The Voynich Manuscript for Dummies…?

by ⋅ 138 Comments

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?

Impromptu Voynich pub meet, Friday 13th June 2014…

by ⋅ 40 Comments

This coming Friday, well-known Voynich Manuscript researcher Rene Zandbergen will (briefly) be in London, hence this impromptu Voynich pub meet announcement. 🙂

ReneZandbergen

If you’d like to come along, Rene, Philip Neal and I will be – from 5.30pm to 6pm onwards – at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, an historic London pub with its own riverside gallows especially for pirates. So if you do happen to have a wooden leg, an eye-patch and a bag bulging with pieces of eight, be aware of the potential for mishap. 🙂

If it’s a nice-ish day (i.e. not raining torrentially), the chances are that we’ll be in the beer garden / patio area – go through the pub, turn left after the main bar, and continue forward to an outside area. Good for dogs, too (particularly if you’re John Kozak, *hint*).

But if it’s a wet day (and let’s face it, that’s the English summer to a ‘T’), be aware that we could end up anywhere in the pub’s two floors. If so, mooch around looking for a table with a slightly tattered copy of “Le Code Voynich” on, and you’re almost certainly in the right place. Hope to see some of you there!

“A Highly Unlikely Scenario”, reviewed…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Having been exposed to what might reasonably be termed a ‘surfeit’ of unhealthily imaginative Voynich theories since nineteen-clickety-duck [*], I’d like to think that I’ve seen quite a lot of ‘highly unlikely scenarios’: and so pretty much anything involving Roger Bacon, time travel, and the Voynich Manuscript I should have covered, right?

Wrong! In her 2013 novel “A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide To Saving The World” Rachel Cantor straps an extra ten feet to her conceptual pole and vaults far higher than just about anyone else would try. (In fact, I’d say she tries her level best to vault out of the whole darn arena.)

Yet there’s a spark, verve and swerve to her jambalaya of story ingredients: future fast food corporations at war, a heady mix of mismatched philosophies, time-travelling conversations (with Marco Polo and family members), magical songs (“who is the king of the [clap] third ether?“, stop me if you’ve heard it before), anarchist book club members (sort of), and clothes so vividly jangling they make your inner eye hurt (toreador pants and red afros? Yes, really). And then the story properly begins…

There will be those who glibly snark that such a book is not a ‘novel’, it is simply a creative writing experiment that somehow managed to escape the labs: and that the correct cultural response to such over-hybridized monsters is a tranquilizer dart in the thigh and a discreetly dark van to clear the Frankenbody from the streets. But pshaw to such reactionary knee-jerking, I say: for all its angularity, such writing keeps language fresh and (dare I say it) exciting. Read this and enjoy it! 🙂

[*] Which is, of course, the punch-line to the wonderful old joke: “Two little old ladies playing bingo. One says to the other, ‘You know, I’ve been coming here since nineteen clickety-duck’.“

Claudette Cohen and a Voynich Finno-Baltic Birth Registry…?

by ⋅ 65 Comments

Might the Voynich Manuscript be a Finno-Baltic birth registry? Might the names of some of the nymphs really be “Ellda, Sellai, Saisa, Saillar, Sia, Ella, Sara, Saisa, Rllai, and Eillkka”?

On the positive side, Claudette Cohen already has more words decrypted than Stephen Bax (she has a plucky ten to his stodgy nine), so she should clearly take some comfort that her brave-hearted Finno-Baltic decryption is numerically more of a success than his plainly inferior effort. And she also thinks that she has found thirteen points of similarity with a 1910 map of Sortavala, though with more than a passing nod towards “Karelian embroidery” (it says here).

Cipher Mysteries readers surely don’t need an advanced diploma in telepathy to know what I’m thinking here.

“Good for you, Claudette Cohen – even though you’re wrong for about a thousand different reasons, I’m happy for you that this is how you’ve come to the Voynich Manuscript. Enjoy your stay, and try to have some fun with it!”

Travel Channel

by ⋅ 6 Comments

Sorry for the short notice, but über-cipher-mystery The Voynich Manuscript is featuring prominently on an episode of “Castle Secrets & Legends” on the Travel Channel UK (Freeview channel 42) at 9pm tomorrow, i.e. 16th May 2014. It’s also playing on The Travel Channel Europe about now as well, if you happen to be elsewhere in our beloved United States of Europe EU. The blurb goes like this:-

“Behind the gates of the world’s most impressive castles, manor houses and mansions, many secrets are waiting to be revealed. Marvel at these amazing structures in all their glory and hear of the remarkable, mysterious and bizarre tales tied to the rich and powerful who once resided there.”

Yada yada yada. *sigh* All the same, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll have taken some nice footage of Villa Mondragone, which genuinely is an astonishing place in a wonderful location. If so, it’ll definitely be worth recording. Cryptography Schmyptography, eye candy wins out every time, right?

New Voynich-Nibiru-dinosaur-Time theory…

by ⋅ 10 Comments

Modern life plainly has me stumped: I now can’t even tell email spam and Voynich theories apart. Both seem to be generated from long lists of largely comprehensible phrases, before being dumped in my inbox as self-evident truths: both make my head hurt.

So with that gushing introduction over, here’s this week’s Voynich theory, courtesy of Jimmy Craig on starseeds.net (don’t ask what that is, you can guess enough to tell from its URL that you probably don’t want to know), who believes “that the Voynich Manuscript is describing “Food”, as in the “Mana from Heaven”, that Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat.” Moreover,…

The Characters in the Voynich Manuscript, are a description of the process that removes time. All the language in the Voynich Manuscript is apart of this algorithm based description, because of the complexity of the argument itself, the algorithm is parsed. This is probably the correct way, or more correct way of addressing the algorithm itself. The Process that Removes Time is Nibiru the Star Wormwood, Star of David. It is the great flood at the end of time, that brings mankind into Forever Night. The characters of the Voynich Manuscript are this Ocean, that is Nibiru the mechanism that removes time.

Craig then refers to the dragon picture on f25v, where the little dragon seems to be vacuuming up a giant plant into its snout:-

The Green Flower is Nibiru, the dinosaur in white below it is “Time”, the Star Nibiru is consuming “Time”, consuming the Dinosaur that is vomiting out the Flood Waters. Time is being destroyed by Nibiru we see the food or mana from heaven being produced thus some have concluded the Voynich Manuscript was a recipe book, when in fact it is a description of the translation of the universe. Therefore, it is a difference in the description of potential for the portion of man inheriting the new universe.

My own meta-theory is that there is a Voynich theorybot out there on a cunning, distant server, busy cranking out Voynich theories. You may think that this is a lousy hypothesis to explain the current near-Biblical flood of Voynich theories but… where’s your disproof?

Spring 2014 Voynich Miscellany…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

Over the last few days here at Cipher Mysteries, I’ve had all kinds of ups and downs with the website, mainly to do with excessive levels of spam (which triggered account suspensions, etc). Anyway, I’ve now turned all the security dials to 12 (Spinal Tap must have got it wrong, because 11 apparently wasn’t high enough) and have added yet more Heath-Robinson bodgery to the webmaster scripts and configurations: fingers crossed it will make a positive difference. And I’ve finally got outgoing mails working again (how annoying was that?!), *sigh*

Regardless, it’s spring cleaning time: that is, time to clear out my short term collection of Voynich cultural mini-links, some of which you might even like. Arty Voynich appropriators first:-

‘Modestly’ (Anne Corr) is offering a 32-page hand-made book comprising images from the Voynich Manuscript. She says:-

There are eight folded pages each with four illustrations printed onto a lovely textured watercolour paper chosen for its excellence in print quality and longevity. I have used a coptic stitch with a faux leather cover, finished with a faux leather tie. It certainly gives the impression of a medieval book.

I hope she’s talking about her own book: as if we haven’t got enough trouble with Voynich theorists who similarly claim that the Voynich itself “gives the impression of a medieval book.” *shakes head, sighs*

Rather less obviously crafty is New Zealander Baron’s Selection, who (virtually) offers T-shirts via Zazzle themed around “Philosophy, Politics, general ‘intellectual’ stuff.” One is called Voynich #1 T-Shirt (f67r1), and the other Voynich #2 T-shirt (Scorpio).

Incidentally, I once won a big box of promo T-Shirts for suggesting that the right question for the answer “Above a grocer’s shop in Grantham” was “What was the setting for Ben Elton’s ‘Inferno’?” All of which was a very long time ago indeed, however you try to slice that particular gala pie.

And now we move on to Voynichian musicians.

Melbourne music producer Andrei Eremin has recently put out a track called Voynich Manoeuvre. I actually quite like it, but it has got a certain 9pm-in-a-Shoreditch-restaurant vibe to it that’s hard not to notice: music to drink overpriced urban cocktails to. But perhaps that’s the point, I don’t know.

Anyway, Arcadia Studios TV has a YouTube interview with Nelson Rebelo of rocking Portuguese underground band The Voynich Code to promote their debut single ‘Antithesis’: here’s the official video for it. The guitar lick at about 4:19 is quite cool, though the whole band then goes into a sequence where they all look they’re playing air guitar, even though most of them are holding guitars. Which is a bit odd.

All the same, my son points out (correctly, it has to be said) that Antithesis is hard to distinguish from the awesomely dark the Lego Movie Batman song, though The Voynich Code’s version possibly still gets the vote (by a whisker). But feel free to make up your own mind, pop pickers! And that’s just the first verse… 😉

Finally: some proper Voynichian miscellany.

Was the (15th century) Voynich Manuscript written in the (1987-vintage) conlang Lojban, perhaps through some kind of trickery involving Leonardo da Vinci and time travel? You know the answer already (I can only hope), but though this April Fool’s Day paper was inspired both by Talbert and Tucker and by Stephen Bax, the way it deciphers “penis” and “darseBar” surely combines technical correctness with historical mastery in a way that the preceding three authors can only dream of emulating in the future. Enjoy!

“Overcompensating” web comic does the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 16 Comments

Jeffrey Rowland’s “Overcompensating” web comic has just run a short story about the Voynich Manuscript, with the author’s surprisingly reasonable premise being that “I’m sick of them not figuring out what the Voynich Manuscript means! I guess we’ll have to figure it out ourselves.”

OC1486-frame-1

How foolish of us all, it could only ever have been a manual for building a God 2.0! Perhaps J.J. really has nailed it, who can tell? 😉

Coast to Coast AM does the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 21 Comments

Tonight (23rd March 2014), Coast to Coast AM talk host George Noory will be discussing the Voynich Manuscript with “spiritual artist and musician Stuart Davis” and PR-hungry Voynich theorist Stephen Bax.

Well… at least the musician guy sounds credible. 😐

I have to admit that, not so many years ago, I would experience a frisson of excitement whenever I heard about the Voynich Manuscript’s being picked up by the media. Back then it would get no more than one or two genuinely substantial mentions per year, whether in Cryptologia, Nature, New Scientist, or wherever: and I was fascinated to see how the Voynich cultural meme developed over time.

But over the last few months it has been mentioned in so many goshdarned articles that the same phenomenon instead induces a wave of nausea – my stomach sinks and I wonder “how are they going to misrepresent Voynich research this time?”

For instance, Stephen Bax seems doggedly determined not only to recapitulate every single error made in Voynich research up to 1970 (e.g. …
* reading Voynichese as an obscure-but-lost-or-maybe-polyglot language;
* parsing Voynichese as if it were a simple letter-for-letter language;
* looking for obscure language matches for possible herbal cribs;
* assuming that any published research must have some Rastafarian-truth-in-all-truths viability; etc, etc),
…but also to represent his own nine wonky words as if they somehow define cutting edge Voynich research.

In fact, the mistakes Bax has made (and indeed continues to make) are about as stolidly retro as rockabilly quiffs.

But, of course, the chances of anybody outside the Voynich world having the history and cryptology chops to call him on this are terribly slim. Would George Noory ask him why he is so certain that Voynichese is actually a language, when…
* the dictionary statistics are all wrong, with words often differing by a single letter;
* different letters have different preferences for positions on the page;
* indeed, “p” gallows tend to occur in pairs halfway along the top line of paragraphs;
* frequently occurring groups like “aiiv” and “aiir” are apparently the same as medieval page references;
* and so on?

Incidentally, Bax’s most recent ‘find’ is that the plant depicted on f6v is Ricinus communis, the castor oil plant. Father Petersen, Ethel Voynich, Ellie Velinksa, and even Mazars and Wiartz (2006) all think this is a good match, so he’s kind of kicking at a long-opened door here. However, when Bax suggests that EVA “qoar” (which recurs 11 times throughout the manuscript) might be the name of the plant, I think he’s just being equal parts overoptimistic and foolish, and showing his ignorance about how Voynichese works.

Perhaps at any moment in history we get no more and no less than the Voynich ‘experts’ we deserve. What a horrible thought. 🙁

Review: Leena Krohn’s “Datura”…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

Leena Krohn’s novel “Datura” has long been on my big fat list of Voynich novels: though originally released in 2001 as ‘Datura tai harha jonka jokainen näkee’ by the multi-genre Finnish writer, it has now been translated into English as Datura, or a delusion we all see.

The story follows a woman running a kind of Finnish Fortean Times, and its chapters are criss-crossed by her (fictional) encounters with oddbods holding a wide range of fringe beliefs about reality. All the while, her accidental addiction to Datura is growing, while her ability to tell fantasy from reality diminishes… it’s a slippery slope. The Voynich Manuscript is in there somewhere (but then again, so is a lot of other marginal stuff).

That’s the bare bones of the story – is it worth a read?

Unfortunately, I didn’t really enjoy it half as much as I hoped I would. Krohn launches her story from a traditional horror plotline trope (the a-little-bit-of-this-surely-won’t-hurt gag), but never really puts her foot on the accelerator: her main character’s meetings with Fortean outsiders are more tetchy and impatient than genuinely weird or mind-expanding, and only occasionally intersect with anything like the plot.

Even the book’s Fortean fare – the Voynich Manuscript included – acts merely as a backdrop to the main character’s solipsistic, dreary suburban life, in thrall to her friend Markus (who owns the magazine she edits) for no particularly good reason. Even the ridiculous practical risks involved with taking Datura – aka the moonflower, angel’s trumpets, Devil’s Weed, or Jinson weed – are breezed over.

I’m sorry to say that at the end of the book I came away wishing that Krohn had been braver, had taken more risks with the writing, had been… I don’t know, altogether more gothic.

Structurally, you can’t (I’d say with my editor hat on) genuinely hope to sustain a book around a main character whose interactions with other characters are avowedly indifferent or grudgingly accepting: it’s just not enough for readers to work with.