Pirate Treasure Maps – Does X Mark The Spot?

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Is there any such thing as a pirate treasure map? Somewhat surprisingly, if you ask just about any academic or maritime historian with an interest in the subject, the chances are they’ll tell you no. In short, the mainstream position is that they’re all fakes, tall tales concocted by scammers to extract money from the greedy and gullible.

Well… I don’t deny that there’s an awful lot of truth in that, insofar as it does often seem that the pirate treasure hunting world (industry?) is populated almost entirely by only two classes of people – the scammers and the scammed.

But over the last year or so, I’ve been researching two very different claimed strands of pirate treasure history – the (alleged) William Kidd maps and the (alleged) Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) maps. (Yes, it turns out that there are at least two versions of the Levasseur / Le Butin cryptogram… but this is all terrifically murky.) And what I’ve found is that just saying “it ain’t so” doesn’t really do these histories justice – the stories behind all of them are simply fascinating.

Anyway, seeing as International Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up shortly, what I’ve decided to do is give an evening talk on pirate treasure maps to give all this new material a bit of a public airing.

So if you like history and/or pirates or you’re secretly an armchair treasure hunter, I’ve got some great stories for you about these mysterious pirate treasure maps you won’t have heard of or read about. I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope a good few of you can come along and be entertained.

It’s being held on Sunday 15th September 2013 at the Cornerhouse Community Arts Centre in Surbiton (not far from the A3) at 7.30pm (though the doors and the bar open at 7pm). I’ve set up the ticketing via my friend Glenn Shoosmith’s startup BookingBug, and you can book through the nifty WordPress widget in the top right of the page.

I’ll post a bit more about this as the date approaches, but that should be enough to be going on with – hope to see you there! 🙂

Voynich “Glossodahlia” book…

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Let’s imagine you had two fairly unhealthy (but specific) obsessions: (1) retro jars, bottles and containers, and (2) the Voynich Manuscript. When added together, might these two wrongs somehow make a right?

If that just happens to be a question you have long pondered, then I’m pleased to be able to tell you that your wait is over! The free electronic book Glossodahlia by Tarek Joseph Chemaly, and pulished by 7UPstairs Publishing surely places this whole contentious issue beyond discussion. Tarek writes:-

The Voynich manuscript has been decoded. Its flowers have given up their secret. They speak in tongues – glossolalia. And they tell stories of brokenhearted cosmic lovers and of a retired intergalactic bureaucrat as she tends to her garden once baking is done.

With my Voynich researcher hat on, I’d point out this whole thing feels like a collage scraped from the Beinecke’s old “CopyFlo” images. Also, not all the pages are plants (a couple of pharma jars have crept in as well), and tiny scraps of Voynichese pepper the edges of the collaged images, like hardy barnacles clinging to curiously shaped ships.

Anyway, make of it what you will. 🙂

Dorabella Cipher Ultimate SmackDown – Eric Sams vs Beatrice Gwynn?

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In the red corner we have #1 codebreaking musicologist Eric Sams: and in the blue corner, historical mystery specialist Beatrice Gwynn! Who will be the winner in tonight’s Dorabella Cipher Ultimate Smaaaaackdooooown?

A frisson of crypto excitement ripples through the crowd as Eric Sams rises to his feet. He’s humming to himself, rhythmically pounding his gloves, and with a gleam in his eyes that’s well-earned: his 1970 Musical Times article has been in the bibliography of nearly every Dorabella Cipher article that followed. Sams certainly looks in cracking form: his article Cryptanalysis and Historical Research from Archivaria 21 (1985-1986) casts light on how he decrypted the shorthand used by William Clarke (secretary to Cromwell’s army), the shorthand used by Sir John Thompson (Prime Minister of Canada between 1892 and 1894), etc. He’s got power, reach and stamina, normally an unstoppable combination in this game, as you can also see from his many articles on cryptography at the Centro Studi Eric Sams.

But his opponent tonight, Beatrice V. Gwynn, has many tricks up her fighting sleeves, and perhaps her decades of experience looking at mysteries rather than histories will guide her to victory here. She co-authored a 1977 book on the Phaistos Disc; proposed a theory on the Voynich Manuscript (it’s apparently a hygiene manual written in left-right-mirrored Middle High German, but let’s not hold that against her); and even wrote a book on the evidence used to convict Alger Hiss (“Whittaker Chambers: The Discrepancy in the Evidence of the Typewriter”). Sure, she may not have Sams’ raw cryptanalytical clout, but perhaps she can match him for reach and stamina.

The referee’s in the centre, the seconds have left the ring and… Rrrrrround One begins. The two fighters eye each other up warily over their gloves, waiting to see who will make the first move. And it is Sams who strikes first, whipsmart and sharp as ever:

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, α, β
BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES
E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Gwynn reels on the ropes, punch-drunk from the sheer interpretativeness of Sams’ claimed decryption. But she quickly collects herself, before launching her own cryptological counter-attack (in her article “The Elgar Cipher”, The Elgar Society Newsletter 1975):-

PINCH FROM TOBACCO
DORA A RIDDLE NOON
SILENT ALONE TIME

Sams is rocked on his heels by the power of the blow (though he must surely be wondering what happened to the rest of the letters – let’s just say it’s a long story). But he soon powers back with what he thinks is a knockout blow – an unpublished 1972 article containing his raw decrypt (i.e. without his wobbly interpretation on top):-

STARTS. LARKS! IT’S EXOTIC BIT A CLOK OBSCURC MY NEW LETTEE
AB BELOW. I OIN THE WARK MAKES E.E. SIGH WHEN E ARE TOO LOMMONT.

Even though Gwynn deftly dodges the wildness of this codebreaking haymaker, Sams has a follow-on jab – pages from Elgar’s archives where he uses the same shapes to encipher “MARCO ELGAR” (the name of his dog), “A VERY OLD CYPHER”, “DO YOU GO TO LONDON?” and “THE GOLD IS BURIED UNDER THE KITCHEN FLOOR” (only kidding!).

marco-elgar-cipher-enhanced

Surprised by the primary evidence, Gwynn drops to her knees on the canvas and gets up again quickly, only to receive a standing count from the referee. As the bell rings for the end of the contest, Sams punches the air in victory and the cheer of “E-ric / E-ric / E-ric” fills the arena air. Gwynn looks desolate: have all her years of effort and striving really been trumped by Sams’ nonsensical-sounding decrypt?

At last the judges pass the result to the referee, who announces it as… A DRAW – neither side managed to land a clean punch. But wait… in all the chaos, a haunting melody starts to fills the room, quieting the crowd. It’s Javier Atance playing his claimed solution (direction 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8 = do/re/mi/fa/so/la/te/do, 1/2/3 humps = natural / flat / sharp) on a distant organ. But the sound system is quickly unplugged and the pandemonium resumes… in fact, will there ever be an end to it?

* * * * * * * * * * * *

To me, the Dorabella Cipher is a bit like the “Voynich Lite” – even though they both closely resemble simple monoalphabetic ciphers, they both employ one or more tricks that make utter fools of those who seek to break them in a classical kind of way.

Sams was keenly aware of this, and even points out that taking a traditional crypto approach will get you only as far as something like this:-

– B S C – A H C M – N E W L E – E E A B B E L O – O I N T
H E W A H C M – C S E E S A I W H E N E A R T W L O M M O N T
S T A R T S L R – I T S E A R W T I C B I T A C L O C

(or, as Decrypto 8.5 suggests, “TD INVISHE CREE ENT TEROOM HAVECNVISIDEEDNMCVEHEN YACROSSO HAD ANY A DRY MADENY CAMIT MAN IRO I”).

That’s the cryptanalytical mystery: while at the same time, the historical mystery is that Edward Elgar and Dora Penny never spoke of ciphers before or after this. What conceivable rationale would he have had for sending her a near-unbreakable cipher (disguised as a perfectly breakable cipher) in only his third ever letter to her? How can we find a solution to both of these mysteries at the same time?

Sandra And Woo do the Voynich… The Book of Woo!

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Online webcomic Sandra And Woo has just taken a detour into CryptoLand, with a Voynich-inspired page called The Book of Woo to celebrate its 500th edition. What’s more, author Oliver Knöerzer (AKA “Kernel River Zoo”) has offered a $250 reward to “the person who is able to provide a decipherment that’s sufficiently close to the plain text“, plus “another $100 to two charities determined by the readers who contributed the most useful information for breaking the code.” Really, Oliver, I’d have helped regardless. 😉

The Book of Woo’s most obvious predecessor would seem to be the Codex Seraphinianus, which is also “primarily a work of art, not a puzzle for the general public“, though I wouldn’t describe the Book of Woo as being quite as hardcore as that (but then again, what is?). The Vick Industries cipher seems to be a more design-oriented mindset entirely, though the art-house rationale behind that has yet to emerge into the light.

How is anyone supposed to decrypt The Book Of Woo? Helpfully, Knöerzer does throw a handful of hints in our path, though mainly about what it isn’t rather than about what it is. He says:-

* The encryption isn’t based on an algorithm only suitable for computers which executes a loop 100 times or something like that.
* The encryption isn’t based on some sort of device or mechanism that is hard to get.
* No “classical” steganographic method was used since that would just be impossibly hard to crack.
* The plain text is some sort of literature, as one can guess from Woo’s comment and the illustrations. A lot of time went into the plain text as well, it’s not just a copy of the first page of Rascal or something like that.

But he also warns that “[if] you think you can simply carry out a frequency analysis on the letters and be able to reconstruct the English or German plain text this way, well, that’s just a waste of time.” Indeed, even a brief look at the text reveals blocks of characters arranged in a very artificial CVCV (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel) manner. There are also quite a few patterns that are repeated multiple times: here’s a colourized section of the first page, so you can see a bit of what I’m talking about…

book-of-woo-page-1-colourized-cropped

What’s going on here? Well… I’ve had a few brief email exchanges with Oliver recently, so have possibly at least a flicker of an idea. And given that he has already openly flagged both the Voynich Manuscript and my book on it (The Curse of the Voynich) as having been useful (he’s even reused the Voynich’s “T” gallows character in his cipher alphabet), it probably wouldn’t hurt to recap a few Voynich-related observations here. 🙂

The first thing to say about ‘Voynichese’ (the structure that shapes the Voynich Manuscript’s text) is that there seem to be two main schools of thought: (a) that it’s a cipher system that for some reason our statistical toolkits aren’t able to help us much with, and (b) that it’s a real language but we’re too in love with our analyses to see the bleedin’ obvious.

(For the record, I’m in the (a) camp, which means that when I look at a map of all the different types of Voynichese evidence, I want to understand what kind of trick was used to confound all the different statistical tests, rather than throw my hands up in the air and say “Stats, shmats!”.)

The second thing to note is that almost all of the Voynich Manuscript is written using a very compact alphabet (roughly 22 characters), whereas The Book of Woo uses something like fifty unique shapes (I haven’t transcribed it yet, but that’s how it looks). What connects them is that they are both very predictable at the character level… up to a point. That is, in some circumstances you can reliably predict what the next character along is going to be, but in other circumstances predictions can be of little use.

(For what it’s worth, I believe that it is this specific combination of predictability and unpredictability that convinces people that Voynichese is a language, whereas real languages only tend to work like that in a few very specific ways, e.g. “q” almost always being followed by “u”.)

Trying to account for this property ultimately led me to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript in part uses “verbose cipher”, i.e. employing pairs or groups of letters to encipher single letters in a misleading way. For example, the Voynichese letter-pair “or” gets repeated immediately after itself a number of times, with the best known examples being on page f15v:-

or-or-oro-r

Do any real-life languages do this? I don’t think so, but that remains a matter of opinion.

The Voynich Manuscript has a large number of extra curious properties that I believe point to other tricksy mechanisms (e.g. in-page transposition of some sort, if you please), but my suspicion right now (based only on having a nose around it) is that Oliver may have found these unnecessarily abstruse to build a cipher around.

No: I think what’s going on in The Book Of Woo will turn out to be largely based around verbose cipher – specifically a combination of paired letters. Having said that, the big problem with a simple verbose cipher is that it is, well, as verbose as it sounds: and so to make it not bloat as badly as a Microsoft application, it needs some compression tricks to be used at the same time.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I suspect that verbose cipher gets combined with the kind of scribal abbreviation in use during the 15th century. Similarly, because the overall word-length isn’t too extreme for The Book of Woo, I suspect (a) that certain letters used at the start or end of words will encipher prefixes or suffixes, somewhat like a kind of shorthand; and (b) that it’s more likely to be English than German. 😉 It may well also be that certain letter pairs themselves encipher common letter pairs or even letter triples (such as “the”): these are the kinds of tricks I’d expect to see here being used to disguise the structure.

And yet… words seem to be words (i.e. it’s an aristocrat cryptogram rather than a patristocrat cryptogram), so it’s very much as if he wants to help us, not hinder us. So even though it looks a bit tricky at first glance, maybe it will all fall out nicely in the end. We shall see, hopefully before issue #1000! 😉

Jabron Cryptogram update…

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A fresh new day, and a fresh set of web searches brings up useful information on the Jabron Cryptogram that so intrigued Alfred Weysel for his (1972) book “L’Île des Veilleurs”. Firstly, as to where it is, this 2011 post by Philippe Mathé helps us improve on “somewhere in the gorges by Jabron”:-

Au lieu-dit “le pont de l’Evescat”, entre Jabron et Le Bourguet, une inscription est gravée sur la falaise bordant l’ancienne piste templière.

Luckily, Google Maps happens to know about Le Pont de l’Evescat, so we can see that it sits between Jabron and the bridge that carries the D252 from Le Bourguet over Le Jabron river. Any Cipher Mysteries reader holidaying in Provence now knows where to point their hire car’s GPS towards. 🙂

Another thing that needed improvement was the quality of the scans: thankfully, the thunting treasure-hunting site has a couple of nice clear photos, though I’m not wholly convinced that their attempt to trace the letters worked out too well. There are lots of lines there, sure: but which are carved and which are natural? 🙁

So… just to prove it’s not easy, here’s my own attempt at tracing them:-

jabron-lines

Personally, unless someone sensible can get there and take some properly high-res images of these, as well as others with (e.g.) raking lights shone across them, I don’t think we’ll be able to reliably tell what are merely old cracks and what are really old letters. There’s also a shape below these letters in the thunting tracing which doesn’t appear in the letters, making this all very odd and unsatisfactory (but that’s how it nearly always goes with these things, right?)

Incidentally, the same two websites (which look to have largely come from the same source) also mention some odd cryptograms allegedly found in 1942 in the wall of the chapel at Valcros nearby, and claim that there’s a large body of people investigating these mysteries. I’d be a bit surprised if that’s true, but will go and have a look for these now, and post what I find in a few weary days’ time. 🙂

Voynich Manuscript: an Andean Sky God Cathar theory?

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Voynich theories are like radish shoots after Spring rain (as Rudy Cambier likes to say) – they keep on popping up. And here’s a new radish shoot theory, courtesy of Morten St George, whose Andean Sky God website digs deep into a whole range of historical mysteries – Nazca lines, Shakespeare, Cabala, Rosicrucianism, and now the Voynich Manuscript.

According to St George, the 9-rosette castle is likely to be a fortress similar to Carcassone, but one “destroyed by the Crusaders, i.e. left without ruins“… “Montségur, the final stronghold of the Cathari Church“. So it’s clearly a Cathar document.

Of course, the 15th century radiocarbon dating presents a problem for any Cathar Voynich theory: indeed, St George acknowledges that “it would seem impossible for the Cathars to have written the Voynich because at that time the Cathars no longer existed, at least not anywhere in Europe.”

So… if the Cathars wrote the Voynich Manuscript in the 15th century but they weren’t in Europe, where were they? St George’s response is unexpected yet logical:-

“The plant drawings in the Voynich provide the answer. The Voynich has drawings of more than one hundred exotic plant species, highly detailed drawings from flower to root, all of which represent plants that no one in Europe had ever seen before. Realistically, there is only one place on Earth that can produce such an extraordinary diversity of plant life, and that’s the tropical rainforests of South America, which I shall call Amazonia. The Cathars went to Amazonia.”

In fact, the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 13 (the ‘balneological section’) has a whole load of drawings of the “elaborate network of conduits, funnels, and containers up in the trees to collect rain water, which they then used for drinking and washing. In the Voynich, drinkable rain water, in contrast to rainforest water, is always depicted in blue color“. Ah, so that is why they’re coloured differently! 😉

However, there is no happy ending for the Cathars in exile: even hundreds of years later, St George is convinced that the Inquisition would hunt down and kill the Cathars in South America. “In such circumstances, the Church of Satan would continue to hunt down the Cathars until the end of time.”

In a worthy piece of soul-searching, St George finishes up his presentation with the following Q&A couplet:-

“Do you think this sounds like the plot of an end-of-times film?

Things are what they are.”

Well…

In the spirit of Rich SantaColoma’s desire to keep all possibilities in play, I freely admit say that there is a small chance that Morten St George has stumbled onto something huge here – that the Voynich Manuscript was indeed written by Cathars in exile in South America, before their being finally (if belatedly) obliterated from the pages of history by the Inquisition. (It also doesn’t take much to connect St George’s ideas with Leo Levitov’s (now venerable) Cathar heresy Voynich theory.)

Of course, the real study of history is about far more than enumerating possibilities, because in the hands of the imaginative (let alone of those really don’t get out enough), there is no list of possibilities that cannot be doubled or tripled in length. Indeed, such possibilities tells us far more about the showboating creative facility of the person or people constructing them than about the real historical artefact itself: the role of the object ultimately reduces to that of a stage on which to play out stories culled from the pareidoiliac static of a troubled mind.

And in my opinion, the biggest sign of such trouble is normally when would-be decrypters discover – almost always to their personal surprise and amazement – that their deciphering methodology developed for one particular object also just happens to work on other, apparently unrelated objects. For example, John Stojko not only could read the Voynich (in Old Ukrainian), but was also (as I recall) able to read Estrucan gravestones. It’s tempting to speculate whether he could in fact have used the same approach to “read” any string of letters. “John Stojko Read My Barcode” isn’t yet a T-Shirt slogan, but perhaps it should be.

If all the world’s a stage, then the evil Church conspiracy, the Rosicrucians, Shakespeare, and the Voynich Manuscript are surely the festival side-stages on which the troubled perform their one-man (or indeed one-woman) shows. Curiously for things of such age, history only has a walk-on part in such productions. The play’s the thing, indeed!

La Buse French documentary…

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There’s a nice-looking 2010 documentary on the pirate/corsair Olivier Levasseur (“La Buse”) being screened on French TV that I unfortunately might just have missed. It’s an episode of the series “Patrimoine et énigmes du monde marin” on TV5, filmed by Hervé Jouon, with a 52-minute running time.

There also seems to be a 13-minute version of it on YouTube (also a 2010 film by Hervé Jouon for Grand Angle Productions). But this seems to be a heavily cut-down edit of the whole show, perhaps for a different series or documentary strand entirely.

historian-action-shot

Can any of my French readers tell me if I can pay to see the full-length TV5 episode streamed online anywhere?

Even so, the YouTube version covers the cryptogram side of the story fairly well, and even manages to include action shots in an Réunion archive of a French historian reading Levasseur’s execution instructions. (Which worked for me, but perhaps I’m a bit too easily pleased by that kind of stuff).

All the same… if you like an occasional bit of French language but all the above sounds just a tad too heavyweight for you, then I possibly have the perfect answer: a 5-minute Flash-style animated retelling of La Buse’s story, courtesy of Cap Canal!

cap-canal-la-buse

Unfortunately, while the production team managed to hire good artists and decent voice talent, I found the history side of the episode rather lacking in accuracy. All the same, it’s a bit of real-life-pirate-themed fun for kids, and maybe that’s the whole point. [But you can’t really blame me too much for wanting people to get the basic history right, right? 🙂 ]

A Visual Map of Voynich Evidence, Theories & People…

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Unless you just happen to have been an expert in Voynichese for a decade or more, making sense of all the evidence and the theories (and even the people) surrounding it can be quite daunting. So I thought I’d help by drawing a map!

theory-evidence-map

From my perspective, the general problem is that once you really latch onto a piece of evidence or a particular angle, you can easily become trapped inside it: and even though the solution you then reach may be entirely logical, it is almost always inconsistent with the other kinds of evidence and types of angle, and hence is almost always nonsensical.

I’d say this is precisely what happened with Gordon Rugg’s hoax theory, Jorge Stolfi’s East Asian language theory, and William Friedman’s artificial language theory – they all relied too heavily on one particular kind of evidence, and so arrived at untenable conclusions. But you will doubtless have your own thoughts on each of these. 🙂

It should also be clear that, like a kind of hummingbird theoretician, I’ve dotted around this diagram over the years, adding different ideas to the mix that try to explain different aspects of the evidence. I still believe that each of these suggestions will turn out to be largely correct, but the big trick will be finding a way – Intellectual History style – of making them all right at the same time!

Flirtation codes!

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Here’s something I stumbled upon recently: a Victorian code world of gloves, handkerchiefs, hats, eyes, parasols and even stamps. Basically, the 1890s saw a craze for flirtation codes, using everyday objects close at hand to signal your romantic intentions and responses. I particularly like the specificity of “I will be at the gate at 8 p.m.”, but I guess that’s just me. 🙂

There were numerous variations of these: usefully, an 1891 edition of the Taranaki Herald (New Plymouth New Zealand) lists several such codes, which I have transcribed below:-

GLOVE FLIRTATION.

Holding with tips downward - I wish to be acquainted.
Twirling around the fingers - Be careful! We are watched.
Right hand with the naked thumb exposed - Kiss me.
Left hand with the naked thumb exposed - Do you love me?
Using them as fan - Introduce me to your company.
Smoothing them out gently - I wish I were with you.
Holding them loose in the left hand - Be contented.
Biting the tips - I wish to be rid of you very soon.
Folding up carefully - Get rid of your company.
Striking them over the hand - I am displeased.
Drawing half way on left hand - Indifference.
Clenching them (rolled up) in right hand - No.
Striking over the shoulder - Follow me.
Ends of tips to lips - Do you love me?
Tossing them up gently - I am engaged.
Turning them inside out - I hate you.
Dropping both of them - I love you.
Tapping the chin - I love another.
Putting them away - I'm vexed.
Dropping one of them - Yes.

HANDKERCHIEF FLIRTATION.

Drawing across the lips - Desirous of an acquaintance.
Drawing across the eyes - I am sorry.
Taking it by the centre - You are willing.
Dropping - We will be friends!
Twirling in both hands - Indifference.
Drawing across the cheek - I love you.
Drawing through the hands - I hate you.
Letting it rest on the right cheek - Yes.
Letting it rest on the left cheek - No.
Twisting in the left hand - I wish to be rid of you.
Twisting in the right hand - I love another.
Folding it - I wish to speak with you.
Over the shoulder - Follow me.
Opposite corners in both hands - Wait for me.
Drawing across the forehead - We are watched.
Placing on the right ear - You have changed.
Letting it remain on the eyes - You are cruel.
Winding around the forefinger - I am engaged.
Winding around the third finger - I am married.
Putting in the pocket - No more at present.

PARASOL FLIRTATION.

Carrying it elevated in left hand - Desiring acquaintance.
Carrying elevated in right hand - You're too willing.
Carrying closed in left hand, by side - Follow me.
Carrying in front of you - No more at present.
Carrying over shoulder - You are too cruel.
Closing it up - I wish to speak with you.
Dropping it - I love you.
Folding it up - Get rid of your company.
Letting it rest on the left cheek - No.
Letting it rest on the right cheek - Yes.
Striking on hand - I am much displeased.
Swinging it to and fro by the handle on the right side - I am married.
Swinging same on left side - I am engaged.
Tapping the chin - I am in love with another.
Twirling it around - We are watched.
Using as a fan - Introduce me to your company.
With handle to lips - Kiss me.
Putting away - No more at present.

FAN FLIRTATION.

Carrying right hand in front of face - Follow me.
Carrying in left hand - Desirous of an acquaintance.
Placing it on the right ear - You have changed.
Twirling it in left hand - I wish to get rid of you.
Drawing across forehead - We are watched.
Carrying in right hand - You are too willing.
Drawing through the hand - I hate you.
Twirling in right hand - I love another.
Drawing across the cheek - I love you.
Closing it - I wish to speak to you.
Drawing across the eye - I am sorry.
Letting it rest on right cheek - Yes.
Letting it rest on left cheek - No.
Open and shut - You are cruel.
Dropping - We will be friends.
Fanning slow - I am married.
Fanning fast - I am engaged.
With handle to lips - Kiss me.
Shut - You have changed.
Open wide - Wait for me.

HAT FLIRTATION.

Carrying it in the right hand - Desirous of an acquaintance.
Carrying it in the left hand - I hate you!
Running the finger around the crown - I love you.
Running the hand around the rim - I hate you.
To wear on the right side of the head - No.
To wear on the left side of the head - Yes.
To wear on the back of the head — I wish to speak with you.
To incline towards the nose — We are watched.
Putting it behind you — I am married.
Putting it in front of you — I am single.
Carrying in the band by the crown — Follow me.
Putting it under the right arm — Wait for me.
Putting it under the left arm — I will be at the gate at 8 p.m.
Putting the hat on the head straight — All for the present.

EYE FLIRTATION.

Winking the right eye - I love you.
Winking the left eye - I hate you.
Winking both eyes - Yes.
Winking both eyes at once - We are watched.
Winking right eye twice - I am engaged.
Winking left eye twice - I am married.
Dropping the eyelids - May I kiss you?
Raising the eyebrows - Kiss me.
Closing the left eye slowly - Try and love me.
Closing the right eye slowly - You are beautiful.
Placing right forefinger to right eye - Do you love me?
Placing right forefinger to left eye - You are handsome.
Placing right little finger to the right eye - Aren't you ashamed?

All of which is a lot like all the foolishly faked-up floriography that Victorians loved so much: but why say it with flowers when you can say it with a fan?

Anyway, I have to say that these promenading picayunes pale into paltriness compared with something else I found in the same web-trawling session: the (frankly astonishing) secret world of stamp codes.

stamp-code

You’ve already guessed when these flourished (same as above), what they said (same as above) and how they worked (same as above): all I can add is that here’s a link to a truly epic webpage devoted to a whole variety of stamp codes, highly recommended. Fabulous stuff… enjoy! 🙂

A Tale of Two Voynich Articles…

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Two long(-ish) form Voynich manuscript articles emerged recently, one in the Jewish magazine The Tablet “Tablet Magazine”, the other in the New Yorker’s online blog section. These tell us quite a lot – though not really about the Voynich Manuscript itself, but rather about how the Voynich Manuscript is now perceived.

The first article, by Batya Ungar-Sargon, is called Cracking the Voynich Code: The quixotic quest to read meaning in the patterns of a bizarre manuscript that has bedeviled scholars for years.

Her basic take is that “the Voynich Manuscript has become a beacon for a secular community of quasi-Talmudic scholars whose interpretive ingenuity and stamina have few parallels“, so her piece is built around interviews with several of them (including the “patient, tireless” Gordon Rugg, and the “deeply humble” Rich SantaColoma). [She also talked with me on the phone for an hour, but perhaps I didn’t fit her template 😉 ].

Taken as a whole, fitting her article into a primarily Jewish-interest magazine was always going to be a bit of stretch: William Friedman was Jewish, sure, but that’s a small piece of material to make a full-length dress out of. I can’t help but wonder whether Batya’s ambition is to write long-form pieces for the New Yorker, and that this was a try-out for her portfolio. She clearly writes well, but I don’t think her journalistic instincts are yet fully honed – her article, in my opinion, is still more ‘relating’ than the literary reportage to which she aspires.

The second article – The Unread: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript – by Reed Johnson is, coincidentally enough, from the New Yorker blog section. As such, it’s a kind of New Yorker long-form take on a blog post, i.e. longer than a normal blog post, but quite a lot shorter than a typical New Yorker article (I used to subscribe to it, though how I ever found enough time to read each issue I don’t know 🙂 ).

This isn’t Ungar-Sargon-style journalism, but is instead Reed’s telling the story of how he came to waste three years (only three years? Pshaw!) on the Voynich Manuscript – basically, while trying to write his own “Dan Brown–style thriller”, having nearly completed his “M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Virginia” in 2010. He tries to introduce a little light drama into his account (Did he crack the Voynich? Did he finish his book?) but with enough of a wink to astute readers that they know the resolutions long before the end.

Unlike Batya, Reed is not an observer looking in on the Voynich research world from the outside, but is instead an active participant in what he calls the “often fractious” Voynich mailing list. His feeling about this is that “If crowds have any wisdom, soon we should see the fruits of a more recent deciphering project: Internet crowdsourcing“. And yet, he also wonders whether it would be a disappointment for the Voynich Manuscript to be decrypted – that, “no matter how thrilling such a text might be, it [would] remain a disappointment for being closed off, completed — for being, in the end, no longer a mystery“.

My own conclusion is that the Voynich mailing list has become more part of the problem than part of the solution: and that the extraordinarily productive collaboration its early days saw was more down to the small number and high calibre of the participants (Jim Reeds, Jim Gillogly, Jacques Guy, etc), most of whom left the list long ago. Really, the collective wisdom of the crowd very much depends on the crowd you happen to be dealing with: though Reed stops short of showing his hand in this regard, so we end up knowing what happened but not his thoughts or feelings about it. Perhaps the whole card game hasn’t yet concluded for him.

What’s nice about these two articles is that, for all their differences, they are both good examples of clear-headed contemporary writing about the Voynich Manuscript, far from the lurid wodges of mystery-soaked ahistorical fragments I frequently used to see. Indeed, both give an account of the Voynich’s history that is broadly correct, something which simply never happened even a decade ago: perhaps the radiocarbon dating has helped validate the Voynich as a “proper” subject.

And yet… it’s as if something (or someone) is missing from the whole party. The Voynich Manuscript has had many of the best codebreakers of the age (the Friedmans, Manly, Tiltman, etc) examine it closely: yet as these articles show, a lot of contemporary discourse still revolves around the – frankly rather foolish and shallow, I think – postmodernist cipher/hoax tension as exemplified by Gordon Rugg and Rich SantaColoma.

To my mind, it’s as if something really important is missing from the whole conceptual landscape of how the Voynich is perceived, that everyone is somehow in the wrong kind of doubt. We’ve collectively travelled a really long way forward, for sure, but the ideas and insights gained on that journey have all been zapped by a kind of “motivated learning” paralysis, where debate is held in a stasis between powerful epistemological agendas.

It often feels as though, myself excepted (and who listens to what I say, ha!), the Voynich-as-a-genuine-historical-artefact point of view has no champion. I genuinely tire of the way people continually generate possible alternative histories for it, when I’m just about the only person trying to reconstruct the mainstream history they’re so busy fighting against.

I want to ask those “theorists”: why do you find the idea that the Voynich Manuscript was made basically when its radiocarbon dating says so dreadfully upsetting? Why do you invest so much time and effort into identifying outlandish alternatives that might possibly be made to work (with a few well-chosen tweaks to the mainstream historical timeline)? Do you not see that, by kicking back so hard against a straightforward historical account that hasn’t even been written yet, you are yourself holding everything back? Can you not see that by doing this you have become part of the problem, not part of the solution?

That is the Voynich Manuscript debate that’s missing, the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. But nobody is writing that particular article, and I’m not sure anyone ever will… and perhaps we’re all worse off for that silence.