The secret history of Voynich chicken scratches…

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A recurring motif running through my own Voynich research is trying to grasp what happened to the manuscript over time. If you examine it carefully, you’ll find plenty of good reasons to think that its original (‘alpha’) state was significantly different to its final (‘omega’) state. My strong hunch is that if we were able to reconstruct how the manuscript looked in its original state, we would take a very different view on how it ‘worked’ or ‘functioned’ as an object – and so I keep on gently digging away at the marginalia and codicological clues, to see what subtle stories they have to tell us, what secret histories are betrayed by their presence.

Of course, to many (if not most) Voynich researchers this is just too arcane a way of looking at what (to their eyes) is simply a cryptological or linguistic conundrum. Each to their own, eh? But all the same, here’s a new angle to think about…

In a previous post, I discussed the so-called “chicken scratch” marginalia on f66v and f86v3, with a codicological aside that…

[…]if you reorder Q8 (Quire #8) to place the astronomical (non-herbal) pages at the back, and also follow Glen Claston’s suggestion by inserting the nine-rosette quire between (the reordered) Q8 and Q9, what you unexpectedly find is that the f66v and f86v3 chicken scratches move extremely close together. If this is correct, it would imply that the doodles were added very early on in the life of the VMs, probably earlier even than the fifteenth-century hand quire numbering (and hence probably early-to-mid 15th century).

However, I think this chain of reasoning can be extended just a little further. Why do these chicken scratch marks only occur on these two pages and nowhere else? I suspect that the most likely reason is that the two pages were not only (as I noted) “extremely close” to each other but also – at the moment that the chicken scratches were accidentally added to the manuscript opened out on someone’s (Simon Sint’s?) writing desk – were probably on two pages facing each other.

Yet the paradox here is about how this ever could have been, given that both marginalia are on verso pages.

Now, for normal two-panel bifolios, the assignment of “r” (recto) and “v” (verso) is unproblematic – the recto side is always the page nearest the front of the book, while the verso side is the page nearest the back. However, if you instead look at wider-than-two-panel bifolios and consider rebinding the panels along different edges, pages can change their orientation (facingness) and hence can change between verso and recto.

So, because f66v is part of a normal two-panel bifolio, for it to have originally been a recto page requires that it was on a wider bifolio that was trimmed down to two panels and then rebound… and there’s no obvious reason to think anything  like that happened. Hence, I think we can reasonably infer that if the two chicken scratch pages did originally sit side-by-side, f66v was on the left hand side of the pair.

Looking at f86v3, however, we see that it is on the back of the Voynich’s infamous “nine-rosette” drawing, which comprises a large 3 x 2 set of panels that fold out. Moreover, Voynich researcher Glen Claston has proposed that at some point in its history, this quire (Quire 14) sustained significant damage along its original binding crease (green, below) and so was rebound along a different fold (blue, below).

rosette-folding

And guess what? If you were to bind Quire 14 along the green line, make the big horizontal fold first (as it is now), and keep the blue fold internal (i.e. exactly the way it is now), the page which would sit right at the front of Q14 is (you’re way ahead of me) f86v3. And because f86v3 also has the Q14 quire mark (near the bottom right), this would give yet more support to the idea that the VMs was reordered and rebound before the quire numbers were added. Also, you can see the raggedy edge of the damaged binding on the left-hand side of f86v3:-

Voynich Manuscript f86v3 - 600x808

Now: I should add that a fair while back Glen Claston alluded to having three separate pieces of evidence that supported his claim that Q14 was originally folded and rebound along the green line, and it may well be that this whole chicken scratch argument was one of them. Well, I for one don’t mind playing catch-up with such a sharp brain as his. But hey, I got there in the end! 🙂

One nicety then becomes whether Q14 was bound into this position, or whether the whole codex was no more than an unbound set of gatherings in its early existence: but if the crease suffered significant damage (as seems apparent) when Q14 was removed from the codex, it must have been bound into position before being removed, surely?

All the same, there is one further problem to consider: if both sets of chicken scratches were added when the manuscript was open at a single page, then something must have happened to Q8 before then – because the f66v chicken scratches are on the back page of Q8 in its final order, not its original order.

This points to a number of hypothetical codicological timelines to evaluate, such as:-

Scenario #1

  • The manuscript is assembled. The two bifolios of Q8 are (relative to their current orientation) inside out and back to front, with f58v on the back page. Q14 is inserted immediately afterwards (but with the primary fold along the blue line). Q9 immediately follows (also with the primary fold different what we see now).
  • Q8 is reversed, leaving f66v on the back of the quire (next to f86v3)
  • The manuscript is bound with Q8 reversed
  • The chicken scratches are added
  • Q14 is removed (damaging the binding) and rebound with the other outside quires. Q9 is also rebound to be less “flappy”.
  • Quire numbers are added

    •  

Scenario #2

  • The manuscript is assembled. The two bifolios of Q8 are (relative to their current orientation) inside out and back to front, with f58v on the back page. Q14 is inserted immediately afterwards (but with the primary fold along the blue line). Q9 immediately follows (also with the primary fold different what we see now).
  • Q14 is removed and accidentally reinserted into the middle of Q8, placing f66v next to f86v3.
  • The manuscript is bound in this order
  • The chicken scratches are added
  • Q8 is reversed, leaving f66v on the back of the quire
  • Q14 is removed (damaging the binding) and rebound with the other outside quires. Q9 is also rebound to be less “flappy”.
  • Quire numbers are added

Personally, I’m rather more convinced by the first scenario (mainly because it seems a slightly simpler sequence) – but you may well have your own opinion. Still, at least it’s an issue that could be codicologically tested (by checking sewing stations, contact transfers etc). The secret history of chicken scratches! 🙂

Review of Brett King’s “The Radix”…

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I hate to admit it, but Brett King’s new book “The Radix” has very nearly pushed me over the edge as far as Voynich-themed novels go. OK, if you like your cipher mystery fiction spiced up with implausibly steel-chinned Secret Government Agency action heroes with PhD-level history credentials and who the US President just happens to owe a favour (basically Cotton Malone or Daniel Knox on overdrive), then maybe you’d like it. M-a-y-b-e. But if not, I strongly suspect you won’t, sorry.

It’s completely true that Dan Brown’s books leave me wanting to shoot the fumblingly-drawn main protagonists by the end of Chapter One, all the secondary characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publisher by the end of Chapter Three (given that I see Dan as closer to Gavin Menzies than to Machiavelli, I’d rather cut his hands off than shoot him): and compared to that particular cultural nadir, I’m delighted to say that The Radix is at least reasonably well written. But all the same, I can’t think of a single book where I so badly wanted the bad guys – in this instance, Renaissance conspiracy fans, the evil Borgias’ evil descendants (did I mention they were evil?) – to kick John Brynstone (King’s hero)’s unbelievably buff butt down the road to Hell so very quickly (specifically, by page 17).

But then I thought, hold on a mo’… could it be that “The Radix” is actually some kind of postmodern-ish reversal-of-expectations gag – by which I mean, did King consciously make the protagonist so unlikeable, so implausible, and so unsexy because he wanted the bad guys to be, ummm, the good guys? Historically, it’s true that (for example) Lucrezia Borgia has been demonized for so long that even now it’s desperately hard for historians (even Sarah Bradford in her 2004 biography of Lucrezia, which I’m still halfway through) to untie every Borgia-damning knot that partisan writers have tied over the centuries: so could it be that King’s novel is merely Part I of some bizarre rehabilitatory Borgia anti-history?

Achhhhh… try as I might, I can’t really believe that King has a uber-revisionist angle in mind, given that his “Radix” is so close in spirit to a comic-book escapade (and not one of dear Alan Moore’s sardonic club-sandwich plots, with a beard-hair delight in each multi-layered bite) crossed with an airport novella, with John Brynstone so utterly 2d that his action sequences practically jerk from static box to static box. All of which makes it perfect for a Jason Statham vehicle for 2011, then? Alas, yes – which alone is probably a damn good reason why the film-of-the-book shouldn’t be made. Despite King’s agent’s best attempts, let’s all just hope divine justice prevails, shall we?

Though “The Radix” has doubtless been pitched at the cipher mystery beach brigade, my worthless personal opinion is that Cipher Mysteries readers looking for 2010 summer holiday fiction should instead plump for Enrique Joven’s completely antithetical “The Book of God and Physics: a Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, which manages to tell its own Voynich-themed story with nary a jutting jaw or a laws-of-physics-defying stunt. Of course, please feel free to read both and tell me if I’m just plain wrong – comment below, I don’t mind. 🙂

Voynich pub meet – Summer 2010…

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It’s coming up to that time of year when I invite UK Voynicheros [*] of all creeds (hoax, language, cipher, glossolalia, etc) to converge upon an historic London pub one Sunday afternoon for a not-at-all-formal chat about all things cipher-mystery-related over a couple of drinks, and perhaps to borrow or return some books from / to my own overstocked VMs / cipher library.

So, out goes the shout to (in no particular order) Philip Neal, Barbara Barrett, Marke Fincher, Tony Mann, Bunny, John Kozak, Peter Howard Mason, Keith Body, Gerry Kennedy, Jeff Haley, and indeed to anyone else who might like to come along – please email me to let me know what dates you prefer. Also, if you’re an overseas Voynichero who (it just so happens) plans to be in London around the end of August / early September 2010, email me your dates too and I’ll try to fit it around them.

As always, looking forward to it! 🙂

[*] Just so you know…

  • “Voynich researchers” – deluded souls whose methodological rigour is of little use against this cryptological Everest
  • “Voynichians” – people immersed in the VMs world for so long they probably have their own private pronunciation for EVA
  • “Voynicheros” – those who don’t take the Voynich quest hugely seriously, perhaps even preferring travelling to arriving. 🙂

Chaocipher updates…

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Like hourly buses on a wet winter morning, here’s a pair of Chaocipher pages that arrived at my stop one after the other, both discussing how to break John Byrne’s Exhibit 1, and both strongly recommended reading for those interested in the Chaocipher.

First to arrive was Carl Scheffler’s page on Exhibit 1 (but you might perhaps want to read his introductory page on the Chaocipher first, complete with nice coloured disk diagrams). By looking for long sequences of repeated symbols, he managed to reduce the staggeringly-large search space down to a mere ~457,000 permutations to check: in fact, he further managed to reduce the space to only 444 permutations, which would probably be achievable even without the aid of computers. Furthermore, once he had discovered the initial ring state, Carl went on to reverse engineer the keyphrase used to set the disks up (‘THINKTHINK’, with the sequence of letters applied to the disks with the pattern LLRLLRLRRLR). He has a further page planned on Exhibit 4 – I’ll let you know when he posts this.

Subsequently, Moshe Rubin’s near-definitive update on Exhibit 1 turned up. As usual, Moshe’s 12-page PDF manages to answer more or less every question you find yourself asking along the way (though admittedly he doesn’t yet know to whom Byrne’s enciphered “CORDIALTHANKSTOLO” was referring). From this, you can also see that Byrne used ‘Q’ and ‘W’ for ‘,’ and ‘.’ (plus ‘Z’ for ‘end-of-line’), hence the plaintext begins “ALLGOODQQUICKBROWNFOXESJUMPOVERLAZYDOGTOSAVETHEIRPARTYW“.

Incidentally, though the idea of encoding punctuation as rarely-used letters is a well-known cipher trick, I find the historical question of when this mechanism was first used particularly intriguing. This is because I’ve long wondered whether the “am” letterpair frequently found at Voynich line-ends might also encipher a rare letter (such as ‘X’). True, there are some Milanese ciphers with letters for scribal abbreviations and contractions (the 1450 cipher for Tristano Sforza enciphers ‘-9’, while the 1455 cipher for Ludovico Petronio Senen has a cipher for ‘subscriptio’), but these seem to belong to a quite different family. I can’t see this in Kahn or al-Qalqashandi, so… what was the earliest cipher to replace punctuation with rarely used letters?

The Voynich silly season is upon us (which is a shame)…

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Rather than spam your (no doubt already dangerously close-to-overfilled) inboxes with a stream of inane posts about edgy Japanese musicians producing conceptual albums inspired by the VMs’ illustrations (e.g. …

Limited edition Merzbow (Masami Akita) pressed on lime green vinyl, a work inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript, in a bootleg style cover.

…), Cipher Mysteries will be gently snoozing through most of this year’s silly season, and I cordially suggest you do the same!

You know, it really is about time the Next Big Thing happened in the VMs world (and I don’t mean the radiocarbon and ink papers finally being published in a proper journal). Why hasn’t some tenacious Yale art history student picked up on the codicological mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia and done a proper spectroscopic analysis of them? Why hasn’t anyone really gone looking for a mid-15th century abbot (for who else would have their own scriptorium, producing documents for him to sign?) not too far from Savoy and called something not too far from “Simon Sint…”? The closest I’ve found so far is Abbé Simon du Bosc (who died in 1418, but was an abbot in Northern France), but probably isn’t much of a match… oh well! =:-o

Edith Rickert, revisited…

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The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman’s “First Study Group” of WWII cryptologists: but I’ve recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days of what modern crypto people now call (perhaps with a touch of disdain) “non-machine ciphers”, and so we shallow computer-centric moderns might have plenty to learn from what they had to say (if they left any notes for us to find, which we don’t currently know).

Did the Voynich manuscript, then, have a Zeroth Study Group circa 1920? John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert were part of the same American First World War codebreaking team, and certainly had far more than a passing familiarity with the VMs (Rickert briefly corresponded with WMV, for example). However, their attention subsequently turned to producing critical edition of Chaucer’s work, a challenge which was to occupy them both for many years.

Not that much has been written about Edith Rickert: when I blogged about her before, I found only a few online sources (such as this one) to work from. However, a very nice 2009 paper by William Snell just turned up on the Net – A Woman Medievalist Much Maligned: A Note in Defense of Edith Rickert (1871–1938) – which seems to meet this lack well.

Probably the most telling comment on Manly’s relationship with Rickert was this:-

…Manly’s remarks written in April 1934 to David H. Stevens, the English teacher at Chicago who worked on the cipher team with them during the First World War, two years before Rickert’s final heart attack: “Miss Rickert is working twenty-five hours a day, as usual, and is on the verge of a breakdown, but she won’t break. She never does.” (Qtd. in Ramsey 1994: 77)

But then she did, alas. 🙁

Review of Enrique Joven’s “The Book of God and Physics”…

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(I’ll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don’t have star ratings & I’m not one to hide what I’m thinking, so this connection shouldn’t affect the following in any significant way.)

A thing I hear again and again from Cipher Mysteries readers is that they just aren’t into buying novels: for the most part, they’re non-fiction addicts hooked on the subtle adrenaline rush of research and who mostly feel bemused (and possibly even slightly alienated) by my fiction reviews. What, they say, can we possibly learn from a novel?

My angle on Voynich novels has never really been that of a lit crit: which is possibly just as well, it ought to be said, because most are little more than medium-boiled airport novels. Rather, I’m interested in how the idea of the Voynich Manuscript (and/or other historical cipher mysteries) is perceived and passed on by non-Voynich-researchers. Do novelists and/or their research assistants just read the Wikipedia page and make up the rest (as per the basic ‘lazy writer’ stereotype), or do some of them actually engage with the VMs, with the messy Voynich research process, and perhaps even – shock horror – with the historical evidence?

To be honest, few VMs novelists give the impression of their even having reached halfway through the Wikipedia page (however understandable that is), while a surprising number give a strong impression of having relied on even less helpful VMs information sources (such as “The Friar and the Cipher”, ugh). Even in this glorious era of Internet research, the ancient ‘GIGO’ rule (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) works the same as it ever did. *sigh*

Yet Enrique Joven falls squarely into the engagement camp with his novel “The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, in that he has plainly done a lot of reading on the subject and is even well aware of the Voynich mailing list. His fictional treatment of the Voynich mystery is also pretty much the first one I’ve read that treats Jesuits in a fairly sensible, non-tokenistic way (doubly impressive given that his protagonist is a teacher at a Jesuit school), and he constructs his narrative around the VMs’ thrice-APODed page f67r1 and the astronomical sparks showered over the Imperial Court by the tense relationship between Brahe and Kepler (a subject I happen to know a fair amount about).

Yet curiously, the limitations of Enrique’s book arise not from the cipher or from the history, but instead from his treatment of those (fictional) Voynich mailing list members his protagonist gets caught up up with, many of whom apparently suffer from multiple-(virtual)-personality disorder. Now, I’m no great fan of the Voynich mailing list as it has become (has any genuinely useful research appeared there in several years? I don’t think so), and it is true that some listmembers post under deliberately false or whimsical names, as if they were secretly emo teenagers. But to make this aspect so central to the story has all the feeling of a false modern mythology, a kind of ‘Hollywood Internet’ where Everyone (apart from the straight-as-a-die protagonist) Is Online In Order To Hide Some Important Aspect Of Themselves That Will Be Revealed Later In The Plot.

That aside, Joven writes pretty well – and it was a pleasure to read a Voynich book where the Long-Hidden Secret Power It Contains is in fact not About To Destroy The World As We Know It, where the main character is not a charmlessly bionic version of Anthony Grafton, and where there are neither hordes of competing three-letter-agencies nor quasi-mystical Church-backed Conspiracies all fighting each other for ownership of the VMs’ boringly heretical secret.

Long-time (if not actually long-suffering) Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly point to my high opinion of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum and Lev Grossman’s Codex (both of which have much the same kind of ambitions and restrained execution as Enrique’s book) as correlative evidence that I’m down on Voynich airport novels: but actually, given that Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” is still firmly my #1 (why don’t Voynich novelists ever read this first?) on the Big Fat List, it really is all a matter of personal taste. OK, I still think Enrique’s publishers should have dug deep inside themselves to find the sense to keep the rather nice original Spanish title “The Castle of the Stars” (which actually chimes nicely with the story on many different levels, while also being pleasantly reminiscent of the linguistic hack “The astronomer married a star”), but then again it is what it is, and perhaps a clunky title alone isn’t enough to make or break a book these days.

One slightly odd coincidence is that just about the time that the paperback version came out recently, an entirely new Voynich theory came out (courtesy of P. Han) linking Tycho Brahe and historical supernovae to the VMs by way of China (but more on that another day). All of which just goes to show that there really is, errrm, nothing new under the sun, and that the boundary between historical hypothesis and fictional supposition can be surprisingly thin!

Isaac Casaubon’s “Ephemerides”…

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I wonder if anyone has ever looked at Casaubon’s letters and his monumental diary (called the “Ephemerides”, and written in Latin) with a Voynich-informed eye?

Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was regarded as one of the most learned men in Europe: and what is perhaps interesting to us (and that I didn’t know until a few days ago) is that though he started his career at the Academy of Geneva, he worked for a while at the University of Montpellier (1596-1598), before moving on to Lyon (1598-1599) at which point he was summoned to Paris by King Henry IV. In fact, though Dee researchers know him for his pursuit of John Dee’s papers, Casaubon only lived in London from 1610-1614 (and he couldn’t actually speak English), while Dee himself had died only in 1608 or 1609 (depending on who you ask).

Casaubon’s Latin correspondence (“Casauboni epistolæ, insertis ad easdem responsionibus“) was printed in Rotterdam (1709), while his Ephemerides were printed somewhat later (1850). Though I don’t think there is a critical edition of the Ephemerides available (nor indeed a translation, sadly), there are online editions of his letters here (I),  here (II), here (III), here (IV), and here (V), courtesy of the University of Mannheim.

OK, I’ll freely admit that the chances of anything turning up from this are small (Casaubon doesn’t really seem the type to gossip about a mysterious unreadable herbal that was doing the rounds). But because (given the VMs’ apparent links with Southern France / Savoy I’ve blogged endlessly about) we’d perhaps be more interested in 1596-1599 when he was in Montpellier and Lyon, you never know! 🙂

Voynich chicken scratches…

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As a Voynich Manuscript marginalia cognoscente, I’m always alert for new angles on the various incidental marks apparently added by its later owners. So, when Tim Tattrie left a comment about the “chicken scratch” marginalia on my recent Voynich-frontiers-circa-2010 post, I thought it was probably time to revisit them here.

Tim’s query was whether anyone had pursued the initials scribbled on f66v and f86v3: he noted that these were “clearly the same downward swept doodle of two or three letters (h?r), and because it is repeated in two folios, leads one to speculate its the initials of either the author, or an owner.” This almost exactly echoes what Jon Grove said on the Voynich mailing list (11 Sep 2002), that “It seems to consist of three connected downstrokes followed by a longer upstroke with a loop and final flourish, almost like ‘wR’ but not quite. It’s certainly not a random scribble. If it is a signature or monogram then it might help to establish dates and/or locations for the MS. ” To which Dana Scott replied at the time: “Notice that the single line ‘signature’ in f66v is essentially the same as the top line ‘signature’ in f86v (there are some differences to the right of each line).”

OK, so let’s look at them in all their hi-res glory. Firstly, the chicken scratches on f66v:-

And now here are the chicken scratches on f86v3. Palaeographically, I think this is much more interesting, because you can see what looks like a scribal line ending stub (in red), and lots of places where the quill has opened up under pressure in different directions (in blue). Some years ago, I suggested that these scratches might be an ink blot transfer of Georg Baresch’s signature, because if you rotate and flip them you can see letter-sequences that vaguely resemble “g///g”:-

However, there is a codicological nicety to consider here, which is that if you reorder Q8 (Quire #8) to place the astronomical (non-herbal) pages at the back, and also follow Glen Claston’s suggestion by inserting the nine-rosette quire between (the reordered) Q8 and Q9, what you unexpectedly find is that the f66v and f86v3 chicken scratches move extremely close together. If this is correct, it would imply that the doodles were added very early on in the life of the VMs, probably earlier even than the fifteenth-century hand quire numbering (and hence probably early-to-mid 15th century). And this would rule out Baresch by a couple of centuries or so. 🙂

But I have a possible bombshell to drop here. If I once again rotate and reverse the f86v3 chicken scratch, this moves the ornate scribal line-ending to the start, implying that it was the start of a line. Following the lines through from there on a Retinex-enhanced version of the page, I now suspect we know enough to separate out the letters one at a time:

If I’ve got this correct, then the letter sequence here is:-

  • (blue) “S“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (red) “i“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (orange) “m“
  • (green) downstroke
  • (purple) “o” / “n” / “t” [though it’s not entirely clear which]

So, something like “Simon”, then. What is particularly curious is that I have elsewhere suggested that the top-line marginalia on f116v reads “por le bon simon sint” in what I suspect was the handwriting of either the original author or someone very close to him/her. If that is right, then we can piece together a little bit of the VMs’ early 15th century provenance: that what we are looking at here is the ink blot signature of someone named (something close to) “Simon Sint”, who was very possibly the person to whom that original author gave the manuscript. Though it’s hard to be sure, this person may well be the same one who added the earliest set of quire numbers (which I called “Quire Hand 1” in The Curse)… but we’ll leave that issue for another day, that’s probably quite enough wobbly inferences for one post! 🙂

OK, as explanations go it’s not 100% convincing as yet, but all the same it’s a pretty joined-up historical hypothesis that could (and indeed should) be codicologically tested, which is more than can be said about most speculative VMs theories. I’m pretty sold on the idea that this is telling us we should be looking for someone (possibly a monk) in Southern France / Savoy called something not too far from “Simon Sint” circa 1450, and that this is his signature (i.e. he cared so little about the VMs that he used it as blotting paper, shame on him). Jeez, how specific do I need to be? 🙂

A Beautiful Infinity…

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There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand…

* * * * * *

The Brazilian girl’s plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely notice a curious mélange of hard-to-pin-down antique odours: spirit of hartshorn, hepatic air, green vitriol, all distinct yet merging awkwardly between one another, like jelly and ice cream in a child’s pudding bowl. They both feel the nausea slowly roll over them, but neither thinks to raise the alarm, as the aqua tofani weaves its dizzying, nauseous, near-fatal spell on them both. Of course, we don’t intend killing them: tonight’s sacred mission is one of life, not death.

Our filter masks firmly in place, we silently ease out of the concealed block behind the disabled toilets and past the sabotaged air-conditioning unit. The girl’s preparation has been good, for there is no klaxon, no lights, no alarm: following her confident lead, I guide the wheely bag carefully past the two tumbledown security-suit mannequins and onwards through the exhibition. Looking ahead, always ahead, we glide swiftly past countless Ouroubos-filled stands and up the wheelchair ramp to the locked glass plinth in the arena’s central raised area – yes, to the book. Or rather, to ‘The Book’.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the diamond-edged ring we made together over the shimmering orange dawn-lit fire on the mountainside: looking in her eyes, I take it and slide it quickly onto my middle finger. The girl – is she young, or old? Suddenly I can’t tell any more – nods, flicking her renegade, emptily-hungry eyes at me, and deftly touches my shoulder, her fingertip feeling for all the world like a butterfly landing and quickly gently launching itself away, far away into the curious half-light. On cue, I turn my attention to the security glass, and carefully use the hard-edged symbol of our union to etch its front face with four good-size concentric circles.

The hall is starting to fill, now: our small army of alchemists is emerging one by one from their hiding places behind occult bookstalls, beneath pagan stall covers and carefully-positioned wizard cloaks, each with a red or yellow hood and a surgical mask tightly fastened down, just as she had specified. As the last of the twelve completes the circle around us, I step sharply forward and punch the ring’s diamond tip right at the centre of the design. The glass buckles a little, yet doesn’t quite give way – No, I think, something is wrong, and for an instant a cloud of burnt cinnamon doubt swirls around me, enveloping me in the riptide of fears I’ve worked so hard to suppress these past three years.

Yet perhaps sensing my edginess, the alchemists start to clap and chant, and before long I feel their resolve coursing through my veins. The bull in my soul charges forward and I punch, punch, punch the toughened glass until it starts to yield to my attacks, and its etched central circle finally gives way. Impatiently, I widen the glassy gap with my bare hands just enough to remove the book and to raise it over my head in triumph, tersely spattering its centuries-rigid vellum cover with my blood as I do so. The alchemists swoop in too to hold it aloft and to turn it to The Page, that one, marvellous page we have been waiting to see all our lives.

I look over to the girl: she nods once again and I bring out the ceremonial firebowl from the bag. Adam – dear, ever-reliable Frater Adamus – deftly removes the page with his pocket knife, folds it to shape, fills it with regulus of antimony, and ties up its gathered top using aqua vitae-impregnated handmade blue twine from his workshop. We are all trembling now, for everyone (even Baresch) was right – the Philosophers’ Stone is indeed hidden inside The Book: yet this is neither a metaphorical truth nor a pharmacological truth, but instead a literal truth. For once you have – as we have, over so many decades – worked to decode its carefully layered and allusive visual symbolism, the Voynich’s pages form a map spiralling in on itself… all pointing to one place, the single slightly-thicker-than-average vellum herbal bifolio inside which the tiny fragments of Stone were sealed all those centuries ago. We, then, are its 21st century liberators, its alchemical revolutionary freedom front: all we have to do now is light the blue touchpaper, and see the long-promised fireworks. And this ceremony marks the end of alchemy’s epic struggle, the chequered flag at the finishing line of two millennia of The Work. My queen nods once more for me to step forward with my lit taper, so that we can all make the ultimate step – beyond History, beyond pain, beyond Time itself. And I do, but…

* * * * * *

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand… In this moment, I don’t know if I’m living forever or dying forever, if the girl is really human or some selfish dark spirit that is guiding me I know not where. Am I releasing her or creating her? Is she part of me or am I part of her? A flash from the the burning vellum page suddenly lights up our faces and I lay down beside her on the floor, the alchemical king and queen finally together, just as the Ancients foretold. A fire alarm finally goes off, its sprinklers lurch into action with a indoor cloudburst, but it is all too late, far too late, the Stone is here, The Stone Is Here! For all the burning, twisting sensations, we know for certain that the Stone is merely giving us a taste of ultimate Death to deliver its promise of ultimate Life. Yet though the colours in its flames are more intense than ever now, so too is the agony: I turn to the girl and see the same things I’m feeling reflected in her sprinkler-soaked face, and as we hold each other tightly I know it is both the end and the beginning, and our eternal future together lies in and beyond the Stone…

* * * * * *

Why on earth, mused the firemen, policemen, and paramedics, would anyone have gone to the trouble of placing all those strangely-posed lifelike statues in the middle of the hall? And why was just a single page missing from the precious Voynich Manuscript, on a rare two-day loan to this alchemy conference? File it under ‘M’ for ‘mystery’…