flame” was produced by Simon Cowell, I won’t hold that against it. 🙂

But historically, claims of actual eternal flames go back a very long way: in my book, I mentioned briefly that many in the Renaissance believed a “perpetual light” burned in the Temple of Vesta in Ancient Rome. Leon Battista Alberti’s 1450 book “Momus” mentions (though admittedly in a fictional context) a “perpetual flame, tending itself even though no material is laid under it and no liquid poured over it“, Giovanni Battista Della Porta documented many attempts at reproducing eternal flames in his Natural Magic in XX Books, while in his libro architettonico Antonio Averlino described a continuously-burning candle he saw in Sant Maria in Bagno. Another related story concerns Abbot Trithemius, who allegedly sold two “unquenchable eternall lights” to Emperor Maximilian I for 6000 crowns.

I thought this was one of those things for which there was unlikely to be any significant literature: I’d collected all the pieces together from scattered footnotes. However, recently I was inspired by Archer Quinn’s, ummm, perpetual ranting to properly read through Kevin Kilty’s well-known page on perpetual motion. All good stuff: and he even mentions eternal flames!

Kilty, who seems to have derived his information on this subject from Arthur Ord-Hume’s 1977 book “Perpetual Motion: history of an obsession“, mentions that:-

“Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657) made a lifelong study of these lamps, so many of which were supposedly found in old tombs, vaults and temples. Ord-Hume spends several pages examining ways to explain the observation of perpetual lamps. This is giving too much serious attention to a fantasy. It is likely that no one ever observed any such lamp.”

(Though I should of course point out that Averlino claimed to have observed an eternal flame). Fascinating! I was not aware of Fortunio Liceti‘s connection with eternal flames, and so rushed to buy Ord-Hume’s book as quickly as I could. I shall continue this thread when it arrives…

The Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscripts…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about the “Hero’s Journey”, his condensation of mythology into the single ur-story (often referred to as the “monomyth“)beneath it all. In recent decades, Campbell’s work was popularized by Chris Vogler in his book “The Writer’s Journey”, that distilled the original 17 stages to a 12-stage / 3-act writing template. All of which makes the recent Hollywood writer’s strike seem to me potentially anachronistic: in 10 years time, the [Auto-Plot] button will probably have put them all out of a job anyway.

Incidentally, if you’re familiar with the “Patterns” literature (where recurring patterns of behaviour are given names in order that people can recognize them and manage their causes, rather than simply fire-fighting their consequences), you should be very comfortable with the monomyth: it’s basically a pattern template for mythological behaviours.

The first of Campbell’s stages is the “Call To Adventure“: someone (a Herald) or something (a Macguffin, say) challenges the Hero (and, behind the scenes, often the Anti-Hero too) to take temporary leave of his Ordinary World (DullWorld) to enter the Special World of the Macguffin (DangerWorld). Stage Two is where the Hero says: errrm, thanks… but no thanks, I’m actually quite happy here sweeping the floors [A.K.A. “Refusal of the Call“], while Stage Three is where the unseen writing Gods swoosh the Hero up like the miserable piece of snot he is and propel him onwards to his adventure in DangerWorld, whether he likes it or not [A.K.A. “Supernatural Aid“]. Because, let’s face it, only a nutter would place themselves in danger for no reason.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, most people are happy to enjoy the frisson of danger that comes with the Refusal of the Call: a cipher manuscript is all too obviously a Macguffin, a siren call to a mad textual adventure that you simply wouldn’t wish on anyone (let alone yourself). Anyone (such as myself) who has spent any significant time in the VMs’ World Of Research Agony will readily verify that this is basically the case.

But I find it fascinating that the founding mythology of the 19th century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was built around claimed cipher manuscripts. These had been owned by masonic scholar Kenneth Mackenzie, then found in a cupboard by Rev. A.F.A. Woodford in 1885, and then deciphered by William Wynn Westcott – the plaintext was in English, but had apparently been encrypted using a 15th century Trithemian-style cipher. Westcott then supposedly wrote to someone called Fraulein Anna Sprengel (whose contact details had helpfully been enciphered, though I can see no sign of them in the 56 released folios), who made him and his two collaborators “Exempt Adepts”: and gave them a charter to work the five initiatory grades described in the cipher manuscripts.

Are the cipher manuscripts in any way genuine? Though the paper used for the 60 folios of the cipher was watermarked 1809, the association it mentions between the Tarot trumps and the Tree of Life was first proposed by Eliphas Levi only in 1855. And, for me, the simple act of using 45-year-old paper (never mind the constantly changing story surrounding the object, and the continued inability to find Anna Sprengel) makes me suspect that deception (or, at the very least, some kind of misleading myth-making) was intended right from the start.

Doubtless many of the hundreds of initiates who felt compelled by the unseen Gods to accept this Call to Adventure heartily enjoyed their foray into the Golden Dawn’s DangerWorld. But regardless, the Cipher Manuscript at the heart of the constructed myth seems to have been nothing more than a Macguffin: Refusal of the Call is often exactly the right place to stop.

The Book of Soyga, revisited…

by ⋅ 6 Comments

It’s a nice historical detective story, one kicked off by John Dee, Frances Yates‘ favourite Elizabethan ‘magus’ (though I personally suspect Dee’s ‘magic’ was probably less ‘magickal’ than it might appear), when he claimed to have told an angel that his “great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga“. Dee lost his precious copy of the “Book of Soyga” (but then managed to find it again): when subsequently Elias Ashmole owned it, he noted that its incipit (starting words) was “Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor…“.

However, since Ashmole’s day it was thought to have joined the serried, densely-stacked ranks of long-disappeared books and manuscripts, in the “blue-tinted gloom” of some mythical, subterranean library not unlike the “Cemetery of Lost Books” in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s novel “The Shadow of the Wind” (2004)…

Fast-forward 400 years to 1994, and what do you know? Just like rush hour buses, two copies of the “Book of Soyga” turn up at once, both found by Deborah Harkness. Rather than searching for “Soyga“, she searched for its “Aldaraia…” incipit: which is, of course, what you were supposed to do (in the bad old days before the Internet).

It is a strange, transitional document, neither properly medieval (the text has few references to authority) nor properly Renaissance. There are some mysterious books referenced, such as the Liber Sipal and the Liber Munob: readers of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” may recognize these as simple back-to-front anagrams (Sipal = Lapis [stone], Munob = Bonum [Good], Retap Retson = Pater Noster [our Father]). In fact, Soyga itself is Agyos [saint] backwards.

But what was the secret hidden behind the 36 mysterious “tables of Soyga” that had vexed John Dee so? 36×36 square grids filled with oddly patterned letters, they look like some kind of unknown cryptographic structure. Might they hold a big secret, or might they (like many of Trithemius’ concealed texts) just be nonsense, a succession of quick brown foxes endlessly jumping over lazy dogs?

  • oyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    rkfaqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    rxxqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    azzsxbqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    sheimasddtguoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    eyuaoiismspkfaqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    enlxflfudzrxxqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    sxcahqczfbtfzsxbqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    azepxhheurgmyknqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    rlbriyzycuyddpotxbqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    ryrezabirhdiszeknqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    ogzgfceztqalpntsxhssyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    opnxxsnodxqhuekknykkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
    rcqsfueesfsqrqgqrossyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
    roauxmdkkxkhyhmpzqphdtgtguoyoyoyoyoy
    aqxmudiamubkoqifbszktdmspkfaqtyoyoyo
    sazoesrmlrnaqnzhgabmsmlpeahfsddtguoy
    ………………………………
    (etc)

Jim Reeds, one of the great historical code-breakers of modern times, stepped forward unto the breach to see what he could make of these strange tables: he transcribed them, ran a few tests, and (thank heavens) worked out the three-stage algorithm with which they were generated.

Stage 1: fill in the 36-high left-hand column (which I’ve highlighted in blue above) with a six-letter codeword (such as ‘orrase‘ for table #5, ‘Leo’) followed by its reverse anagram (‘esarro‘), and then repeat them both two more times

Stage 2: fill each of the 35 remaining elements in the top line in turn with ((W + f(W)) modulo 23), where W = the element to the West, ie the preceding element. The basic letter numbering is straightforward (a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, … u = 20, x = 21, y = 22, and z = 23), but the funny f(W) function is a bit arbitrary and strange:-

  • x f(x) x f(x) x f(x) x f(x)
    a…2, g…6, n..14, t…8
    b…2, h…5, o…8, u..15
    c…3, i..14, p..13, x..15
    d…5, k..15, q..20, y..15
    e..14, l..20, r..11, z…2
    f…2, m..22, s…8

Stage 3: fill each row in turn with ((N + f(W)) modulo 23), where N = the element to the North, ie the element above the current element.

For example, if you try Stage 2 out on ‘o’, (W + f(W)) modulo 23 = (14 + 8) modulo 23 = 22 = ‘y’, while (22 + 15) modulo 23 = 14 = ‘o’, which is why you get all the “yoyo”s in the table above.

And there (bar the inevitable miscalculations of something so darn fiddly, as well as all the inevitable scribal copying mistakes) you have it: the information in the Soyga tables is no more than the repeated left-hand column keyword, plus a rather wonky algorithm.

You can read Jim Reeds paper here: a full version (with diagrams) appeared in the pricy (but interesting) book John Dee: Interdisciplinary essays in English Renaissance Thought (2006). The End.

Except… where exactly did that funny f(x) table come from? Was that just, errrm, magicked out of the air? Jim Reeds never comments, never remarks, never speculates: effectively, he just says ‘here it is, this is how it is‘. But perhaps this f(x) sequence is in itself some kind of monoalphabetic or offseting cipher to hide the originator’s name: Jim is bound to have thought of this, so let’s look at it ourselves:-

  • 1.2.3.4..5.6.7.8..9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.21.22.23
    2.2.3.5.14.2.6.5.14.15.20.22.14..8.13.20.11..8..8.15.15.15..2

If we discount the “2 2” at the start and the “8 8 15 15 15 2” at the end as probable padding, we can see that “14” appears three times, and “5 14” twice. Hmm: might “14” be a vowel?

  • 2 3 5 14 2 6 5 14 15 20 22 14 8 13 20 11 8
  • a b d n a e d n o t x n g m t k g
  • b c e o b f e o p u y o h n u l h
  • c d f p c g f p q x z p i o x m i
  • d e g q d h g q r y a q k p y n k
  • e f h r e i h r s z b r l q z o l
  • f g i s f k i s t a c s m r a p m
  • g h k t g l k t u b d t n s b q n
  • h i l u h m l u x c e u o t c r o
  • i k m x i n m x y d f x p u d s p
  • k l n y k o n y z e g y q x e t q
  • l m o z l p o z a f h z r y f u r
  • m n p a m q p a b g i a s z g x s
  • n o q b n r q b c h k b t a h y t
  • o p r c o s r c d i l c u b i z u
  • p q s d p t s d e k m d x c k a x
  • q r t e q u t e f l n e y d l b y
  • r s u f r x u f g m o f z e m c z
  • s t x g s y x g h n p g a f n d a
  • t u y h t z y h i o q h b g o e b
  • u x z i u a z i k p r i c h p f c
  • x y a k x b a k l q s k d i q g d
  • y z b l y c b l m r t l e k r h e
  • z a c m z d c m n s u m f l s i f

Nope, sorry: the only word-like entities here are “tondean”, “catsik”, and “zikprich”, none of which look particularly promising. This looks like a dead end… unless you happen to know better? 😉

A final note. Jim remarks that one of the manuscripts has apparently been proofread, with “f[letter]” marks (ie fa, fb, fc, etc); and surmises that the “f” stands for “falso” (meaning false), with the second letter the suggested correction. What is interesting (and may not have been noted before) is that in the Voynich Manuscript, there’s a piece of marginalia that follows this same pattern. On f2v, just above the second paragraph (which starts “kchor…”) there’s a “fa” note in a darker ink. Was this a proof-reading mark by the original author (it’s in a different ink, so this is perhaps unlikely): or possibly a comment by a later code-breaker that the word / paragraph somehow seems “falso” or inconsistent? “kchor” appears quite a few times (20 or so), so both attempted explanations seem a bit odd. Something to think about, anyway…

Dots for vowels, revisited…

by ⋅ 63 Comments

One very early cipher involved replacing the vowels with dots. In his “Codes and Ciphers” (1939/1949) p.15, Alexander d’Agapeyeff asserts that this was a “Benedictine tradition”, in that the Benedictine order of monks (of which Trithemius was later an Abbot) had long used it as a cipher. The first direct mention we have of it was in a ninth century Benedictine “Treatise of Diplomacy“, where it worked like this:-

  • i = .
  • a = :
  • e = :.
  • o = ::
  • u = ::.

“R:.:lly“, you might well say, “wh:t : l:::d ::f b::ll::cks” (and you’d be r.ght, ::f c::::.rs:.). But for all its uselessness, this was a very long-lived idea: David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers” (1967) [the 1164-page version, of course!] mentions the earlier St Boniface taking a dots-for-vowels system from England over to Germany in the eighth century (p.89), a “faint political cryptography” in Venice circa 1226, where the vowels in a few documents were replaced by “dots or crosses” (p.106), as well as vowels being enciphered in 1363 by the Archbishop of Naples, Pietro di Grazie (p.106).

However, perhaps the best story on the dots-for-vowels cipher comes from Lynn Thorndike, in his “History of Magic & Experimental Science” Volume III, pp.24-26. In 1320, a Milanese cleric called Bartholomew Canholati told the papal court at Avignon that Matteo Visconti’s underlings had asked him to suffumigate a silver human statuette engraved with “Jacobus Papa Johannes” (the name of the Pope), as well as the sigil for Saturn and “the name of the spirit Amaymom” (he refused). He was then asked for some zuccum de napello (aconite), the most common poison in the Middle Ages (he refused). He was then asked to decipher some “‘experiments for love and hate, and discovering thefts and the like’, which were written without vowels which had been replaced by points” (he again refused). The pope thought it unwise to rely on a single witness, and sent Bartholomew back to Milan; the Viscontis claimed it was all a misunderstanding (though they tortured the cleric for a while, just to be sure); all in all, nobody comes out of the whole farrago smelling of roses.

(Incidentally, the only citation I could find on this was from 1972, when William R. Jones wrote an article on “Political Uses of Sorcery in Medieval Europe” in The Historian: clearly, this has well and truly fallen out of historical fashion.)

All of which I perhaps should have included in Chapter 12 of “The Curse of the Voynich“, where I predicted that various “c / cc / ccc / cccc” patterns in Voynichese are used to cipher the plaintext vowels. After all, this would be little more than a steganographically-obscured version of the same dots-for-vowels cipher that had been in use for more than half a millennium.

As another aside, I once mentioned Amaymon as one of the four possible compass spirits on the Voynich manuscript f57v (on p.124 of my book) magic circle: on p.169 of Richard Kieckhefer’s “Magic in the Middle Ages”, he mentions Cecco d’Ascoli as having used N = Paymon, E = Oriens, S = Egim, and W = Amaymen (which is often written Amaymon). May not be relevant, but I thought I’d mention it, especially seeing as there’s the talk on magic circles at Treadwell’s next month (which I’m still looking forward to).

Finally, here’s a picture of Voynichese text with some annotations of how I think it is divided up into tokens. My predictions: vowels are red, verbose pairs (which encipher a single token) are green, numbers are blue, characters or marks which are unexpected or improvised (such as the arch over the ‘4o’ pair at bottom left, which I guess denotes a contraction between two adjacent pairs) are purple. Make of it all what you will!

Besicles…?!

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Just mooching around the web looking for Trithemius-related stuff (as you do), I saw a reference to Renaissance “telescopes, microscopes and bezicles” in the first (free) page of Polygraphia and the Renaissance sign: The case of Trithemius, from the Springer journal Neophilologus. I had never heard of “bezicles”, so decided to have a sniff around, see what I was missing.

It turns out that the author meant the (more modern French) “besicles“, meaning ‘spectacles‘ (though people usually say lunettes): there’s a glossary of spectacles terms here. Now: besicles was originally bericles, where the ‘r’ somehow transformed into ‘s’ over the centuries (but you’d have to ask a linguist about this subtle shift). And bericles was in turn from beryl, a “smoke-coloured stone” (according to this fun page on spectacles history) used to grind the lenses from – although pure beryl is colourless, & it is the impurities in it which give it colour.

There’s a bigger article on spectacles in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (yes, really!), though you’d need to pay to read it (boo, hiss).