Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

I thought I’d just give a gentle Cipher Mysteries tap to all your virtual elbows: that there’s a Voynich pub meet this evening (i.e. Sunday 28th September 2014 from 7pm onwards) in a splendidly historic London tavern, and that it would be great to see all or any of you there. As always, if you have a particular interest in one or more other historical ciphers (i.e. not just the Voynich Manuscritp), you’re more than welcome too.

Oh, and if you are planning to come along, please free to say hello beforehand via a comment here or an email, particularly if there’s any cipher-related book from my overstuffed bookshelves that you’d like to borrow.

Alas, I can’t promise that Rupert Allason will turn up with a copy of Arnold Deutsch’s fingerprints in his hand and that we’ll all be drinking champagne to toast the newly-identified Somerton Man (now wouldn’t that be good). But cheers and hope to see you there all the same! 😉

Something is ‘liminal’ if it sits right on a kind of perceptual boundary: so it is surely the Voynich Manuscript’s liminality – that is, its apparent inability to be included in or excluded from any category or pigeonhole – that makes it such an infuriating object to study. Why can’t we prove or disprove that it is a language, a cipher, a shorthand, indeed an anything? Why, centuries after it was constructed by person or persons unknown for reasons unknown, are we still unable to drag any part of it kicking and screaming into the light of certainty?

Yet a recent email here from BC helps demonstrate the difficulties we face when we try to do this. He (very reasonably) asks:

“What do you think best explains the lack of repeated sequences? (i.e. there are almost no repetitions of any group of 3+ consecutive words). I would think that disproves the hypothesis of a pure natural language already.”

It’s a fair point (and I’d add that it works equally well as a disproof for both “pure natural language” and simple substitution ciphers, which are almost exactly the same thing). Moreover, many of the repeats that you do find within the Voynichese corpus are qokedy/qokeedy blocks, words which combine a small information content with a strong affinity for sitting next to one another (as I recall, but please correct me if I’m wrong) such that trivial repeats of these are statistically almost certain to be found somewhere in the text.

Yet conversely, it could be argued that if a pair of instances were to be found where a longer non-trivial block is repeated, that would surely throw a statistical spanner of improbability into that reasoning’s smoothly rotating spokes, in much the same way that the statistical improbability of the Gillogly strings militate strongly against most non-DOI-based readings of Beale Paper B1.

And so it is with all that in mind that Torsten Timm points – in his interesting and challenging paper that I will discuss in more detail another day – to a particularly intriguing (nearly-)repeating sequence pair, both halves of which are on page f84r:-

<f84r.P.3>  shedy qokedy qokeedy qokedy  chedy okain chey
<f84r.P.10> shedy qokedy qokeedy qokeedy chedy raiin chey

This is surely as close to a “Gillogly sequence” as we get in Voynichese. In fact, this to me is very much as if we are looking through a gap in the confounding clouds, insofar as it seems that the same (or at least very similar) plaintext sequence is being processed in two slightly different ways by the same system to yield two extremely close Voynichese sequences.

But yet the almost complete absence of any other reasonable-length sequence pairs throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s hundreds of pages speaks loudly against the idea that what we are looking at is either a natural language or just about any straightforward cipher. So this pair is arguably most useful as a demonstration of how weak many of our current proofs and disproofs are.

As a consequence, my current answer (to “What do you think best explains the lack of repeated sequences?”) would be that the Voynichese text seems to have been consciously constructed in such a way to avoid including non-trivial repeating sequences (i.e. I don’t really include “qokedy/qokeedy” sequences in this).

But this comes with a caveat: that this “Timm pair” is then probably the keenest example we have of a slip-up in the generally excellent execution of a tricky system specifically designed to avoid including non-trivial phrase repetitions (and which almost completely managed to succeed in this ambitious aim).

Yet because it contains three trivial consecutive qokedy/qokeedy words, it plainly suffers from the weakness that it existence might just be a statistical coincidence, of the kind of Dave Oranchak sees suggested so often for Zodiac Killer cipher patterns. Hence its inherent liminality: we just can’t tell for sure whether it’s a break in the system or a freak occurrence fooling us into thinking it’s a break in the system.

…unless you happen to know of any other “Timm pair”-like sequences that are even more solid?

What would a “Voynich Manuscript for Dummies” look like? It’s easy to poke fun at the foolish mess Wikipedia editors have made of the subject, but it’s not so easy to do it properly.

For me, the first big step would be finding sufficient writing courage to discard all Voynich theories. Yes, all of them. Every single one. Come on, is there a single Voynich theory out there that genuinely adds anything significant to what we know about the manuscript itself?

(Even my Antonio Averlino hypothesis is a bit guilty in that respect, because it was so painstakingly built on top of best-in-class historical evidence that it ended up a bit too precise and monochromatic for most people’s tastes. And the stuff it did predict [e.g. the concealed machine drawings] nobody yet feels comfortable with. Oh well!)

I also really don’t care for the kind of who-might-have-done-it-and-why speculation that fills the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page: that’s another whole category of stuff that should get the +10 Blue Pencil of Death wielded at it.

In addition, the whole what-flower-is-that-drawing-similar-to cult that seems to have monopolized many Voynich researchers’ attentions in the last few years is a thing that for me warrants only the briefest of mentions. It is such a hazard-rich and information-poor approach to history: and the whole supposed point of the activity (to find cribs for code-breakers to work with) is destroyed by the complexity of Voynichese . If we can’t even tell vowels from consonants, numbers from letters, or even what ‘the’ or ‘and’ is across hundreds of pages of text, how much help could a crib give us? [“Not much” is the sad answer.]

But once you’ve stripped out all the rubbish, what is left? Well… the internal evidence (the codicology and palaeography, i.e. the construction, the writing and the pre-1600 history), the external evidence (mainly provenance from 1600 onwards), and the Art History (techniques employed, similarities with other documents and drawings, etc). And… errrm… that’s about it.

At this point, you’d have to point out that I’d obviously be writing for some fairly sophisticated Dummies. And I suspect that this is ultimately the problem, because almost everything written to date on the subject isn’t about the Voynich Manuscript itself, but about the Foolish Mythology of the Voynich Manuscript. And what a waste of everyone’s time that exercise has proved to be, huh?

I suppose that this is what I despair about: not only that the unfortunate legacy of Victorian historians (and their search for moral tales for the edification and instruction of the young) was a portfolio of polished pants myths that have taken over a century to dismantle, but also that the mythological-and-as-yet-largely-undeconstructed Voynich Manuscript remains very much in that disappointingly shiny vein. I mean, Roger Bacon and John Dee… is that honestly the best people can do after a hundred years? *sigh*

All this rant boils down to is this: that I’ve become heartily sick and tired of re-reading the same basic “Voynich Mystery Mythology for Dummies” account that bloggers, journalists, novelists, meeja luvvies, computer scientists and even (gasp!) historians seem so keen to regurgitate ad nauseam; and that I think the discourse around the Voynich Manuscript has become so worn-through that many people would struggle to recognize a genuinely informative and accurate account of the object itself.

Remove all the lurid speculation and the mad theories from the next Voynich article you read, and is anything much left?