Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

Following the Volkskalender and Cisiojanus logical train of thought to its next station along, the question comes whether there might be any other information we have about the Voynich zodiac nymphs that could give us a second angle to drive down, to form a kind of pincer attack.

Alert Cipher Mysteries readers might swiftly point out here that there is indeed one particular zodiac nymph that might be of interest. This is the crowned nymph on the Leo page, which I first discussed here back in 2015.

(Note that the Voynich Manuscript has two other crowned zodiac nymphs, one in Cancer and the other in Libra: but in both of these cases, the crown seems to have been added as a separate codicological layer.)

If (as I’m currently wondering) the zodiac section is ultimately some kind of embellished Volkskalender month tables, then it might well prove to be that case that this crowned Leo nymph is flagging a saint’s day or a feast day that had particular significance to the Voynich Manuscript’s composer / author / compiler.

And given that the fifteenth century Volkskalender tradition normally placed the Leo zodiac roundel on the page for July, a reasonable starting point would surely be examining Saint’s days (memorials) or feast days in July during the fifteenth century.

Saint’s Days in July

So what feast days are there in July? Sadly, the scribe of the Volkskalender I was looking at before got bored of copying the Cisiojanus syllables by the time he got to July, so we’ll instead start with the version from the German Cisiojanus Wikipedia page:

júl proces údal oc wíl ¦ kili frá bene márgar apóst al
árnolfús prax mág ¦ ap chríst jacobíque sim ábdon

The (1430) Kalendarium in Ms. GkS 79 2° in Copenhagen’s Royal Library has a nice clear Cisiojanus July list, transcribed here by Erik Drigsdahl as:

1. Iul – (Jul(i))
2. **** pro – Processio Marie
3. ces
4. o – (Odalrici ep.cf.)
5. dal
6. oc – (Octava apostolorum)
7. et – @@@@
8. ki – (Kiliani m.)
9. li
10. fra – (Septem fratrum)
11. be – (Benedicti abb.)
12. ne
13. **** mar – Margarete v.
14. gar
15. **** ap – Divisio apostolorum
16. pos-
17. tol – @@@@
18. Ar – (Arnulphi ep.)
19. nol-
20. phus
21. prax – (Praxedis v.)
22. **** Mag – Maria Magdalene
23. ap – (Apollinaris ep.)
24. cris – (Cristine v.)
25. **** ia – Jacobi ap.
26. co-
27. bi
28. pan – (Pantaleonis m.) – @@@@
29. **** oll – (Ollego) – @@@@
30. ab – Abdon (et Sennen mr.)
31. don.

For the sake of clarity, lines with @@@@ are slightly different from the Wikipedia Cisiojanus, while lines starting **** and marked here in bold were originally marked in red (“rubricated”) in the 1430 Kalendarium to indicate that they were feast days:
* 2nd July – The Visitation of The Blessed Virgin Mary
* 13th July – St Margaret of Antioch (I believe “v.” is short here for ‘virginis et martyris’)
* 15th July – The Dispersion of the Apostles
* 22nd July – St Mary Magdalene
* 25th July – St James the Greater (the Apostle)
* 29th July – St Ollego (a saint local to the Hainaut region, according to this analysis of Ms. GkS 79 2°, but given that the Cisiojanus mnemonics were copied and adapted all across Europe, I’d point out that it’s difficult to know whether this was added here or copied as-is from a previous document’s Cisiojanus mnemonic)

The Candidates

2nd July: The Visitation of The Blessed Virgin Mary is always going to be a likely feast to link a crowned nymph to: but there are other Marian feasts throughout the year, and why don’t they too have a similar crown?

13th July: this is the Greek feast day of St Margaret of Antioch (known there as St Marina, but normally celebrated in the West on 20th July). St Margaret was one of the saints who spoke (posthumously) to Joan of Arc. “Her remains were […] divided between shrines in Montefiascone and Venice”: many cults grew up around her, Exeter also claiming to have her skull, for example.

According to this site:

She prayed at her death that women in childbirth would, upon calling on her, be safely delivered of their child as she had been delivered from the belly of the dragon. She is also known as the patron saint of women, nurses, and peasants. She also intercedes for those who call on her from their deathbed.

15th July: The Dispersion of the Apostles doesn’t strike me as a particularly crownable feast: but perhaps some may think otherwise. It is what it is.

22nd July: oddly, even though in the modern Catholic Church this is a feast day (St Mary Magdalene), this was only made so by Pope Francis: before 2013, it was only a memorial day. Yet from the above, it would seem that it was (locally) considered to be a feast day.

“Da Vinci Code” and “Holy Blood Holy Grail” (etc) aside, there would seem to be moderately good reason to consider that what we are looking at here might be specifically to do with Mary Magdalene. She was, according to this Catholic site:

Patron of contemplative life, converts, glove makers, hairdressers, penitent sinners, people ridiculed for their piety, perfumeries, pharmacists, sexual temptation, tanners, women.

25th July: St James the Greater. He was “the patron saint of veterinarians and pharmacists”. So it would seem as though late medieval pharmacists were spoilt for choice as to which Saint to place their trust in. But was he crownable? I’m not sure.

29th July: St Ollego (presumably Oleg, perhaps a Polish saint?) I don’t know anything about.

And So My Candidate Cribs Are…

Putting all the above together, the most likely crib for the crowned Leo nymph’s label would seem to be one of:
* “pro” (for “Processio Marie”), [though I suspect this may be the weakest of the three]
* “mar” (for St Margaret of Antioch), or
* “mag” (for St Mary Magdalene)

This may not sound like much at first, but when you combine these possibilities with the labels that appear for adjacent nymphs, it may well yield surprisingly fruitful results. Hopefully we shall see… 🙂

I thought I’d post up a quick thought that came to me just now while looking at Fribourg Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Ms. L 309 (which is yet another volkskalender, naturally). There, the page for January (f2r) begins as follows (top left):

Here, underlined in green (by me), you can see the first two big feasts of the year – 1st January (“Circumcisio Domini”) and 6th January (“Epiphania Domini”). You can also see (beneath the green arrow) the famous “Cisiojanus” mnemonic, one syllable per day.

Cisiojanus

I first posted about “Cisiojanus” back in 2009, after Steve Herbelin had suggested that the circular diagram on Voynich Manuscript page f67r2 might possibly contain at least some of it in its text. What’s particularly interesting here is that while the usual version of the mnemonic begins…

1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
2. si → (continuation)
3. o → (continuation)
4. ján → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
5. us → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
7. í → (continuation)
8. si → (null)
9. bi → (null)

…what we see in Ms L 309 is subtly different…

1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
2. si → (continuation)
3. o → (continuation)
4. ján → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
5. us → (a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
7. í → (continuation)
8. er → erhard, short for St. Erhard of Regensburg (whose feast day is 8th January)
9. hard → (continuation)

What seems to me to have happened here is that the Cisiojanus mnemonic had, in a previous version of the same calendar, been adapted for a south-western German audience. That is, the otherwise meaningless “si-bi” syllable pair in the original version had been replaced by “er-hard” to include the local saint’s name, so that his 8th January feast day would be remembered and celebrated in the couplet. And yet the scribe copying this particular manuscript didn’t seem to know who St Erhard was (he was an Irish missionary to Bavaria, who later became “auxiliary bishop of Ratisbon and possibly the abbot of Ebersheimmunstet Abbey“), because he miscopied the feast name as “Erhandi”. *sigh*

As background, the Fribourg description for Ms L 309 says that it came from “Sud-ouest de l’Allemagne“, and that the calendar section (starting on f2r) was “Très probablement du diocèse de Constance ou de Bâle; une main cursive du XVe s. a introduit dans les mois d’octobre et novembre des célébrations typiquement lausannoises (par exemple la dédicace de Lausanne au 20 oct. et S. Himier au 12 nov.).” So if this is correct, it would seem that we can loosely map the transmission path from this document from south-east Germany (where Regensburg is, in Bavaria) to south / south-west Germany, purely on the basis of the Cisiojanus adaptation.

Hence what I’m starting to think is that, zodiac crossbowmen aside, there may well be a large number of internal local features – e.g. local adaptations to the Cisiojanus mnemonic, along with local feasts and many others – that we could sensibly use to determine the transmission paths and relationships between Volkskalender B documents. It’ll need a little more consideration, for sure, but this could very easily be moving in the right kind of direction.

And finally… Voynich labels, perhaps?

Doubtless this has been suggested before (though a brief check revealed nothing)… but could it be that the Voynich zodiac labels actually hold nothing more than the syllables of a Cisiojanus mnemonic? If so, then as long as you have the right month – and the right local adaptation of the mnemonic, of course – a modern codebreaker might possibly be able to use the zodiac labels on that page as a “block paradigm” match (though you’d also need some good guesses about the correct order and direction of the circular rings of labels to follow).

For example: even though the Voynich Pisces zodiac page has “marc / mars” written over it, I suspect that the month accompanying it is in fact more likely (based on those places where Volkskalender B zodiac roundels accompany months) to be February. In which case, one version (given on the German Cisiojanus Wikipedia page) of the February Cisiojanus rhyme is:

brí pur blásus ag dór ¦ febru áp scolástica válent
júli cónjungé ¦ tunc pétrum mátthiam índe

Don’t say I don’t spoil you with good stuff. 🙂

A few days ago, when discussing the way that the Sagittarius crossbowman appears in similar fifteenth century manuscripts, I wrote that it was clear to me “that we are looking at a family of manuscripts with many similar features“, and that I suspected “the real historical heavy lifting – building a complete list of these fifteenth century manuscripts, and then deriving a cladistic tree linking them all together – must have been done already“.

With some initial help from Jürgen W. in Cambridge (thank you very much!), and then a little further assistance from (the now-retired) Professor Francis B. Brévart himself, I believe I now have the basic literature framework in place that forms the backdrop to what we seem to be looking at. It will take a lot more work to fill out the picture more satisfactorily, but what follows should bring anyone interested in what I’m writing about up to speed.

German Volkskalender

There are a large number of (largely fifteenth century) manuscripts and incunabula that cover broadly the same set of material: tables of Saints days, tables for calculating the position of the moon over its 19-year Metonic cycle, tables showing unlucky days (e.g. when not to undergo bloodletting, cupping, etc), lucky days (e.g. “guldin zal”), days to take baths, days to avoid hot baths, etc. Some also have extensive sections on the signs of the zodiac and the planets: many are bound along with similar documents. As a genre, this is almost exclusively German, though a handful of Old French versions have survived.

The first person to try to properly catalogue these documents was Ernst Zinner, in his (1925) “Verzeichnis der astronomischen Handschriften des deutschen Kulturgebietes” (though with three later addenda in 1952, 1962, 1964). Their contents were often copied one from the other (though with frequent differences), but as I understand it Zinner was more interested in collating the raw bibliographical data rather than trying to offer a cladistic synthesis of them all.

The specific name Zinner gave to these fifteenth century texts was “Volkskalender“, as a loose analogy to a separate series of much later (mainly 18th century) calendars. Despite the many substantial differences between the two series of documents (and the protests from other historians, who rightly point out that these calendars were necessarily expensive, and so probably had little to do with ordinary volks at all), the name has stuck.

All the same, the bibliographic references for individual documents may well refer to them as “Iatromathematisches Hausbuch”, or “Hausbuch”, or any number of different names. Brévart (1996) is fairly scathing about the definitional hole some historians have dug themselves into here: but all that needs to be said is that they’re all essentially talking about the same group.

Brévart’s two families

Professor Francis B. Brévart spent many years looking at these specific manuscripts. From our point of view, his two most significant publications were:

* “The German Volkskalender of the Fifteenth Century” [via JSTOR], in Speculum 63 (1988), pp.312-342.
* “Chronology and Cosmology. A German Volkskalender of the Fifteenth Century,” The Princeton Library Chronicle (1996), pp.225-265.

While Brévart 1988 discusses the contents of the manuscripts and introduces the two main families these fall into, Brévart 1996 includes a substantial list of the manuscripts in the two families. You really need to read both papers to get a clear picture of these manuscripts. Thankfully they combine erudition, attention to detail, and clarity of expression: very highly recommended.

The single document from which all the others ultimately derived was an extended Kalendarium compiled by Johannes Wissbier of Gmund between 1404 and 1405. Brévart refers to the more than thirty manuscripts directly descended from this as his “Volkskalender A” family. However, Brévart 1988 continues:

“During the third decade of the fifteenth century a totally different version of the Volkskalender came into being. In addition to the Kalendarium and the treatises on cosmology, the signs, and the planets found in Wissbier’s work, it included various other texts- for example, on the labors of the months, the four temperaments, phlebotomy, bathing, purging, and the unlucky days.”

This separate set, comprising more than twenty documents, is what Brévart calls the “Volkskalender B” family. This is the family we should be most interested in.

Brévart’s “Volkskalender B” family

Brévart 1996 lists (pp.250-254) twenty-six Volkskalender B documents (though also giving a useful mini-bibliography on each one, which I have not reproduced here):

* Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Ms. germ. 2° 1069 [link]
* Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Ms. germ. 4° 20 [link?]
* Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Hdschr. 319 [link]
* Edinburgh: The Library of the Royal Observatory, Ms. Crawford 4.6. (olim 9.14-5.14) [1478]
* Einsiedeln: Stiftsbibliothek Hs. 297 [1498] [link]
* Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek Cod. B 27 (olim Irm. 1365) [link]
* Frankfurt: Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Ms germ, qu. 17 [link]
* Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek Cpg 291
* Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek Cpg 298 (“and 831” [?])
* Heidelberg: Universitätsbibliothek Cpg 557
* Karlsruhe: Badische Landesbibliothek Cod. 494 (olim Donaüschingen, Fürstlich-Fürstenbergische Hofbibliothek) [1443]
* London: British Library Ms. Add. 17987 [Warburg lo-res photos] [1446] [link]
* London: University College Ms germ. 1 [1471] [link] [UCL description]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 28 [c.1440] [link]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 349 [c.1480] [link]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 730 [c.1500] [link]
* Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 736 [c.1465] [link]
* Munich: Universitätsbibliothek 2° Cod. ms. 578 [1474] [link]
* Nuremberg: Staatsarchiv Hs. 426 [1430] [link]
* Prag: Narodni Muzeum Schlossbibliothek Krivoklat Cod. Ie7 (51.996)
* St. Gallen: Stiftsbibliothek Cod. 760
* Tübingen: Evangelisches Stift Msc. 17 [1462]
* Vienna: Oesterrichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 3085
* Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek Cod. 264.5 Extravagantes [1491] [link]
* Würzburg: Universitätsbibliothek Cod. M.p.med.f.5 [c.1450] [link]
* Zurich: Zentralbibliothek Ms. C 54 [c.1465] [link]

It’s possible that there are several more manuscripts in this family that escaped Brévart’s roving eye, e.g. this one as mentioned by René Zandbergen (though Brévart categorises it as a Volkskalender A family member):

* Planeten-Buch – BSB Cgm 7269, Konstanz, [BSB-Hss Cgm 7269] [1463]

The Sagittarius Crossbowman link

Why should anyone be interested in this family of documents? Simply because these contain almost all the roundel images of Sagittarius-the-zodiac-sign where what is normally depicted as an archer is instead depicted as a crossbowman.

Personally, I’m very much convinced by the previously-made suggestion that the crossbowman image in some of these documents was accidentally copied from a roundel of Sagittarius-the-constellation: and so it seems to be a very strong possibility that the Sagittarius crossbowman depicted in the Voynich Manuscript was copied from a member of the Volkskalender B family.

Moving forward, the idea would be to try to work out the relationships between these 26+ documents, and then see how the Voynich Manuscript’s section fits in to that tree. There are bound to be copies missing from the tree, for sure: but it seems to me that just about the surest way we will ever have to understand the Voynich Manuscript’s “zodiac” section is by carefully placing it in the context of Brévart’s “Volkskalender B” family, and seeing what we learn.

An interesting-sounding document referred to by Alfred Martin in 1906 (pp.174-175, thanks to Stefan Mathys!) is Cod. Sang. 760, the contents of which the St Gallen archivists describe as follows:

This manuscript, illustrated with numerous colored pen drawings, originated in a secular environment in Southern Germany or in Switzerland around the middle of the 15th century. It describes the signs of the zodiac, the planets, the four temperaments, and the four seasons regarding their influence on human health. This is followed by dietary guidelines primarily regarding bloodletting, but also regarding eating, drinking, sleeping, waking, resting and moving, as well as, in concrete terms, regarding bathing (illustration p. 101) or defecating (illustration p. 120)

As to the manuscript’s origins, the archivists suggest:

Most likely an amateur doctor with an interest in astronomy, from the Southern region of Germany, wrote the original text around 1400 and assembled it into a compendium. Later the text was repeatedly supplemented and modified.

There are numerous reasons why I’m intrigued by Cod. Sang. 760: not only its zodiac roundels, but also the sun-moon roundels on adjacent pages, and the textual focus on all the things I’ve recently been wondering whether the Voynich zodiac pages encode – blood-letting, baths, clysters (enemas), etc.

“Iatromathematisches Hausbuch” manuscripts

Yet Cod. Sang. 760 (which was only digitized in 2014) is but one of a series of “Iatromathematisches Hausbuch” manuscripts, some of which were discussed on Stephen Bax’s site https://stephenbax.net/?p=1211 back in 2015, e.g.:

* Cod. Pal. Germ. 291

* Cod. Pal. Germ. 557

…and so forth. The 30-element list of Saint’s Days that appear on twelve pages at the start of these also appear in other manuscripts, perhaps most notably this one from Konstanz in 1463 (as mentioned by Rene):

* Planeten-Buch – BSB Cgm 7269, Konstanz, Anfang 15. Jh. bis 17. Jh. [BSB-Hss Cgm 7269]

What is interesting in CGM 7269 is that not only does the Sagittarius crossbowman appear, but also the image of two people in a bath (previously used to illustrate bathing) has been appropriated for the Gemini zodiac sign.

(There’s also Tübingen Md 2, MS Cod Sang 827, and Strasbourg Ms.2.120 to consider, etc.)

I could go on, but I hope the basic point – that we are looking at a family of manuscripts with many similar features – is clear.

The copied crossbowman hypothesis

I’m acutely aware that what follows is less of an outright answer than a provocation towards approaching an answer.

The first step is hypothesizing the origins of the Sagittarius crossbowman: I now feel quite sure that it was a copying error within the basic Iatromathematisches Hausbuch manuscript family, where a crossbowman roundel originally drawn to accompany the constellation Sagittarius was miscopied into the zodiac roundel accompanying the zodiac sign Sagittarius.

This is hardly a huge departure from what has been noted before, specifically when Rafal Prinke and Rene Zandbergen asked Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and Prof. Dieter Blume (respectively) about this.

However, by positing the crossbowman drawing as a copying error, we can start to view the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac section not just as something visually influenced by a set of manuscripts, but as a member of the cladistic tree of a specific family of manuscripts.

The iatromathematical table/label hypothesis

Structurally, these iatromathematical housebooks have quite stylized layouts and contents. For example, they typically start with a nineteen-column computus table (which was no secret at all), followed by a set of twelve tables of Saint’s Days (I believe), with 30 elements in each list.

In the Planeten-Buch, these lists have further become associated with zodiac signs, in much the same way that we see in the Voynich Manuscript (albeit in a non-obvious way).

It would therefore seem reasonable to secondly hypothesize that the contents of these tables might have (in some way) ended up as the Voynich zodiac labels (e.g. using some combination of abbreviation and acrostic), i.e. from tables to labels.

Incidentally, this would be the kind of “block paradigm” match I’ve talked about for some time here. The reason I think it is of particular cryptographic interest is that there is good cryptanalytical reason to suspect that the Voynich’s “labelese” (i.e. the version of the text used to write labels) is only a subset of the ‘language(s)’ used to write the main text. As such, labelese may well be weaker and hence easier to break.

Where next?

So far, I have only looked at a handful of manuscripts, and from these have elicited only the outline of a research angle.

But the real historical heavy lifting – building a complete list of these fifteenth century manuscripts, and then deriving a cladistic tree linking them all together – must have been done already, surely?

Can I therefore again ask my German-speaking readers for their help, this time to dig up any literature looking at this family of manuscripts as a whole?

I’m sure it’s out there, but I haven’t yet found it. All pointers, tips and suggestions gratefully received! 🙂

The Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundel section has long frustrated researchers’ efforts to make sense of it at a high level, never mind determining what any specific zodiac nymph’s label means.

However, I can now see the outline of a new hypothesis that might explain what we’re seeing here…

A Stylistic Impasse?

The fact that each zodiac sign has thirty nymphs, thirty stars and thirty labels (all bar one?) would seem to be a good indication that some kind of per-degree astrology is going on here: and this is a lead I have pursued for many years.

The literature on this, from Pietro d’Abano to Andalo di Negro to (the as yet unseen) Volasfera, is uniformly Italian: so it would seem a relatively safe bet that the source of this section is also from that same Italian document tree.

At the same time, the observation that the drawings in the zodiac roundels are stylistically quite distinct from the rest of the Voynich Manuscript’s drawings has been made many times.

Combine this with the fourteenth century technological dating for the (unusual) Sagittarius crossbow, and you get loosely driven towards a working hypothesis that at least the central figures were copied from a (still unknown) late 14th century or early 15th century woodcut almanach, of the type that was most commonly found in Germany and Switzerland.

However, this leads to an awkward stylistic impasse: how can this zodiac section be both Italian and German at the same time?

Klebs and Martin

Back in 2009, I mentioned Arnold Klebs’ very interesting 1916 article on the history of balneology in the context of discussing Quire 13. However, there was another intriguing quote there that I only got round to chasing up a few days ago:

The yearly pilgrimages to the healing springs in the month of May, the baths of the women on St. John’s Day, which Petrarca describes so picturesquely in one of his letters from Cologne, were ancient survivals, indications of a deeply rooted love for and belief in the purifying powers of the liquid element. These seasonal wanderings to the healing springs were naturally brought into relation with astral conjunctions, a tendency soon exploited by the calendar makers and astrological physicians. Days and hours were set for bathing, blood-letting, cupping, and purging, carefully ascertained by the position of the stars. Martin in his book gives a great variety of such instances which offer interest from many points of view.

The author and book to whom Klebs is referring here is Alfred Martin and his immense (1906) “Deutsches Badewesen in vergangenen Tagen“, Jena : Diederichs. (The link is to archive.org .)

It turns out that Klebs sourced a great deal of his article from Martin’s labour of love (with its 159 illustrations and its 700-entry bibliography), which covers public baths, private baths, Jewish baths, bath-related legislation, mineral baths, bath architecture, bath technology, spas, saunas, and so forth, ranging from Roman times all the way up to 1900, and with a dominant focus on German and Swiss archival sources.

The Zodiac Bath Hypothesis

You can by now surely see where I’m heading with this: a zodiac bath hypothesis, where the Voynich’s zodiac section was in some way a copy of a German/Swiss original, which itself brought together the two traditions of per-degree astrology and good/bad times for “bathing, blood-letting, cupping, and purging” (as described by Klebs).

In some ways, this should be no surprise to anyone, given that the first few nymphs are all sitting in barrels, which were essentially what medieval private baths were (well, half-barrels, anyway).

And perhaps, in the context of clysters (enemas), it’s not inviting too much trouble to speculate what legs drawn apart / together might be representing. 🙂

The problem is that – probably because of my only fragmentary German – I can’t find any mention of “Days and hours were set for bathing, blood-letting, cupping, and purging, carefully ascertained by the position of the stars” in Martin’s German text.

I can see plenty of references to blood-letting (“aderlass”) etc, but pinning down the exact part that Klebs robbed out has proved to be beyond me.

Can I therefore please ask a favour of (one or more of) my German readers; which is simply to find the section in Alfred Martin’s book to which Krebs was referring? Thanks! 🙂

It would seem likely that this will then refer to a book in Martin’s capacious bibliography, at which point the game is (hopefully) afoot!

As I wrote before, I think we have four foundational challenges to tackle before we can get ourselves into a position where we can understand Voynichese properly, regardless of what Voynichese actually is:

* Task #1: Transcribing Voynichese into a reliable raw transcription e.g. EVA qokeedy
* Task #2: Parsing the raw transcription to determine the fundamental units (its tokens) e.g. [qo][k][ee][dy]
* Task #3: Clustering the pages / folios into groups that behave differently e.g. Currier A vs Currier B
* Task #4: Normalizing the clusters i.e. understanding how to map text in one cluster onto text in another cluster

This post relates to Task #2, parsing Voynichese.

Parsing Voynichese

Many recent Voynichese researchers seem to have forgotten (or, rather, perhaps never even knew) that the point of the EVA transcription alphabet wasn’t to define the actual / only / perfect alphabet for Voynichese. Rather, it was designed to break the deadlock that had occurred: circa 1995, just about every Voynich researcher had a different idea about how Voynichese should be parsed.

Twenty years on, and we still haven’t got any consensus (let alone proof) about even a single one of the many parsing issues:
* Is EVA qo two characters or one?
* Is EVA ee two characters or one?
* Is EVA ii two characters or one?
* Is EVA iin three characters or two or one?
* Is EVA aiin four characters or three or two or one?
…and so forth.

And so the big point of EVA was to try to provide a parse-neutral stroke transcription that everyone could work on and agree on even if they happened to disagree about just everything else. (Which, as it happens, they tend to do.)

The Wrong Kind Of Success

What happened next was that as far as meeting the challenge of getting people to talk a common ‘research language’ together, EVA succeeded wildly. It even became the de facto standard when writing up papers on the subject: few technical Voynich Manuscript articles have been published since that don’t mention (for example) “daiin daiin” or “qotedy qotedy”.

However, the long-hoped-for debate about trying to settle the numerous parsing-related questions simply never happened, leaving Voynichese even more talked about than before but just as unresolved as ever. And so I think it is fair to say that EVA achieved quite the wrong kind of success.

By which I mean: the right kind of success would be where we could say anything definitive (however small) about the way that Voynichese works. And just about the smallest proof would be something tangible about what groups of letters constitute a functional token.

For example, it would be easy to assert that EVA ‘qo’ acts as a functional token, and that all the instances of (for example) ‘qa’ are very likely copying mistakes or transcription mistakes. (Admittedly, a good few o/a instances are ambiguous to the point that you just can’t reasonably decide based on the scans we have). To my eyes, this qo-is-a-token proposition seems extremely likely. But nobody has ever proved it: in fact, it almost seems that nobody has got round to trying to prove anything that ‘simple’ (or, rather, ‘simple-sounding’).

Proof And Puddings

What almost nobody seems to want to say is that it is extremely difficult to construct a really sound statistical argument for even something as basic as this. The old saying goes that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” (though the word ‘proof’ here is actually a linguistic fossil, meaning ‘test’): but in statistics, the normal case is that most attempts at proof quickly make a right pudding out of it.

As a reasonably-sized community of often-vocal researchers, it is surely a sad admission that we haven’t yet put together a proper statistical testing framework for questions about parsing. Perhaps what we all need to do with Voynichese is to construct a template for statistical tests for testing basic – and when I say ‘basic’ I really do mean unbelievably basic – propositions. What would this look like?

For example: for the qo-is-a-token proposition, the null hypothesis could be that q and o are weakly dependent (and hence the differences are deliberate and not due to copying errors), while the alternative hypothesis could be that q and o are strongly dependent (and hence the differences are instead due to copying errors): but what is the p-value in this case? Incidentally:

* For A pages, the counts are: (qo 1063) (qk 14) (qe 7) (q 5) (qch 1) (qp 1) (qckh 1), i.e. 29/1092 = 2.66% non-qo cases.
* For B pages, the counts are: (qo 4049) (qe 55) (qckh 8) (qcth 8) (q 8) (qa 6) (qch 3) (qk 3) (qt 2) (qcph 2) (ql 1) (qp 1) (qf 1), i.e. 98/4147 = 2.36% non-qo cases.

But in order to calculate the p-value here, we would need to be able to estimate the Voynich Manuscript’s copying error rate…

Voynichese Copying Error Rate

In the past, I’ve estimated Voynichese error rates (whether in the original copying or in the transcription to EVA) at between 1% and 2% (i.e. a mistake every 50-100 glyphs). This was based on a number of different metrics, such as the qo-to-q[^o] ratio, the ain-to-oin ratio, the aiin-to-oiin ratio, the air-to-oir ratio, e.g.:

A pages:
* (aiin 1238) (oiin 110) i.e. 8.2% (I suspect that Takeshi Takahashi may have systematically over-reported these, but that’s a matter for another blog post).
* (ain 241) (oin 5) i.e. 2.0% error rate if o is incorrect there
* (air 114) (oir 3) i.e. 2.6% error rate

B pages:
* (aiin 2304) (oiin 69) i.e. 2.9% error rate
* (ain 1403) (oin 18) i.e. 1.2% error rate
* (air 376) (oir 6) i.e. 1.6% error rate

It’s a fact of life that ciphertexts get miscopied (even printed ciphers suffer from this, as Tony Gaffney has reported in the past), so it seems unlikely that the Voynich Manuscript’s text would have a copying error rate as low as 0.1% (i.e. a mistake every 1000 glyphs). At the same time, an error rate as high as 5% (i.e. every 20 glyphs) would arguably seem too high. But if the answer is somewhere in the middle, where is it? And is it different for Hand 1 and Hand 2 etc?

More generally, is there any better way for us to estimate Voynichese’s error rate? Why isn’t this something that researchers are actively debating? How can we make progress with this?

(Structure + Errors) or (Natural Variation)?

This is arguably the core of a big debate that nobody is (yet) having. Is it the case that (a) Voynichese is actually strongly structured but most of the deviations we see are copying and/or transcription errors, or that (b) Voynichese is weakly structured, with the bulk of the deviations arising from other, more natural and “language-like” processes? I think this cuts far deeper to the real issue than the typical is-it-a-language-or-a-cipher superficial bun-fight that normally passes for debate.

Incidentally, a big problem with entropy studies (and indeed with statistical studies in general) is that they tend to over-report the exceptions to the rule: for something like qo, it is easy to look at the instances of qa and conclude that these are ‘obviously’ strongly-meaningful alternatives to the linguistically-conventional qo. But from the strongly-structured point of view, they look well-nigh indistinguishable from copying errors. How can we test these two ideas?

Perhaps we might consider a statistical study that uses this kind of p-value analysis to assess the likeliest level of copying error? Or alternatively, we might consider whether linguistic hypotheses necessarily imply a lower practical bound for the error rate (and whether we can calculate this lower bound). Something to think about, anyway.

All in all, EVA has been a huge support for us all, but I do suspect that more recently it may have closed some people’s eyes to the difficulties both with the process of transcription and with the nature of a document that (there is very strong evidence indeed) was itself copied. Alfred Korzybski famously wrote, “A map is not the territory it represents”: similarly, we must not let possession of a transcription give us false confidence that we fully understand the processes by which the original shapes ended up on the page.

As I see it, there are four foundational tasks that need to be done to wrangle Voynichese into a properly usable form:

* Task #1: Transcribing Voynichese text into a reliable computer-readable raw transcription e.g. EVA qokeedy
* Task #2: Parsing the raw transcription to determine Voynichese’s fundamental units (its tokens) e.g. [qo][k][ee][dy]
* Task #3: Clustering the pages / folios into groups where the text shares distinct features e.g. Currier A vs Currier B
* Task #4: Normalizing the clusters e.g. how A tokens / patterns map to B tokens / patterns, etc

I plan to tackle these four areas in separate posts, to try to build up a substantive conversation on each topic in turn.

Takahashi’s EVA transcription

Rene Zandbergen points out that, of all the different “EVA” transcriptions that appear interleaved in the EVA interlinear file, “the only one that was really done in EVA was the one from Takeshi. He did not use the fully extended EVA, which was probably not yet available at that time. All other transcriptions have been translated from Currier, FSG etc to EVA.”

This is very true, and is the main reason why Takeshi Takahashi’s transcription is the one most researchers tend to use. Yet aside from not using extended EVA, there are a fair few idiosyncratic things Takeshi did that reduce its reliability, e.g. as Torsten Timm points out “Takahashi reads sometimes ikh where other transcriptions read ckh“.

So the first thing to note is that the EVA interlinear transcription file’s interlinearity arguably doesn’t actually help us much at all. In fact, until such time as multiple genuinely EVA transcriptions get put in there, its interlinearity is more of an archaeological historical burden than something that gives researchers any kind of noticeable statistical gain.

What this suggests to me is that, given the high quality of the scans we now have, we really should be able to collectively determine a single ‘omega’ stroke transcription: and even where any ambiguity remains (see below), we really ought to be able to capture that ambiguity within the EVA 2.0 transcriptions itself.

EVA, Voyn-101, and NEVA

The Voyn-101 transcription used a glyph-based Voynichese transcription alphabet derived by the late Glen Claston, who invested an enormous amount of his time to produce a far more all-encompassing transcription style than EVA did. GC was convinced that many (apparently incidental) differences in the ways letter shapes were put on the page might encipher different meanings or tokens in the plaintext, and so ought to be captured in a transcription.

So in many ways we already have a better transcription, even if it is one very much tied to the glyph-based frame of reference that GC was convinced Voynichese used (he firmly believed in Leonell Strong’s attempted decryption).

Yet some aspects of Voynichese writing slipped through the holes in GC’s otherwise finely-meshed net, e.g. the scribal flourishes on word-final EVA n shapes, a feature that I flagged in Curse back in 2006. And I would be unsurprised if the same were to hold true for word-final -ir shapes.

All the same, GC’s work on v101 could very well be a better starting point for EVA 2.0 than Takeshi’s EVA. Philip Neal writes: “if people are interested in collaborating on a next generation transcription scheme, I think v101/NEVA could fairly easily be transformed into a fully stroke-based transcription which could serve as the starting point.”

EVA, spaces, and spatiality

For Philip Neal, one key aspect of Voynichese that EVA neglects is measurements of “the space above and below the characters – text above, blank space above etc.”

To which Rene adds that “for every character (or stroke) its coordinates need to be recorded separately”, for the reason that “we have a lot of data to do ‘language’ statistics, but no numerical data to do ‘hand’ statistics. This would, however, be solved by […having] the locations of all symbols recorded plus, of course their sizes. Where possible also slant angles.”

The issue of what constitutes a space (EVA .) or a half-space (EVA ,) has also not been properly defined. To get around this, Rene suggests that we should physically measure all spaces in our transcription and then use a software filter to transform that (perhaps relative to the size of the glyphs around it) into a space (or indeed half-space) as we think fit.

To which I’d point out that there are also many places where spaces and/or half-spaces seem suspect for other reasons. For example, it would not surprise me if spaces around many free-standing ‘or’ groups (such as the famous “space transposition” sequence “or or oro r”) are not actually spaces at all. So it could well be that there would be context-dependent space-recognition algorithms / filters that we might very well want to use.

Though this at first sounds like a great deal of work to be contemplating, Rene is undaunted. To make it work, he thinks that “[a] number of basics should be agreed, including the use of a consistent ‘coordinate system’. Again, there is a solution by Jason Davies [i.e. voynichese.com], but I think that it should be based on the latest series of scans at the Beinecke (they are much flatter). My proposal would be to base it on the pixel coordinates.”

For me, even though a lot of this would be nice things to have (and I will be very interested to see Philip’s analysis of tall gallows, long-tailed characters and space between lines), the #1 frustration about EVA is still the inconsistencies and problems of the raw transcription itself.

Though it would be good to find a way of redesigning EVA 2.0 to take these into account, perhaps it would be better to find a way to stage delivery of these features (hopefully via OCR!), just so we don’t end up designing something so complicated that it never actually gets done. 🙁

EVA and Neal Keys

One interesting (if arguably somewhat disconcerting) feature of Voynichese was pointed out by Philip Neal some years ago. He noted that where Voynichese words end in a gallows character, they almost always appear on the top line of a page (sometimes the top line of a paragraph). Moreover, these had a strong preference for being single-leg gallows (EVA p and EVA f); and also for appearing in nearby pairs with a short, often anomalous-looking stretch of text between them. And they also tend to occur about 2/3rds of the way across the line in which they fall.

Rather than call these “top-line-preferring-single-leg-gallows-preferring-2/3rd-along-the-top-line-preferring-anomalous-text-fragments“, I called these “Neal Keys”. This term is something which other researchers (particularly linguists) ever since have taken objection with, because it superficially sounds as though it is presupposing that this is a cryptographic mechanism. From my point of view, those same researchers didn’t object too loudly when cryptologist Prescott Currier called his Voynichese text clusters “languages”: so perhaps on balance we’re even, OK?

I only mention this because I think that EVA 2.0 ought to include a way of flagging likely Neal Keys, so that researchers can filter them in or out when they carry out their analyses.

EVA and ambiguity

As I discussed previously, one problem with EVA is that it doesn’t admit to any uncertainty: by which I mean that once a Voynichese word has been transcribed into EVA, it is (almost always) then assumed to be 100% correct by all the people and programmes that subsequently read it. Yet we now have good enough scans to be able to tell that this is simply not true, insofar as there are a good number of words that do not conform to EVA’s model for Voynichese text, and for which just about any transcription attempt will probably be unsatisfactory.

For example, the word at the start of the fourth line on f2r:

Here, the first part could possibly be “sh” or “sho”, while the second part could possibly be “aiidy” or “aiily”: in both cases, however, any transcriber attempting to reduce it to EVA would be far from certain.

Currently, the most honest way to transcribe this in EVA would be “sh*,aii*y” (where ‘*’ indicates “don’t know / illegible”). But this is an option that isn’t taken as often as it should.

I suspect that in cases like this, EVA should be extended to try to capture the uncertainty. One possible way would be to include a percentage value that an alternate reading is correct. In this example, the EVA transcription could be “sh!{40%=o},aiid{40%=*}y”, where “!{40%=o}” would mean “the most likely reading is that there is no character there (i.e. ‘!’), but there is a 40% chance that the character should be ‘o'”.

For those cases where two or more EVA characters are involved (e.g. where there is ambiguity between EVA ch and EVA ee), the EVA string would instead look like “ee{30%=ch}”. And on those occasions where there is a choice between a single letter and a letter pair, this could be transcribed as “!e{30%=ch}”.

For me, the point about transcribing with ambiguity is that it allows people doing modelling experiments to filter out words that are ambiguous (i.e. by including a [discard words containing any ambiguous glyphs] check box). Whatever’s going on in those words, it would almost always be better to ignore them rather than to include them.

EVA and Metadata

Rene points out that the metadata “were added to the interlinear file, but this is indeed independent from EVA. It is part of the file format, and could equally be used in files using Currier, v101 etc.” So we shouldn’t confuse the usefulness of EVA with its metadata.

In many ways, though, what we would really like to have in the EVA metadata is some really definitive clustering information: though the pages currently have A and B, there are (without any real doubt) numerous more finely-grained clusters, that have yet to be determined in a completely rigorous and transparent (open-sourced) way. However, that is Task #3, which I hope to return to shortly.

In some ways, the kind of useful clustering I’m describing here is a kind of high-level “final transcription” feature, i.e. of how the transcription might well look much further down the line. So perhaps any talk of transcription

How to deliver EVA 2.0?

Rene Zandbergen is in no doubt that EVA 2.0 should not be in an interlinear file, but in a shared online database. There is indeed a lot to be said for having a cloud database containing a definitive transcription that we all share, extend, mutually review, and write programmes to access (say, via RESTful commands).

It would be particularly good if the accessors to it included a large number of basic filtering options: by page, folio, quire, recto/verso, Currier language, [not] first words, [not] last words, [not] first lines, [not] labels, [not] key-like texts, [not] Neal Keys, regexps, and so forth – a bit like voynichese.com on steroids. 🙂

It would also be sensible if this included open-source (and peer-reviewed) code for calculating statistics – raw instance counts, post-parse statistics, per-section percentages, 1st and 2nd order entropy calculations, etc.

Many of these I built into my JavaScript Voynichese state machine from 2003: there, I wrote a simple script to convert the interlinear file into JavaScript (developers now would typically use JSON or I-JSON).

However, this brings into play the questions of boundaries (how far should this database go?), collaboration (who should make this database), methodology (what language or platform should it use?), and also of resources (who should pay for it?).

One of the strongest reasons for EVA’s success was its simplicity: and given the long (and complex) shopping list we appear to have, it’s very hard to see how EVA 2.0 will be able to compete with that. But perhaps we collectively have no choice now.

In the Voynich research world, several transcriptions of the Voynich Manuscript’s baffling text have been made. Arguably the most influential of these is EVA: this originally stood for “European Voynich Alphabet”, but was later de-Europeanized into “Extensible Voynich Alphabet”.

The Good Things About EVA

EVA has two key aspects that make it particularly well-adapted to Voynich research. Firstly, the vast majority of Voynichese words transcribed into EVA are pronouncable (e.g. daiin, qochedy, chodain, etc): this makes them easy to remember and to work with. Secondly, it is a stroke-based transcription: even though there are countless ways in which the inidvidual strokes could possibly be joined together into glyphs (e.g. ch, ee, ii, iin) or parsed into possible tokens (e.g. qo, ol, dy), EVA does not try to make that distinction – it is “parse-neutral”.

Thanks to these two aspects, EVA has become the central means by which Voynich researchers trying to understand its textual mysteries converse. In those terms, it is a hugely successful design.

The Not-So-Good Things About EVA

In retrospect, some features of EVA’s design are quite clunky:
* Using ‘s’ to code both for the freestanding ‘s’-shaped glyph and for the left-hand half of ‘sh’
* Having two ways of coding ligatures (either with round brackets or with upper-case letters)
* Having so many extended characters, many of which are for shapes that appear exactly once

There are other EVA design limitations that prevent various types of stroke from being captured:
* Having only limited ways of encoding the various ‘sh’ “plumes” (this particularly annoyed Glen Claston)
* Having no way of encoding the various ‘s’ flourishes (this also annoyed Glen)
* Having no way of encoding various different ‘-v’ flourishes (this continues to annoy me)

You also run into various annoying inconsistences when you try to use the interlinear transcription:
* Some transcribers use extended characters for weirdoes, while others use no extended characters at all
* Directional tags such as R (radial) and C (circular) aren’t always used consistently
* Currier language (A / B) isn’t recorded for all pages
* Not all transcribers use the ‘,’ (half-space) character
* What one transcriber considers a space or half-space, another leaves out completely

These issues have led some researchers to either make their own transcriptions (such as Glen Claston’s v101 transcription), or to propose modifications to EVA (such as Philip Neal’s little-known ‘NEVA’, which is a kind of hybrid, diacriticalised EVA, mapped backwards from Glen Claston’s transcription).

However, there are arguably even bigger problems to contend with.

The Problem With EVA

The first big problem with EVA is that in lots of cases, Voynichese just doesn’t want to play ball with EVA’s nice neat transcription model. If we look at the following word (it’s right at the start of the fourth line on f2r), you should immediately see the problem:

The various EVA transcribers tried gamely to encode this (they tried “chaindy”, “*aiidy”, and “shaiidy”), but the only thing you can be certain of is that they’re probably all wrong. Because of the number of difficult cases such as this, EVA should perhaps have included a mechanism to let you flag an entire word as unreliable, so that people trying to draw inferences from EVA could filter it out before it messes up their stats.

(There’s a good chance that this particular word was miscopied or emended: you’d need to do a proper codicological analysis to figure out what was going on here, which is a complex and difficult activity that’s not high up on anyone’s list of things to do.)

The second big problem with EVA is that of low quality. This is (I believe) because almost all of the EVA transcriptions were done from the Beinecke’s ancient (read: horrible, nasty, monochrome) CopyFlo printouts, i.e. long before the Beinecke released even the first digital image scan of the Voynich Manuscript’s pages. Though many CopyFlo pages are nice and clean, there are still plenty of places where you can’t easily tell ‘o’ from ‘a’, ‘o’ from ‘y’, ‘ee’ from ‘ch’, ‘r’ from ‘s’, ‘q’ from ‘l’, or even ‘ch’ from ‘sh’.

And so there are often wide discrepancies between the various transcriptions. For example, looking at the second line of page f24r:

…this was transcribed as:


qotaiin.char.odai!n.okaiikhal.oky-{plant} --[Takahashi]
qotaiin.eear.odaiin.okai*!!al.oky-{plant} --[Currier, updated by Voynich mailing list members]
qotaiin.char.odai!n.okaickhal.oky-{plant} --[First Study Group]


In this specific instance, the Currier transcription is clearly the least accurate of the three: and even though the First Study Group transcription seems closer than Takeshi Takahashi’s transcription here, the latter is frequently more reliable elsewhere.

The third big problem with EVA is that Voynich researchers (typically newer ones) often treat it as if it is final (it isn’t); or as if it is a perfect representation of Voynichese (it isn’t).

The EVA transcription is often unable to reflect what is on the page, and even though the transcribers have done their best to map between the two as best they can, in many instances there is no answer that is definitively correct.

The fourth big problem with EVA is that it is in need of an overhaul, because there is a huge appetite for running statistical experiments on a transcription, and the way it has ended up is often not a good fit for that.

It might be better now to produce not an interlinear EVA transcription (i.e. with different people’s transcriptions interleaved), but a single collective transcription BUT where words or letters that don’t quite fit the EVA paradigm are also tagged as ambiguous (e.g. places where the glyph has ended up in limbo halfway betwen ‘a’ and ‘o’).

What Is The Point Of EVA?

It seems to me that the biggest problem of all is this: that almost everyone has forgotten that the whole point of EVA wasn’t to close down discussion about transcription, but rather to enable people to work collaboratively even though just about every Voynich researcher has a different idea about how the individual shapes should be grouped and interpreted.

Somewhere along the line, people have stopped caring about the unresolved issue of how to parse Voynichese (e.g. to determine whether ‘ee’ is one letter or two), and just got on with doing experiments using EVA but without understanding its limitations and/or scope.

EVA was socially constructive, in that it allowed people with wildly different opinions about how Voynichese works to discuss things with each other in a shared language. However, it also inadvertantly helped promote an inclusive accommodation whereby people stopped thinking about trying to resolve difficult issues (such as working out the correct way to parse the transcription).

But until we can start find out a way to resolve such utterly foundational issues, experiments on the EVA transcription will continue to give misleading and confounded results. The big paradox is therefore that while the EVA transcription has helped people discuss Voynichese, it hasn’t yet managed to help people advance knowledge about how Voynichese actually works beyond a very superficial level. *sigh*

For far too long, Voynich researchers have (in my opinion) tried to use statistical analysis as a thousand-ton wrecking ball, i.e. to knock down the whole Voynich edifice in a single giant swing. Find the perfect statistical experiment, runs the train of thought, and all Voynichese’s skittles will clatter down. Strrrrike!

But… even a tiny amount of reflection should be enough to show that this isn’t going to work: the intricacies and contingencies of Voynichese shout out loud that there will be no single key to unlock this door. Right now, the tests that get run give results that are – at best – like peering through multiple layers of net curtains. We do see vague silhouettes, but nothing genuinely useful appears.

Whether you think Voynichese is a language, a cipher system, or even a generated text doesn’t really matter. We all face the same initial problem: how to make Voynichese tractable, by which I mean how to flatten it (i.e. regularize it) to the point where the kind of tests people run do stand a good chance of returning results that are genuinely revealing.

A staging point model

How instead, then, should we approach Voynichese?

The answer is perhaps embarrassingly obvious and straightforward: we should collectively design and implement statistical experiments that help us move towards a series of staging posts.

Each of the models on the right (parsing model, clustering model, and inter-cluster maps) should be driven by clear-headed statistical analysis, and would help us iterate towards the staging points on the left (parsed transcription, clustered parsed transcription, final transcription).

What I’m specifically asserting here is that researchers who perform statistical experiments on the raw stroke transcription in the mistaken belief that this is as good as a final transcription are simply wasting their time: there are too many confounding curtains in the way to ever see clearly.

The Curse, statistically

A decade ago, I first talked about “The Curse of the Voynich”: my book’s title was a way of expressing the idea that there was something about the way the Voynich Manuscript was constructed that makes fools of people who try to solve it.

Interestingly, it might well be that the diagram above explains what the Curse actually is: that all the while people treat the raw (unparsed, unclustered, unnormalized) transcription as if it were the final (parsed, clustered, normalized) transcription, their statistical experiments will continue to be confounded in multiple ways, and will show them nothing useful.