Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

As a quick glance at the top of this page should reveal, Cipher Mysteries has finally hit the million-visit mark, and without being carried there by any random traffic spikes.

And so to every Cipher Mysteries visitor I send a great big thank you, a million times over. 🙂

But how best to celebrate this (relatively meaningless but numerically pleasing) milestone? For what it’s worth, my plan is to try to complete some of the bigger cipher-related things I’ve been working on over the last few years and put them out there for you all. After all, the whole point of this blog (in my mind, at least) is more about actual cipher history research than about cipher reportage or out-there theorizing.

Just so you know, the things I plan to finish and put out are:
* a small cipher book I was researching and writing back in 2012 (before I ran out of evidence to work with)
* my “block paradigm” analysis of the Voynich zodiac section
* a surprisingly-well-known-but-entirely-unmapped cipher mystery (which needs proper transcribing etc)
* a top secret cipher project (but that’s another story entirely)

Incidentally, The Cipher Foundation now (finally!) has a bank account, so I also plan to put its first microproject (translating Le Flibustier Mysterieux) in motion over the next few days.

Finally, I also plan to set up a celebratory pub meet one Sunday in the next couple of months, where I shall see if I can persuade an historic London pub to put on a barrel of “Enigma” for us (if Robinson’s even still brew it, because it has disappeared from their website), and perhaps stream the meet live on the Internet, so everyone can take part if they wish. Hope to see you there! 🙂

I’ve recently had a number of emails from Don of Tallahassee, describing various ways in which he thinks Voynichese can be decomposed into simpler subunits: broadly speaking, his scheme is similar to Jorge Stolfi’s well-known crust-mantle-core model, but with a very much larger base group.

Numerically, Don’s model works well: but – in my opinion – it doesn’t yet help us move towards what I would consider any of the basic milestones we would need to pass before we can crack the puzzle of Voynichese.

If anyone wants to be the Voynich Champollion, here is my list of the milestones you’ll need to tackle in your research programme, with various sample challenges. I don’t mind admitting that I haven’t yet succeeded at any of these: make no mistake, they are all hugely difficult.

(In the context of Don’s models, my opinion is that he – like many others before him, so it is in no way a criticism – has effectively skipped over the first three milestones, and gone straight for the modelling milestone. But we all need to get vastly more confident about the first three milestones before we can start doing modelling in an effective way.)

Milestone #1: Reading

Personally, I’m not convinced that we’re even reading Voynichese accurately off the page yet.

For example:
* Page-initial letters have quite a different instance frequency distribution from anything else, particularly in the Herbal pages. Why should that be?
* Line-initial letters have, again, a different instance frequency distribution as compared to text within lines. Is it therefore safe to assume that these are the same kind of text as each other?
* In 2006, I proposed that EVA ‘aiin’ characters may well represent Arabic digits, by steganographically enciphering the values using different shapes of the scribal flourish on the tail of the (‘v’-shaped) EVA ‘n’. This basic hypothesis needs to be tested microscopically and with careful imaging techniques, but my proposals to the Beinecke some years ago to do this were turned down.
* Philip Neal has pointed to evidence that certain stylized text sequences may be quite different from the rest of the text. There are both ‘vertical Neal keys’ (down the start column of many pages) and ‘horizontal Neal keys’, which often appear about 2/3rds of the way across the top line of a page or paragraph, and often ‘bracketed’ by a pair of single-leg gallows (‘p’ or ‘f’).
* In 2006, I proposed that Neal keys might form part of a tricky in-page transposition cipher (as described briefly by Alberti in 1467), where the gallows characters might form references to within key-like sequences. But this hypothesis has not been tested any further.

Challenge: when we try to decipher Voynichese, are we even trying to decipher the right thing? When there are so many different things that each suggest that the text as a whole is not an homogenous entity, why do so many people persist in treating it as if it is a single, simple language?

Milestone #2: Parsing

The second roadblock is that we can’t yet even parse Voynichese. Because of the ambiguities and weird letters, Voynich Manuscript researchers use a stroke-based transcription called ‘EVA’: this lets us transcribe the text and talk about it, even if we disagree (or are uncertain) about how these should be parsed.

For example:
* Is ‘ch’ a unique letter or is it a ‘c’ letter followed by an ‘h’ letter?
* Is ‘ii’ a pair of ‘i’ characters or a separate character?
* Is ‘ee’ a pair of ‘e’ characters or a separate character?
* Are ‘cth’ / ‘ckh’ / ‘cfh’ / ‘cph’ actually a t/k/f/p gallows character followed or preceded by ‘ch’, or four entirely separate composite letters?

Challenge: what kind of statistical tests would help us compare multiple different candidate parsing schemata, to help us decide which ones are more likely?

Milestone #3: Tokenization

The third roadblock is that there seems strong visual evidence that characters are not the same as tokens: which is to say that some individual letters in the plaintext may map to multiple letters in the Voynichese ciphertext.

For example:
* Is ‘qo’ a token?
* Is ‘dy’ a token?
* Is ‘o’ + gallows a different kind of token to just plain gallows?
* Is ‘y’ + gallows a different kind of token to just plain gallows?

Challenge: what kind of statistical tests would help us compare multiple different candidate tokenization schemata, to help us decide which ones are most likely?

(Note that Milestones #2 and #3 overlap sharply, making the process of getting past them quadratically more difficult, in my opinion.)

Milestone #4: Modelling

Even if we get to the stage that we are able to read, parse and tokenize Voynichese with some degree of certainty, we still face many grave difficulties, not least of which is that we have at least two ‘dialects’ to solve at the same time – Currier A, Currier B, and ‘Labelese’ (for want of a better term). For each of these languages/dialects, we need to model the language functioning and use the results to understand their internal structures.

For example:
* What do the contact tables between adjacent tokens suggest?
* Can we produce Markov models for each of these ‘languages’?
* Is ‘qo’ a free-standing unit (i.e. that is only steganographically prefixed to words), or is it genuinely an integrated part of words?

Challenge: what is the mapping between Currier A, Currier B, and Labelese? Can we somehow normalize the three such that they all conform to a single unified scheme? Or are there basic differences between them such that this is impossible?

A recent comment to Cipher Mysteries by ‘Jimbo’ made me look again at the the various crowned nymphs in the Voynich Manuscript.

The Three Crowns

As far as I can see, there are three crowns in the Zodiac section, firstly in Cancer:-

There’s another in Leo:-

And another in Libra:-

There are also plenty of nymphs with a ‘tressed’ hairstyle in both the zodiac section and the water section, that some people (incorrectly, I suspect) think resembles some kind of crown. Here is a set of three examples from the Voynich’s Sagittarius page (rotated upright):-

Incidentally, one thing I can’t recall being mentioned elsewhere is that one particular nymph seems to directly link the zodiac pages to the water pages, by virtue of her standing in some kind of miniature bath or basin:-

Observations

To my eyes, there’s a big codicological (i.e. composition-layering) mystery about the whole way the nymphs were drawn. Not only were they originally all drawn with a single breast (and if there is some kind of long-standing graphical tradition of drawing one-breasted nymphs, it is something that decades of nymph-maniacal Voynicheros have apparently failed to uncover), but many specific details – most notably things such as these three crowns and the tressed head-dresses – were apparently added to the original drawing in a later ‘phase’ or composition pass.

And that begs the question: what was so wrong with the original unadorned ‘ugly duckling’ layer that the author felt compelled to dress it up with additional breasts, as well as crowns and tressed hairstyles? I don’t know, but I do wonder how far understanding that layering would carry us towards understanding the whole manuscript.

As far as the crowns go, the Cancer crown is somewhat dull, and was clearly added in a later pass; whereas the Leo crown was painted red and – crucially, I suspect – seems to have been part of the original layer, rather than an addition in a later construction phase.

The Libra crown is, like the Cancer crown, also clearly a later addition. Some people have speculated that this might have been modelled on a real crown that existed in the 15th Century, such as the Holy Crown of Hungary:-

…or perhaps something to do with Barbara of Cilli.

My Own Conclusions

Feel free to infer what you like from all the above.

For me, however, the Leo crown is the real deal, and the Cancer crown (added in almost the same place on the zodiac roundel preceding the Leo roundel) is a fake, designed to draw attention away from the Leo crown. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the Libra crown, for all its similarity to the Holy Crown of Hungary, is very probably a misdirection as well.

Yet… what was so telling about the red crown drawn in the original layer on the Leo zodiac roundel that the author wanted to distract our attention away from it? That, I think, is the right question to be asking here.

Edit: here’s what the Leo crown looks like, scaled up and overdrawn in Gimp. What does it mean? I don’t know but… I’m looking.

Many apologies, I thought I’d posted about this weeks ago but I obviously hadn’t, bah! 🙁

At 11am to 12.15pm this Saturday (20th June 2015), the York Festival Of Ideas will be hosting Cracking the Code, a 75-minute panel discussion with Bill Sherman (currently of the V&A), John Clark (University of York), Rene Zandbergen, and Sir Dermot Turing (Trustee of the Bletchley Park Trust). It’s at the University of York, and it’s freeeeeeee.

If you don’t know Bill Sherman, shame on you: he’s the person who curated the “Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers” exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library from November 2014 to last March, that gave the Voynich Manuscript its first working holiday away from the Beinecke since Hans Kraus donated it to them. He’s also the author of “John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance” (on the shelf to my right), and numerous other books and articles.

The title of the session isn’t much help (nor indeed was the York Festival of Ideas PR), so I have honestly no idea what they plan to panelize (panelify?). When Rene and Bill did a talk at the Folger last November, it claimed to be a “conversation” that would “review what is known (and not known) and focus on new approaches to this old problem, including science and art history, Medieval and Renaissance history, codicology and conservation, and the history of collecting.”

Hmmm… ohhh kayyyy, then. 🙂

Anyhow, just in case they accidentally veer off into the marshy horrors of Baxland, I’ll bring a crate of rotten tomatoes: no pressure, people, but if you press that button, the stage will end up looking as if the red team won at Splatoon, I swear it.

But that aside, I’m looking forward to it. 😉

The problem with radiocarbon dating as an analytical historical technique isn’t that the underlying science of radioactivity is hard (in fact, it’s fairly mechanical and straightforward, albeit probabilistic), but rather that mention of the S-word (‘science’) unduly raises many people’s expectations that they can use it to get to some kind of unshakeable bedrock of knowable truth about the past. “God’s smoking gun”, if you like (or not if you don’t).

Sorry, but even if you’ve paid your money to the University of Arizona to get a radiocarbon dating number in your eager hand, you still have a large number of issues to deal with.

For example, the historical curves are all twisted about thanks to human history (global pollution etc), which means that you have to go from uncalibrated raw data to calibrated historical data; another problem is that locale-specific human effects (e.g. polluted urban air vs clean mountain air, etc) can shift the likely dates forwards or backwards; another is that carbon trapped inside certain diets (e.g. shellfish or seafood) eaten by the animals whose radioactive carbon we are testing can cause yet more havoc inside the calculation; and so on and so forth.

Back in 2012, I tried to give an accessible summary of the most difficult bits of all this, but the tricky historical reasoning that necessarily has to be wrapped around radiocarbon dating remains a fiendishly technical business that few Voynich researchers can genuinely make proper sense of in toto.

One thing is fairly solid, though: of the four data points we have, three are extremely – and I do genuinely mean extremely – close. Certainly close enough for the three pieces of vellum to have come from the same decade.

Incidentally, “BP” (‘Before Present’) is the technical term for “number of years before 1950”; which means that the 500BP notches 3/4 of the way across the horizontal scale correspond to 1450. Hence you can visually see that the curves for all three of the top three samples go to around 1450.

The first counterintuitive thing about all this is that these curves are only probabilitic date curves insofar as we know nothing else at all about the object’s likely place of origin. For example, if we can determine by other means that the manuscript came from a polluted urban area, then we should (as I understand it) eliminate much of the earlier (leftmost) years’ components that make up the curve to effectively produce a new, much narrower curve biased more strongly towards the later (rightmost) years.

The second counterintuitive thing is that if you try to statistically combine just the top three samples together (by approximating their distributions as Gaussian probability distributions and then using a neat bit of stats maths), you get… pretty much exactly the same curve as any one of them. Think about that: because these three radiocarbon dates are so close together, each statistical merge brings hardly any new information to the party, giving the clever stats machinery barely anything to use to help it narrow that wider initial range.

This leads to the third counterintuitive thing: that in fact almost all the narrowing of the date range (from say [1400-1450] down to [1404-1438]) is therefore down to that pesky fourth sample, a thin sliver taken from the heavily-handled outermost edge of leaf f68. My personal prediction is that the difference in dating that this sample offers will eventually prove to have arisen from nothing more than a badly-chosen sampling site (on one of the most heavily handled areas of vellum in the entire manuscript). If Greg H. had instead taken it from the top of the page much nearer the bound edge, I expect that the radiocarbon dating would have ended up almost exactly the same as the other three.

It’s important to note at this point that I’m genuinely not trying to use this single f68 sample to try to ‘prove’, ‘verify’, or ‘validate’ my Averlino Voynich theory. Actually, the way this works is completely the other way round, in that what came first for me was a whole load of codicological, cryptographic, palaeographic and Art History analyses, which all seemed to me to specifically point to a construction date in the 1450 to 1470 range (neither before nor after). Hence for me, Averlino was simply an illustrative cherry on what was already to me a well-baked Art History cake: my identification of him as the author of the Voynich might be right or wrong (and I still don’t know either way), but all my other dating still stands.

And it is this other dating evidence which I happen to trust more than f68’s single radiocarbon dating value.

The problem with accepting nothing beyond the raw radiocarbon date range (as Richard SantaColoma is wont to argue people should do, which is somewhat ironic given that it’s the specific piece of information which his various it’s-a-hoax-but-using-unused-old-vellum theories then immediately deem irrelevant) is that it leaves you vulnerable to calculational and procedural errors. If you genuinely want to date the Voynich Manuscript, then I think you have no honest choice but to engage with ceramics, parallel hatching, cryptographic alphabets or whatever fields you choose to build up multiple sets of independent dating evidence. Unless you have these to combine with the radiocarbon dating, your results will be weak.

Which leads to the final counterintuitive thing for this post: that while radiocarbon dating itself is scientifically strong, the tricky reasoning surrounding it is historically fragile. The more you can sensible combine with it, the stronger a support it becomes: but argue from it in isolation from everything else, and your conclusions and inferences simply won’t have a great deal of strength. It’s like one leg of a tripod: you need two more legs for it to be able to stand for any length of time.

If you look at the reverse side of the Voynich Manuscript’s famous nine-rosette foldout sheet, you’ll find two curious (and as yet wholly unexplained) circular diagrams sitting beside one another:

Let’s look a little closer (f85r2 is on the left and f86v4 is on the right):

f85r2

The characters look like this (N, E, S, W):-

For f85r2 (the ‘sun’ circle on the left), the interlinear description notes that:

The sex of the figures is indeterminate, as neither breasts nor beards are visible. The South figure is leaning on a staff, and looks like an old man or woman; the other three could be women or young men, possibly children.

The figures are partially hidden behind by the inner frame: the South figure is hidden from the knees down by the inner frame, and the other three are hidden from the waist down. All four figures wear a colored, buttonless shirt, with long and narrow sleeves, which in the South figure is seen to be a tunic or dress, ending just above the knee. Ring collars are visible in the North and West figures. All three figures have light hair, bushy over the ears and cropped just below them. The East figure wears a dark skullcap.

The right hands of West, North, and East are hidden by the inner frame. With the left hand, North seems to be pointing to the last word of the text above (which sits on a line by itself); East holds an unidentified dark object, consisting of two stacked bulbs of unequal size, topped by a short spike (it could be a root); and West seems to be holding a flower, shaped like a lily but dark colored. South holds a staff with the left hand, and a chain with three huge rings on his right.

Comments:

It has been conjectured that the four figures represent the Four Ages of Man. If the diagram is to be read clockwise, like the text, then West (who lies over the “start marker”, by the way) would be Infancy. However, East (with the skullcap) looks younger than the other three.

D’Imperio suggested that this diagram might tie in with Galenic medicine: while a Voynich mailing list contributor by the name of Eric suggested back in 2004 that the four characters on f85r2 were all male. (Here’s his page preserved on the Wayback Machine).

[North] Gazing towards his left hand, on which (or in?) is a small square object with a blue dot in the center – most probably a ring. The right hand bends out of view. Hands positioning ambiguous. Wears a small headband or crown – small dots inside could be jewels. Wearing a blue shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair cut above the ears. Most probably male.

[East] Holding a round object in the right hand topped with a cylinder and a spike and two circles to either side – possibly an oil lamp (the spike being a flame). Left hand bends out of view. Hands positioning ambiguous. Has a band of blue across the forehead, though it isn’t a cap since his hair flows freely out the top. Wearing a blue shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair cut around the ears. Most probably male.

[South] Holding and leaning on a cane in the right hand. Left hand holds a large circled chain of three loops. Hands seem front-to-back. High forehead, very short hair (above ears). Wearing a green full-length dress with blue sleeves and trim, with wrist bands and a plunged neckline. Mouth is painted blue. Could be a man or woman.

[West] Holding a lily shaped object in the right hand. Left hand bends out of view. Hands positioning seems correct. Wearing a blue shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair cut below the ears. Most probably male.

Back in 2004, I conjectured that these four characters might instead represent four powerful European nations:

N = Holy Roman Emperor (ring)
E = Venice (glassware)
S = Rome/Sicily (a blind guess on my part, but feel free to play cherchez-le-pain) 🙂
W = France (fleur-de-lys)

More recently, Marco Ponzi suggested that these four characters might represent the four seasons with Winter (East) holding a metallic hand-warmer, an idea which then got elaborated into a page on Stevie Bax’s site. Needless to say, I’m not convinced by this, not even slightly.

But if you want a properly interesting medieval parallel, I’d perhaps suggest the Wheel of Fortune, the Rota Fortunae: “Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel!”, indeed. Schwikipedia describes it thus:

“Characteristically, it has four shelves, or stages of life, with four human figures, usually labeled on the left regnabo (I shall reign), on the top regno (I reign) and is usually crowned, descending on the right regnavi (I have reigned) and the lowly figure on the bottom is marked sum sine regno (I am without a kingdom). Dante employed the Wheel in the Inferno and a “Wheel of Fortune” trump-card appeared in the Tarot deck (circa 1440, Italy).”

Needless to say, I don’t buy into this either: in fact, all these theories seem to be bouncing off the surface, and not really getting any kind of grip on this diagram.

f86v4

At first sight, this seems quite different to the first diagram, apart from a load of odd filigree-style detailing… but closer examination reveals some features hidden in plain sight:-

The characters look like this (N, E, S, W):-

Eric concludes that these four moon-side characters are probably all female, and describes them thus:-

[North] Holding a round object in right hand (this might be false and should be an open hand, with the object actually the arching design – though by looking at the detail of the area, it seems most likely it is an object; however, it is not painted in the light yellow color the other objects are) and what looks like a small twiggy plant in a soil pouch in the left. Faces away from the viewer. Seems to have a hair band or possibly a blindfold. Hands positioning ambiguous. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Could be a man or a woman.

[East] Holding a round object in the left hand and a seemingly flat, square object in the right (this might also be false – the square object is rounded in a fashion and could be the arching design; the object is colored yellow like the other objects though, so I have included it as an object). Hands seem back-to-front. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Could be a man or a woman.

[South] Holding a round object in the left hand and a bowl in the right. Hands seem back-to-front. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Breast outline visible.

[West] Holding twigs (straw, wheat?) in the left hand and an dumbell shaped object with a round addition on top (a vase possibly?) in the right. Hands seem back-to-front. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Both breast outlines are visible.

As to what these all are, there are surprisingly few theories: Erni Lillie once wrote that this depicted Dante’s Mystic White Rose (full theory here).

For myself: having read a lot about magic circles over the years, I have a strong suspicion that the West figure is holding hyssop, mentioned in the Bible as a herb used for ceremonial cleansing. And the way that we are looking at the back of the North character’s head reminds me of a paricular medieval necromantic demon whose name eludes me but whose face was supposed never to be depicted. (I mentioned directional spirits here and here in relation to f57v before).

But beyond that, people have largely drawn a blank here too.

An unexpected parallel

If we compare the two sets of four figures with the four figures on f57v’s circular diagram, some further unexpected similarities emerge:

It seems to me that the four characters on f86v4 (middle row) are in some way related to the four characters on f57v (bottom row). What that actually means I really don’t know… but it’s an interesting point, eh?

And the block paradigm says…

If you strip away the decorative ‘papellony’-style fish-scale detailing from f86v4, you end up with two circular diagrams side by side, one with a sun at the centre, the other with a moon at the centre. I honestly find it hard to believe that something so distinctive arrived here ex nihilo: this pair must surely have come from a prior document somewhere.

If that original pair of diagrams still exists and we can find it, then we stand a chance of reverse-engineering the text beside the Voynich Manuscript’s versions of these diagrams. This is a block we should be actively looking for!

People have long proposed that the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20 (‘Q20’) might be a collection of recipes of some sort. This also suggests that there may well have been an original plaintext block of recipes from which Q20 was derived (though whether as a cipher, shorthand, or curious language it matters not at this stage): but do we stand any chance of identifying the original document?

Actually, we do know quite a lot about Q20: and having thought about these many observations for several years, the inferences I remain most convinced by are:-

(1) that the tails on the paragraph stars are probably hiding ‘y’, short for ‘ytem’ or ‘ybidem’;

(2) that the tail-less paragraph stars on f103r were added in after the event – that is, that f103r was originally written unstarred, but that untailed stars were later added in so that this page blended in better with the others (but I don’t know why, or what this means);

(3) that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with f105r the first page of the first gathering (‘Q20a’) and f116v the last page of the last gathering (‘Q20b’), and as a result we cannot really trust the layout of the bifolios as they have been handed down to us;

(4) that the last paragraph of f116r probably contains some kind of attribution or conclusion – e.g. this book was copied by me on the 4th January 1453 in the town of Milan, from the manuscript lent to me by the painter Giovanni from Verona etc etc 🙂 ;

(5) that even though we currently have between 345 and 347 starred paragraphs and four missing pages (i.e. two missing folios, or rather one missing bifolio), I think – because I’m far from convinced that all the paragraph stars are definitely genuine ‘item’ markers – we have to be very wary about trusting that the number of starred paragraphs we see is an accurate representation of the number of itemized paragraphs in the original.

All the same, my overall suspicion is that if we were to look for candidates for the original source of this recipe block, we should perhaps look for a source compiled prior to 1450 containing between 300 and 400 itemised recipes. As usual, I’d prioritize European sources over others, and I’d prioritize candidates whose writer obviously believed them to be secret; but everyone sees this differently, so make of those particular preferences what you will.

All in all, I currently only have a single serious candidate for that original block, one that I stumbled upon only recently: and because it’s Christmas time, I thought I’d throw it out to you lovely people, see what you think. 🙂

It’s MS. 6741 of the National Library of Paris, containing a sizeable (359 numbered items of varying size, plus various rhymes) set of recipes compiled from various sources by Jean le Bègue / Jehan le Bègue [1368-1457], as admirably transcribed by Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (and translated by her two sons) in 1849 in her book Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to the XVIIIth Centuries, on the Arts of Painting.

If you’re interested, there’s some modern discussion on Merrifield’s work here: but both her and Jean le Bègue aren’t really discussed anywhere much these days, which I think is a shame because there’s lots of lovely stuff in there.

PS: this post may be the first time someone has proposed a possible link between MS 6741 and the Voynich Manuscript’s Q20, but please correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂

The book begins (p.47):

EXPERIMENTA DE COLORIBUS.

1. Nota quod auree littere scribuntur sic, cum ista aqua ; accipe sulphur vivum, et corticem interiorem mali granati, aluminis, saltis, et de pluvia auri, tantum quantum vis, et aquam gummi liquide, et modicum de croco, et misce, et scribe.

The book finishes (p.320):

DEO GRATIAS

Compositus est liber iste a magistro Johanne le Begue, Licentatio in Legibus, Greffario Generalium Magistrorum Monetae Regis Parisiis, anno Domini 1431, aetatis vero suae 63.

THANK GOD

This Book is composed by Master Jehan Le Begue, a Licentiate in the Law, Notary-General of the Masters of the King’s Mint, at Paris, Anno Domini 1431, when he was 63 years of age.

How are we ever going to resolve the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript?

Even sixty years ago, it was abundantly clear to William Friedman (widely believed to be the greatest ever codebreaker) that the Voynich’s cipher/language was of a different type to anything that had previously been encountered, and that normal cryptanalytical tools would be of little use in revealing its secrets. If Voynichese was ‘gettable’, Friedman and then Brigadier John Tiltman (who I personally place right up there with Friedman) would surely have got it, or would have begun to get it: but neither did. Yet high quality scans, several decades of study and the Internet’s million eyeballs have not yet yielded insights significantly beyond what Friedman and Tiltman managed.

And so we fast forward to 2014, where researchers continue to adopt one of two basic paradigms: (a) that Voynichese uses an unknown cipher, and so we must grind through an endless series of statistical tests that must surely eventually isolate an answer, and (b) that Voynichese is written in an unknown language, and so we must extract a set of individual word cribs to identify the language’s family etc.

After a lot of consideration, my opinion is that the Voynich Manuscript laughs in the face of both approaches: and that if you’re using either (or indeed both) of them, you’re almost certainly wasting your time. Moreover, by spamming people with the results of your research, you’re wasting their time too.

Please understand that I’m not saying that these two paradigms are worthless in all circumstances: rather, I’m saying as flatly and directly as I can that though they do have great value in other contexts, they are essentially worthless when applied to the Voynich Manuscript. They have not worked, do not work and never will work for it: hopefully that’s a clear enough position statement.

So… if they don’t work, what’s the alternative? Ay, there’s the rub.

The Block Paradigm

With all the above in mind, it became apparent to me a while back that what was actually missing was an entire paradigm, by which I mean a complete and systematic way of thinking about what we are trying to do with Voynich research, with what tools, and for what purpose. Hence I’ve spent most of this year trying to work out what that new paradigm should be, and to find a good way of communicating it.

(This has basically been why Cipher Mysteries has been so quiet as far as the Voynich Manuscript goes.)

My working title for this new way of thinking about the Voynich Manuscript is the “Block Paradigm”, because as its target it seeks to identify not a letter, a word or even a language, but a block of text. That is, the idea is to use three stages:
(1) identify blocks of the plaintext that stand some chance of appearing in other manuscripts;
(2) find possible matches for them in other manuscripts; and then finally
(3) attempt to reverse-engineer the way that the two blocks map to each other.

As such, the Block Paradigm is entirely neutral about whether Voynichese is a cipher, a shorthand or an unusual language (or any combination of the three): the purpose of the first two stages is to get us to the point that researchers can attempt to do the reverse-engineering third stage for a given block with reasonable confidence that they may have something that could well be the plaintext.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to introduce and discuss a number of candidate blocks from the Voynich Manuscript. Right now, I only have a possible matching plaintext block for one of them (and that’s a particularly complicated block that I’ve been working with for some years), so this is only really the start of what I hope will be a broadly collaborative and productive process.

I’ll start with a candidate block that has already been discussed by Voynich researchers, though not nearly as fully as I think it deserves.

The Poem Block

On 26 Apr 1996, Gabriel Landini posted to the Voynich mailing list:-

Folio 76R has a full body of text, that is, the page is almost completely filled with text. I can guess 4 paragraphs. However if we go to folio 81R, then the text looks like if it was written as a poem. Some lines longer than others and there is no drawing that is restricting the line lengths. I wonder if the pages like 81r are songs, hymns or prayers…

Rene Zandbergen replied (on 29 Apr 1996):

If I remember well […] f81r is unique is this respect. To me, it gives the impression as if a drawing was intended for the right margin, but it has been omitted. This is at variance with the generally accepted theory that all drawings were done first and the text filled in later. Another special feature of this page is that there seems to be a connection of the drawing in the left margin, through the binding gutter, to the opposite ‘page’ (which would be f78v if my above assumption for 81r is correct). […]

The ‘poem’ idea fits well with Currier’s observation that the line seems to be a functional entity. This again is strange in view of the fact that in many cases the text is clearly organised in paragraphs, i.e. several full lines followed by one short line and sometimes a somewhat larger gap between this and the next line. The length of each last paragraph line seems to be anything from one word to a full line. Note that when it is one word, it is sometimes centered on the line.

With the benefit of better scans and 18 further years of study, let’s look again at this possible ‘poem’ on f81r and annotate what we see:-

I’ve marked the two horizontal Neal keys (at the top of the two main sections of text) in red, some extraneous-looking text appended to the final line (possibly a date, or a signature?) in green, two almost identical gallows-initial words in blue, and various unusual features of the text in purple.

The text itself seems to have a line structure of 7 / 8 / 8 / 8 lines (as per the ornate line-initial gallows-initial words): so if this is a poem, my prediction is that the poem was originally 8 / 8 / 8 / 8 lines but that an entire line got omitted by mistake during the copying. (Copying ciphers by hand is surprisingly hard to get right).

As for the likely subject matter of the poem, that too isn’t too hard to predict: given that it is sandwiched between two drawings of naked nymphs in baths, it would surely shock nobody if the poem turned out to be about water or baths.

I would also expect the poem to be in Latin or Italian (OK, Tuscan), because those were (as I recall) the languages typically used for balneological poems pre-1450.

So what might the poem actually be? You might think it could be a section grabbed from Peter of Eboli’s famous early medieval Latin poem “De Balneis Puteolanis”: but that, according to C. M. Kauffmann’s “The Baths of Pozzuoli” (p.14) consists of thirty-seven sections (an introduction, thirty-five sections each covering a different bath, and a dedicatory section at the end), each section having precisely twelve hexameters. Hence I suspect we can eliminate De Balneis Puteolanis as a candidate simply because it has a different verse length – we’re looking for eight or sixteen line sections, but it is based around twelve-line sections.

All of which is where my preliminary account of this poem block comes to a halt: I simply don’t know the balneological literature well enough to take this any further forward. Were there any pre-1450 balneological poems written with eight or sixteen lines per section? I believe that this question should probably be the starting point for researching this particular block; but what do you think?