Apologies for three missing posts!

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A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I’m very sorry to say that you’ve missed out on three recent updates to the site.

They were (in chronological order):
(1) Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp… – discusses an upcoming lecture at Cambridge University on various Slavic mystery documents and John Stojko’s Voynich theory.
(2) Voynich fruitiness back in season… – discusses two recent fruity Voynich theories that popped up on the Internet, one linking the VMs with Jewish pharmaceutical conspiracies, the other with the coelacanth (yes, really!).
(3) Decent 2010 paper on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers – discusses a paper by two Norwegian academics searching for homophone cycles in the uncracked Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher.

Feel free to click through and have a look at them, they were all good posts, well worth a read. Enjoy! 🙂

Voynich fruitiness back in season…

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Go on, admit it: for all your research rationality and historical smarts, you secretly love nutty Voynich theories – the fruitier they are, the more in control of your own thoughts you feel. Of course, that feeling of superiority is merely the most fleeting of illusions: the only real difference is that you’re smart enough to keep your mouth shut. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool etc.

So here are some low-hanging Voynich fruits to help you feel better about yourself. Think of it as therapy you can actually afford!

(1) “Flanders”, a 50-post veteran on theforbiddentruth.net, shared his thoughts on “probable jew” Wilfrid Voynich’s conspiracy-fuelling pharmacological manuscript:-

These documents are called the Voynich Manuscripts, as they came into the possession and the estate of a probable jew, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, allegedly from the jesuits in Villa Mondragone.

Because of the jesuit, Vatican, jewish-communist connections as well as the mystery surrounding the documents, they may be of interest to those whose interests lie in those areas. Some of the information in the links ties in with activists in the pre-jewish/communist takeover of Russia. […]

One has to wonder is whether the documents have not actually been already translated while our present “wonderful jewish drug companies” are benefitting from “their research” into the “modern” pharmaceticals. Maybe someone else will have the key to knowledge which would remove some of their mystery.

Marvellous stuff, simply marvellous.

(2) Mark Russell added a comment to a Voynich-related post on the Government Book Talk website (which was, sensibly enough, actually discussing how to download Mary D’Imperio’s book “Elegant Enigma”)… but his thoughts memorably led off into the little-known world of the “fish/mammal”:-

4) In one of the [Voynich Manuscript’s] pictures they have a picture of a Pre Historic Fish/Mammal in the Middle of the page.
5) Recently they have found Two of these Fish/Manuals in the ocean—Must be over 100,000,000 years old in evolution.
6) They say that this species of fish/mammals was the evolution of Man going to Land.
[…]
17) The Scales on many of these pictures look like the scales from the Pre-Historic Fish/Mammal.
[…]
It is very interesting that this book has a Picture of a Fish/Mammal—We have only found (2) of these Fish/Mammals in the last 100 years. There is no way anyone should of been able to see one of these Fish/Mammals back in the 1400′s or the 1500′s.

Just in case you’re not quite connecting with Mark here, I’m pretty sure he’s trying to reach towards linking the fish-eating-a-nymph drawing in the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (the water / balneological quire) with the famous ‘Lazarus taxon’ – i.e. a species formerly thought to be extinct, but which subsequently turned out to be still alive – the coelacanth. So here’s the Voynich fish…

…and here’s a coelacanth caught in 1974 (courtesy of Wikipedia, bless ’em)…

Spooky, eh? 🙂

Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp…

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Here’s an upcoming talk at Cambridge’s Sidney Sainsbury’s Sussex College on 12th October 2011 at 5pm which might be of interest to Voynich researchers. Harvard Professor George Grabowicz promises an interesting couple of hours with his lecture “The Eternal Return of National Mystifications: the Voynich Manuscript, the Book of Vles and the Igor Tale“. (It seems to be a follow-on to a talk he gave to the ASEES 42nd Annual National Convention in November 2010called Code and Message in Slavic Mystifications: the Book of Vles, the Voynich Manuscript and the Igor Tale.)

You’d be forgiven for not having heard about the other two named manuscripts: I’d only heard of the first one – the Book of V[e]les because it is generally believed (from its faked-up use of modern Slavic language) to be a literary forgery, and not the ancient Slavic battlefest written on mysterious planks as was originally claimed. Unless Grabowicz has some surprising new angle on this, I guess this part will be pretty straightforward.

But you’ll probably be unshocked to hear that there is a long-running debate over the authenticity of the final manuscript of the trio, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (which, incidentally, Borodin used as the basis for his opera “Prince Igor”, historical trivia buffs). While Wikipedia would have us believe that the “current scholarly consensus” on the Ms is that it’s a genuine 12th century manuscript, there’s a vocal cadre of Harvard historians (led by [former?] Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus Edward L. Keenan) who actually think it’s a goddamn fake. I can only presume, ummm, Harvard Professor Grabowicz has his own opinion on this matter. 🙂

“The Eternal Return” part of Grabowicz’s talk’s title, then, would seem to be about how some people would love these stories to be true almost in a religious way, so as to return to some mythically / nationalistically pure primordial state (following Mircea Eliade’s use of the term). But… what has all that got to do with the Voynich Manuscript?

Directly with the VMs itself, not a lot, I’d say: the claims that the Voynich is a fake or hoax remain extremely lightweight, and fail to sit comfortably with the radiocarbon dating, codicology, palaeography, and art history (all of which point fairly unequivocally to the 15th century). But then again, there is also a rich loam of faux historical retrospective storytelling that various people have projected back onto the VMs, most notably (in my opinion) John Stojko’s hilariously fruity “Letter to God’s Eye”.

It turns out that Grabowicz covered Stojko’s nonsense (admittedly tangentially on p.21, but it’s there none the less) way back when in a nice little article from 2001. What he also mentions – somewhat scarily – is that Stojko’s Voynich theory also appeared to be inching its way into nationalist accounts of Ukrainian history. It’s probably this that “Michael the friend of D” was talking about in 2007, that I mentioned somewhat cursorily here.

OK, it’s true that I tend to talk about these hallucinatory nationalist back-projections as if they’re high comedy, but the reality is that they’re desperately low tragedy, weapons of mass mystification used to trigger slow-motion car crashes between nations and factions. So, if Grabowicz can stoutly resist the postmodernist temptation to trashtalk the VMs’ authenticity (a swamp every sensible academic should actively avoid) and focus instead on the quasi-militant use of stupid theories in troubled times, it should be a great talk. 😉

At last, someone ‘gets’ the Voynich Manuscript…

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And who better than Kemal S, an ironically elitist dilettante who digs sketchy coffee houses, Sufis, and Hermeticism? For the first time in a very long while indeed, I’m relieved to find a nice post on the Voynich Manuscript from someone with sufficient culture and wit to appreciate its enraging crosstalk without lapsing into Wikipedia-esque cut’n’paste brainlessness. Bless you, K, even if I’m unable to stretch to your standard fees (“Coffee, a kiss, and a back massage”, allegedly).

Notes for passing researchers: “Kashf al-Asrar al-Makhfiya” translates roughly as “Key to the secrets of the hidden ones”; while even though كتاب كنـز أسرار translates as “Treasure book secrets”, the manuscript name listed is [Makhtut] Ibn Sina Kanz Al-Asrar, a medieval grimoire attributed to Ibn Sina (i.e. Avicenna) but which actually looks to me more like handwritten copies of Powerpoint presentations taken by a bored Arabic MBA student. Finally, Malik ibn Anas was a real 8th century Imam and teacher, but I would be somewhat surprised if a dourly sagacious religious authority such as him wrote a “Kitab al-Sirr” (book of the secret)… but I guess you never know. 😉

Voynich, summer 2011 miscellany…

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Slowly but inexorably, the Voynich curve is a-changing: as the meme continues to extend its two-way taproots into mainstream culture during 2011, more artists and novelists are seeing its unreadability and inscrutability as sources of neo-postmodernist inspiration. Simultaneously, discussion of the manuscript is sprawling into many different languages and cultures (such as Romanian, according to Google Trends): yet these forays are typically only for bloggers to plant a brightly coloured flag on top of the Voynich iceberg, rather than exploring the vast volume of cryptographically frozen material beneath.

All of which is to say that hit counts count for little: if you’re looking to dig up interesting stuff on the Voynich Manuscript, Google is now only rarely of any use (and don’t start me on Bing, we’d be here all night). Which is of course a shame, but I thought I ought to point it out anyway.

Regardless, here’s a sporadic unreality check for you, broadcast live and direct from the often-moribund world of Voynichiana: all the VMs news that’s fit to deny. Enjoy!

(1) Klaus Schmeh has been busy (presumably) finishing up his upcoming book on cipher mysteries (and more on that when it arrives). To help prepare the ground for that, he’s done a number of 10-minute talks on the VMs in German, including this one on YouTube from Science Slam Ulm which even included a number of Powerpoint visual jokes, and a more crypto-oriented presentation from Science Slam Bochum. Oh, and also at Science Slam Hamburg, Muenster, Ulm, Koeln, etc. Unmissable stuff, if you happen to be a German-speaking Voynichophile (and you weren’t already in one of the audiences).

(2) “Baroque pop” band Borrowed Beams of Light have released an album called Stellar Hoax, apparently inspired by the Voynich Manuscript. More on that here.

(3) Zbigniew Banasik’s Manchu Voynich theory has been partially revived (if not yet actually resuscitated), with a Reddit post by ‘daruka’.

(4) Sad news: the Voynich Monkeys archive of the main Voynich mailing list has apparently eaten its last banana. Is anyone planning to step forward to produce a new Internet-accessible archive? It’s not as if anything of great consequence has been posted there in the last few years (ducks beneath large plexiglass screen, winking to camera), but its absence is a bit of a shame, all the same. 🙁

(5) Meanwhile, a Japanese Voynich researcher continues to repost interesting emails from the early (and far more productive) days of the Voynich mailing list, not really sure why. For me, it’s an odd feeling to find your own emails randomly popping up on the Web some eight years delayed, rather like the start of Carl Sagan’s Contact. Does anyone happen to know what’s going on in Japan, Voynich-wise?

(6) And finally… no plans for a Voynich Summer 2011 pub meet as yet, sorry! I’m currently holding down three jobs simultaneously, which (mathematically) would seem to leave me roughly -40 free hours each week. Hence the recent low post rate on Cipher Mysteries! Hopefully this will change for the better soon: but in the meantime, a virtual Voynich toast to you all – cheers!

I’ve just got back from Italy…

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…where I’ve been filming in Venice and Milan for a Voynich documentary to come out (I guess) in late 2012. So, I’m very sorry if I’ve been somewhat quiet of late, but this process has involved a fair amount of behind-the-scenes preparation to try to get the most out of all the different locations.

Apart from nearly getting sunstroke in the 35-degree heat one of the days, 🙁 it turned out to be a thoroughly great experience. The crew were all fantastic to work with (even at the end of a 12 hour working day), while the impressive historical and technical experts assembled by the production team were also a pleasure to meet and work with. What’s more, in all the different filming locations, we managed to gain access to unusual corners of places that normally remain locked to visitors, and this turned up a good number of historical surprises I for one wasn’t expecting at all… but more on all those once the programme has aired.

You may be wondering whether this documentary will somehow resolve all the unanswered questions about the Voynich Manuscript. Errrrm… of course not, that would be ridiculous. Even so, the things I saw were historical eye-openers for me (and I’ve seen a lot of stuff), and I very much hope you will enjoy the ride! 🙂

Milanese enciphered letters, call for help…

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Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know that I’m pretty good at digging historical things up, at shining lights under long-unmoved archival rocks. Well… my challenge this week was to find some mid-Quattrocento Milanese enciphered letters, and though I’ve possibly got most of the way to an answer, I’ve ended up a bit stuck, and would really appreciate some help from all you good people!

The starting point was that I was sure that the Archivio di Stato in Milan contains a vast number of documents from the period I’m most interested in (Milan’s Francesco Sforza era, i.e. 1450-1465), so that ought to be the first place to look for these. But (as is normally the case) relevant manuscript catalogues are few and far between online, so I initially drew a blank.

Then I (somewhat luckily) stumbled across a 1995 book online called “Fifteenth-century Dance and Music: Treatises and Music” by A. William Smith. Page 6 of its “Fifteenth-century Italian Dance Sources” chapter mentions a letter: “26 July Archivio di Stato milanese. Potenze estere. Napoli 1455. in cifre from Albrico Maletta, Sforza ambassador in Napoli to Duke Francesco Sforza in Milano.” Interestingly, f20v of the famous Tranchedino cipher ledger is marked as “Cum Francisco Maleta” (though this is sandwiched between a 1458 cipher and a 1459 cipher, so might well have been entered into the ledger later than 1455): all the same, it would be interesting to compare the two. But how to find the manuscript reference for this?

The first thing to note is that “Potenze Estere” is actually the name of a large set of documents within the Milanese Carteggio Sforzesco archive. Obviously, I then searched like crazy for (I’d guess a scan of a 19th century) inventory of this, but without any luck. So where next?

Then I remembered Aloysius Meister’s “Die Anfaege Der Modernen Diplomatischen Geheimschrift” (1902): p.30 contains a (surprisingly complex, I think) Milanese cipher key and nomenclator dated 14th March 1448, with the reference “Mailand, Staatsarchiv. Pot. Est. Cifre Fasc. 2 Nr 5.” There’s also a 1483 cipher (p.31) noted as “l. c. Fasc. 1 Nr 15” (interestingly, this contains a “4o” composite character (for ‘z’) but with the ‘o’ attached to the downstroke of the ‘4’), and a 1530 cipher key (p.32) listed as “l. c. Fasc. 4 Nr. 53 Grofs 4o”.

(I should add that Meister 1902 also lists ciphers for Modena, including one [p.35] dated 23rd June 1435 “In Milano” which fascinatingly contains “4” for ‘Q’ and “4o” for “Qua”. [“Canc. duc. Arch. Proprio Mappe II. Nr 1.”]: and for Florence, he lists the Cifra di Galiotto Fibindacci da Ricasoli 1424, which similarly uses “4o” for “Q” [p.50])

So there you have it: it seems that the Carteggio Sforzesco’s Potenze Estere archive contains several specific bundles of cipher documents (“Cifre Fasc[iculus/-i]”) that sounds like what I’m looking for. But then again, Meister was writing over a century ago and much may well have changed there: specifically, here’s a link to the best listing I could find for the pre-1535 part of the Potenze Estere archive, but note that there is no obvious cipher bundle or subset to be seen. And that would seem to be the end of the line – though I’d expect the 1455 letter from Naples listed by Smith is probably filed in the Napoli section of the Pot. Est. archive (which is more or less entirely arranged geographically).

At the end of all that, I don’t know whether I’m really close or really far away. Are the cipher bundles Meister referred to still in the Potenze Estere, and what do they contain? Or have they been moved, split, stolen or lost at some point during the last century? Regardless, where do I need to go to see them and what should I ask for? Any pointers you can turn up to help me answer these questions would be much appreciated! [Please leave comments on the page below, or email me at the normal address]. Thanks!

Update: I subsequently found a more detailed listing on p.927 of this sizeable inventory: it says that the Atti Ducali (1392-1535) section of the Archivio Sforzesco contains “Cancelleria segreta 1450-1535, scatole 11. Raccolta di documenti relativi all’attività quotidiana della cancelleria: sommari, cifrari, occorrenze (carta, inchiostro ecc.), archivio, documenti relativi alla biblioteca del castello di Pavia.” So perhaps the cipher documents Meister saw were later moved over to this Atti Ducali section?

Alternatively, the Carteggio Sforzesco’s Potenze Sovrane archive also holds a section marked “Cancelleria segreta – Chiavi e cifrari (scatt. 1591, 1597 – 1598)”, which is what Lidia Cerioni relied on for her book “La diplomazia sforzesca”, and might instead be what I’m looking for (it’s hard to tell). Oh, and just a few bundles away, the same archive has the intriguing-sounding scat. 1569: “Miscellanea, astrologia, occultismo, superstizione etc.” Really, what historian of mysteries could resist sneaking a peek? 😉

High class Voynich miscellany…

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Here are some piquant canapes to twingle your Voynich tastebuds, a bit like “Space Dust for researchers”.

(1) Gerry Kennedy has discovered that a deathmask of Wilfrid Voynich was taken, and that it still exists.

(2) Jackie Speel tells me that “in 1916 Wilfrid Voynich was involved in a friendly law case with the Lincoln Cathedral authorities over the ownership of one of their books he had acquired in good faith from another American dealer (The Times May 11, 1916 pg 4 refers). In the event he donated the book back to the cathedral.”

(3) Jackie also notes that Wilfrid Voynich’s British Museum (i.e. what is now the British Library) “ticket/renewal details still survive – he first joined on 19 October 1895 and the ticket was last renewed 29 November 1907.”

(4) Diane O’Donovan points out that “Chinese inks are high carbon”.

(5) While Ludi Price concurs that f1r’s “glyph 3 does look uncannily like yuan, the [Chinese] character for ‘first'”, the key problem with VMs Chinese theories is that “(spoken) Chinese in the 14th/15th century was completely different to modern Mandarin Chinese. It had more tones, more glutteral stops, and was more akin to modern day Cantonese than it is today. People who want to tackle a VMS as Chinese theory would need to approach it from a Classical Chinese standpoint, not a modern one.”

(6) Henry Berg has just published his own breathtakingly syncretic Voynich theory, and hacked it on as a link to the bottom of the Wikipedia page (shame on him). It’s a heady mix of Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular), Athanasius Kircher, Isaac Voss and even Shugborough Hall (no, I kid you not), with 17th century conspiracies and disinformation aplenty. Great fun for the the next Voynich pub meet: but little genuine chance of being a workable hypothesis, alas.

(7) On the diametrically opposite side of the color wheel, here’s a reasonably balanced (but, even so, frequently wrong) view of the VMs’ ciphertext, courtesy of Sravana Reddy and Kevin Knight, hot off the presses. Enjoy!

Voynich – the McCrone report now online!

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Wowza – the long-awaited chemical analysis of the Voynich Manuscript’s inks by the McCrone Institute (you know, the one commissioned for Andreas Sulzer’s 2009 ORF documentary on the VMs) has just appeared sans fanfare on the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Voynich page.

Feel free to read the report as a PDF, though note that it wouldn’t render in Internet Explorer for me, so I downloaded it directly (“Save Target As…”) and opened it in Adobe Reader. Its key conclusions are:-

* A single ink [typical iron gall] was “in all probability” used for both the main body of the text and for the drawings.
* A second ink [high iron] was used for the folio numbers.
* A third ink [high carbon, very low iron] was used for the quire numbers .
* A fourth ink [high carbon, very low iron] was used for the Latin alphabet on f1r.
* The blue paint was ground azurite “with minor amounts of cuprite, a copper oxide”.
* “The green paint is a mixture of copper-stained amorphous organic material optically consistent with copper resinate, and copper-chloride compounds consistent with atacamite or similar compounds”, but without any resins obviously present.
* Gum (presumably gum arabic) was used to bind the green paint and all the inks (apart from the Latin alphabet ‘a’ on f1r, which seems to have been bound with a protein), though “the spectra include several sharp peaks […] that are not expected for a gum as per the spectra in our library”, which “suggests the possibility of other constituents, which remain unidentified as of this date”. Note that the blue and red-brown paints were not tested for gum.

It’s going to take a while to digest this properly, basically because the Beinecke has only released the text part of the report, and none of the figures, photographs or reference spectra mentioned in the text. Other scans referred to in the text (such as UV scans of f1r, and presumably of f17r as this appeared in publicity montages for the documentary) are similarly absent: it would be particularly nice to see these as well, wouldn’t you say?

To my mind, the various ink compositions would seem to suggest that there were three distinct codicological phases: a first text/drawing phase (normal iron gall), a second quire number and f1r Latin alphabet phase (where the inks are different, but made to broadly the same house style), and a third folio numbers phase. All of which should be no great surprise to most Voynich researchers, but all the same I personally find it interesting that the quire numbers seem to have been added in the same general phase as f1r’s attempted cipher alphabet. It therefore seems likely that the quire numberer did not know how to decipher the VMs, a conclusion I reached several years ago via quite independent codicological means.

Finally, it is somewhat disappointing that the single most-debated piece of information is conspicuously absent: I refer, of course, to the suggestion that the ink was added not hugely long after the vellum was originally made. Which unfortunately means that many of the nuttier theories are still in play. Oh well: apart from that, it’s a nice piece of work, highly recommended!

Voynich pub meet 3rd April 2011…

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Yes, the weather forecast looks pleasant enough to go for ye verilye pleasantte (and genuinely historical) olde Londonne pubbe The Prospect of Whitby at 4.30pm this Sunday 3rd April 2011, a mere ten minute stroll from Wapping station. As normal, the BeerInTheEvening page for the pub has practical details of getting there; or feel free to Google Map its postcode (E1W 3SH) etc.

Plan A is to meet on its beer terrace in the middle looking out over the Thames. Hope to see you (and Klaus Schmeh) there!