I just posted up a ten-word description of the VMs on the cool-website-du-jour TenWordWiki:

Unreadable Quattrocento cipher manuscript. Maddening trollbait for PhDs, but cool!

OK, it’s a fairly reasonable first attempt, though perhaps not quite achingly ironic enough for today’s ADD generation. Far hipper bloggers than me would probably have smirkingly jirked:-

Secretly reads: “All your Renaissance base are belong to us”

If you can vaguely remember shorthand advertisements of the 1980s, there’s also an extremely strong argument for:-

If u cn rd ths, u r a fkn genius!

…except that it could be read purely self-referentially. Still, if you’re looking for a high irony factor gag, you’d probably prefer my #2 definition, which I rejected only on the grounds that it wasn’t actually true:-

Proof that bored scribes can obfuscate “Squeamish ossifrage” countless ways.

Of course, with the web being the way it is, there will probably be 200 edits of the page before tomorrow night. But at least you know now what I was thinking! 🙂

Just a quick Voynich thought for you (I’ve been typing all day and my fingers are tired, so apologies for keeping it very brief) .

On f86v3, have you noticed how the two spotty, side-profile beak, wings-outstretched birds are almost identical? Apart from the fact the one on the right here (which is in the bottom right corner of the actual page) has some kind of heavily-inked line in front of it, and that there’s a faint line behind and to the left of its right wing. (Click on the picture for a full-resolution version.)

f86v3-birds

Furthermore, the vertical lines just to the right of the second bird are in a much fainter ink, which is a bit reminiscent of some of the balneo section drawings I’ve discussed here before. This leaves me with a lingering suspicion that this page may (once again) have been executed in two passes – a first layout pass, and a second obfuscatory pass. Don’t know what it all means, but it’s interesting all the same. 🙂

Here’s something neat and slightly unexpected from long-time Voynich Manuscript researcher (and Voynich theory über-skeptic) Rene Zandbergen I think you’ll probably appreciate.

Arguably the least-discussed subject in the VMs is the set of tiny plant drawings in the two ‘pharma’ (pharmacological) sections, which somehow usually manage to fly beneath most researchers’ radars. Yet it has been known for decades that a good number of these plant drawings recapitulate or copy plant drawings in the main herbal sections (though as I recall these are more or less all Herbal A plants, please correct me if I’m wrong) – mapping these correspondences properly is an interesting challenge in its own right, but one to which nobody (as far as I can see) has really stepped up in the last decade.

And so it is that the general indifference to the pharma section forms the backdrop to Rene’s latest observation, which is this: that the pair of roots depicted on the two (now separated) halves of the Herbal A f18v-f23r bifolio recur side-by-side at the bottom of f102r2 in the pharma section. Here’s what the f18v-f23r bifolio would look like if you took out the bifolios currently bound between them (ignore the green mark in the middle from f22v, that’s just my lazy editing):-

f18v-f23r-bifolio-small

…and here’s what the pair of roots at the bottom of f102r2 look like. Somewhat familiar, eh?

f102r2-detail-small

Actually, I think it’s fair to say that this is extremely familar.

Now, it should be obvious that that you can (depending on how strong a piece of evidence you think the above amounts to, and what other observations you think are relevant) build all kinds of inferential chains on top of this. Cautious soul that he is, Rene concludes: “the colours of the two herbal pages were perhaps not applied when the bifolio was laying open like this“, basically because the two green paints are so different, which is similar to my observation in yesterday’s post about the two blues in Q9. He continues: “I don’t even think that the colours were applied by the same person who made the outline drawings, not deriving from these drawings though.

Regardless, the pretty-much-unavoidable codicological starting point would seem to be that f18v and f23r originally sat side-by-side, and hence almost certainly sat at the centre of a herbal gathering / quire. It also seems likely that the two green paints were applied after other bifolios had been inserted between f18v and f23r (though not necessarily in their final binding order, or at the same time).

Furthermore, if you look at f23v (i.e. the verso side of f23r), you can see where the tails of the “39” quire number’s two long downstrokes have gone over from the bottom of f24v (the last page of the quire). This indicates to me that the f18v / f23r bifolio was already nested just inside the f17 / f24 bifolio when the quire numbers were added: and when combined with the new idea that f18v-f23r was probably the central bifolio of its original gathering, I think the implication is that (unless Q3 was originally composed of just two bifolios, which seems somewhat unlikely) Q3’s quire number was added after the bifolios had been reordered / scrambled / misordered. OK, it’s pretty much the same thing I argued in “The Curse” (pp.62-68): but it’s nice to see the same ideas coming out from a different angle.

q3-quire-mark

However, the range of green paints is a bit troubling. Even though I’ve just now looked at all the greens in Q3, I’m struggling to reconstruct a sensible codicological sequence: but perhaps the reason for this will turn out to be that there isn’t one to be found. Could it be that a significant amount of Herbal grouping data could be inferred simply by spectroscopically analysing the various green paints used, and looking for recto/verso matches? Glen Claston will doubtless argue otherwise, but the chances that a verso page and a recto page with precisely the same green paint were facing each other at the time they were painted must surely be pretty good, right?

So, Rene: another good find, cheers! 🙂

Rene Zandbergen recently stumbled upon a circular drawing in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France’s MS Coislin 338, and wondered whether it might be “a possible precedent for a Voynich astronomical illustration, where the original MS is Greek“, just as for two other Greek manuscripts (Codex Taurinensis C VII 15 and MS Vat Gr. 1291) he turned up and wrote about in other years. What he finds interesting is that “the Voynich MS astronomical illustrations are rather arcane, and do not deal at all with the astronomy of the times of Copernicus and after, but with the times much before that.

To my eyes, though, comparing just one page of MS Coislin 338 with the thrice-great APOD picture isn’t the whole story. You see, a fair few years ago Voynich researcher John Grove proposed that the VMs’ Quire 9 had been misbound along an incorrect fold after the quire numbers had been added but before the folio numbers were added: and if you follow his argument through, you discover that without much doubt the VMs originally placed its 16-way “sun-face” page f68v1 immediately adjacent to its 12-way “moon-face” (APOD) page f67r1.

f68v1-f67r1-tiny

This elegant (but still fairly basic) codicological observation is why I find the APOD comments (for each of the three times the picture on the right has come up) lacking, because nearly all of them were made without grasping these two pages’ original context. OK, so far so “Curse of the Voynich” (pp.58-61, to be precise) – and I would add that it seems fairly unlikely to me that the two (very different) blue paints on these pages were added when they were in their original page order. But what is new for 2010 is that MS Coislin 338 also contains a 16-way circular diagram (fol. 121v) placed immediately adjacent to Rene’s 12-way circular diagram (fol. 122r). And the zigzag edging on the two right-hand 12-way drawings seems eerily familiar too…

f121v-f121r-tiny

So… you might reasonably ask what amazing secrets this section of MS Coislin 338 holds: but if you did, you’d perhaps be a little disappointed to find out that it simply contains a Greek commentary by Theon of Alexandria (Hypatia’s father, as historical proto-feminist conspiracy fans may already know) on Ptolemy’s Handy Tables. Intriguingly, this particular copy was made in the 15th century – but that may (for the moment) be just about as far as we can take this whole parallel.

The problem we face is that we simply don’t know whether such irritatingly good matches between documents are causal, correlative, or (given the large number of documents that have been trawled over the years for comparison) simply random. Really, it would take someone sitting down with a proper critical edition of Theon’s commentary around these pages to see what kind of data it describes, and then prolonged meditation on what we might think about the Voynich Manuscript’s possibly-linked pages as a result. But is anyone likely to do that? I’m not sure… but perhaps we’ll see!

Edith Sherwood very kindly left an interesting comment on my “Voynich Manuscript – the State of Play” post, which I thought was far too good to leave dangling in a mere margin. She wrote:-

If you read the 14C dating of the Vinland Map by the U of Arizona, you will find that they calculate the SD of individual results from the scatter of separate runs from that average, or from the counting statistical error, which ever was larger. They report their Average fraction of modern F value together with a SD for each measurement:

  • 0.9588 ± 0.014
  • 0.9507 ± 0.0035
  • 0.9353 ± 0.006
  • 0.9412 ± 0.003
  • 0.9310 ± 0.008

F (weighted average) = 0.9434 ± 0.0033, or a 2SD range of 0.9368 – 0.9500

Radiocarbon age = 467 ± 27 BP.

You will note that 4 of the 5 F values that were used to compute the mean, from which the final age of the parchment was calculated, lie outside this 2SD range!

The U of A states: The error is a standard deviation deduced from the scatter of the five individual measurements from their mean value.

According to the Wikipedia radiocarbon article:
‘Radiocarbon dating laboratories generally report an uncertainty for each date. Traditionally this included only the statistical counting uncertainty. However, some laboratories supplied an “error multiplier” that could be multiplied by the uncertainty to account for other sources of error in the measuring process.’

The U of A quotes this Wikipedia article on their web site.

It appears that the U of Arizona used only the statistical counting error to computing the SD for the Vinland Map. They may have treated their measurements on the Voynich Manuscript the same way. As their SD represents only their counting error and not the overall error associated with the totality of the data, a realistic SD could be substantially larger.

A SD for the Vinland map that is a reasonable fit to all their data is:

F (weighted average) = 0.9434 ± 0.011 ( the SD computed from the 5 F values).

Or a radiocarbon age = 467 ± 90 BP instead of 467 ± 27 BP.

I appreciate that the U of A adjust their errors in processing the samples from their 13C/12C measurements, but this approach does not appear to be adequate. It would be nice if they had supplied their results with an “error multiplier”. They are performing a complex series of operations on minute samples that may be easily contaminated.

I suggest that this modified interpretation of the U of A’s results for the Vinland Map be confirmed because a similar analysis for the Voynich Manuscript might yield a SD significantly larger than they quote. I would also suggest that your bloggers read the results obtained for 14C dating by the U of A for samples of parchment of known age from Florence. These results are given at the very end of their article, after the references. You and your bloggers should have something concrete to discuss.

So… what do I think?

The reason that this is provocative is that if Edith’s statistical reasoning is right, then there would a substantial widening of the date range, far more (because of the turbulence in the calibration curve’s coverage of the late fifteenth century and sixteenth century) than merely the (90/27) = 3.3333x widening suggested by the numbers.

All the same, I’d say that what the U of A researchers did with the Vinland Map wasn’t so much statistical sampling (for which the errors would indeed accumulate if not actually multiply) but cross-procedural calibration – by which I mean they experimentally tried out different treatment/processing regimes on what was essentially the same sample. That is, they seem to have been using the test as a means not only to date the Vinland Map but also as an opportunity to validate that their own brand of processing and radiocarbon dating could ever be a pragmatically useful means to date similar objects.

However, pretty much as Edith points out with their calibrating-the-calibration appendix, the central problem with relying solely on radiocarbon results to date any one-off object remains: that it is subject to contamination or systematic uncertainties which may (as in Table 2’s sample #4) move it far out of the proposed date ranges, even when it falls (as the VM and the VMs apparently do) in one of the less wiggly ranges on the calibration curve. Had the Vinland Map actually been made 50 years later, it would have been a particularly problematic poster (session) child: luckily for them, though, the pin landed in a spot not too far from the date suggested by the history.

By comparison, the Voynich Manuscript presents a quite different sampling challenge. Its four samples were taken from a document which (a) was probably written in several phases over a period of time (as implied by the subtle evolution in the handwriting and cipher system), and (b) subsequently had its bifolios reordered, whether deliberately by the author (as Glen Claston believes) or  by someone unable to make sense of it (as I believe). This provides an historical superstructure within which the statistical reasoning would need to be performed: even though Rene Zandbergen tends to disagree with me over this, my position is that unless you have demonstrably special sampling circumstances, the statistical reasoning involved in radiocarbon dating is not independent of the historical reasoning… the two logical structures interact. I’m a logician by training (many years ago), so I try to stay alert to the limits of any given logical system – and I think dating the VMs sits astride that fuzzy edge.

For the Vinland Map, I suspect that the real answer lies inbetween the two: that while 467 ± 27 BP may well be slightly too optimistic (relative to the amount of experience the U of A had with this kind of test at that time), 467 ± 90 BP is probably far too pessimistic – they used multiple processes specifically to try to reduce the overall error, not to increase it. For the Voynich Manuscript, though, I really can’t say: a lot of radiocarbon has flowed under their bridge since the Vinland Map test was carried out, so the U of A’s processual expertise has doubtless increased significantly – yet I suspect it isn’t as straightforward a sampling problem as some might think. We shall see (hopefully soon!)… =:-o

A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona (1902), this balneological Panteo was “an author of various works in Latin, and a friend of all the learned men of his day“. His book begins:-

Annotationes Ioannis Antonii Panthei Veronensis ex trium dierum confabulationibus ad Andream Bandam iurisconsultum: […] in quo quidem opere eruditus lector multa cognoscet: quae hactenus a doctis viris desiderata sunt. De thermis Caldarianis: quae in agro sunt Veronensi…

There are a fair few copies around: for example, in addition to its other textual artefacts 🙂 , the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds one. Back in 1998, Christies sold one for £1,495, but a cheaper option is to get a microfilm copy (from NYU’s Reel #491). 

Panteo’s original manuscript has been dated to 1488, and is held in Verona as MS 2072 (about a page down):-

Giovanni Antonio Panteo, De thermis Calarianis; Andrea Banda, Sylva Caldariana suo Pantheo. Manoscritto cartaceo, ultimo decennio del secolo XV; mm.300 x 200; ff.150; scrittura corsiva e littera antiqua, inchiostri bruno e rosa; iniziali miniate decorate, tre grandi disegni a penna colorati; legatura recente in cuoio. Ms. 2072

The description given there says that this is a humanistic manuscript, and that it contains three large coloured diagrams “of great interest for the attention and documentary realism with which they represented the characters, landscapes and architectural details: the unknown artist was probably aware of the stories of Saint Orsola that just in those years (between 1490 and 1495) Carpaccio painted in Venice.” However, it’s not clear if those three drawings were reproduced in the Venetian book version: or if they were, how well they transferred across.

Of course, the reason this is relevant to Cipher Mysteries is because of the baths depicted in the Voynich Manuscript: for if the vellum radiocarbon date (1404-1438) is a reliable indicator of when the VMs was written down, then we should arguably be looking closely at 15th century texts on balneology to try to place these into their historical context. This is because the 15th century saw the medicinal cult of the hot springs’ rise to prominence, as well as its fall – by 1500, people believed (according to Arnold Klebs’ book, which I discussed here) that spas and baths were the source of syphilis, causing interest in them to rapidly wane.

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that balneological historians tend not to look very hard at this period: far more effort seems to have been invested on stemmatic analysis of the many manuscripts of The Baths of Pozzuoli than on compiling synthetic accounts of the development arc of balneology in the 15th century. Please let me know of any books that buck this apparent trend!

Anyway, what is interesting is that there is actually a recent monograph on this balneological Panteo: “Prime ricerche su Giovanni Antonio Panteo” (2003 or 2006?) by Guglielmo Bottari, published in Messina by the Centro interdipartimentale di studi umanistici, ISBN 8887541272. 185 p., [2] c. di tav. : ill. ; 22 cm. Not many out there, but 40 euros buys you a copy here. Perhaps that might have more to say about this matter, and possibly even a copy of the coloured drawings in MS 2072 (which would be nice). 🙂

* * * * * *

Update: Paul Ferguson very kindly (and swiftly) passed on a link to a low-resolution scan of an illustration from Panteo’s manuscript featuring debating humanists, baths, and swallowtail merlons – thanks very much for that! 🙂

panteo-illustration

EXT. Shadow of a European castle. A balding bloke in dark glasses is laying on a gold-plated deckchair next to a gold-plated swimming pool. Behind him, workmen on ladders painstakingly paint gold leaf over the castle’s swallow-tail merlons. A gold-plated mobile trills.

NIC CAGE (picking up phone)
Manny, I’m busy.

AGENT
Hey, Nicky – looked at the proposal yet?

NIC CAGE
You gotta be kidding me – $6m and four points above the line, all for some book nobody can read?

AGENT
It’s “Da Voy-nitch”, Nicky. A real life Da Vinci Code – no joke! Right now it’s a hot cake, everybody wants a slice of it.

CAGE
But I don’t get it: how does this fit my whole “Joe Schmo” schtick?

AGENT
Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s what I get my 15% for. Just look at your fax machine…

 CAGE pulls page after page of unreadable text from his gold-plated fax machine.

CAGE
Hey, I can’t read a thing – this doesn’t make any sense…

AGENT
So…

CAGE
You mean… I get to make up basically all my lines and nobody cares?

AGENT
Like, bingo. An unreadable script for an unreadable book. Genius high concept. Spielberg loves it. We all love it.

CAGE
Right… and my character’s back story is… what?

AGENT
You play international bookseller and revolutionary man of mystery ‘Wilfrid Voynich’ …

CAGE
So do I finally get to be married to Helena Bonham Carter this time?

AGENT
Do NOT call her “Johnny Depp’s sloppy seconds”, or I’ll haveta call the u-n-i-o-n. But yes, she’s Lily Boole.

CAGE
Boole is cool. Roger Ebert will love it, again. Are there lots of…

AGENT
…implausible action sequences that add nothing to the plot? Check.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, Wilfrid Voynich is charming, devoted to his wife, yet strangely unsure of his own sexuality.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, you get to fight against the drone armies of the Conspiracy, both for gold and for glory.

CAGE
I don’t know… can they go to five points? I’m getting a good feeling about this…

The APOD third-time-lucky Voynich page has (just as you’d expect) been reblogged and retweeted near-endlessly, even on the What Does The Prayer Really Say blog, which describes itself as “Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues – by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf“, and has a Catholic priest smiley in the header:  o{]:¬)  Quality-wise, I have to admit that this tramples all over my (similarly-vaguely-autobiographical) ‘surprised balding bloke’ smiley, so score one for God here. =:-o

Interestingly, Fr. Z’s version of the APOD page has a few more pertinent comments than the original APOD page, including one (indirectly) from commenter Brother Charles’ mother who just happens to work at the Beinecke:-

That’s one of our most notorious holdings. We used to have a form letter to answer inquiries about it. Now I suppose it’s a form e-mail. I believe that the best guess is that the manuscript is an herbal with pharmaceutical recipes, etc. All kinds of people, some of them pretty far out, are trying to ‘crack the code.’

Also, Denis Crnkovic (who was once asked to see if the VMs was written in Glagolithic – apparently “it is not“) remarked that “My conjecture (totally unproved) is that it is a “secret writing” codex from around the Prague area used to further the scientific experiments and conclusions of the Prague alchemists.” Well… this would arguably be the #1 Voynich hypothesis, were it not for what seems to be the set of Occitan month-name labels on the zodiac emblems. But a damn good try, anyway. 🙂

As a final aside for the day, here’s a link to a set of urban myths about the Beinecke Library, courtesy of the Yale Daily News. Enjoy!

The APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) for 31st January 2010 was the Voynich Manuscript’s page f67r1yet again. By which I mean it was first featured there in 2002, and then again in 2005, and now here it is for the third time round. Before very long, the 2010 discussion page had accumulated a hundred comments and several thousand views: and didn’t it all just annoy the heck out of me.

The overwhelming majority of comments that have been left there are basically the kind of superficial semi-snarky stuff that gee-whiz bloggers who stumble upon the VMs tend to fire and forget: you know… from a twin universe / a board game / you need 3d glasses to read it / language of the birds / solar eclipse / solar calendar / compass rose / herbal written in an “obscure form of Gaelic” / autistic author / mirrored text / language of the Cathars / “lunar phase mandala related to alchemy” / written ” by a snoutband of suspicious blood” / early sci-fi author / Macedonian “after-oak” / the 24 cardinal directions of Fenshui (and so forth). Basically, a load of ingenious and observant people reinventing a century’s worth of dud wheels, all of them simultaneously square and punctured. Sorry to go all curmudgeonly on you, but how is this in any way a positive assistance to the whole VMs research debate?

The only genuinely thoughtful commenter was Neal Brodsky, who wrote: “The text appears to have been set down in a 15th century western European cursive script. The language itself has elements in common with medieval Germanic languages. It would be difficult and perhaps a bit bold to substantiate any further claims about the nature of this MS.” Which is fair enough, but does make it look as though the taxi dropped him off at completely the wrong party. 🙁

I just don’t know: in the same way that Egyptologists honestly don’t need yet another conceptual theory on the Pyramids in order to advance, I can’t honestly say that Voynich researchers need any more off-the-cuff femto-theories gaily geysered up by shooting-from-the-hip clicksperts. In my opinion, what we need now is to construct proper, tightly-focused (yet eminently do-able!) research questions that stand a reasonable chance of advancing our knowledge by being answered, such as:-

  • What precisely was the original order of the Voynich Manuscript’s pages? [and how to go about working this out?]
  • What was the ‘alpha’ [original] state of those pages where we can apparently see layering? [and why were the layers added?]
  • How did Voynichese evolve during the manuscript’s construction [and what does that tell us about Voynichese?]
  • What did the now-unreadable marginalia originally say? [and what happened to them to make them unreadable?]
  • Where was the Voynich Manuscript between 1450 and 1600? [and who owned it?]

All of which is to say that I think the time has long since passed for Voynich research to leave puberty behind, i.e. that it should stop trawling historical byways for half-cocked answers, but instead put its collective efforts towards developing workable questions. OK, maybe that’s not a PR-friendly vote-catcher of a manifesto to nail to the church door, but at least it’s an honest statement of principle, make of it what you will. 🙂

It’s a real-life Jurassic Park scenario: for decades, all most people have heard of Erich von Däniken is the occasional fossilized soundbite (such as “Chariots of the Gods“). But now, like a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex cloned from dinosaur DNA, von Däniken is back with a new (2009) book called “History Is Wrong” – it lives, it liiiives!

…OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The von Däniken that emerges from its pages is, let’s say, far less bodacious than the one of old – though his most famous subjects of interests (Nazca lines, metal library, Book of Enoch, Father Crespi, etc) all get wheeled out, you don’t have to read too far in to notice that his delivery has changed from ‘strident’ to (frankly) ‘rather whinging’.

Actually, for the most part “History Is Wrong” focuses less on why historians have got ancient history wrong than on why contemporary historians have got von Däniken wrong –  to be precise, its full title should be “History Is Wrong… About Me!

Hence, he goes to some lengths to paint a picture of how (particularly in the case of the underground metal library) his sources switched their stories to make him look like a fool; how subeditors and translators altered the slant of his text to make him look like a showman; how journalists (specifically German ones) serially misrepresented his claims to make him look like a conman; and, finally, how everything he wrote back then still remains basically true today. Even if everyone else thinks it’s nonsense.

So, I think the key question this book poses for the reader is whether history is right about von Däniken – is he (or is he not) a foolish showman/conman?

I’ll answer this by looking at how von Däniken looks at the VMs (which is, of course, this blog’s specialist subject). He opens the book by describing how he asked a hundred people if they had heard of the Voynich Manuscript – only one person had (yup, 1% or 2% would be about right). He then quickly recounts its history (getting some bits right, other bits wrong) with a few minor digressions, before leaping sideways on page 21 to Father Crespi, Plato, terraforming, Adam’s book, Berossus’ Babyloniaca, the Avesta, Enoch (for more than 30 pages!), IT = “Information Trickery”, Plato again… until finally (on page 81!) he loops back to the Voynich Manuscript again (but then only very briefly).

From my perspective, I don’t think you can say that von Däniken offers anything useful or insightful about the VMs that hasn’t been rolled out a thousand times before – for example, though he discusses “89” and “4”, he does this in only a fairly superficial way. The only interesting Voynich ‘authority’ EvD cites here is “German linguist Erhard Landsmann” (p.85), who (rather impressively, it has to be said) concludes in his own Voynich paper that “A prophet is thus a pumpkin shaped spacecraft” (p.6). [Note: his name is actually “Landmann”.]

Purely based on EvD’s treatment of the VMs, I can only really conclude that:-

  • von Däniken doesn’t read his sources as carefully or as deeply as he thinks he does.
  • He actively seeks out fragmentary correlations across time and space, which he then misrepresents as compelling evidence of causal connection between the two.
  • He doesn’t really know how to do history: his interest is in peering past mere facts to the shared web of doubt that he believes supports them all, that offers us glimpses of the “gods-as-astronauts” meta-narrative behind historical reality.

In short, his book is no different to the mass of non-working, unmethodical Voynich theories out there already, with the only exception being that he doesn’t even get as far as suggesting an answer. Even for von Däniken, that would be just too whacko a thing to do. 😉

And yet… because his book is in many ways an autobiography, the main thing that emerges from it is actually EvD himself: a charming and driven man, yet a victim in equal parts of his own optimistic enthusiasm and other people’s bullshit. Really, if you had a meal with him circa 2010, I think he would actually be delightful company. Sure, he became madly rich from his books (and goodness knows that few authors manage that these days): but maybe History will indeed turn out to have been (a little, just a little) Wrong About Him – that for all the readers taken in by all his non-history, I suspect that perhaps he conned himself ten times more.