Just a quick note on Voynich cipher cribs.

Even though I’ve built up a fairly substantial set of (what I think are) reasonably pragmatic deductions about how Voynichese works, actually finding any way to use those to get at the rest has (perhaps unsurprisingly) proved difficult. To recap, I suspect that…

  • “4o” steganographically codes for “lo” (and perhaps “la” as well, via some subtle letter formation difference we’re too close to the text to notice)
  • “a[i][i][i]v” steganographically enciphers Arabic digits using the startpoint of the apparent scribal flourish
  • “a[i][i][i]r” verbosely enciphers various rare plaintext letters (such as ‘z’)
  • “e[e][e]” and “ch” / “sh” verbosely encipher vowels
  • “-8” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “contractio”
  • “-9” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “suspensio”
  • “8-” enciphers “et” or “&”, as well as for Arabic numeral combination (into large numbers)
  • “t-” directs the decipherer to a horizontal Neal key (usually on the top line of a paragraph)
  • “p-” directs the decipherer to a vertical Neal key (usually down the first column of a paragraph)
  • “k-” and “f-” I’m not sure about. 🙂
  • “ot” / “op” / “ok” / “of” / “yt” / “yp” / “yk” / “yf” verbosely encipher fixed letters (hence their use in labels)
  • “or” / “ol” / “ar” / “al” verbosely encipher fixed letters
  • “cXh”, where the ch’s crossbar strikes through a gallows, enciphers the shorthand stroke “subscriptio”
  • (etc, etc)

Of course, I happily admit that all, some or none of these may well be wrong: the issue I’m discussing here is what to do next if (like me) you happen to think that there stands a good chance that these are right. Basically, where now?

It struck me a few days ago that the “aiiv” pattern has a rough analogue in part of the Florentine shorthand used by Leonardo da Vinci: as I discussed in my post on Leonardo’s handwriting, LdV used “i-with-a-circle” for ‘uno‘, and “i-with-a-circumflex” for ‘una‘. Now, today’s thought is that if (say) “aiv” similarly enciphers “uno/una”, then what would happen if we went looking for words in the astronomical quire #9 (‘Q9’) for words of the form “verbose letter” + “aiv”, just in case they encipher “l-una”, i.e. “luna”?

For example, if we look at the topmost line of f67r1 (the thrice-exalted APOD page, with what is manifestly the moon in the middle), the fourth word along is “osaiiv”. Now, I suspect that this is an example of coyness on the VMs’ author’s part, insofar as “os” probably doesn’t exist in the cipher system (i.e. the pair should actually read “or”), so he/she has used “os”as  a kind of secondary misdirection, perhaps suspecting that “oraiiv” might look slightly too crackable. 🙂

So, might “luna” be the first word in the VMs to be genuinely deciphered? It’s certainly possible, but I’d hesitate running down to the betting shop just yet: all the same, it might help point to ways of sneaking past the pack of rottweilers on the door. The titles of the Q9 planet pages might all be there on their respective top lines, if we but gothink to go  looking for them…

Giancarlo Truffa recently posted a link to the HASTRO-L mailing list that contains a mention of a surprising claim that Leonardo da Vinci apparently designed a telescope:-

On page 59(b) of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus appears this drawing. Bülent Atalay proposed in 2005 that it is Leonardo’s “telescope”. The page also contains a “study of light reflection of a concave mirror”.

And here’s the drawing itself:-

Leonardo-telescope

Though (perhaps understandably) skeptical of the basic proposition, Giancarlo kindly listed the literature:

  • B. Atalay and K. Wamsley “Leonardo’s Universe: The Renaissance World of Leonardo da Vinci” (National Geographic Books, 2009)
  • B. Atalay “Math and the Mona Lisa: the Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci” (Smithsonian Books, 2004)

Bülent Atalay was convinced enough by his own arguments to get a modern reproduction built, so maybe this is a proto-telescope… though the odds would seem to be against it. Add it to the (long) list of things that Leonardo may have invented (but probably didn’t)…

An intriguing email just arrived on Cipher Mysteries’ virtual doormat: recent blog subscriber Anna Castriota (thanks for writing, Anna!) asks whether I think there is any sign of filigree in the Voynich Manuscript.

Of course, as per normal with the VMs, the answer is a “tentative maybe”. There are good grounds for believing that its author had been exposed to an eclectic range of artistic influences that we can glimpse expressed in different ways, so it would not be a huge surprise if filigree was also on this list. But… was it?

Technically, filigree is formed from twisted gold or silver wires: and if you go looking for its characteristic shape in the VMs, I think you might just about note a resemblance in the exterior lines of the sun face and moon face “calendar” pages.

f67r1-filigree

Voynich Manuscript, f67r1 (“moon face calendar”), detail

f68v1-filigree

Voynich Manuscript, f68v1 (“sun face calendar”), detail

Of couse, if you were to point out that this is a pretty tenuous comparison, I’d have to agree. 😉 

However… I suspect it is instead rather more useful to hunt through the VMs looking for the spirit of Quattrocento filigree decoration, wherein goldsmiths repetitively filled out basic designs with dense filigree twists. If I’ve got the history right, this was a mid-Quattrocento precursor to what Warburg called the horror vacui, the abhorrence of emptiness – a fashion that crept into decorative artworks after the 1480 rediscovery of Nero’s Golden House (Domus Aurea) with its numerous busy images – according to which artists strove to fill every inch of decorated surface with a mass of buzzing details. An accessible source on these ‘grotesques’ is Chapter 7 of Joscelyn Godwin’s “The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance”: but (unless you happen to know better) I happen to think filigree goldsmiths basically got there first.

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, I think a relevant piece of forensic inference is that there are good codicological grounds for concluding that many of its later (more sophisticated) drawings were executed in two basic passes: (1) a primary layout pass (probably expressing the basic idea) , and (2) a secondary decorative pass (probably concealing that basic idea, for whatever reason). So, our research question then becomes whether we can detect this filigree design spirit at play in the Voynich Manuscript’s more decorated pages…

And you know, on balance, I think that we probably can: the key example I would give is the pair of “magic circle” pages. These comprise two circular diagrams on adjacent pages, one with a sun shape in the centre (f85r2) the other with a moon (f86v4), but both surrounded by four human figures at 90 degrees to each other.

two-magic-circles-small

What, you can only see the four characters on the left-hand magic circle? Well… I’ll come to that shortly.

What is particularly curious about these is that the second “moon” magic circle drawing has been obscured by layer upon layer of dense decoration, such that the four figures around the centre (along with a series of other details) are barely visible. That is, while the left one is completely undecorated, the right one is abundantly overdecorated to the point of total coverage.

 second-magic-circle-small

In the immortal words of Rolf Harris CBE, “Do you know what it is yet?” If you’re still having trouble seeing this, here is that same magic circle one last time with all the concealing decorative stuff removed (though fairly inexpertly, and at low resolution):-

 second-magic-circle-stripped-bare

And no, I too have no idea what this denotes or means. But I am pretty sure (from the different inks that were used) that this diagram was drawn in multiple stages, with something not dissimilar to the stripped-out version being the result of the first (expressive) drawing phase, and the preceding image being the result of the second (concealing) phase.

Whatever was originally depicted here, it is hard not to conclude that the author wanted to obscure the structure of this particular page, and so filled in every available space with a dense thicket of misleading detail. Ultimately, this reminds me very strongly of the repetitive decorative nature of filigree decoration – which is why I pointed towards a “tentative maybe” right at the top of the page. 🙂

You can also see this kind of busy, space-filling activity at play on the nine-rosette fold-out page (which is actually on the reverse side of the same folio as the magic circles pages). Here again you can see what appears to be the initial expressive phase (in lighter ink) and a later space-filling phase (in darker ink, and painted in). Quite why this should be so remains a mystery, but I do suspect that here again it was added to distract attention away from the original content of the page.

nine-rosette-filigree

All of which therefore suggests that it might be a (quite literally) revealing exercise to look at the nine rosettes through multispectral filters, to see if we can determine if they similarly began life unadorned, but were then über-decorated at a later stage. Perhaps the right question to be asking of all the drawings hasn’t to date really been asked: what is signal, and what is noise?

Of course, it has been suggested that these filled-out circular designs are merely scribal doodles, time-filling graffiti, a bored student in his medical class, etc: but then again, nobody now looks at the “Academia Leonardi Vi[n]ci” circular knot roundel prints from circa 1500 and calls them mere doodles, so what are the rules in this game, hmmm? Or is this just symptomatic of one of those semantically irregular verbs, that shade away when applied to people you don’t much care for: “I design, you sketch, he/she doodles“?

academialeonardivinci-small

“Academia Leonardi Vici”, print at the British Museum “(After) Leonardo da Vinci”

I sometimes get accused of reading too much into all these fragments: but when you put them together, they very often do afford us glimpses into their secret shared life. This, in the end, is what Art History is all about: for all its forensic aspirations, it is largely a romantic discipline, built on the faint hope that the notion of technique relied upon by each generation of artist will be sufficiently expressed in their works to reconstruct a narrative of continuity across the centuries.

But sometimes, it’s hard to actually put this into practice without feeling somewhat akin to “The Mentalist”: empathetically channelling a torrent of details to bring them back to life as a stream of narrative. But is it only in TV Land that this approach can solve whodunits, or is “The Mentalist” actually a closet art historian? [*]

[*] And yes, I did happen to see “The Mentalist” Episode 1-13 (“Paint It Red”) where Patrick Jane switched a pair of canvases to get a stolen $50m 15th century painting back from a Russian mobster. Be assured that proper art historians don’t do that (well, not often, anyway). 😉

Here’s a quick Voynich Manuscript palaeographic puzzle for you. A couple of months ago, I discussed Edith Sherwood’s suggestion that the third letter in the piece of marginalia on f116v was a Florentine “x”, as per Leonardo da Vinci’s quasi-shorthand. I also proposed that the topmost line there might have read “por le bon simon s…

Going over this again just now, I did a bit of cut-and-paste-and-contrast-enhance in a graphics editor to see if I could read the next few letters:-

por-le-bon-simon-sint

OK, I’m still reasonably happy with “por le bon simon s…“, but what then? Right now, I suspect that this last word begins “sint…” (and is possibly “sintpeter“?) – could it be that this is the surname of the intended recipient? Of course, in the Bible, St Peter’s name was originally Simon, so “simon sintpeter” may or may not be particularly informative – but it could be a start, all the same.

But then again, the “n” and/or “t” of the “sint” could equally well have been emended by a well-meaning later owner: and the last few letters could be read as “ifer“, depending on whether or not the mark above the word is in the same ink. Where are those multispectral scans when you need them? Bah!

Feel free to add your own alternate readings below! 🙂

(1) A big hello to Rich SantaColoma as he emerges from the VMs “List Closet” into the bright(-ish) light of the blogosphere. His “New Atlantis Voynich Theory” blog sets out his basic stall – which is that, thanks to his “Nagging Sense of Newness” about the Voynich Manuscript, he harbours strong doubts that it is anywhere near as old as mainstream Voynich researchers (such as, errrm, me, apparently) think it is.

The truth is that historians have basically frittered the last century away on foolish conceits (such as the Roger Bacon thing, the Dee-and-Kelley thing, or the it’s-a-hoax-because-the-NSA-can’t-break-it thing), and so until such time as a single proper codicological and palaeographical analysis comes along to define the research problem properly, we’ll remain in the same old evidential free-fall.

As for me, I’m sticking with John Manly’s assessment (that the quire numbers were added in the 15th century) as a basic starting point for the dating: and if that turns out to be wrong, then so be it. That doesn’t make me “mainstream”, just… old-fashioned, I guess. 🙂

Incidentally, it’s a little-known fact that the Beinecke’s catalogue originally listed MS 408 as fifteenth century, but that in the 1970s (perhaps as a result of Brumbaugh’s wobbly claims?) this got extended forwards to the sixteenth century… I suspect they got it right the first time round.

PS: Rich, given that I think Q13 has a water theme, I’m sticking with the catoblepas (with its heavy head hanging down) rather than the armadillo – given that even Leonardo wrote that the catoblepas was found at the Nigricapo [the source of the Niger river], it was very much part of the mental landscape of the Florentine Quattrocento.

(2) And another big hello to (the apparently email-address-less?) “acevoynich” and [his/her] eponymic “acevoynich’s blog“. Though given [his/her] apparent inability to find Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich Manuscript Mailing List, The Journal of Voynich Studies, voynich.nu, the Voynich Wikipedia site, the Voynich dmoz entry, etc (let alone D’Imperio or The Curse) I have to say I’m somewhat dubious that [he/she] is, as [he/she] claims, actually writing a “thesis”. Does [he/she] really have a research question in mind, or is [he/she] just a [troll/trollette]? Hmmm…

Still, acevoynich feels confident to ask the five key W-questions of the big V-manuscript: who, what, where, when, why. Again, I refer the honourable member to my previous answer: and add that until such time as we have the forensic side (the “What happened?” question) considerably more locked down than it is at the present, I suspect that these W’s are (sad as it is) actually more harmful than helpful. Oh well! 🙁

A new day dawns, bringing with it a nice email from Augusto Buonafalce in response to my post on Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘x’-like abbreviation for ‘ver (as recently mentioned by Edith Sherwood).

buonafalce_verbuonafalce_ver_normal

Augusto points out that if you remove the plain diagonal line in the reflected version, what remains appears to be similar to a ‘b’… but isn’t. In the 15th century “mercantesca” script, this particular ‘b’-like shape was used to denote ‘v’: Leone Battista Alberti suggested (in his Tuscan grammar) that this shape should be more widely employed to help tell ‘v’ apart from ‘u’. Specifically, Alberti’s ‘b’-like shape looked like this:-

buonafalce_b

Now, mercantesca hasn’t really been discussed in the context of the Voynich Manuscript before (Google returns no useful hits, while even the old VMs mailing list archives appear to be silent), which is something of a shame – for if arch-Florentines such as Leonardo, Alberti, and even Michaelangelo used it, mercantesca must surely have been as close to the beating heart of the Quattrocento project as the much-touted (but very different) ‘humanist hand’.

(The ‘humanist hand’, you may recall, is an upright, formal script that was a conscious revival of an earlier script – which is why dating the Voynich Manuscript based on supposed similarities with the the humanist hand alone is so contentious.)

While the formal humanist hand was used mainly for writing in Latin, the informal mercantesca (which flourished from 1350 to 1550, peaking around 1450-1500) was used mainly for writing in the vulgar tongue: when written well, it is sometimes called ‘bella mercantesca’.

There’s a reasonable literature on this which a Voynich researcher with palaeographic leanings ought to have at least a reasonable look through.:-

  • Orlanelli, G. ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura mercantesca nel secoli XIV e XV’, in Studi in onore di Riccardo Filangieri (Naples 1959) I, pp.445-460
  • Irene Ceccherini (Firenze): La Genesi della Scrittura Mercantesca. (summary of 2005 poster session)
  • Albert Derolez, The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books (2003)

Having said that, it is perhaps the 45 volumes of the CMD (the Catalogue of Dated Manuscripts) produced over the last 50 years that need checking here, particularly the CMDIt (the Italian section), I suspect. A proper palaeography research challenge is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while: but that’s definitely a job for another day…

Stuff to be thinking about! 🙂

Poor old Roald Dahl, remembered more or less entirely for his plucky parentless pawpers propelled into beastly circumstances (but who somehow come good in the end). Apart from bookish Dahl completists patiently working their way through the library shelf to find hidden gems to read to their son/daughter (errrm… like me), whoever would end up reading Dahl’s “Esio Trot“?

It’s a nice (if slightly mawkish, compared with Dahl’s normal writing) little story: it concerns a plot contrived by a lonely retired gentleman (Mr Hoppy) to gain the attention of the attractive widow (Mrs Silver) living in the flat immediately below him, despite her obsession with a puny tortoise called Alfie. I’d like to point you to the Wikipedia article here, but as it does nothing but summarize an already short story, that would be a mean-spirited waste of link ink. 🙂

But does this book contain a cipher mystery? Why… yes! Mr Hoppy pretends to Mrs Silver that he had been told a tortoise-enlarging secret by a Bedouin tribesman – and writes down a special chant for her to whisper to Alfie each day, which begins…

ESIO TROT, ESIO TROT,
TEG REGGIB REGGIB!

Speaking as a collector of Quattrocento letter transposition ciphers (such as Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino used, and which Alberti also described), I have to say that it came as quite a surprise to me to find a modern example with illustrations by Quentin Blake. (Though given that Dahl was employed by MI6 for some years, his interest in cryptography is perhaps not totally unexpected?)

So… can you read “Esio Trot” yet? Or are you not as backwards as a tortoise? 😉

Edith Sherwood recently posted up a webpage comparing one of Leonardo da Vinci’s abbreviations with the third character on the Voynich Manuscript’s back page. She says that this is an ‘x’ – a letter which doesn’t appear in Italian, but which Leonardo often uses to denote “ver“. Might she be right?

pox-labor-large

Just to be sure, let’s zoom right in on that first word: is this ‘pox‘, ‘pof‘, or ‘por‘ (etc)?

pox-large

Does that first letter seems oddly familiar? Let’s look at the letters in the bottom-left margin of f66r:-

y-en-muc-mal

So, the stakes are high insofar as these pieces of added writing (on f116v and f66r) both appear to be by the same hand – and so understanding one better might well also help us decrypt the other.

Anyway… for her ‘x’ claim, Edith refers us to the “Clavis sigillorum” (key to the ‘seals’ i.e. to the special symbols) on pages 1-4 of Jean Paul Richter’s (1883) “The Literary Works of Leonardo Da Vinci” (later reprinted as “The Diaries of Leonardo da Vinci”), which we can now see online here, courtesy of Cornerstone Book Publishers (who publish a zesty mix of Masonic, Esoteric & Pulp Fiction books, just so you know). In common with many other Quattrocento Florentines, Leonardo often placed a (nasalizing) bar above a, e, i, o, and u to indicate an, en, in, on, and un (or sometimes am, em, etc). But the special abbreviating symbols he used were:-

leonardo-abbreviations-v2

So, as you can see, Leonardo did indeed use an ‘x’-like abbreviation for ver: but is this what we see on f116v? To my eye, there’s something that doesn’t quite ring true: partly because the distinctive shape used by Leonardo is not really present – but mainly because the ‘x’-like character that is there has so clearly been emended by someone using a different colour ink.

It therefore seems very likely to me that a later owner guessed that this should read ‘pox‘ (for whatever reason) and emended it accordingly: but was this (as Edith Sherwood claims) what was originally written here? I think very probably not. So… what does it say, then?

Back in 2006, I hazarded a guess (Curse, p.27) that this line was written in Occitan and originally read “por labor a mon aut…” followed by EVA ‘och‘ (Voynichese): now, though I still suspect Occitan, my current reading (somewhat to my surprise) is that it starts with “por le bon simon s…

Lest you think this is some kind of slightly delayed April Fool’s joke (and that I’m trying to sneak in a reference to Duran Duran singer/lyricist Simon Le Bon), please be assured that it’s honestly not – “le bon simon” is simply what it seems to say in this (admittedly much-disputed) margin. Unless you know better? Look at it for yourself and feel free to post your own reading!

And finally… here’s a link to a nice little web application that transforms a message you type in into Leonardo’s handwriting. Now that you are an expert on Leonardo’s abbreviations, you should quickly realise that this fails to handle both “per“, “ver“, “di“, “br“, “ser“, “uno“, and “una” and “an“, “en” (etc) properly. Incidentally, Leonardo also replaced “j” for “i” if it was next to an “n” (so that the resulting letter-pair wouldn’t get confused with an “m“), which this (otherwise very cool) app also doesn’t handle correctly… but perhaps I’ve covered enough arcane palaeographic ground for one day, and should stop there! 🙂

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!]

Get up, fool!“, barked Guillaume Imbert, the French Grand Inquisitor. Yet the Grand Master Jacques de Molay continued to lay on the prison floor, passively resisting to the end. “OK… that was your last chance, Templar scum. Guards – crucify him, and wrap him in a shroud which his bodily fluids will seep into, leaving a ghostly imprint which will quickly come to be believed an image of Christ Himself.

There was a sudden rattling at the cell door, and a plainly-dressed Philip IV and his entourage swept in. De Molay opened a single swollen eyelid. “What, no bling today, Your Majesty? Pawned all the Royal Jewels, perchance? Presumably that’s why you’re planning to seize the vast Templar treasure trove… such a pity we’ve already hidden it in plain sight in a location known only to the author, his/her publisher’s marketing department, and Henry Lincoln.”

No worries, Jackie-boy“, smirked the king, “I have already set in place my own sprawling conspiracy to retrieve it that will run for centuries – yes, even beyond the French Revolution and the first two World Wars upon which your man Nostradamus will write so eloquently.”

“Pah!” retorted de Molay. “Our Templar conspiracy has a two century headstart on your upstart Royalist conspiracy. In fact, we have well-drafted plans to go underground for seven hundred years only to reemerge as a 21st century ninja fighting force with a secret Gnostic terrorist agenda. Unfortunately, because I am illiterate, I could not read those plans, so torturing me to reveal them has been a bit of a waste of time so far.

You call that a conspiracy?” spat the gallic Inquisitor. “But how will you preserve the secret knowledge of Jesus himself at the heart of your anti-Church Templar initiation ceremony which 20th century novel-readers will hear so many versions of? Surely you will need some kind of heavily-enciphered Macguffin to transport dangerous heretical information that could change everything for heavily religious readers (if they happen to be particularly gullible) through time?

Yes, the Church wants to know that too“, exclaimed Philip IV, “for it is their fanatical agents who are going to be hunting it down for the next six centuries. Even if they are all in my pocket in Avignon at this particular point in history.

The Grand Master paused menacingly, eyeing the two men. “Well… OK, then… seeing as we’re best mates an’ all that. We’ve already had our deepest, darkest secrets enciphered by a mad monk by the name of Roger Bacon, who cunningly disguised it as a herbal manuscript from two centuries hence, with instructions for it to be copied by Leonardo da Vinci when he’s born. Oh, and we’ve listed the 365 secret hiding places for the Templar treasure in an appendix at the back. Basically, it’s a bit like the Beale Papers, which we’ve got planned for the future too – good job we’ve already written the Declaration of Independence, eh?

The King drew his once jewel-encrusted dagger and sharply held it at de Molay’s throat. “And does your idiot author really expect his/her readers to swallow all that guff, even if they are laying on a sun-kissed beach? Surely that’s enough to make even one brain cell want to strangle itself?

Guillaume Imbert gently pulled the king’s arm back. “It worked for Dan Brown“, he hissed in the Royal Ear, “so nobody wants to mess with The Secret Formula“.

Is this true, then, de Molay?” snarled Philip. “Is this the Secret Novel-Writing Formula enciphered in the Templar’s secret codex? Will it be Dan Brown himself who will decipher the so-called-six-centuries-hence ‘Voynich Manuscript’ and grasp the Templar money-making secret of writing Romance novels? You know, the secret of making unlimited money from home I see described in so many banner ads unfurled outside my palaces?”

But the Grand Master merely turned to face the king, slowly raised his hand in the ancient Sumerian symbol of defiance with his middle finger raised aloft to the sky, and proclaimed the secret Templar initiatory phrase later to be popularized by Priory of Sion Grandmaster Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli – “Prithee, sit on it, sire“. Plainly, some secrets are beyond all discussion…