At the start of my own VMs research path, I thought it was important to consider everyone’s observations and interpretations (however, errrm, ‘fruity’) as each one may just possibly contain that single mythical seed of truth which could be nurtured and grown into a substantial tree of knowledge. Sadly, however, it has become progressively clearer to me as time has passed that any resemblance between most Voynich researchers’ interpretations (i.e. not you, dear reader) and what the VMs actually contains is likely to be purely coincidental.

Why is this so? It’s not because Voynich researchers are any less perceptive or any more credulous than ‘mainstream’ historians (who are indeed just as able to make fools of themselves when the evidence gets murky, as Voynich evidence most certainly is). Rather, I think it is because there are some ghosts in our path – illusory notions that mislead and hinder us as we try to move forward.

So: in a brave (but probably futile) bid to exorcise these haunted souls, here is my field guide to what I consider the four main ghosts who gently steer people off the (already difficult) road into the vast tracts of quagmire just beside it…

Ghost #1:  “the marginalia must be enciphered, and so it is a waste of time to try to read them”

I’ve heard this from plenty of people, and recently even from a top-tier palaeographer (though it wasn’t David Ganz, if you’re asking). I’d fully agree that…

  • The Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia are in a mess
  • To be precise, they are in a near-unreadable state
  • They appear to be composed of fragments of different languages
  • There’s not a lot of them to work with, yet…
  • There is a high chance that these were written by the author or by someone remarkably close to the author’s project

As with most non-trick coins, there are two quite different sides you can spin all this: either as (a) good reasons to run away at high speed, or as (b) heralds calling us to great adventure. But all the same, running away should be for properly rational reasons: whereas simply dismissing the marginalia as fragments of an eternally-unreadable ciphertext seems to be simply an alibi for not rising to their challenge – there seems (the smattering of Voynichese embedded in them aside) no good reason to think that this is written in cipher.

Furthermore, the awkward question here is that given that the VMs’ author was able to construct such a sophisticated cipher alphabet and sustain it over several hundred pages in clearly readable text, why add a quite different (but hugely obscure) one on the back page in such unreadable text?

(My preferred explanation is that later owners emended the marginalia to try to salvage its (already noticeably faded) text: but for all their good intentions, they left it in a worse mess than the one they inherited. And this is a hypothesis that can be tested directly with multispectral and/or Raman scanning.)

Ghost  #2: “the current page order was the original page order, or at least was the direct intention of the original author”

As evidence for this, you could point out that the quire numbers and folio numbers are basically in order, and that pretty much all the obvious paint transfers between pages occurred in the present binding order (i.e. the gathering and nesting order): so why should the bifolio order be wrong?

Actually, there are several good reasons: for one, Q13 (“Quire 13”) has a drawing that was originally rendered across the central fold of a bifolio as an inside bifolio. Also, a few long downstrokes on some early Herbal quires reappear in the wrong quire completely. And the (presumably later) rebinding of Q9 has made the quire numbering subtly inconsistent with the folio numbering. Also, the way that Herbal A and Herbal B pages are mixed up, and the way that the handwriting on adjacent pages often changes styles dramatically would seem to indicate some kind of scrambling has taken place right through the herbal quires. Finally, it seems highly likely that the original second innermost bifolio on Q13 was Q13’s current outer bifolio (but inside out!), which would imply that at least some bifolio scrambling took place even before the quire numbers were added.

Yet some smart people (most notably Glen Claston) continue to argue that this ghost is a reality: and why would GC be wrong about this when he is so meticulous about other things? I suspect that the silent partner to his argument here is Leonell Strong’s claimed decipherment: and that some aspect of that decipherment requires that the page order we now see can only be the original. It, of course, would be wonderful if this were true: but given that I remain unconvinced that Strong’s “(0)135797531474” offset key is correct (or even historically plausible for the mid-15th century, particularly when combined with a putative set of orthographic rules that the encipherer is deemed to be trying to follow), I have yet to accept this as de facto codicological evidence.

To be fair, GC now asserts that the original author consciously reordered the pages according to some unknown guiding principle, deliberately reversing bifolios, swapping them round and inserting extra bifolios so that their content would follow some organizational plan we currently have no real idea about. Though this is a pretty sophisticated attempt at a save, I’m just not convinced: I’m pretty sure (for example) that Q9 and the pharma quires were rebound for handling convenience – in Q9’s case, this involved rebinding it along a different fold to make it less lopsided, while in the pharma quires’ case, I suspect that all the wide bifolios from the herbal section were simply stitched together for convenience.

Ghost #3: “Voynichese is a single language that remained static during the writing process”

If you stand at the foot of a cliff and de-focus your gaze to take in the whole vertical face in one go, you’d never be able to climb it: you’d be overawed by the entire vast assembly. No: the way to make such an ascent is to strategize an overall approach and tackle it one hand- and foot-hold at a time. Similarly, I think many Voynich researchers seem to stand agog at the vastness of the overall ciphertext challenge they face: whereas in fact, with the right set of ideas (and a good methodology) it should really be possible to crack it one page (or one paragraph, line, word, or perhaps even letter) at a time.

Yet the problem is that many researchers rely on aggregating statistics calculated over the entire manuscript, when common sense shows that different parts have very different profiles – not just Currier A and Currier B, but also labels, radial lines, circular fragments, etc. I also think it extraordinarily likely that a number of “space insertion ciphers” have been used in various places to break up long words and repeating patterns (both of which are key cryptographic tells). Therefore, I would caution all Voynich researchers relying on statistical evidence for their observations that they should be extremely careful about selecting pragmatic subsets of the VMs when trying to draw conclusions.

Happily, some people (most notably Marke Fincher and Rene Zandbergen) have come round to the idea that the Voynichese system evolved over the course of the writing process – but even they don’t yet seem comfortable with taking this idea right to its limit. Which is this: that if we properly understood the dynamics by which the Voynichese system evolved, we would be able to re-sequence the pages into their original order of construction (which should be hugely revealing in its own right), and then start to reach towards an understanding of the reasons for that evolution – specfically, what type of cipher “tells” the author was trying to avoid presenting.

For example: “early” pages neither have word-initial “l-” nor do we see the word “qol” appear, yet this is very common later. If we compare the Markov states for early and late pages, could we identify what early-page structure that late-page “l-” is standing in for? If we can do this, then I think we would get a very different perspective on the stats – and on the nature of the ‘language’ itself. And similarly for other tokens such as “cXh” (strikethrough gallows), etc.

Ghost #4: “the text and paints we see have remained essentially unchanged over time”

It is easy to just take the entire artefact as a fait accompli – something presented to our modern eyes as a perfect expression of an unknown intention (this is usually supported by arguments about the apparently low number of corrections). If you do, the trap you can then fall headlong in is to try to rationalize every feature as deliberate. But is that necessarily so?

Jorge Stolfi has pointed out a number of places where it looks as though corrections and emendations have been made, both to the text and to the drawings, with perhaps the most notorious “layerer” of all being his putative “heavy painter” – someone who appears to have come in at a late stage (say, late 16th century) to beautify the mostly-unadorned drawings with a fairly slapdash paint job.

Many pages also make me wonder about the assumption of perfection, and possibly none more so than f55r. This is the herbal page with the red lead lines still in the flowers which I gently parodied here: it is also (unusually) has two EVA ‘x’ characters on line 8. There’s also an unusual word-terminal “-ai” on line 10 (qokar or arai o ar odaiiin) [one of only three in the VMs?], a standalone “dl” word on line 12 [sure, dl appears 70+ times, but it still looks odd to me], and a good number of ambiguous o/a characters. To my eye, there’s something unfinished and imperfectly corrected about both the text and the pictures here that I can’t shake off, as if the author had fallen ill while composing it, and tidied it up in a state of distress or discomfort: it just doesn’t feel as slick as most pages.

I have also had a stab at assessing likely error rates in the VMs (though I can’t now find the post, must have noted it down wrong) and concluded that the VMs is, just as Tony Gaffney points out with printed ciphers, probably riddled with copying errors.

No: unlike Paul McCartney’s portable Buddha statue, the Voynich Manuscript’s inscrutability neither implies inner perfection nor gives us a glimmer of peace. Rather, it shouts “Mu!” and forces us to microscopically focus on its imperfections so that we can move past its numerous paradoxes – all of which arguably makes the VMs the biggest koan ever constructed. Just so you know! 🙂

Word arrives at Mysteries Mansion from “Fred Jones / Will Smith” about his/her shiny new Beale Papers theory: “Yes the codes are broken! I am giving them out free for all to see at http://www.bealetreasurecodes.com 

As everyone knows, Part 2 was decoded in the original 1885 pamphlet (though the precise details of how the decoder silently worked past where the encoder misnumbered the words in the Declaration of Independence text have caused a fair few modern cryptologists to suspect the whole thing might be some kind of hoax): but what of Parts 1 and 3? You know, the bits that say where the treasure is hidden. 🙂

If you hack through all the foliage (Jefferson? Templars? What?), Jones/Smith’s claim is that if you apply a modified part of the plaintext of Part 2 to the first few lines of Part 1 (so that “71, 194, 38, 1701, 89, 76, 11, …” maps to “INTHECOUNTYOFBEDFORDABOUTFOURMILESAQUADRANTAWAYFROMBUFORD” you get some kind of cunning mix of French and English fragments in the remainder, which (once he’s filled in the gaps) he claims reads as follows:-

In the county of bedford about four miles a quadrant away from buford then here by ahan need ban o tug de a tac foam ruth ci in en but heath narrow mount tut by aire aid t blockade utterly the lentuer stagnation defunt having hag note aerial sa middle ninth bar …

Ohhhhkayyyy… it’s at this point I throw my hands up in the air and simply point out that this looks not entirely dissimilar to Levitov’s VMs descryption (and, though GC will disagree, to Leonell Strong’s claimed VMs decryption too) – a kind of polyglot mishmash of language-like fragments, not unlike hurling a bowl’s worth of Alphabetti Spaghetti at a wall and trying to piece together the resultant letter gloop into sentence-like things. Oh well…

Smith/Jones has put up two (quite big) pages already with more planned over the next few days/weeks: perhaps he/she will have plenty of surprises for us for Part 3. We shall see!

A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.

I recently stumbled upon an active Voynich researcher I’d never heard of: Angela Catalina Ghionea (note that, even though Internet Explorer throws up lots of warnings for her website, it’s basically OK), who is a teaching assistant and 3rd year PhD student in the History Department at Purdue University.

She’s “currently focused on the most mysterious manuscript in the world, The ‘Voynich Manuscript’ “, and is preparing an article called “Understanding the Voynich Manuscript. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants“. Her recent presentations at various conferences include:-

  • Voynich Manuscript and its Genuine Alphabet” (12 April, HGSA 2008 Conference, Purdue)
  • Understanding the “Voynich”, the Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World. American Shamanism and Exotic Plants” (29 March at the OAH 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, Hilton Hotel)
  • Contributions to Voynich Manuscript’s Mystery” (24 March 2008, MARS Conference, Purdue)
  • Voynich Manuscript is not a Hoax. Uncovering New Evidence” (Purdue, 29 January 2008)

All of which I hope to see very soon (and to review here). But this set me wondering: how many other people with PhD’s have looked at the Voynich? I drew up a quick list (let me know if there are more), but there are plenty of familiar faces…

  • William Romaine Newbold
  • John Manly (love the cigar story!)
  • Leonell Strong (love that facial hair / collar combination)
  • Derek de Solla Price
  • Jim Reeds
  • Jacques Guy
  • Gabriel Landini
  • Jorge Stolfi
  • Gordon Rugg
  • Edith Sherwood

Though according to Dr C. S. Lewis Barrie PhD, the Voynich Manuscript is a medieval blog, which is why it makes no sense. Ah, bless.

Every few days, I get asked to recommend a good introduction to the Voynich Manuscript (the ‘VMs’ for short). But each time this happens, my heart sinks a little: given the size and scope of historical research you’d need to have to properly grasp the subject, it’s a bit like being asked to recommend a good 5-page encyclopaedia. Or rather, as none such exists, like being asked to write one.

However, you can describe it in a paragraph: it’s a handwritten book that’s 230+ pages long, very probably about 500 years old, and filled with strange words and obscure pictures no-one can understand. I call it “a Scooby Doo mystery for grownups“, but one where everyone is trying to pin the blame on a different janitor: and so the story loops endlessly, as if on a lost satellite cartoon channel.

For once, the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page falls well short of being genuinely useful: the VMs is so contested, so politicized, so intensely rubbish that the whole neutral tone Wiki-thing fails to please (I gently satirized this in my VQ questionnaire). Bucketfuls of worthless opinions, and endless pussyfooting around: throw all that junk away, I say, and start from scratch. *sigh*

But if Wikipedia’s faux-scientific neutrality can’t get you started, what can? If (like me) you are a fan of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” (1911), your ideal introduction to the Voynich Manuscript might well be succinct, partial, and cynical (in fact, almost toxically so). In this vein, I heartily recommend “Folly Follows the Script“, an article by Jacques Guy (AKA “Frogguy“) in the Times Higher Education supplement from 2004. While ostensibly reviewing Kennedy and Churchill’s recent book on the VMs, Guy rips apart a lot of the pretension and falsity that now surrounds the manuscript, in particular Gordon Rugg’s muchvaunted (but actually resoundingly hollow) hoax papers. Which is, errrm, nice.

If you prefer lots and lots (and did I say lots?) of data, the best introductory site by miles is Rene Zandbergen’s excellent voynich.nu, in particular his “short tour“, and the even shorter tour. But frankly, it’s hard for most people to care about Newbold, Petersen, Friedman, Strong, Brumbaugh, O’Neill, Feely, Manly, and even John “The Brig” Tiltman unless you’ve already lurched over the line into Voynich-obsessive mania: none of them could read a word of the VMs, and they’re all long dead.

Alternatively, if you prefer a kind of gentle postmodern defeatism, I could happily recommend a very readable article by Lev Grossman called “When Words Fail“, which first appeared in Lingua Franca magazine way back in April 1999: sadly, nothing much of substance has changed in the intervening decade (or, indeed, over several preceding decades too).

This might seem a horrible thing to say, given that so much ink has been spilled (and, more recently, so many HTML tags wasted) on the VMs over the last century in the honest pursuit of this wonderful (yet devastatingly cruel) enigma. But we still know next to nothing of any real use: the kind of intensely Warburgian art-historical research I’ve been slaving over for the last six years seems totally alien to most ‘Voynichologists’, a title that perpetually hovers too close to David Kahn’s Baconian “enigmatologists” (see “The Codebreakers” (1967), pp.878-9), with their “deliriums, the hallucinations of a sick cryptology“.

All of which is to say that both cynicism and nihilism are probably good starting points for reading up on the VMs: a century of careless credulity has got us all nowhere. But this is not to say that I am pessimistic about any advances being made. In fact, I would say that “the Devil’s in the details” or the alternative “God is in the details” (both of which are sometimes attributed to Aby Warburg!) to flag that, beyond the superficial flurry of foolish and wishful opinions out there, I think there are things we can (and eventually will!) know about the Voynich Manuscript; but that for the moment these remain hidden in its vellum margins.

All of which is another story entirely