Voynich miscellany (again)…

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The Voynich Manuscript meme continues to tap at our cultural windows, asking politely to be let in from the rain. And sometimes people do…

For example, here’s a knitted squid sitting on a copy of Gawsewitch’s “Le Code Voynich” (don’t be put off by the LiveJournal 14+ age warning, it really is a knitting page).

Over at evilbore, Eric P is getting cross about how the VMs is sneaking in under the cultural radar: “What’s caused this subconscious societal permeation of this obscure text?” he asks, before linking to Voynich News (good call!)

Or alternatively, here’s someone called Malcolm starting a game of Lexicon based around a (fictional) deciphering of the VMs. Lexicon is an RPG where players take on the role of cranky scholars building a faux Wikipedia (one letter at a time, hence the name) around a fictional world, while trying not to cite themselves. Errrm… just like the real Wikipedia, then. 😉

Norbert R. Ibanez has posted up some thoughts on the VMs in ‘English’ (with a PDF you can download): though his ideas may be basically OK, I don’t like his automatic translator much. 🙁

And finally, I’ve had some visitors from a posting about my VQ (“Voynich Quotient“) page put up on the Yog-Sothoth forums (dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu players). One poster mentions “Keeper’s Companion Vol. 1, p.63“, where it presumably links the VMs to the Necronomicon: add that to the ever-growing web of Voynich references out there.

New Byzantium book…

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Over the years I’ve spent looking at the Voynich Manuscript, I’ve become progressively more accustomed to its ways, to the point that it is no longer an enciphered grimoire to me, but simply a book we cannot as yet read. When learning to juggle, the primary force which keeps the ball in the hand is not gravity but fear: all the while people see the VMs as a dark, Necronomicon-like repository of ancient evil (basically, confusing unreadable with unspeakable), their fears prevent them from grasping what it actually is.

Yet there’s still something odd about how the Voynich Manuscript is rooted, upon what it stands: specifically, it seems to my eyes to have one foot in early modern European (specifically Northern Italian, I would say) culture and the other in late medieval Byzantine culture. Though I’m still unable to satisfactorily express how this works, what I can say is that many of its herbal drawings have a structural quality that is neither medieval European (slavishly copied, overstylised, unrealistic) nor Renaissance European (emblematic rather than symbolic, abstract). The closest match I’ve found is in Byzantine herbals, many of which are drawn from life, but which have a kind of secret inner numericality: not Kabbalah, but topology / geometry.

I’m therefore always on the lookout for good stuff relating to Byzantium, but its 1000-year history is fascinating for many other reasons: the rich seam of inspiration the Romantic poets found in the marvellous decay of Venice was perhaps but a shadow of the irony and wonder to be discovered in Byzantium’s own history.

And so a book I’m looking forward to is “Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire” by Judith Herrin (Princeton, 2007), which seems to have exactly the kind of overall historical narrative all the fragments of Byzantine history I’ve ever read lacked. There’s a helpful review here: the hardback’s £25 RRP is a little hard to swallow, for sure, but what can you do? (Errrm, wait for the paperback?)

Voynich magic circles (Part 1)…

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I’m just collecting my thoughts after an exhilarating lecture by William Kiesel (the publisher and editor of Ouroboros Press) on magic circles at Treadwell’s in Covent Garden (Christina’s post-lecture blog entry is here). William presented a long series of images of magic circles (manuscripts diagrams, woodcuts, paintings, etc) from the Middle Ages right through to the 19th century, including many of John Dee’s strange diagrams.

Voynich Manuscript, page f57v (the ‘magic circle’ page)

The reason I’ve been trying to find out about magic circles for years is because, as you can see above, page f57v in the Voynich Manuscript apparently contains one. Or (more precisely), whatever f57v actually contains, it seems on the surface to follow the constructional rules and layout of genuine magic circles. However, this is hard to research because the topic of magic circles has attracted relatively little academic interest over the years, Richard Kieckhefer’s (1997) Forbidden Rites (an in-depth study of a 15th century necromancer’s manual) being one of the few honourable exceptions. Which is why I was so excited about the lecture.

Having said that, there are many things about f57v that cast doubts on its ‘magic circle-itude’. For example, I could find no other magic circle with the directional spirits given faces rather than simply named: depictions in every other magic circle I had seen were instead abstract diagrammatic renderings (swords, pentacles, rings, sigils, etc), and names of the directions (to help orient the circle, the first thing any proper necromancer would want to do). But even more brutally: when magic circles are all about the power of names, why ever would someone want to replace them with images?

And so… after the lecture, I asked William for his thoughts on f57v (which, delightfully, he had looked at before). As far as the directional faces go, he agreed that this was pretty much a unique feature: though a tiny number of magic circles he had seen do have sigils shaped to broadly resemble faces, that would seem to be a completely different strand of development to that which we see in the VMs. Overall, even though he did note that it was intriguing that the postures of the four “people” on f57v were all different, the main impression the page left him with was that each of the four faces faced in a different direction (though he didn’t know what that meant).

On the train home, I sat there wondering what this might have caused this, letting all the various aspects swirl around me (though, no, I didn’t have any of Treadwell’s wine that night). And then all the bits clunked into place, with that sound very familiar to any Simpsons fan: “d’oh!”

I should explain. Perhaps the biggest trap Voynichologists fall into is that of overthinking issues: when many complex explanations for a given phenomenon exist, sometimes simple ones gets overlooked, or (worse) rejected for appearing too simple. And the simplest explanation here is that, because almost every magic circle has the directions of the compass written on it, that would be both the first thing you would want to keep and the first thing you would want to hide. And so it seems highly likely to me that the four faces on f57v code for N/E/S/W. In short, I think that (like the VMs’ “Naked Lady Code” I described in my book) the four faces employ a misleadingly elaborate way of enciphering something very simple – the compass directions. But which is which – and how – and why?

  • The left figure is facing forward-left
  • The top figure is facing backward-right
  • The right figure is facing forward-right (and holding a ring / egg)
  • The bottom figure is facing backward-left

But how do these four map onto N/S/E/W? The first thing to notice is that magic circles are very often written in Latin, with the four points written Oriens [E], Meridies [S], Occidens [W], Septentrio [N]: and so an encipherer would only need to hide one in order to hide them all.

While I don’t know for sure… I do predict that the nose and eyebrow of the left figure’s face was elaborated around an “S” to denote “Septentrio” [i.e. North]: and that the only useful information is that a ring (as rings are far more common than eggs in magic circles, The Black Pullet notwithstanding) should be placed opposite it [i.e. South]. The flower-like shape at the centre is probably an elaborated shape around the central o-shapes, which probably denote locus magistri, the place where the exorcist / conjuror / master of the magic circle should stand. Finally: might the heavily-drawn straight line on the shoulder of the ring-carrying person denote a sword? Very possibly.

 

Voynich Manuscript, page f57v – four central figures

This doesn’t answer every question about f57v (how could it?): but it does give a good snapshot of my current thoughts on how (beneath all the deception) it is actually a magic circle (though perhaps not as complex a magic circle as you might initially think).

Part 2 will move on to the VMs’ other magic circles…

Review of "PopCo"…

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I’m a lousy fiction reviewer, probably for two main reasons: (1) creative writing classes taught me how to spot when writers are cheating (in order to make me a more honest writer myself); and (2) years of Voynich Manuscript-related research has made me constantly alert for infinitesimal details upon which the answer might just hinge.

Put these two together (a lie-detector and an adrenaline-fuelled eye for detail), and you have a completely unfair toolkit for reading novels, simply because novels are very rarely actually “novel” – they’re more often an assembly of ideas.

Take Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo” (FourthEstate, 2004), for example. Superficially, it’s like a 500-page anagram of my life (BBC Micro / chess / maths / philosophy / Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem / videogames / business / marketing / cryptography / cryptology / secret history / Voynich Manuscript / etc), together with a load of other untaken doors (Bletchley Park / SOE / crosswords / vegetarianism / vegan / Go / low-level drug-use / homeopathy / etc), and it’s written quite well: so I really should be engaged by it, right?

Problem #1 is one of construction: the first tranche is basically Douglas Coupland (specifically Microserfs), the second tranche Iain Banks (his fiction rather than his science fiction), then a bit of Martin Gardner’s puzzle columns and Simon Singh’s The Code Book: there’s a kind of teenage girls’ magazine section along the way, and a rather clunky historical pirate romance, before it all flips out into Thomas’ fictional take on Naomi Klein’s No Logo… Yet to me, a book needs to be more than merely a collage of influences, a narrated scrapbook: but perhaps that makes me too old-fashioned for contemporary fiction. If you wanted to be kind, you might compare it with Kurt Schwitters‘ Merz, carefully arranged collections of found objects (forged Merz pieces get placed on eBay all the time): but sorry, Thomas is no Schwitters.

Problem #2 is the lack of parents. The other day, while watching (the original TV series of) Batman on BBC4, my four-year-old son asked me where Batman came from. Well, I said, a man called the Joker killed both Bruce Wayne’s parents, and when a bat bit him in the caves beneath his mansion, he somehow gained a super crime-fighting ability. OK… so where did Spiderman come from? Well, I said, after both Peter Parker’s parents died, he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and gained amazing spider-like powers. My son paused, looking back at the screen. But what about Robin, he asked. No, don’t tell me, I know: both his parents were killed… Before he had a chance to say “(and he was bitten by a radioactive robin)”, I suggested we look Robin up on Wikipedia (though sadly he was basically correct). In PopCo, the main character Alice Butler is basically Crypto Girl, a sort of Elonka-lite: her mother dies and her dad runs away, and she gains her m4d cryptological and prime factorisation sk1llz from her grandad. Put it that way, and it all looks a bit comic-book thin, doesn’t it?

Problem #3 is that I’m wise to novelistic conceits. I know that in a cryptological novel, someone called A[lice] is going to communicate with someone called B[en], who will pass on what she says to someone called C[hloe]: and this kind of spoils it. Incidentally, Ron Rivest denies that he used “Alice” and “Bob” (in his 1978 paper introducing RSA public-key cryptography) in any kind of homage to the film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (which is actually a bit of a shame). It would also have been cool if PopCo’s Alice had been born in 1978 and openly named in crypto homage to Ron Rivest’s paper, but I think she’s too old (is she 29? I can’t find the page, rats!).

Problem #4: cringeworthy logic/maths puzzles. To give texture to her story, Thomas brings together loads of lateral puzzles and mathematical ain’t-that-amazin’ fragments, the kind of thing that you sometimes hear being trotted out at student parties. For example:-Two men go into a restaurant and order the same dish from the menu. After tasting his food, one of the men goes outside and immediately shoots himself. Why? (p.109) The explanation given for this in PopCo is ludicrous (it involves an albatross and a dead child, don’t get me started): but why is one not simply a food-taster for the other? Fugu: mmm, delicious… hey, what’s that trainee doing in the kitchen… aaaarrgggh!

Problem #5 (probably the biggest of all for a Voynichologist) is that PopCo uses the Voynich Manuscript as a MacGuffin (or do I mean a “Philosopher’s Egg MacGuffin”?). Alice’s grandfather spends years on the VMs, and even gets her to count the words and letters on each page (and later to factorise large numbers): perhaps washing his car would have been a better way to earn pocket money. Alice says that she’s learnt so much from the journey, from the search for the heart of the VMs: but really the manuscript is no more than occasional wallpaper for the narrative. The Beale Papers also make a brief appearance: my guess is that Scarlett Thomas would have used them as the central hook, had there been more than a paltry $20million dollars’ worth of treasure linked to them: the alternative “Stevenson/Heath” pirate cipher mystery Thomas constructs is a bit thin when held up against real ones, regardless of the size of its haul.

…and so on. I feel in a bad place: I really wanted to like PopCo, but all I can do is whinge (and I haven’t even moaned about her merging Alberti’s and Vigenere’s cryptography, etc). Other reviewers (such as here and here) seem basically to like the book: and compared to Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress (where I wanted to kill all the main characters by the end of Chapter One, all the minor characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publishers by the end of Chapter Three) it’s Shakespeare.

Cryp-lit like this requires a certain kind of technical devotion from the reader, and if you are a diehard crypto-geek PopCo is something you really ought to read. But only if you’ve read the good stuff (like Neal Stephenson’s excellent Cryptonomicon) first.

The "visual poetry" of the Voynich Manuscript…

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It must seem like I’m fixating on everything apart from the VMs itself, but sometimes that’s how blogging works: and, indeed, how life itself works. This June 2005 entry from visual poet Geof Huth’s “dbqp: visualizing poetry” blog takes a confidently sideways angle on the manuscript from most people.

Geof talks of the Voynich’s “hypnotic beauty” and wonders whether “the draw of this book is that we must treat it as a child treats a picture book: We read the images and look at the text.” Yet I happen to believe that there is more visual poetry to be found in the VMs than even he thinks, many miles beyond the limited horizons of “The Friar and the Cipher” (which he had just read).

Geof also suggests that the VMs might have influenced the DIY cultural anarchist mIEKAL aND. Certainly, there’s some visual overlap with the fonts here (one grabbed from the Rohonczi Codex), but as for the VMs’ influence on the “crossmedia beliefware” here, his Zaum Gadget and other hypertoys at Qazingulaza, and according to this page, “THE DRIFTLESS GROTTO OF WEST LIMA, a permanent public grotto/park/installation which when finished will feature a bird-operated time machine in a 25 ft blue glass tower“, I really couldn’t say.

I’d never really thought of it before just now, but to me the Voynich does have the same kind of deep structure as poetry: that ineffable feeling of polished granite blocks effortlessly grinding past each other in an unseen topology, far below the surface. And a kind of coruscating anti-etymology too, that elegantly hunts down and destroys the patterns our magpie eyes feverishly search out.

Burning flames, dead stars humming:
Rhythm of a dance? Each thing
Is lost inside this packed-in future –
The one you tried to grasp so much.
We throw our words, our empty hopes,
And foolish dreams upon this pyre,
To keep you living in your fire.

Make of it all what you will.

"Codex", by Lev Grossman…

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“Codex” (2005) , another Voynich-ish thriller to add to the Big Fat List, is by New-York-based writer Lev Grossman who you might know as the author of the “When Words Fail” article (a nice introduction to the Voynich Manuscript) in April 1999’s Lingua Franca I have favourably cited here several times.

In his novel, an investment banker gets roped in by a wealthy couple to track down a medieval travel narrative, which may or may not be a fraud. Lev’s website says (of his own book) that “It’s also an unusual love story, as well as a love letter to the mysteries and wonders of the Book, the death of which has been wildly exaggerated“: sounds plausible to me. 🙂

Oh, and it genuinely does appear to be an international bestseller, as evidenced by the 25 copies of it in my local libraries (where most interesting books don’t even merit a single copy, sadly).

"Codice Voynich", by Claudio Foti…

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There’s a new book just out, self-published through lulu.com, called “Codice Voynich” by Claudio Foti. It’s 143 pages long, 6″ x 9″, and in Italian – though fewer pages, it has the same dimensions as the VMs and, who knows, perhaps even the same language. 😉

But printing is basically easy now: and so the big issue for publishers and self-publishers is sales and marketing – getting people to buy your wares. Yet for print-on-demand business wrappers like Lulu, the economics are somewhat suspect: unless you’ve got absolutely killer content that large numbers of people need right now and can be compressed into a tiny number of pages (like, say, “Getting Laid with Facebook“), who is going to pay £13.15 for a softback? Yeah, Voynich completists like me, sure: but are there really more than 20-30 of those in the world?

For my own Voynich book, I worked out that for digital printing to make good economic sense, it could sensibly have no more than 240 pages, and I could charge no more than £9.95 per copy, no matter what I actually put inside it. And so I’ll be very interested to see what makes Claudio’s book worth more for 90+ less pages.

Incidentally, typical keywords Claudio has flagged are: magic alchemy Prague Rome medieval Middle Ages manuscript codex Atlantis Bacon Kelley mysterious rune Lovecraft Necronomicon Nostradamus Dee Voynich. No huge surprises there: which itself is a bit of a shame. If it had been “Voynich Facebook Smurf Cheeseboard Helicopter“, well…

Yet more Voynich "solutions"…

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I recently found a German Voynich Lexicon wiki-page, with lots of nice things that appear almost nowhere else (such as a link to my Compelling Press Voynich book page, *sigh*).

It has quite a light touch, reminiscent of my old Voynich friend Elmar Vogt: for example, it has a short “Newbold of the month” section pointing to two latter-day Voynich “solutions”, neither of which I’d heard: Erhard Landmann’s book, and Dirk Schroeder’s kabbalistic numerology.

Perhaps more usefully, the site also has a list of Voynich media mentions, going from 2001 all the way up to 2008. OK, it’s in German: but even so, you can get a good idea of what’s being said about the VMs (and where). There’s a link there to a 2007 Suddeutsche article I was interviewed for (and which I’d forgotten about until I saw it there just now).

But here’s the punchline: the more Voynich coverage from around the world I see, the more it seems to me that the English-speaking world doesn’t currently give a monkey’s about the whole issue. With all due respect to the army of novelists out there slaving away on their Voynich-themed soon-to-be-masterpieces, you might consider avoiding making them too parochial: the translations may well make you more money…

Incidentally, I’m now 50 pages into Scarlett Thomas’ novel “PopCo”: I’ll post a review here as soon as I’ve finished it…

Dutch Voynich hoax bloggery…

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I just stumbled across part 1 and part 2 of a long-ish Dutch blog entry on hoax theories of the Voynich Manuscript, specifically Gordon Rugg’s Cardan grille nonsense. If, like me, you don’t speak Dutch, note that Google Translate‘s Dutch-to-English translation appears not to be working, and so use FreeTranslation.com instead (which does work fine).

Actually, I do (thanks to Tanya) have a single Amsterdam survival phrase, which I learnt long before I was married: “Zeker niet, mevrouw: ik word getrouwd!” Anyway, moving swiftly on…

What tickled me about the Dutch bloggery was the fact that the people commenting on it were amused by f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” sequence, with one of them asking “Wat dacht je van de smurfen?” All of which prompted (Proust-stylee) long-buried memories of the abysmal Smurf collectible figurines BP gave away as promotional items in the 1970s (and which are doubtless now worth the GDP of Morocco each) to surface. I just never dreamed I’d join Smurfs and the Voynich Manuscript in the same sentence. Life is strange.

Incidentally, 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the Smurfs’ burf: thankfully, the movie tie-in has been delayed to 2010 (though if we’re really lucky, Paramount will cancel it first). But here’s a blog entry on them that does ring true (oh, and here’s a working Smurf Name Generator).

"The Spiderwick Chronicles" and the VMs…

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You may not have heard of them, but the six books in The Spiderwick Chronicles – stories that follow a group of kids in their everyday struggles with elves, goblins and boggarts – have (according to a piece in this week’s MCV, which seemed to have been written by Vivendi’s PR folk) sold six million copies worldwide, more than a million of which were in the UK. Oh, and the US box office release of the movie grossed nearly $25m: and there’s a computer game imminent, too.

LA-based blogger Martin van Velsen caught the film’s opening: and was struck by the title-sequence, during which Arthur Spiderwick constructs a book, one page every day, by gluing down small objects and animal (mostly insect) parts and writing a commentary around them. Martin wonders if the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript (both of which he describes as “pure works of fiction, a flight of fantasy out of control… [yet] based… on the real world“) were effectively the real Spiderwick Chronicles.

“When browsing the Voynich Manuscript I tend to find myself wonder what was drawn true to life and what was made up. More importantly, did the author deliberately stay on the edge as to lure the reader into believing some of the imaginary depictions are actually real?”

All good thoughts. He ends his blog with a rather splendid quote from H. P. Lovecraft:-

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

This whole blog entry warmed my heart, simply because here we have a blogger who really gets the Voynich. OK, he’s into H. P. Lovecraft and Luigi Serafini too, so it wasn’t a massive jump sideways: but all credit to him regardless. 🙂