Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

Like it or not, we find ourselves completely surrounded by Bad Voynich Theories: this is an unfortunate (and often dispiriting) state of affairs, and one that seems unlikely to change any time soon.

Having said that, everyone is entirely free to pursue their own foolish Voynich theory (though it sometimes seems as though this is close to becoming obligatory). But as long as you’re only wasting a small amount of your own time, that’s essentially fine, because you’ll probably learn a load of interesting stuff along the way. And if you can (eventually) get to the point where you truly understand the basic mistake that set you on the wrong track (and can actually accept it), you’ll probably have stretched your mind in an overall positive way.

However, the one thing that takes a Bad Voynich Theory and turns it into an outright tragedy is when it starts to gain followers – people who have no inkling of the basic historical/logical error the original theorist has almost certainly made. For if there are (say) a thousand Voynich theories out there (and the smart money is surely on the actual figure being a fair bit higher), that means that at least 999 of them are wrong: or, put another way, the chances of a randomly picked Voynich Theory being correct is no more than 0.1%.

I’ve written before that I think Tucker & Talbert’s “New Spain / Nahuatl” Voynich theory is demonstrably wrong, but their camp has now acquired a new ally who wants to take those ideas much further….

“The Annotated Voynich Codex”

Jules Janick at Purdue University has picked up Arthur O. Tucker’s Mesoamerican baton and done his best to hurtle forward down the same track with it. According to his freshly-minted Voynich project page (a longer PDF version including Janick’s transliteration tables and working examples of plant decryptions is here):

The two botanists who have published papers in refereed journals (Hugh O’Neil, 1944 and Arthur O. Tucker, 2013) have observed the presence of only New World plants. Tucker has demonstrated that this is a MesoAmerican codex based on identification of plants, animals, a mineral, language symbols, and heliocentrism.

(Of course, he means “Hugh O’Neill” here. *sigh*)

Subsequent analysis by Tucker and Jules Janick have demonstrated a direct connections to colonial Mexican history including illustrations of landmarks and cities and an allusion to the establishment in 1530 of the Celestial City of Jerusalem (Puebla de los Angeles) by the Franciscan friar Toribio of Benvente known as Motolinía (1482–1568). All our research to date indicates that the Voynich is a 16th century codex associated with indigenous Indians of Nueva España educated in schools established by the Spanish.

(He means Toribio de Benavente here, who arrived in New Spain in May 1524.)

Janick believes that the Voynich’s pharma section offers so many labels of herbs and plants that it can be used as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for decrypting Voynichese. I’ve cut-and-pasted his transliteration table (below) into a form that Voynich researchers can quickly make sense of (note that I’ve given EVA t/k pride of place at top left, because it is the ‘tl’ from which every single Nahuatl Voynich theory ultimately seems to spring):

With the Voynich Manuscript so comprehensively solved, we should all now decamp to the bar for tequila shots (surely the only sensible way of ingesting agave), right? Well… no, not just yet. Janick continues:

However, the bulk of the manuscript defies translation, and it appears that a dialect or lost language associated with Classical Nahuatl is involved. This is being pursued. We are convinced that the Voynich codex is a document produced by Aztec descendants that has been unfiltered through Spanish editors. As such, we believe it may be a critically important manuscript to colonial Mexican history.

So despite the fragments of Voynichese that seem to be Nahuatl (if you squint at them in just the right way), there are huge sections of the text (I’m guessing this means 99% of the text) which even Janick’s clever transliteration table still makes no sense of. But to give him his dues, he would still appear to be several times further forward than Stephen Bax ever managed (numerically speaking, that is). 🙂

Puebla de los Angeles

Despite these significant (and, I suspect, insurmountable) linguistic shortcomings, Janick, Ryba & Tucker seem pretty convinced about their interpretation of the Voynich’s infamous nine-rosette page. Here’s a link to their paper Voynich Diagram 86v: An Interpretation, which excitedly concludes:

Page 86v of the Voynich Codex is a complex figure that involves two concepts: (1) a kabbalistic sephirothtic Tree of Life, and (2) a map associated with Puebla de los Angeles, the New Celestial City of Jerusalem established by the Franciscan Friars including Motolinia. It includes four encircling cities, Huejotzingo, Tlaxcalla, Tecamachalco, and Zempoala (Cempoala) Vera Cruz, all mentioned by Motolinia. The diagram is evidence that the artist of the Voynich Codex was involved with Catholic mysticism linked to Jewish kabbalah.

So… yet another nine-rosette spatial decryption to place atop what is already a tall and teetering pile. Anyone got a box of matches? The weather’s suddenly turned cold here and… (you know the rest).

Your Chance To Meet Jules Janick!

Regardless, if you’re just as excited as Janick et al. seem to be about this (and I can assure any disbelieving Cipher Mysteries readers that there are plenty of Voynichese/Nahuatl devotees out there) and can haul your sorry ass over to West Lafayette in Indiana this coming Wednesday lunchtime (21st September 2016), the very distinguished Jules Janick himself will be giving a talk on all this at Purdue University, hosted by the Jewish Studies Program:

Wednesday, September 21 ~ Beering Hall, Room B222 ~ 12:30
Jules Janick, James Troop Distinguished Professor of Horticulture, Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University, “A Kabbalah Sephirothic Tree, the New Jerusalem, and the Voynich Codex: Understanding a Bizarre 16th Century Manuscript of New Spain”

Personally, I think the probability that the Voynich Manuscript originated in New Spain is so close to zero that your desktop calculator would have to switch into scientific notation to display it. But given that nobody gives a monkey’s about what I happen to think, all I can say is: it is what it is.

Before I begin: I just stumbled upon a bot-generated webpage that claimed to be “A discussion of the geography, accuracy and geometric salesman relating to the 14C farrago of the Voynich“. Who’d have thought random text could be so splendidly insightful?

Irena Hanzíková

Anyway… might Irena Hanzíková be our Voynich theorist of the day? A recent piece in Novinky.cz (the highest-traffic Czech news-site, and the online face of Czech newspaper Právo) has a nice picture of her:

The Voynich Manuscript is, she says, nothing less than “o knihu života” (the book of life), and that “Obsah bude pro všechny překvapením” (the content will surprise us all).

But the article does (thankfully) give us a short snippet of her transcription / decryption of folio 49 (it doesn’t say recto or verso) to keep us going while she gets the rest countersigned by a notary: apparently it says “Vedle cti doutná zlomyslnost, prospěch má sestru zradu, cílem je poznat svět, přesto svítit do tmy” (and, in case you hadn’t guessed, it is written in Old Czech).

Giuseppe Bianchi

Of course, Hanzíková has plenty of competition: such as Giuseppe Bianchi, a surveyor from Arquata Scrivia in North-West Italy, whose April 2016 article in La Stampa describes his wondrous Voynich microwriting theory.

He believes the key to understanding the Voynich lies in f1r (the first page) and f116v (the last page), because the whole manuscript is sort of an experiment in “proto-typography” – forming letters with (terrifically tiny) stencils, where each stencil is equivalent to a particular code. Here’s how the second word of the (in)famous “michiton oladabas” breaks down into stencil presses, which is (I have to say) a lot like an odd cross between William Romaine Newbold’s supposed microwriting and the Phaistos Disk’s shape-stamping:

There’s plenty more on YouTube, if microstamping Voynich theories are your bag.

Glen Russum

Enthusiastic smoker Glen Russum has his own Voynich theory to fill his YouTube video with (for example)

I want for Yous to do most of the paying Sam Can Not
be doing it without Help o what I am saying to Help
I think I am wanting all 8 to Pay His and Hers, and
she also. Not I, Sam They I’m Not going to Pay-
not so- not for all 8 of Us! Have Mercy! Please woMen
Do not be so cruelly cruel. …. (do) Care

The first YouTube commenter calls this “Just ridiculous“: but having seen plenty of genuinely ridiculous Voynich theories, I’d be hard-pressed to say whether this has even managed to attain ridiculousness yet. I guess you’ll have to make up your own mind.

Volder Z

“Volder Z”, by way of comparison, is trying to carve out the perilously narrow linguistic furrow most famously ploughed by Stephen Bax’s ard. Volder takes some bits out of Bax’s box while discarding others; rules out most European languages; then moves to his own brand of “modified Syriac” (i.e. start with Syriac but twiddle with ~50% of each indiviudal letter, even though Syriac was written right-to-left *sigh*); and tries to logically deduce the gallows pronunciation in terms of aspirative plosives.

Of course, there are the inevitable problems (he thinks that EVA “i”, “v” and “q” don’t have sounds), and Volder has an entire second video (which I lost the will to watch after only a few minutes, but perhaps you will fare better). But the short version [spoiler alert] is that he thinks it is a super-early Romany language.

There’s a kind of relentless Mormon logic to Volder’s entire linguistic edifice that Bax utterly shares: that just because you can apply a certain frame of reference to a thing, not only should you do it, but that doing so guarantees you a good result.

And the rest…

I could go on (e.g. Karin Marie Olt, who was shown the solution by twins “Lisa and Leonardo” in her dream, now has a Facebook page and has published her own book, etc), but that’s not really the point.

For me, the single biggest reason why I haven’t covered these kinds of Voynich theories here for such a long time is that they – and even stuff like the bot text I started this page with – all merge into a single thing for me.

The way I see the Voynich Manuscript – as a series of micro-stories, all told by the manuscript’s internal evidence, but not as yet gelling into a complete macro-story – is so diametrically opposite to these Voynich theorists that it’s hard to bridge the gap between them. Asking which is the Voynich theorist of the day, week, month, year or decade would be missing the point: I don’t really want any of them, sorry. 🙁

There are two big problems with the Voynich Manuscript handwriting: (1) it doesn’t flow like normal handwriting; and (2) there are apparently a number of different “hands” in play.

The first researcher to properly foreground the idea of different “Voynich hands” was the US WWII codebreaker Prescott Currier: he noted not only that there were different types of handwriting (which he called “Hand 1”, and “Hand 2”), but also different types of contents, to the point that he grudgingly dubbed them different ‘languages’ (e.g. “Currier A” and “Currier B”, though it should be born in mind that his angle on them was overtly statistical/cryptanalytical rather than linguistic).

Rene Zandbergen has long written about numerous issues that arise from Currier’s A/B insights, as well as with the limits of what you can conclude from them (e.g. here): generally, it is more sensible to talk of Herbal-A, Herbal-B, Pharma-A, Bio-B, etc, because the differences between A and B taper and lurch around rather than abruptly switch.

What emerges from this is a far more nuanced and subtle picture than, say, Gordon Rugg ever assumed, as evidenced in particular by Mary D’Imperio’s interesting paper on cluster analysis (declassified in 2002).

Hand 1 vs Hand 2

But the same kind of thing turns out to be true of Currier’s initial Hand 1 / Hand 2 dichotomy: for when you look a little more closely at the pages, you find that there could easily be several different hands in play.

Certainly, few would disagree that there appears to be a broad division to be made between large-hand A pages (such as f8v, the last page of the first quire)…

…and tiny-hand B pages (such as f33r, the first page of Quire 5)…

It is certainly conceivable that Hand 1 and Hand 2 were both written by the same person (say, using different types of quill, or with different types of content, etc etc): moreover, some researchers (such as Sergi Ridaura and others) have specifically asserted that this is the case.

Yet the more that I have tried to work with the Voynich Manuscript’s pages as 15th century palaeographical artefacts, the less comfortable I have become with this suggestion. There are similarities between Hand 1 and Hand 2, for sure: but those similarities also sit at broadly the same kind of level you would expect to see from different scribes working in the same town, or taught by the same teacher. Further, I’d argue that there is no palaeographic ‘tell’ to be seen that links 1 with 2 in a definitive way: and that’s precisely the kind of thing you’d need to properly form the logical core of a “Hand 1 == Hand 2” argument.

More Than Two Hands?

Even though Currier started from this two-hand viewpoint (and was also not working with anywhere near as good a set of images as we now have), he eventually found himself pushed to a radical conclusion:

Summarizing, we have, in the herbal section, two “languages” which I call “Herbal A and B,” and in the pharmaceutical section, two large samples, one in one “language” and one in the other, but in new and different hands. Now the fact of different “languages” and different hands should encourage us to go on and try to discover whether there were in fact only two different hands, or whether there may have been more. A closer examination of many sections of the manuscript revealed to me that there were not only two different hands; there were, in fact, only two “languages,” but perhaps as many as eight or a dozen different identifiable hands. Some of these distinctions may be illusory, but in the majority of cases I feel that they are valid. Particularly in the pharmaceutical section, where the first ten folios are in a hand different from the middle six pages, I cannot say with any degree of confidence that the last ten pages are in fact in the same hand as the first ten.

Taken all together, it looks to me as if there were an absolute minimum of four different hands in the pharmaceutical section. I don’t know whether they are different than those two which I previously mentioned as being in the herbal section, but they are certainly different from each other. So there are either four or six hands altogether at this point. The final section of the manuscript contains only one folio which is obviously in a different hand than all the rest, and a count of the material in that one folio supports this; it is different, markedly different. I’m also positive it’s different from anything I had seen before. So now we have a total of something like five or six to seven or eight different identifiable hands in the manuscript. This gives us a total of two “languages” and six to eight scribes (copyists, encipherers, call them what you will).

So, might Captain Currier have been right about there having been so many contributing hands? Surprisingly, it’s not something that has been satisfactorily dealt with by palaeographers at any time in the last century. If you thought the silence following Mary D’Imperio’s paper was bad, the pin-drop-library-quiet surrounding Voynich palaeography is arguably even worse.

But perhaps we’ll start putting that right before too long…

Voynich Manuscript handwriting

Finally, the palaeographic problem with Voynich Manuscript handwriting is that it does not flow – for the most part, it’s not “joined-up writing”, as British children are taught to call cursive handwriting, but printed out, one letter (or short block of letters) at a time.

The reason I call this problematic is that this reduces our ability to do satisfactory palaeographical matching between Voynichese and other texts, simply because almost all other texts of the right kind of period are cursive. (So when we do comparisons between Voynichese and other texts, we are immediately at a disadvantage, because they are different kinds of things.)

The big exception to this sweeping generalization is, of course, humanist handwriting, which survives in numerous top-end Quattrocento examples much loved by palaeographers. While what we see in the Voynich Manuscript is most definitely not humanist handwriting, there is a strong case to be made that it is a “humanistic hand” – by which I mean something that borrows from the letter formation and ductus of both pure humanist hands and is yet close to more straightforward cursive mercantile hands of the time.

But a discussion of that will have to wait for a further post…

A little while back, the Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library announced that it would be allowing a specialist Spanish publishing house called Siloe to produce a short-run facsimile edition of the Voynich Manuscript.

The story was covered in El Pais back in December 2015, months before Siloe’s people had set their painstaking 18-month production process in motion. (Annoyingly, the second illustration that El Pais included was of a modern reinterpretation of a Voynich Manuscript drawing, *sigh*.) But even then, Siloe’s owners could clearly see the financial upside of the project:

“What really excited us about it was that it is one of the most requested books in the world for exhibitions, so it’s much simpler for an institution like the Beinecke Library, rather than having to loan the codex out all the time, to be able say that there is an exact replica that a Spanish publisher has printed that you can use. This was a good argument for persuading them to give us the project.”

In fact, few people outside of academia or museums even know properly what a facsimile edition is – it’s a copy of a book (usually a rare manuscript) that reproduces the original’s physical state as closely as practical. That is, it is not so much a printed set of scans of the original book’s pages as a brave attempt to reproduce the original object’s overall physicality – its page feel, page weight, waterstains, holes, stitches, binding stations, and all.

As you can imagine, this bravery takes a great deal of time and effort to achieve, not only in terms of the actual printing (which is extremely hard for normal pages, but the Voynich Manuscript also has a number of unusually complicated fold-out pages to deal with), but also in terms of things like getting the basic shape, texture and feel of the pages right, and even scanning the pages in a completely different way from normal. It’s a big, tough old job, however you look at it.

£6000 and up

In due course, the plan is for Siloe to place 898 facsimiles of the Voynich Manuscript on sale for around £6000 each: which, if they sold them all, would net them several million euros. All of which is surely enough to make a crypto guy or gal struggling away in their research garret wonder whether he or she is in the right bloody business. 🙂

But all the same, £6000 is a lot of money for a book, however much hard work has gone into making it. So apart from a small handful of (oxymoronic) cash-rich museums or libraries, who exactly would be ponying up their painfully-amassed cash for one of these improbably splendid facsimiles?

Well, it’s fairly hard to say. The Beinecke itself would want one to palm Voynich tourists off with: but it would be a remarkably inept set of negotiations that didn’t allocate at least one of the copies as complimentary. Siloe say that they have not far from “300” clients already eagerly splashing their cash for a copy: but in the ever-bullish world of press releases, it’s hard to be completely trusting of what any publisher asserts about pre-sales.

Even so, I’d personally be surprised if they had pre-sold a lot more than a hundred up until last week: which was when the all-wise Goddess of PR made them a gift they could not refuse…

The AFP Story

Two weeks ago, I was contacted by Madrid-based AFP journalist Marianne Barriaux, who was about to go to Burgos to interview people at the Siloe publishing house about the Voynich facsimile project, asking me if I might be available for a phone interview on the subject. Three days later, she emailed back to say not to worry, she’d since found Rene Zandbergen’s site and so now had no need to speak with me. Which was nice. 🙂

So really, it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that when the AFP story broke a couple of days ago, it was quickly picked up by numerous newspapers – Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Washington Post and so forth.

What did AFP do right in August 2016 that El Pais did wrong in Dec 2015? August is renowned in the UK press as the “Silly Season”, when the paucity of content (and a lack of journalists not on holiday) can lead B- stories to get trumpeted as if they were A+ stories… and sadly, this is what seems to have happened here. Timing is everything!

Still, the AFP news story is probably the best thing that could have happened to Siloe: chances are that they’ve had a load more pre-orders arrive over the last weekend. Break open another bottle of cava, chaps: happy days.

BBC World Service Newshour

For a 3-minute audio version of my take on the whole story, I was interviewed last night by Julian Marshall for the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme.

The point I tried to make (and that managed to somehow survive the edit) was simply that the Beinecke wasn’t making this Siloe facsimile available to encourage amateur codebreakers to take on the challenge of cracking Voynichese: really, it had done that extremely effectively back in 2004 when it had released its first set of high-ish resolution scans of the Voynich Manuscript’s pages. One might argue, from the continuous attention from the whole crackpot spectrum the Beinecke has had ever since, it was wildly successful in that regard. Success isn’t always what you want it to be, it would seem. 😐

Yet the Beinecke, I believe, would now dearly like to wrest control of the Voynich away from the nutters, and instead hand it over to academics: and so the real point of allowing top-end facsimiles to be made, I would argue, is that its curators want to legitimize the Voynich Manuscript in the eyes of academics as a genuinely interesting historical artefact, one well worthy of study and close analysis (even if we still can’t read a word of it).

However, up until now, the Voynich has been something far closer to Kryptonite for those of Academe who dare to step up to the line: its quicksand of uncertainty sucks in and annihilates reputations, not makes them. And so – sadly – it is hard not to conclude that it will probably be a very long time before the crackpot contingent leave the Beinecke and its forlorn manuscript behind… a very long time indeed.

But What About *The Other* Facsimile?

The first sort-of-but-not-really-a-facsimile edition (i.e. just a set of colour images) was published by Jean-Claude Gawsewitch in 2005 (I always bring my now rather tatty-from-overuse Gawsewitch to Voynich pub meets and talks), though now there are a whole load of similar books, and of wildly varying quality. But if you want to see the best quality images, download them for yourself from the Beinecke’s website.

But lost in all the painstaking mire of Siloe details is the fact that the Beinecke has also produced its own mid-market coffee-table-style photographic facsimile-stylee reproduction, and will be publishing “The Voynich Manuscript” on 6th December 2016, just in time for Santa Claus to get some stock in for your stockings (or alternatively, Yale Books will happily take your £35 pre-orders now, so feel free to step right up, Good Ladies and Gentlefolk of the Interweb).

The publisher’s blurb for this (other) Voynich Manuscript facsimile says:

The essays that accompany the manuscript explain what we have learned about this work-from alchemical, cryptographic, forensic, and historical perspectives – but they provide few definitive answers. Instead, as New York Times best-selling author Deborah Harkness says in her introduction, the book “invites the reader to join us at the heart of the mystery.”

So fear not! Even if your book budget won’t stretch (as mine certainly won’t) to a Siloe-style Voynich Manuscript facsimile, Yale Press’s coffee-table sort-of-facsimile will be far less likely to break your bank.

For me, it’s probably time to replace my ten-year-old Gawsewitch: the only downside is that I’m likely to have to grit my teeth in sharp disagreement with at least half of the essays at the front… but you knew that already. 😉