A few weeks ago, web comic artist Andy Warner emailed to ask if he could bounce some questions about the Voynich Manuscript off me.
Perhaps because many of the answers I gave him were short enough to fit into speech bubbles, Andy’s Voynich article ended up being largely about me and William Friedman and Marcello Montemurro (excellent company to keep).
Doubtless this will ruffle a whole load of Voynichian feathers, but there you go. Enjoy! 🙂
…i.e. was he a member of broadly the same group of Odd Fellows that used the Action Line Cryptogram to acrostically encrypt their initiation ceremonies?
In South Australia, Odd Fellows founded their first Lodge in Adelaide in late 1840 (according to this 1843 page from their journal), at just about the same time as a Lodge was formed in Sydney: and even today, Odd Fellows in SA are apparently still going strong.
So… looking again at the Tamam Shud text, it parallels the Action Line Cryptogram: that is, it gives cryptologists a very strong impression of having been constructed as an acrostic English ciphertext, because its letter frequency distribution closely follows the same frequency distribution pattern found in English texts.
All the same, pure acrostic cryptograms are relatively rare in the wild, because they are more mnemonic than cryptologic: they are there to remind the reader of something they already know rather than to communicate something unexpected to someone else. The more personal the message, the more unknowable its contents: and that’s they way it is, I guess.
So perhaps in this instance Marshall McLuhan is right, and the medium (an Odd Fellows-style acrostic cryptogram) is the message. If so, the most we are likely to infer from this is that it was written by someone who was (or had been) a member of an Odd Fellows Lodge, very probably in Adelaide itself. The Somerton Man may well have been down on his uppers (albeit very shiny uppers), but I expect those same shoes had likely been inside an Adelaide Lodge at some stage.
Now, Pete Bowes will likely take this as a cue for explaining why (in his belief) the contents of the suitcase were laid out in such a ceremonial way: and why the name link to recently-deceased Adelaide Freemason Tom Kean was never explored by the police. But… one thing at a time, Petey-boy, one thing at a time… 🙂
Even though I was, in a recent post here, able to decrypt a few lines of the Action Line Cryptogram (and commenters Clay and SirHubert both improved upon my guesses and decrypted parts of other sections)… I remained hungry to do better. I wondered: might I be able to find something really close to the plaintext?
It was then that I made a lucky guess. 🙂
After stumbling around for a while online looking for plausible-looking Masonic sources, I found a Pennsylvanian bookseller (“Bookworm & Silverfish”) selling a small Odd Fellows pamphlet from 1899 that seemed very close indeed to what I was looking for. I bought it immediately, crossing my fingers really tightly…
Though I can’t claim that this particular methodology will work every time, in this instance it paid off handsomely, because the contents turned out to be almost exactly the cryptogram’s plaintext right down to the tiniest detail (there are a few minor differences, but these all seem to be completely non-critical).
If you want to see the booklet, I’ve updated my permanent Action Line Cryptogram page with a complete set of scans (all bar the blank back cover page).
How nice to be able to say: crack complete! 🙂
I very rarely cover Enigma machines on Cipher Mysteries, mainly because I didn’t think there were many open cipher-related mysteries to do with it (not unless you include the question of why US film-makers apparently feel so compelled to mash up history every time they include Enigmas on camera.).
But it turns out that the two men who (apparently) had the patents for the Enigma design in the 1920s were not the real inventors of the device at all: in fact, the clever principles of modern rotor cryptography were invented by two Dutch naval officers during the First World War. However, when the Dutch Navy refused to proceed with bringing their design to practice, events took a slightly strange turn…
That story – and lots, lots more about Enigma, plus a few early crypto machines – is in the following splendid Google Tech Talk by well-known (and very affable) crypto collector Ralph Simpson, with captions (which you can turn off with the keyboard-like icon just to the left of the settings icon). It’s not often I recommend a 1hr 16min YouTube video, but this is excellent, well worth putting an hour and a bit of your time aside for. Enjoy! 🙂
(If the above embedded video fails to appear for you, here’s a direct link to it instead.)
PS: at 6:49, Ralph holds up a commercial cryptography book which he describes as being from “1988”, but it is of course actually from 1888… just so you know! 😉
Just a quick heads up for you, that Yale Assistant Chief Conservator Paula Zyats (who you may remember having a tete-a-tete with Rene Zandbergen in the 2009 Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary) will be giving a talk entitled The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript: Collaboration Yields New Insights.
It’ll be on Thursday July 10th 2014 at The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, from 5.30pm to 7.30pm, followed by the opening of an exhibition of miniature books made by the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers (it says here). If you go, let me know how it goes (and no heckling, ok?) 🙂
Last year, I was contacted by a young French guy called Emmanuel Mezino: he was writing a book about the famous “La Buse” cryptogram and treasure, and asked if my publishing house Compelling Press might publish it. From my experience with “The Curse of the Voynich”, I told him that if he structured it in two distinct halves – the front half summarizing facts and historical research (giving sources), and the second half comprising his inferences and speculation – then yes, I would be very interested.
My rationale for this was simple: even if readers happen to disagree with every single aspect of the reasoning (which, let’s face it, is often the default position with cipher mysteries), the book would still stand a good chance of being hugely interesting, entertaining, and useful in its own right – the story of La Buse is fascinating and intriguing, and I have found few properly historical accounts that do justice to any phase of the pirate’s life.
However well-intentioned that was, it was perhaps too tightly-fitting an editorial straitjacket for a young writer to want to wear; and so Emmanuel ended up editing and publishing his book himself, giving it a romantic-looking cover:-
For its title, Mezino used the phrase allegedly called out by Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) en route to the gallows, as he (so the story goes) threw a piece of paper containing his cryptogram to the crowd – “Mon Trésor à qui saura le prendre” (i.e. “My [fabulous] treasure [will go] to he who will take it”). Buying it will cost you rather less than the bejewelled gold cross of Goa: 18,00 euros (plus postage) for a physical copy, or (perhaps more likely if you happen to live outside France) 11,99 euros for the ebook.
Without much doubt, I think the best bit about the book is that it includes some close-up photographs of parts of a new cipher document – what could very possibly be a second copy of La Buse’s cryptogram. It’s not a perfect scoop (a low resolution colour version of this was included on page 8 of Liz Englert’s (2013) treasure-hunting omnishambles book “My Adventures of the Famous La Buse Treasure“), but the quality of the scans Mezino includes is on the whole extremely good.
Having said that, armchair treasure hunters will be perhaps less than fully impressed that Mezino somehow fails to include a close-up of the lines of cipher that only appear in this second version of the cryptogram, settling on giving merely his interpretation of what those extra letters say (which may or may not be correct).
Another less than satisfactory section was Mezino’s imaginative rendition of the “La Buse” legend, which for all its liveliness was plainly derived from a variety of unreliable sources (apparently including his interpretation of the drawings around the second cryptogram). Though this wasn’t as bad as Pauline B. Innis’ (1973) “Gold in the Blue Ridge” (a teeth-grindingly dreadful imaginative historical reconstruction of the Beale Papers story, which I wearily read recently), I’m not planning to return to either any time soon.
And it should be no surprise that, for all Mezino’s claims that he has (by collecting together an assortment of markings on rocks scattered across the northern half of Réunion; interpreting them as a star map written on land; reconciling that with sacred-geometry-style details overlaid on the cryptogram itself; and then back-linking everything to the astronomer Hevelius) logically deduced the only possible answer to the cryptogram… I’m more than just a bit skeptical. In fact, I don’t think there’s even a single detail in his reasoning that I’d ‘fess to agreeing with.
But as you’d expect, Mezino brooks no disagreement with his Grand Plan: and as writer and editor, that’s ultimately his right. You buy his book or you don’t, and you agree with him or you don’t. It’s all fine.
For me, though, his account is all a bit of a missed opportunity: pictures aside, he’s included all the stuff I’d have left out, and omitted all the stuff I’d have put in. There’s no critical appraisal of the second cryptogram as a source document (or even, dare I say it, as a possible modern forgery made to impress treasure hunters), nor any critical appraisal of La Buse’s own history and the quality of the sources.
Nor is there any kind of critical assessment of La Buse’s earlier life in the Caribbean, nor Le Butin’s trustworthiness as the (alleged) source for the first cryptogram, nor a critical assessment of Charles de la Roncière’s (1934) “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”, which first brought the cryptogram to the world’s attention.
Many Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless link all this with my recent grouchy post about The Voynich Manuscript for Dummies, where I moaned about how people tend to fixate on the mythology of cipher mysteries, and seem to have no time for looking at the basic historical dimensions of the claimed evidence – transparency, reliability, agenda, bla bla bla. Well, yes: and it would be hard to deny that Emmanuel’s book has ended up somewhat hollow in this respect, which is a big shame.
But even so, I do appreciate that writing an evidence-centred cipher mystery book that manages to keep a properly analytical cutting edge but without destroying the underlying mystique is a really tough writing brief – perhaps almost impossible for a writer’s first book. Ultimately, though, perhaps Mezino’s book will – for all its many shortcomings – prove to be a useful first step in the right direction. Hopefully: and yet from where I’m standing, we’ve got a very long way to go on that road just yet…
Browne’s Master Key is another piece of encrypted Freemasonry, once again uncovered by Klaus Schmeh… and once again, here’s my partial decryption of it.
This time, though, all it took was a quick web search that revealed a page describing broadly how Browne’s Master Key works, and the rest was just a load of head-scratching to prise the bones from their cryptographic coffin:-
In Browne’s Master Key, the cypher was as follows: Substitute the vowels a e i o u y with the letters of Browne’s name; precede most words by meaningless capital letters, and then substitute letters including c for e, and then substitute the words Brethren or Masons with exclamation marks and then run the words together indiscriminately and do not use punctuation.
So, it’s an ambiguous cipher, very much along the lines of the medieval “magical cipher” (where you replace each vowel with the letter immediately after it in the alphabet, thpvgh jt’s npt fxbctlz vfrz sfcvrf), so arguably a little closer to steganography than to cryptography. Let’s look at the first page:-
After the “SIT LUX, ET LUX FUIT” heading (“There is light and there was light”, apparently the magical motto of Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), the ciphertext begins like this:-
Splrbsrtwbs Sostmronwprnongthrlwdgr – Brwthr Rsrn owrwbidrn vhb Tosthrfo Rstcbr Rbrfwr Rthrmbstr RowcrRdstw wprnhoslwdgr – Brwth Rrjnnowrwidrnplrbsrtwsr Rthbtdntedwnr – WwisHo Pfnlsrnowrwbrdrnwhrnewnwbsmbdrb rhr Rrstw wd thrmbstrr – – Hosbnsonrssthr Rr – Brwthr Rsonthinbmrwfthrgrbnd – Brwthr Rspllrbst Wbchbrgrd – Brwthr Rsplrbsrtwat Trndth rchbrgr – Tlrko Ngbndthrc Rbftwoth ***
…which I (partially) decrypt as…
[Mason]s please to assist me in opening the lodge – brother senior (wbidrn) what is the first call before the master (ow) needs to open his lodge – brother junior (widrn) please to see that duty done – (ooishopfNl) senior warden when you was made at here stood the master – his business there – brothers in the name of the grand – brothers (pllrbst Wbchbrgad) – brothers please to attend the charge – (tlrkO ng bUdthEN Ebftwoth ***)
Perhaps a kind reader with a stronger stomach than me for this kind of faffy Freemasonic folderol will feel inspired to decrypt some more – frankly, a paragraph is pretty much my limit. 🙁
What would a “Voynich Manuscript for Dummies” look like? It’s easy to poke fun at the foolish mess Wikipedia editors have made of the subject, but it’s not so easy to do it properly.
For me, the first big step would be finding sufficient writing courage to discard all Voynich theories. Yes, all of them. Every single one. Come on, is there a single Voynich theory out there that genuinely adds anything significant to what we know about the manuscript itself?
(Even my Antonio Averlino hypothesis is a bit guilty in that respect, because it was so painstakingly built on top of best-in-class historical evidence that it ended up a bit too precise and monochromatic for most people’s tastes. And the stuff it did predict [e.g. the concealed machine drawings] nobody yet feels comfortable with. Oh well!)
I also really don’t care for the kind of who-might-have-done-it-and-why speculation that fills the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page: that’s another whole category of stuff that should get the +10 Blue Pencil of Death wielded at it.
In addition, the whole what-flower-is-that-drawing-similar-to cult that seems to have monopolized many Voynich researchers’ attentions in the last few years is a thing that for me warrants only the briefest of mentions. It is such a hazard-rich and information-poor approach to history: and the whole supposed point of the activity (to find cribs for code-breakers to work with) is destroyed by the complexity of Voynichese . If we can’t even tell vowels from consonants, numbers from letters, or even what ‘the’ or ‘and’ is across hundreds of pages of text, how much help could a crib give us? [“Not much” is the sad answer.]
But once you’ve stripped out all the rubbish, what is left? Well… the internal evidence (the codicology and palaeography, i.e. the construction, the writing and the pre-1600 history), the external evidence (mainly provenance from 1600 onwards), and the Art History (techniques employed, similarities with other documents and drawings, etc). And… errrm… that’s about it.
At this point, you’d have to point out that I’d obviously be writing for some fairly sophisticated Dummies. And I suspect that this is ultimately the problem, because almost everything written to date on the subject isn’t about the Voynich Manuscript itself, but about the Foolish Mythology of the Voynich Manuscript. And what a waste of everyone’s time that exercise has proved to be, huh?
I suppose that this is what I despair about: not only that the unfortunate legacy of Victorian historians (and their search for moral tales for the edification and instruction of the young) was a portfolio of polished pants myths that have taken over a century to dismantle, but also that the mythological-and-as-yet-largely-undeconstructed Voynich Manuscript remains very much in that disappointingly shiny vein. I mean, Roger Bacon and John Dee… is that honestly the best people can do after a hundred years? *sigh*
All this rant boils down to is this: that I’ve become heartily sick and tired of re-reading the same basic “Voynich Mystery Mythology for Dummies” account that bloggers, journalists, novelists, meeja luvvies, computer scientists and even (gasp!) historians seem so keen to regurgitate ad nauseam; and that I think the discourse around the Voynich Manuscript has become so worn-through that many people would struggle to recognize a genuinely informative and accurate account of the object itself.
Remove all the lurid speculation and the mad theories from the next Voynich article you read, and is anything much left?
A couple of months back, Byron Deveson left an intriguing comment on a (now somewhat over-run by spy talk and unkempt-looking) Somerton Man post here. He wrote:-
I think some of SM’s clothing came from Tom Kean, MD of Kean Oil after Kean’s death. This would explain the masonic (?) tie.
Recorder (Port Pirie) 20th January 1947 Page 1
Death Of Mr. Tom Kean
ADELAIDE, Sunday.
Mr. Tom Kean (managing director of Kean Oil Proprietary Limited) died at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, on Friday night. He was a staunch worker for Legacy Club, a prominent Freemason, and a former State president of Commercial Travellers’ Association.
There was a second obit in the ‘Tizer (OK, the Adelaide Advertiser, if you insist):-
Mr. Tom Kean. who died at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, was managing director of Kean Oils Pty., Ltd. and a foundation member of the Legacy Club. Born at Dean, Victoria. Mr. Kean joined the Vacuum Oil Co. when 21 and served in Victoria, the Riverina. Tasmania and New Zealand before being transferred to South Australia. He was SA president of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, when he joined the first AIF and served for three years. After the war he had two more terms as president and for one term served as the united president. Later Mr. Kean formed the SA firm of Kean Oils Pty., Ltd., and was managing director when he died. As a foundation member of the Legacy Club he was an enthusiastic supporter in their appeals. A son, Tom, and a daughter, Elon survive.
And even more from the Adelaide Mail:-
Reject Who Served In First A.I.F.
A foundation member of the Legacy Club, and for 43 years a member of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, Mr. Tom Kean, died last night at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, after a long illness.
Mr. Kean, who was 72, served overseas with the First A.I.F. after having been rejected four times. Although never passed for service, he was sworn in by mistake, and served in France for three years as a motor driver in an ammunition column. Mr. Kean was South Australian president of the C.T.A. when he went overseas. After his return he had two other terms as president. He was united president for one term, and was the first returned soldier to hold that office. Born at Dean, Victoria, Mr. Kean was 21 when he joined the staff of the Vacuum. Oil Co. He worked in Victoria, the Riverina, Tasmania, and New Zealand before being transferred to South Australia. After a year in the motor business, Mr. Kean formed Kean Oil Pty., Ltd., of which he was managing director at his death. He was a noted worker for the Legacy Club and charity carnivals, and was a prominent Free mason. He was buried at the Centennial Park Cemetery this afternoon. Mrs. Kean, a son, Tom, and a daughter, Elon, survive him.
Oh, and it’s in the Melbourne Argus too, so it has to be true, eh?
Byron continued in a further comment:-
If SM’s clothing marked “Kean” and “Keane” came from the deceased Tom Kean of Kean Oil, then SM must have visited, or lived in Adelaide prior to 30th November 1948. I expect Kean’s clothing would have been disposed of soon after his death in January 1947 so SM was probably in Adelaide soon after this.
Commenter Misca then quickly noted:-
BD – I’m not sure if it’s relevant but Tom’s daughter Elon killed herself in December of 1947 by jumping off of the seventh floor of the Savings Bank Building. (She is buried with her father in Centennial Park Cemetery.) Cleland reviewed her death and did not open inquiry into her death. Sutherland investigated.
There’s more description here, and a picture of the building here. Incidentally, Elon Vivienne Kean had only just got engaged to Ernest Griffin, as announced in the ‘Tizer of 6th December 1947:
KEAN — RICHARDS. — The engagement is announced of Elon, only daughter of Mrs. R. Kean and the late Tom Kean, of Kensington Gardens, to Ernest only son of Mrs. C. Griffin, of Colonel Light Gardens.
But all that aside, who was Tom Kean? It turns out he was not only the president of the Commercial Travellers’ and Warehousemen’s Association, he was also the King of Commercial Travellers (i.e. the Charity king in the CTA carnival float, is my best guess). He married in 1923.
There’s a fairly gushing description of him in the Adelaide Register of 13th September 1927 (with a picture):
Mr Tom Kean, the new President of the South Australian Commercial Travellers and Warehousemen’s Association, was born in Dean (V.), a farming district between Ballarat and Daylesford. Mr. Kean, who is 52 years of age, on leaving school went on the land, but subsequently gave it up to enter the services of the Vacuum Oil Company. He represented the organization in New Zealand, Tasmania, Riverina, and South Australia. He came to this State in 1903, and evinced so much interest in the Commercial Travellers’ Association, which he joined the following year, that he was eventually elected President in 1915. Then he enlisted and went to the front, serving with the 2nd Australian Siege Battery. He was three years at the war, and on returning to Australia again resumed work with the Vacuum Oil Company. After a time he joined Adelaide Motors Limited, but in 1924 entered into business on his own account. Last year Harrisons Ramsay, Proprietary, Limited, purchased his business, and Mr. Kean took charge of their petrol, kerosine, oil, and belting department, a position he still holds. Mr. Kean is exceedingly popular in commercial circles, and especially among the men on the road, and his election is a tribute to his ability and geniality.
So… I suppose the question here is simply: what do I make of all this?
From a Somerton Man research perspective, the dead man’s clothes-as-worn and the clothes in the suitcase come across to me as fairly… random. Expensive things juxtaposed with hand-me-down stuff, along with shoes and slippers that don’t seem to fit the same feet. Pete Bowes is fond of looking at the omissions in the belongings (the famously missing socks!), but for me the overall pattern of what is present is one of give-me-downs, of charity. Did the Somerton Man have a secretly prosperous life, one that his clothes cunningly concealed? Really, I’d find it hard to believe such a thing. Regardless of anything else, his clothes seem to me to tell a tale of a marginal life, a life lived on the fringes or edges.
If, as per Byron Deveson, the story behind this all was that (the real) Tom Kean specified in his Will that his clothes be given to an Adelaide charity (he surely spent long enough competing for Charity Kingship in Adelaide to know every single local charity), and that this was where the Somerton Man got the dead man’s clothes, then I wouldn’t be surprised one little jot.
So… how can we find Tom Kean’s Will? Over to you all… perhaps?
This coming Friday, well-known Voynich Manuscript researcher Rene Zandbergen will (briefly) be in London, hence this impromptu Voynich pub meet announcement. 🙂
If you’d like to come along, Rene, Philip Neal and I will be – from 5.30pm to 6pm onwards – at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, an historic London pub with its own riverside gallows especially for pirates. So if you do happen to have a wooden leg, an eye-patch and a bag bulging with pieces of eight, be aware of the potential for mishap. 🙂
If it’s a nice-ish day (i.e. not raining torrentially), the chances are that we’ll be in the beer garden / patio area – go through the pub, turn left after the main bar, and continue forward to an outside area. Good for dogs, too (particularly if you’re John Kozak, *hint*).
But if it’s a wet day (and let’s face it, that’s the English summer to a ‘T’), be aware that we could end up anywhere in the pub’s two floors. If so, mooch around looking for a table with a slightly tattered copy of “Le Code Voynich” on, and you’re almost certainly in the right place. Hope to see some of you there!