Voynich Summer Camp, transcript of session #1…

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For the recent Hungarian Voynich summer camp, I offered to do a couple of IM sessions over Skype, both of which seemed to go down very well. I thought many Cipher Mysteries readers might enjoy going over the transcript, so here it is (lightly edited for house style, as usual, and with after-the-event section dividers to make it not quite so unwieldy). I’ll be posting the Sagittarius spreadsheet mentioned here to the the blog very shortly, have no fear! 🙂

Note: Skype IM session on 27/08/2009
vc = “voynich camp”
NP = “Nick Pelling”

o. Introduction

[19:01:42] vc: Thank you very much for the possibility.
[19:01:57] NP: No problem – may I ask who is there this evening?
[19:02:41] vc: We are currently five pople but we are six and tomorrow we will be seven.
[19:02:50] NP: five is fine 🙂
[19:03:11] NP: Do you have names, or are you Devo?
[19:03:19] vc: Two linguists, and 3 geekz.
[19:03:46] NP: I’m not sure who would win the fight. Best to work together.
[19:03:57] vc: Zsolt, Ancsi, Norbi, Miklos, Anna, Andris.
[19:04:13] NP: OK, got it. Where shall I begin?

1. Page Reference Discussion

[19:04:49] vc: can you speak about your own theory about the seem to be page links?
[19:05:29] NP: OK – the apparent page references
[19:08:00] NP: Large medieval documents were bound into quires, and the quires were numbered
[19:08:16] NP: But for centuries, people used letters rather than numbers
[19:08:21] NP: a b c d e etc
[19:08:46] NP: folio numbers were then given in roman numerals for that quire
[19:08:50] NP: i ii iii iv v etc
[19:09:11] NP: The side of the page was also given, with r for recto, v for verso
[19:09:57] NP: So, for centuries people referred to page numbers pimarily in tiny little letter patterns of the form: air, aiv, aiir, aiiv, aiiir, aiiiv
[19:10:38] NP: Few people nowadays (apart from codicologists) bear this in mind, but this was the primary way in which books were structured circa 1400
[19:11:22] NP: So, if we were to look at the VMs through the eyes of someone living 500 years ago, the aiiv / aiir patterns would immediately jump out a t them as being page references.
[19:12:05] NP: Specifically, page references to the first bound quire of a book (for there is no bir biv biir biiv pattern in the VMs)
[19:12:30] NP: So, you might say, what if these are indeed page references to the first quire?
[19:13:09] NP: Well… if they are page references, they’re quite strange ones: references to recto (r) pages would then be vastly outnumbered by references to verso (v) pages
[19:13:51] NP: Ultimately, it comes down to a paradox of vision – we’re presented with something that *looks* like page numbers, but which does not have the statistical profile of page numbers. How can that be?
[19:14:26] vc: We are listening, go on
[19:14:36] NP: Once you start saying “well, these are only designed to resemble page numbers”, then you’re into the realms of cryptography and steganography
[19:15:36] NP: I think that the presence of these non-page-number page numbers is a persuasive reason to look for cryptographic solutions in preference to linguistic solutions
[19:15:43] NP: But then…
[19:16:13] NP: You have to ask the question, what are these non-page-number page numbers actually doing? What is their function?
[19:16:43] NP: When I went to the Beinecke in May 2006, I spent an hour looking at a single page of the VMs trying to work it out.
[19:16:58] NP: f38v
[19:17:32] NP: I had borrowed a magnifying glass from the front desk and went over every aiiv-style pattern on the page, over and over again, looking for a clue
[19:17:46] NP: And then I noticed it, one tiny piece at a time
[19:18:15] NP: And in the two years since, I’ve fleshed it out into a complete story of how they came about, and why they have the shape they do.
[19:19:20] NP: In the first phase, the author wrote a simple “v” shape and added a carefully placed dot above the row of i’s. This indicated one of the Arabic numerals 1-9 (I think)
[19:19:55] NP: However, after that early Herbal A phase, the author revisited it and thought it was too obvious, and so added scribal flourishes.
[19:20:20] NP: These loops start from the dot, go up and around, and rejoin the unflourished “v” shape at the top right
[19:20:54] NP: In the Currier B phase, the author used a completely different way of enciphering numbers (but using the same aiiiv family pattern)
[19:21:13] vc: Yes, we can see it in Psp
[19:21:26] NP: So, you can see the layers of development of the cipher over time. Voynichese wasn’t a static system, it was an evolving system
[19:22:13] NP: The problem with using statistical tools on Voynichese is that the system moves over time, which is why it is important to apply tests to each phase in turn
[19:22:21] vc: That’s why you are so eager about to reconstruct the original binding order…….
[19:22:32] NP: That’s one of the reasons, yes
[19:23:02] NP: Mainly it comes back to the evolution of the cipher, though. By tracking the evolution, we can perhaps find a way into it
[19:23:08] vc: because the question arises – why one can observe this on 38 v first?
[19:23:37] NP: I chose the page because it was clearly written and had plenty of aiiv patterns on to work with.
[19:23:54] NP: Some herbal pages are clear but don’t have much text
[19:24:50] NP: I suppose one of the cutting edge research things I’d like you all to come away with from this is the idea that the Voynich grew and developed
[19:25:13] vc: Is it observable on other pages? for example, on a page written by another Currier hand?
[19:25:14] NP: It was not a “fait accompli”, a huge static thing.
[19:25:24] NP: Only on Currier A pages
[19:25:31] NP: Hand 1 pages
[19:25:40] vc: Hmmm…
[19:25:58] NP: On Hand 2 pages, the “v” flourish is written in one go, but takes a number of shapes
[19:26:11] NP: I think that the Arabic numeral is enciphered using those shapes
[19:26:17] NP: Look for yourself
[19:26:41] NP: I should say: “the v and the scribal flourish are written together in one go”

2. The vertical column on f49v

[19:27:15] vc: Speakin’ bout arabic numerals, have you checked with your own eyes on the real thing F49v?
[19:27:20] NP: yes
[19:27:27] NP: not original
[19:27:31] vc: There are arabic numbers on the left margin.
[19:27:40] NP: Yes, 16th century Arabic numerals
[19:27:52] NP: Yet the quire numbers have 15th century Arabic numerals
[19:28:09] vc: It seems on the reproductions that they are about the same color and style as the Voynichese letters nearby
[19:28:10] NP: Doesn’t add up, unless the f49v letters were added later
[19:28:19] NP: They’re pretty close, but they’re not the same
[19:28:28] vc: 🙁
[19:28:44] NP: It fooled Brumbaugh – he erected a huge theory on that alone
[19:28:54] vc: Next Q from us:
[19:29:22] vc: Then how would you interpret these single character lists on the left of some pages?
[19:29:56] NP: (1) Page titles
[19:30:00] NP: (2) cipher keys
[19:30:02] NP: (3) both
[19:30:05] NP: (4) neither
[19:30:07] NP: 🙂
[19:30:10] vc: XD
[19:30:46] vc: …So you were able to turn the original pages with your bare hands?
[19:30:49] NP: Oh yes
[19:30:52] vc: Jeez…
[19:31:00] NP: They were clean
[19:31:01] NP: 🙂
[19:31:20] NP: Seriously, the Beinecke loves people to look at its books
[19:31:36] NP: But they do insist you take your tinfoil hat off at the door
[19:32:26] NP: Actually, I looked at the VMs for three whole days, which was extremely generous of them, and that was much appreciated

3. Steganography or cryptography?

[19:32:20] vc: Right. So: (we haven’t read your book…yet) Steganography or cryptography?
[19:32:30] NP: Both
[19:32:55] NP: It is a cipher that has been disguised as a language
[19:34:05] NP: One of the back-end ciphers (the verbose ciphers I blogged about earlier today) turns a dense, information-rich series of tokens and turns it into an information-sparse language-like entity
[19:34:21] NP: XYZ –> BABEBI
[19:34:33] NP: is a trivial example
[19:34:57] NP: where X –> BA, Y –> BE, Z –> BI
[19:35:38] vc: Right -we have just thinking about the same conception.
[19:35:44] NP: This gives the apparent CVCVCV behaviour that makes the VMs seem so language-like
[19:35:56] vc: Just to reveal some of our works —
[19:36:03] NP: ok…
[19:36:14] NP: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/08/27/voynich-cipher-structure
[19:37:36] NP: And here’s a test I did in 2003, so I’m pretty consistent: http://voynichcentral.com/users/nickpelling/pairs.gif
[19:37:45] vc: We will definitely read your article later…
[19:38:41] NP: And here’s the article I couldn’t find earlier: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/06/06/the-voynich-cipher-for-code-breakers
[19:41:27] vc: Ok, we have just made a quick look on them for some of us have’nt seen these before.
[19:41:49] NP: There’s lots of good stuff on my blog. Lots!
[19:42:06] vc: The author knows 🙂
[19:42:25] NP: I wouldn’t post it if it wasn’t good. 😉
[19:42:42] NP: You should see the stuff I don’t post! ;-o
[19:42:57] vc: We downloaded your whole blog and copied it to identical CD’s

4. Occitan sources?

[19:43:17] vc: Ok. Next q:
[19:43:36] vc: About the Occitan language.
[19:44:06] vc: Where does the info on the month names come from?
[19:44:30] NP: Jorge Stolfi asked a load of Occitan researchers back in 1997
[19:44:46] NP: There’s a page on it, it’s certainly in the 1997 vms-list archive
[19:45:29] NP: Here’s this week’s post on it: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/08/22/jaume-deydiers-livre-de-raison
[19:45:36] vc: hmm…
[19:45:53] NP: Basically, the closest match was with Toulon Occitan
[19:46:05] NP: But with a bit of German thrown in (for “augst”)
[19:46:26] vc: (also: “may”)
[19:46:36] NP: But is it maij or may?
[19:47:41] NP: However, it’s very likely that the Toulon Occitan was merely one person (Jaume Deydier) so it’s a bit of a small sample to be doing inferences from
[19:48:17] NP: Unless anyone knows better, there aren’t that many written examples of pre-1600 Occitan to be found anywhere
[19:48:34] NP: And spelling was a bit of a fluid thing back then, too
[19:48:58] vc: yes, our lingusist here told us 🙂
[19:49:03] NP: I’ve just read a book on artisan autobiographies, and many artisans deliberately spelt things how they sounded
[19:49:22] NP: a kind of anti-academic independent spirit

5. Voynich Marginalia questions

[19:50:27] vc: Do you think that the marginalia and other features written with latin alphabet originate from more than one person?
[19:50:40] NP: Yes, but perhaps not in the way that you might think
[19:50:51] vc: ?
[19:51:03] NP: The problem with the marginalia is that they have Voynichese embedded in them
[19:51:18] vc: This is not a problem. 🙂
[19:51:36] NP: Well.. you’ll see why it might be…
[19:51:48] NP: If you look at f17r under an ultraviolet black lamp, there’s a piece of Voynichese tacked on the end
[19:52:04] NP: it reads: oteeeolair
[19:52:28] NP: Rene Zandbergen independently observed it earlier this year, so I didn’t just imagine it
[19:52:30] NP: 🙂
[19:52:48] vc: Do one usually have a portable ultraviolet black lamp when you go to the Beinecke? 🙂
[19:53:00] NP: Luckily they have one behind the desk you can borrow
[19:53:06] NP: I left mine in the car
[19:53:07] NP: 🙂
[19:53:36] NP: Similarly, there’s Voynichese embedded in the f116v marginalia
[19:53:48] vc: But that can be seen.
[19:54:02] vc: It would be really nice if they could be used as cribs
[19:54:23] NP: That’s what Newbold thought…
[19:54:37] NP: But why can’t we read the marginalia on f116v?
[19:54:47] vc: Yes… Why?
[19:55:10] NP: I think the answer is that successive owners have emended (altered incorrectly) the text, trying to rescue fading words
[19:55:52] NP: And so f17r, f66r, and f116v have all been rescued but worsened
[19:56:44] NP: Unfortunately, the Beinecke’s scans aren’t good enough for us to be able to do forensic uber-restoration on these
[19:56:56] NP: I’ve tried, though, believe me I’ve tried
[19:57:25] vc: We have consulted with a hungarian medieval scholer who suggested that text on the 116v is actually a prayer or something like that in the realm of magic
[19:57:31] vc: a rune
[19:57:38] NP: Well, a prayer is close
[19:57:46] NP: ahia maria
[19:57:51] NP: + + +
[19:57:57] vc: the characters like + as separators justifiy this theory.
[19:58:00] NP: yes
[19:58:35] NP: However, if you look at the “rescued” letters at the beginning of the same line, you can see the contrast with the faded “ahia maria” letters
[19:58:57] vc: He said that this is usual at medieval spells. At these places one might draw a cross in the air. how is it said in english?
[19:59:20] NP: the same, probably “trace a cross shape in the air”
[19:59:33] NP: “trace out a cross shape in the air” probably better
[19:59:49] vc: As Catholics still do
[20:00:16] NP: It could be a prayer, or a curse, or a spell (protection?) or anything
[20:00:52] NP: Remember that the boundaires between magic and liturgy in the 15th century was painfully thin – both were usually carried out by broadly the same people.
[20:01:17] NP: See Richard Kieckhefer’s book “Forbidden Rites”, recommended
[20:01:19] vc: (What is lighter than a witch? A stone perhaps? Or a duck?)
[20:02:00] NP: I’m getting that sinking feeling
[20:02:47] NP: necromancy, charm, spell, prayer – pretty fluid lines between them all
[20:02:58] vc: Whatever the main language of the spell, the last words seem to be in german. What is your opinion about this?
[20:03:31] NP: I think that this was probably added by the first obsessive Voynichologist (who just happened to be German)
[20:03:34] vc: (The duck comes from Monthy Python and the holy Grail…)
[20:03:39] NP: Georg Baresch
[20:03:44] NP: 🙂
[20:04:17] NP: I think it was probably Baresch who is responsible for most of the attempted rescuing of the marginalia
[20:04:32] vc: So you are saying that this last page is from at least 2 or 3 hands?
[20:04:39] NP: But it was Baresch who ensured that it got passed down to us, so we should be grateful to him
[20:05:03] NP: Yes, but on top of each other rather than side by side
[20:05:20] NP: Blow the page up and look again at the varying density of the ink and quills
[20:05:33] vc: We will certainly do that.
[20:06:34] NP: Also, put the various marginalia side by side to scale (all blown up), it’s an interesting viewpoint
[20:06:53] NP: Print them out at A1 scale – huge!

6. About the Hungarians…

[20:06:59] vc: We still have a lot of questions… do you still have some time?
[20:07:14] NP: I have about half an hour now
[20:07:50] vc: Great.
[20:07:51] NP: but I’d like to rest my fingers for five minutes – so, please, tell me what you each think of the VMs (one sentence each, please!)
[20:09:22] vc: (Miklos): Hi. I personally think that this is a kind of constructed language or maybe a written glossolalia.
[20:10:04] NP: it’s still 100x more rational than believing the moon landings were faked 🙂
[20:10:26] NP: even if it is wrong. 🙂
[20:12:57] vc: We are by the way started our searches on a few different pathes. One group is investigating the mythological context of the drawings with girls (if there’s any). The geekz are rather trying to draw some consequences using the digram and trigram entropies, and comparing our results with various 17th century documents, on different languages (and even as exotiic stuffs as Tamil and Hebrew)
[20:13:29] vc: On the other hand
[20:14:23] vc: we’d like to produce some “grammar” here, as well, so, we decided (similarly as Stolfi did it once) to look at the distributions of different words.
[20:14:26] NP: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/06/18/q13-and-voynich-balneology-sources
[20:14:58] vc: If we concider the first words in the herbal the names of the plants, than maybe that could bring us somewhere.
[20:15:22] NP: There have been many grammars proposed over the years – though I would strongly caution you to treat Currier A and Currier B separately, as the language changed along the way
[20:15:56] vc: Also, we are comparing the Hungarian flora with the drawings, and meanwhile with other old herbals (e. g. ashmole codex). We also about to address a hungarian herbelist in this topic.
[20:16:22] vc: Sure, we’d like to treat the two couriers differently.
[20:16:29] NP: Have you seen the “De Aqua” Voynich theory that was posted to YouTube last month? Its German author has invested a lot of time trying to identify the plants depicted. http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/08/24/de-aqua-voynich-theory-on-youtube
[20:16:48] NP: Erm, don’t shoot the Currier 😉
[20:16:49] vc: Not yet, but we are most curious about it
[20:17:20] NP: If you can read German quickly, there’s plenty of interesting stuff (but a lot of filler too)

7. The f1r paragraph “titles”…

[20:18:13] vc: You can see on f1r that the text is separated to 3 paragraphs.
[20:18:54] vc: Each paragraph ends with some words flushed right.
[20:19:06] NP: Yes… and let’s not forget what John Grove called “titles”, short pieces of text appended to the bottom right of the paragraphs
[20:19:14] vc: is it possible that these are quotations?
[20:19:20] NP: could be anything, who knows?
[20:19:43] NP: As an aside, I should say that the word “possible” sets my teeth on edge
[20:19:50] vc: quotations and the name of the persons who said them
[20:19:58] NP: Probably not
[20:20:28] vc: Not matches with the age?
[20:20:28] NP: My prediction is that they are section titles
[20:21:09] NP: book 1 – agriculture
book 2 – astronomy
book 3 – water
[20:21:10] NP: etc
[20:21:24] vc: hmmmmm
[20:21:43] NP: I would also predict that they relate to the first phase of the VMs’ production
[20:22:20] NP: because the final object has many more sections
[20:22:27] NP: they’re also in A, not B
[20:22:44] NP: but you don’t have to believe me
[20:23:13] NP: I don’t have a gun to your heads
[20:23:28] NP: 🙂

8. Plaintezt language?

[20:23:29] vc: Personally what do you think abozt the plaintext language and the plaintext alphabet length?
[20:23:48] NP: Plaintext language: Italian.
[20:24:05] NP: Maybe German, but if pressed I’ll stick to Italian
[20:24:24] NP: Plaintext alphabet length: just normal, nothing fancy
[20:24:41] NP: I do, however, think that there is something quite special about the enciphering
[20:24:54] vc: namely?
[20:25:21] NP: I think that it was enciphered on wax tablets using a combination of shorthand (to compress it) and verbose cipher (to expand it), such that the overall size of the text matched the original

9. Copy or original?

[20:26:11] NP: I think that there is evidence that the original layout and manuscript features were duplicated, even though the text was enciphered – and so I think that each line of ciphertext corresponds to a line of plaintext
[20:26:23] NP: key evidence for this:-
[20:27:13] NP: (1) the fake vellum hole on f34r – this is a hole that was made in the vellum to copy a a hole that was present in the original copy
[20:27:58] vc: (VBI index of this very feature of your theory?)
[20:28:01] NP: (finding a page number for you…)
[20:28:09] vc: Sorry, could’n miss that one
[20:28:51] NP: (2) f112 has a space on the right hand side. I think that this was a vellum flaw in the original, which was faithfully copied as part of the enciphering
[20:29:35] NP: 10000 VBI points! Ding ding ding!
[20:30:12] NP: Look up close at the hole on f34 – it was rubbed through the vellum, but why?
[20:30:53] NP: Sergio Toresella suggested that the author rubbed through the vellum in some kind of sexual frenzy, but I think he may just have got that wrong
[20:30:55] NP: :O
[20:31:31] vc: VBI index of THIS one is not small.
[20:31:38] NP: Plenty of people have proposed that the VMs is some kind of copy – I just added in some other evidence to say what kind of a copy
[20:31:57] vc: Yes, We have the same opinion.
[20:32:15] vc: It can’t be done in one iteration.
[20:32:28] NP: Essentially, that it’s an enciphered copy but one retaining many aspects of the original layout
[20:33:12] NP: There are also a number of places (particularly in Q13 and the pharma section) where you can see two layers…
[20:33:36] vc: Checkin’…
[20:34:38] NP: f77v (the house at the top)
[20:34:57] NP: f79v (the woman in the pool)
[20:36:39] NP: f88v or the page next to it (curious two-layered spherical jar)
[20:37:13] NP: Sagittarius page – the top left nymph and her odd barrel
[20:37:22] vc: So how these two layers point to the original layout?
[20:37:33] NP: I also think f57v was written in two or more passes
[20:37:50] NP: It’s hard to tell what to think
[20:38:26] NP: What I *suspect* is that there is an odd game of expressing and hiding going on here
[20:39:06] NP: I don’t honestly think that most of the water nymphs have any function apart from distracting your eye from what is really going on on the page
[20:39:22] vc: Mhm

10. The Sagittarius spreadsheet…

[20:39:30] NP: The zodiac nymphs’ poses probably do encode some kind of information, though
[20:40:06] NP: I’m sure a page full of naked women was probably even more distracting to the eye 500 years ago
[20:40:23] NP: talking of which…
[20:40:31] NP: I have a spreadsheet you might like to see
[20:40:41] vc: Sure
[20:40:50] NP: It’s taken from the Sagittarius page of a 14th century manuscript
[20:41:15] NP: and it might just contain basically the same data that is enciphered on the VMs’ sagittarius page
[20:41:42] NP: would you all like to have a look?
[20:41:53] vc: YES
[20:42:06] vc: Take a Y! an E! an S!
[20:42:25] NP: I heard you the first time. 😉
[20:43:27] NP: I should mention that what you have here is an annotated version of a scan of a photocopy of an old b&w photograph that is copyrighted by the Warburg Institute
[20:43:57] NP: I added in the red lines to try to reconstruct the table.
[20:44:24] NP: Which means “please don’t post this on the internet or I’ll get busted”
[20:44:21] vc: Ok, we are seeing the reference. Now what?
[20:44:33] NP: Now, here’s the clever bit
[20:45:00] NP: What the table is encoding is an astrological table per degree.
[20:45:00] vc: ok… won’t post
[20:45:45] NP: That is, each of the 30 degrees has a specific planet, fortune, gender, unlucky day assigned to it
[20:45:58] vc: aham
[20:46:32] vc: so if i transform it into circles, I basically get something very similar semantically to the VMS astro circles?
[20:46:48] NP: Theoretically – the tricky bit is working out how that mapping works
[20:47:32] NP: What it needs is a bunch of clever people looking at it and throwing around ideas for a couple of days
[20:47:49] NP: Which I why I thought of you lot 🙂
[20:48:25] vc: I think we are getting your suggestion. 🙂
[20:48:58] vc: Psp: rectangular to polar
[20:49:20] vc: my very first idea
[20:49:21] NP: The other tables didn’t align half as well as Sagittarius, so it would introduce too much uncertainty into the range of maps to choose from
[20:49:24] vc: of course it’s just me
[20:49:33] vc: Ok, ok
[20:49:42] NP: I think… it might not be the answer
[20:49:52] NP: …but it’s a start 🙂
[20:50:20] NP: Sagittarius is interesting because all the nymphs are facing right
[20:51:02] NP: If there is stuff being encoded in poses / clothes / accessories… look for crossed legs, outstretched arms, arm behind hip
[20:51:15] NP: head-dresses, stars
[20:52:21] NP: Incidentally, I think most of the breasts on the page were added in the second phase.
[20:53:11] NP: However… it may be that the breasts from the first phase (I can barely believe that I’m typing this as a sentence) encoded some kind of information. So you might usefully look for breasts that weren’t added later. :O
[20:53:33] vc: (VBI)
[20:53:50] NP: Bearing in mind that the author seems to have a predilection for adding dots in the first phase and hiding them later
[20:53:55] NP: VBI 100000!
[20:53:59] NP: off the scale
[20:54:12] NP: But… look at it for yourself, and make up your own mind
[20:54:29] vc: ROTF
[20:54:52] NP: At least you have something to compare with the page that nobody else (apart from me) has seen in the last 550 years
[20:55:04] NP: Real data (even if does have drawn on breasts)

11. Finishing up…

[20:55:41] NP: OK, team Voynich Budapest
[20:55:50] NP: I have to go now
[20:56:03] NP: I hope you’ve all broadened your view of the VMs
[20:56:12] NP: And not been exposed to too much VBI
[20:56:22] NP: 🙂
[20:56:23] vc: Thank You very much indeed for the most fruitful conversation.
[20:56:36] vc: Not enough i must say
[20:56:46] NP: Plan A is to return for a second session on Sunday
[20:56:55] NP: Is that correct?
[20:57:11] vc: Yes
[21:01:06] NP: Right – good luck, everyone & talk with you on Sunday!
[21:02:02] vc: Ok, all the best until then
[21:02:06] NP: byeeeeeee
[21:02:13] vc: bye 🙂

The secret history of “Antonio of Florence”…

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I’ve just received (directly from the author, thanks!) a copy of Vladimír Karpenko’s admirably thorough 1990 AMBIX paper on the “cesta spravedlivá” pair of manuscripts. From his analysis, it seems very much as though these are both genuinely 15th century and (just as Rafal predicted) entirely unconnected with the VMs. Oh well! 🙁

Even so, the secret history of the mysterious “Antonio of Florence” (whose alchemical presence lurks behind this whole constellation of documents) is something which nobody seems to have tried to piece together in any substantive way. Of course, my particular interest in this lies in whether it has anything to do with Antonio Averlino of Florence (1400-ca.1469), whose libro architettonico (1455-1465) demonstrated familiarity both with books of secrets and with alchemical concepts (fol. 102r), and whose life prior to 1433 is largely unknown.

Right now, here is how the evidence sits:-

(1) As far as the alchemical background goes, the first two Latin works of Bohemian alchemy appeared circa 1400, attributed to “Johannes Ticinensis” – “Processus de lapide philosophorum” and “Aenigma de lapide“. Though both are now lost, German translations of them appear in the (1670) “Drei vortreffliche chymische Bücher des Johann Ticinensis, eines böhmischen Priesters, Antonii Abbatia, eines der Kunst erfahrenen Mensch und Eduardi Kelläi, eines weltberühmten Engländers, Tractate“, and in the even less snappily-titled (1691) “Johannis Ticinensis, eines Böhmischen Priesters/ Anthonii de Abbatia, eines in der Kunst erfahrenen Mönchs/ und Edoardi Kellaei eines Welt-berühmten Engländers vortreffliche und ausführliche chymische Bücher; Allen der geheimen und Hohen Kunst-Liebhabern zu Nutz und merklichen Unterricht in Teutscher Sprach übergesetzt/ und herausgegeben durch einen/ der niemahls genug gepriessenen Wissenschaft sonderbaren Befohrderer. Mit einer Warnung-Vorrede wider die Sophisten und Betriger“. (Neither is currently available on the Internet, I believe). This really should be the starting point for any study of Bohemian alchemy.

(2) In the first half of the 15th century, a Bohemian by the name of Jan z Lazu was noted (in several documentary sources) as having been skeptical about alchemy. Bohuslav Balbin (“Balbinus”) mentions two of his lost works: “zlato blato” (“Gold – Mud”?) and “aurum luttini” (I can’t read that final word satisfactorily, so please say if you know what it is supposed to say). Wraný (1902) “Geschichte der Chemie und der auf chemischer Grundlage beruhenden Betriebe in Böhmen bis zur Mitte des 19.Jahrhunderts” summarizes what (little) is known about Jan z Lazu. Not consulted (though Rene Zandbergen has apparently seen this).

(3) In medieval Bohemia, Northern Italian ore prospectors (known locally as “Vlach” or “Wallach”)  often kept their secret notes in books known as “Wallenbuch”. According to Wraný (1902), the earliest Wallenbuch dates to 1430 and is attributed to “Antonious von Medici”. Of course, after 1945 Breslau became Wroclaw, which is why I don’t yet know where this intriguing-sounding Wallenbuch is. Not consulted (though the two Wroclaw academic libraries here and here are where I’d start).

(4) In the last few days, Daniele Metili very kindly left a comment here on Cipher Mysteries noting a hitherto unremarked “Anthony of Florence” reference. Noted in Kristeller’s famous “Iter Italicum (Alia Itinera I)”, Olomouc State Archive manuscript #349 (described on pp.133-134 of this scan of J. Bistricky, M. Bohåcek, F. Cåda, “Seznam Rukopisu Metropolitní Kapituly v Olomouci,” in Ståtní Archiv v Opave, Pruvodce po archivních fondech III [Pruvodce po statních archivech XIV; Prague, 1961]) is a collection of late 15th century alchemical works (“Varia praecepta alchimistica in latina et germanica lingua”), one of which is entitled “Fixatio argenti magistri Antonii de Florencia probata per Johannem de Olomucz discipulum eius“. Not consulted (but very intriguing, nonetheless). Who was this Johannes of Olomouc? Though the generally-best-known “John of Olomouc” from the 1400s was a Hussite burned alive in 1415, this seems unlikely to be connected at all. Might this person (as Rafal Prinke suggested) have instead been Jan z Lazu?

(5) 1457 “cesta spravedlivá” manuscript (supposedly by Antonio of Florence’s Czech servant) was composed.

(6) After 1606 (and probably before 1610, I’d guess), a document commenting on the “cesta spravedlivá” was written, presumably in Prague and close to the Rudolfine Imperial Court.

(7) According to Zibrt (thanks Rafal!), in 1611, two versions of the “Tractatus I. de secretissimo philosophorum arcano, II. de lapide philosophico” were printed in Prague. These were attributed to Jan z Lazu, who claimed (in one of the versions) to have been a follower of Antonio of Florence. This same printed edition was later noted by Bohuslav Balbin (“Balbinus”). Jan Hurych believes that this was (or was derived from) an original 15th century work, which is certainly possible.

(8) In 1613,  the same small book was reproduced in “Theatrum Chemicum” volume IV.

(9) Around 1704, what I call “the Leopold copy” was executed: this included copies of the “cesta spravedlivá” manuscript, and an “observationes quaedam…” text (which seems to have been based on an earlier document (marked (6) above).

What is going on here? I think it is important to note that nowhere in the cesta spravedlivá is any explicit connection made with Jan z Lazu – the connection with him only seems to have been made after 1600 or so. This, however, would depend on whether the alchemical manuscript upon which the 1611 books were based was genuine or fake – I’m not sure if this question has been asked. Could it be that the two people genuinely linked here were actually “Antonio of Florence” and “John of Olomouc” (as per the Olomouc manuscript), but that circa 1610 somebody guessed (wrongly?) that John of Olomouc and Jan z Lazu were the same person, and so felt the need to construct a secondary, nationalistic alchemical work to fill in the large gap between the two?

There’s a really great paper waiting to be written here (though probably not really enough for a dissertation), trying to answer one question: how do all these fragments relate to one another?

But there may yet be an even simpler answer: here’s a reference [pp.71-72] to a Prague apothecary from circa 1400-1420 called “Antonius de Florencia” that I dug up. Someone with better access to the archival sources should be able to work out precise dates for this person, as he would seem to be a far more local (and likely) candidate for the mysterious alchemist at the heart of this story:-

Restaurování gotické malby v domě U Lilie čp. 459/I, Malé náměstí 11 Ve 14. století si bydlení Na Malém náměstí oblíbili lékárníci, zejména italští. Roku 1346 přišel do Prahy Angelus de Florencie, který založil na pokyn Karla IV. bota- nickou zahradu v Jindřišské ulici na Novém Městě pražském, v místě dnešní hlavní pošty. V roce 1353 pobýval v Praze Augustinus de Florencie, lékárník a budoucí vlastník vedlejšího domu čp. 459/Ia, nyní zvaného Rychtrův dům, v jeho živnosti po-

kračoval sestřenec (bratranec z matčiny strany) Matěj z Florencie. První zmínka o domu U Lilie pochází z r. 1402, kdy již nesl dnešní pojmenování a byla zde Rudol- fova lékárna. Ve 14. století vlastnil lékárnu lékárník z Florencie Onoforio, od kterého zakoupil vinici na Slupi lékarník Antonius de Florencia, který byl majitelem vedlej- šího domu čp. 459/I, dnes součást Rychterova domu; oba objekty byly patrně v té do- bě spojeny.

Incidentally, looking at a modern map, I’d guess (so please correct me if I’m wrong!) that “Laz” is actually the town of Łazy in Upper Silesia (southern Poland), a good way away from Olomouc. Hmmm… could it be that the town of “Łazy” was some kind of verbal inspiration for the Icelandic children’s TV show Lazytown? Of course, that’s a thoroughly stupid (if not “rotten”) question – but I thought it would be fun to be the first one to ask it. 🙂

Chrysopoeia versus Mythopoeia…

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Fingers on buzzers for a quicky historical quiz: name these three historical characters and the unusual link they share…

  1. A 13th century speculative English monk
  2. A 14th century Parisian bookseller (and his wife)
  3. A 15th century Bohemian disbeliever in alchemy

How did you do?

The first one’s easy, particularly for Voynich Manuscript devotees – it’s the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. The second one’s also pretty easy, especially for Harry Potter fans – it’s Nicolas Flamel (and his wife Peronelle). The final one is next to impossible (unless you just happen to be Czech) – it’s Jan z Lazu (whose name has come up here in recent days). But what fine historical filament connects these three very different people?

The simple answer is that they were each declared to be famous alchemists long after their death, with their printed alchemical works well-read across Europe. Bacon’s supposed “Speculum Alchemiae” was translated into English in 1597; Flamel similarly first made the transition from obscure Parisian bookseller to noted “alchemist” in the late 16th century / early 17th century; and even though Jan z Lazu is recorded as having been “lucky to get away alive” when he told ex-Empress Barbara Celska (1390-1452) that the alchemy she was practising in Melnik (post-1441) was “fraudulent”, yet suddenly around 1611 printed works appeared in Prague attributing great alchemical secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone to him.

However, the more complex answer is (I think) that in each of these three cases alchemy was falsely attributed to the person in the decades around 1600 in order to further nationalistic quasi-historical purposes. Hence, the actual purpose of many alchemical texts from this period is not so much chrysopoeia (“gold-making”) as mythopoeia (“myth-making”) – people perceived that there was a pressing political need for an historical English / French / Czech alchemist to have existed, and so pressed existing historical figures into service. It might not make a lot of sense to us now, but that’s how it definitely worked way back then.

Incidentally, when in 2008 I asked the alchemy expert Adam McLean about Flamel-themed pseudo-alchemy, his response was well-nuanced and thoroughly helpful when considering this whole genre:-

Although contrived they are not "fakes" in the modern sense, rather
they are attempts to reconstruct the past, by devising an object
apparently emerging from a personality they wished had existed.
PS: J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a poem called Mythopoeia in 1931 (even before The Hobbit was written!), which certainly touches on a lot of themes eerily familar to both alchemy historians and cipher mystery aficionados. Voynich list-member Anthony was sure that Tolkien had seen positive rotographs of the Voynich Manuscript, which gives the following few lines an added resonance:-
[...]
and as on page o'erwitten without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
and endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
[...]
Yes! `wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!

Otakar Zachar’s (1899) “The True Path of Alchemy” book…

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Today’s Cipher Mysteries post comes from long-time Voynich researcher Jan Hurych, who very kindly agreed to go through Otakar Zachar’s (1899) monograph on the “Cesta spravedliva v alchymii” (“The True Path of Alchemy”) manuscript by Antonio of Florence dated 1457. Here’s what Jan found…

* * * * * * *

While Otakar Zachar’s name is now generally unknown, he appears to have been connected with various Czech National Museum archivists who he mentions in his book, and so was probably a known historical scholar.

His book is basically a commentary on (and a modern Czech translation of) the manuscript “Cesta spravedliva v alchymii” dated 1457, and which was written in the old Czech medieval language. Though its title translates as “The Right [or righteous, or just, or correct] Way in Alchemy” , it is not about travel 🙂 but rather about the alchemical methods and recipes written therein.

Zachar claims he saw the Czech original (or rather a copy, as explained below) in the National Museum (and which should today be in the National Library): however, becasue I was not able to reach that, I will describe only what is in his book, namely in his conclusion (from p.95 onwards). He also quotes some Latin text taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 (starting at its page 129r) that relates to this same manuscript, but which dates from around after 1606.

Zachar claims that the book was written by the Czech servant of an Italian alchemist called Antonio di Firenze (Florence) and was then hidden somewhere (in Bohemia?). In 1606 (an interesting date!) it was discovered – a hearsay, Zachar admits – by a doctor of medicine (perhaps Czech?) who recognized its value and brought the book to Jerusalem (apparently personally). After the doctor’s death, the book was hidden again (where, in Jerusalem? Or back in Bohemia?) and then rediscovered. Zachar studied the manuscript for several months and copied its text verbatim for his own book (the original text was written on parchment in black ink, with only its chapter headings in red).

The manuscript describes four methods for making gold:-

  1. A bottle of elixir provides gold in value of 30 marks
  2. A cheaper method, providing only gold “fluviatile”, that cannot stand fire
  3. An improvement on method #1
  4. Since gold above (the result of all three methods) contains sulphur, this method is a new way by which the “Veneris” [note that “Venus” is normally the alchemical codeword for “copper”] can be removed

Zachar thinks that #4 is the real secret, and that Antonio and other Italians in Bohemia were looking for a special kind of sulphur, say a “secret sulphur” as it was called in old Czech. Zachar wonders where in Bohemia they were looking… Incidentally, here he calls Antonio “Venezian” (benatcan) so was he from Venice and not from Florence as Zachar said at the beginning? Apparently this was only Zachar’s slight mistake. He also mentioned that “Czech ways” were not as advanced as Italian ones. He noted that some passages in the manuscript were erazed – these passages interested Zachar most, but the erasure was too good for him to read past – he apparently did not have Wilfrid Voynich’s dark room! 🙂

Zachar believes that the Czech manuscript is only a copy of some original – why, he does not say. Also, nothing more is known about Antonio’s servant (who wrote down this manuscript). As for “1457”, that could well be when the original was written, the copy could have been much younger [my comment, j.h.].

So the book – or its history only? – must have been known in the 17th century while the good doctor was still alive, since the book was then in Jerusalem and hidden again after his death.  Of course, all this could have been merely the history of the original manuscript, while what Hanka found in Bohemia was a copy (though exactly when he did was never noted) which may never have travelled to Jerusalem and back again. 🙂

All in all, Zachar’s book does not describe the Voynich Manuscript, but another book entirely. Whether  Antonio himself ever wrote any book, especially the one we now call the VMs – we cannot tell. The Czech manuscript is of course solely concerned with alchemy – no zodiacs, no stars, and no bathing beauties!

* * * * * *

To make things even more complicated, Zachar claims the book reached the National museum via Mr. Vaclav Hanka, who was (in)famous for the discovery of two historical Czech manuscripts (Zelenohorsky, disc. 1817 and Kralodvorsky, 1818). Both of them are today generally considered as fakes, written from nationalistic motives – even though Hanka was an expert on Medieval Czech langauge, he apparently made a number of linguistic mistakes there. 🙂 Zachar confirms he saw the manuscript being first mentioned in 1825 (Jungman’s book History of Czech Literature) but he also quotes some  of the above history, from the copies of some alchemical works dating from the 1600’s. He unfortunately omits to say how he found out (or worked out) that they described exactly the same manuscript. 😮

Hanka himself  lived from 1791 till 1861 and from 1819 onwards he was an archivist in a Czech museum. After his discovery of those two manuscripts, they became the subject of the largely popularized nationalistic “Battle Of The Manuscripts” which lasted right up until the end of the 20th century. The quarrel split the Czech nation (which back then was under the control of the Austrian Empire) into two groups: passionate defenders and passionate rejectors. The battle later subsided and while it never fully stopped, today most people think both manuscripts were just frauds. That is not to say the old “Cesta spravedliva” definitely comes from the workshop of Hanka (and his friend Linda), but the almost-perfect medieval Czech language might just be a gentle giveway…

“The True Path of Alchemy” is *not* the VMs…

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A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that “The True Path of Alchemy” is not the VMs (confirming Rene’s suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny resemblance to the VMs was, shall we say, rather less than 100% accurate. All the same, the affair is not completely closed just yet…

The manuscript of “The True Path of Alchemy” currently lives in the National Museum Library in Prague (though it doesn’t appear in any of their online catalogues). The first person to write about it in any detail was Otakar Zachar, whose 112-page 1899 monograph “Mistra Antonia z Florencie Cesta spravedlivá v alchymii” is available online (you can download it as a set of six 20-page PDFs). As an aside, “Otakar” was the name of Rudolph II’s pet lion, whose death in 1612 was (reputedly) seen as a portent of Rudolph’s own death later that year. Just so you know! 🙂

Zachar’s monograph contains (facing p.47) only one rather underwhelming scan of the original manuscript’s text: click on the following cropped & enhanced thumbnail to see a larger version:-

TruePath-f22v-f23r
“The True Path of Alchemy” f22v and f23r

Unless I’m hugely mistaken (no laughing at the back), the True Path appears to be written not in Italian or Latin but in Czech / Bohemian in an apparently 15th century hand, with the folio numbering in a standard 16th century hand.

Zachar also includes (facing his page 24) an image of a flask with a crown, which unfortunately appears as a near-black page in the scan (though you can just about resurrect it using fairly heavy image enhancement):-

TruePath-flask
“The True Path of Alchemy”, flask with a crown

According to note 43 on this webpage, a more up-to-date article on the Ms by V Karpenko appeared in Ambix 37, 61 (1990), which I shall try to read. Karpenko mentions that the ms contains 13 questions for telling whether an alchemist is false. Presumably #1 is: “does he/she claim to be an alchemist?” 🙂

As to attribution, one webpage I found seems to claim that the manuscript was actually written by Jan z Lazu (A.K.A. “Laznioro”, reputedly the first Czech alchemist) [the claim appears here as well]: but as my Czech extends no further than occasional words such as “rukopisu” (manuscript), I couldn’t say whether that relates to authorship, translation, or adaptation. Perhaps my Czech mate Hurychnioro will have a look and tell me how badly I’ve got it wrong. 🙂

I then went hunting for the MS reference in the scans of the National Museum Library’s card index, where Zachar’s book merits five cards (is that five copies? or five cross-references?): the card annotations mention “86 J 121”, “Schiller 294”, and “Zeyer 1977”. However, even though “86 J …” appears to be a plausible-looking shelfmark for the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze, searching for “86 J 121” in the Manuscriptorium returned no hits. Oh well!

Rene Zandbergen also very kindly sent over the GIFs absent from the voynich.nu site: unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious mention of the “True Path” there. Really, to identify any manuscript in the Kunstkammer inventory (whether the True Path or even the Voynich Manuscript!), you’d need to know how it was bound (i.e. whether the cover was red or white leather etc) and what else was bound in with it. Zachar and/or Karpenko may well have included this information, of course, but I’ve yet to get quite that far. 🙁

And so… back to Bolton, where this all started.

If you compare the basic factuality with Bolton’s floridity, I think you’d have to conclude that the two don’t quite gel:-

  • “1475” – should have been 1457 (d’oh!)
  • “beautifully illuminated” – though there are some pictures and illuminated letters, from the poor quality of the handwriting I’d be fairly surprised if they were “beautiful” per se
  • “rare” – given that it’s the only extant copy, perhaps we’ll give Bolton the benefit of the doubt on this one 🙂
  • “couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language” – the jury’s out, as Karpenko seems to gives the impression that the text is a touch more rational than most alchemical texts. All the same, an alchemy text that’s not exceedingly obscure is probably a fake, so perhaps this is just Bolton being tautologous. 🙂
  • “library of Wresowitz” – Rafal Prinke highlights a good-sized 1855 article on Czech alchemy by Ferdinand Mikovec in the periodical “Lumir”, which says that Vaclav Vresovec z Vresovic (d. 1583) bequeathed his library (containing various alchemical mss) to the town council of Mala Strana in Prague. However, even though linking “The True Path” to this collection would be a good guess, I saw no mention at all of Counsellor VVzV in Zachar’s monograph, so I’m a little skeptical…
  • “high price” – without any textual source, this may well be another Boltonian ’embellishment’, let’s say. 🙂

Despite my obvious disappointment that the True Path hasn’t turned out to be an early sighting of the Voynich Manuscript, I remain optimistic that it might yet turn out to be linked with Filarete. For example, 1457 is a perfect match for when the Florentine claimed to have been collecting and writing his little books of secrets in his (ample) spare time. It may well be that nobody to date has thought to examine “The True Path of Alchemy” specifically with a Filarete hypothesis in mind – might there be some textual ‘tell’ hidden in there? There’s only one way to find out…

Finally, Zachar includes (pp.91-95) a decent chunk of Latin taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 that relates to this manuscript. Thanks to the online magic of Manuscriptorium, I can see that these Observationes quaedam circa suprascriptum processum Bohemicum appear on pages 129r to 153r, and that they were written at the beginning of the 17th century (the text specifically mentions “1606”). Later on I’ll ask Philip Neal if there’s anything hugely interesting there – though the chances are quite small, you never know until you look!

Earliest archival reference to the Voynich Manuscript…???

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A vast constellation of curious books revolves around the hazily uncertain core of the Voynich Manuscript: as with most things, some are outright good, some are just plain bad, while most live in a mixed-up zone in the middle.

Henry Carrington Bolton’s (1904) ” The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II” is a poster-child for that mixed-up zone – equal parts fact and fiction, Bolton’s oeuvre contains more than a dash of both historical sense and hysterical nonsense. Though it does go on to cover many varied aspects of Rudolph’s court, the first half of it amounts to a greatest-hits compilation of the credulous alchemical mythology surrounding John Dee’s Bohemian adventure – “Now That’s What I Call Bohemian Alchemy #1“, if you like. 🙂

However, for all the hallucinogenic tableaux he conjures up via the shewstone of his historical imagination (and for all the brazen liberties he takes with the facts), Bolton clearly did go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate his Ikea mansion out a lot of, well, basically good stuff. Hence the reader (though often deeply suspicious) finds hundreds of genuine factual nuggets embedded into the walls of the proto-scientific passageway Bolton has tunnelled through the Rudolfine era.

So, my question to you is this: is the following particularly shiny nugget (pp.37-38) gold or lead?

[...] when conversation was interrupted by the
entrance of Martin de Rutzke, bringing with him a beautifully
illuminated and rare manuscript rescued at the dispersal of
the library of Wresowitz, who was reputed to have been a
successful experimenter. The work was entitled "The True

Path of Alchemy," and was written by Antonio of Florence
in the year 1475; being couched in exceedingly obscure and
mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black
art, it was particularly admired by Rudolph who ordered his
treasurer to pay the high price demanded for it, and instructed
his librarian to add it to his valuable collection.

For a start, this “beautifully illuminated and rare manuscript… couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black art” bought by Rudolph for a “high price” does sounds terrifically like the Voynich Manuscript as described by Dr Raphael Mnishovsky (according to Johannes Marcus Marci in 1665).

Furthermore, even if I just happened to have a time machine in my shed I could barely have engineered a more blatant archival link between Rudolph II and a mid-Quattrocento Florentine called “Antonio”. (Note that Antonio Averlino is reported by Giorgio Vasari to have died in Rome around 1469, but given that there is no documentation to support or refute this, 1475 is entirely possible.)

As far as the book’s 16th century provenance goes, Wolfgang von Wresowitz died on 21st March 1569, while Bernhard Wresowitz died in 1571, and presumably the alchemical “library of Wresowitz” Bolton mentions was dispersed not long after: Rudolph moved his court to Prague in 1583, but it would probably take someone like Rafal Prinke to trace the Wresowitz alchemical library connection any further.

All in all, the big research question then becomes: did Bolton just make up this whole thing (the document name, author name, date, price, and provenance), or was he reporting something he found while trawling relevant books for intriguing-sounding alchemical stories? He comments elsewhere that he made use of the books by Czech historian Josef Svatek (1835-1897), so perhaps that’s one place to start.

Normally, the first proper place one would look for this would be the 1607-1611 Kunstkammer inventory drawn up by miniaturist Daniel Fröschl, as described in detail in Rotraud Bauer and Herbert Haupt’s (1976), “Die Kunstkammer Rudolfs II“. Unfortunately, the relevant gifs have long disappeared from the voynich.nu Bauer-Haupt page, so doing this will probably require someone (i.e. probably me) to spend a day at the library. However, I should also caution that, because Rudolph II may well have presented the same book to Sinapius around 1608 when he gave him the “de Tepenecz” title (i.e. while Fröschl was drawing up the inventory), it is entirely possible that it may not appear there – so, absence of evidence there would (as ever) not be evidence of absence.

However, the problem with this is that Fröschl’s inventory was completely unknown to historians until the middle of the twentieth century, and hence was unknown to Bolton: so, whatever Bolton’s source for this story, the one place we can be sure it didn’t (directly) come from is that inventory.

But all the same: if not there, where on earth did Bolton happen to read about “The True Path of Alchemy“? If we could answer that question, we might well be able to find out about the Voynich Manuscript’s very early history… definitely worth a closer look, I’d say… 🙂

PS: quick reminder not to forget the London Voynich pub meet at 5pm tonight!

PPS: thanks to a high-speed reply from Rafal Prinke, it now looks as though this is not (after all) the Voynich Manuscript (which is a shame, but what do you expect if you rely on Bolton?) – and possibly closer to a chicken nugget than to a gold nugget. Even so, expect a further post on this shortly! 😮

Voynich cipher structure…

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What (in my opinion) has scuppered just about every code-breaking assault on the VMs to date has been the faulty presumption that you don’t need to worry about anything so boring as “getting the history right first”, because the statistical analysis fairy will fly in waving her +10 Wand of ANOVA and somehow sort it all out. Errrm… won’t she?

Yet even as early as 1931 John Matthews Manly pointed out that the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers were clearly written in a 15th century hand – hence it couldn’t easily post-date 1500. So why do people still persist in using their stats tricks to hunt for complex mechanisms (such as Vigenère polyalphabetic ciphers, and even the dreaded Cardan grille – though personally, I’d rather have a nice mixed grille) that weren’t invented till nearly a century later? Whatever cryptographic arrangement you propose yielded the VMs’ distinctively structured behaviour should be consistent with the limited palette of techniques available to a cipher-maker circa 1450-1500.

In short, history says (whether you choose to listen to it or not) that we shouldn’t hypothesize some single high-powered cipher trick – rather, we need to look for a set of simple techniques consistent with Quattrocento knowledge of cryptography blended together in a devious (and probably subtly deceptive) way.

Even so, 50 years of statistical hackery later, it seems pretty clear that the cryptographic stats fairy hasn’t worked her spell as hoped. But why should her (usually pretty good) magic have failed so abysmally?

Well… if you delve a little deeper into theoretical statistica, you find the theorists’ nimble “get-out clause” – that the presence of so-called confounding factors can disrupt all the neat assumptions underlying stats’ mathematical models. These factors, in a nutshell, are ways in which individual samples within your overall dataset are causally linked together locally in non-obvious ways that make the global numerical tests go wrong… really quite badly wrong, in fact.

Unsurprisingly, I believe that the presence of confounding factors is precisely the reason that the standard statistical toolbox continues to draw so much of a blank with the VMs – that is, the individual letters / glyphs are silently linked together in ways that act as local confounding factors to any global analytical pass. But if so, what exactly are those pesky linkages?

My conclusion is that the bulk of the, errrm, ‘confundity‘ arises because the “vowel” glyphs (a / e / i / o / y) are like many Budapest workers – they only get to pay their rent by holding down two or more different jobs at the same time (though normally only one job at any given moment). For example, I don’t believe that the “o” in “qo” has anything at all to do with the “o”s in “ot”, “or” or “ol” (you can tell this because “qol” only pops up in those later sections where you find free-standing “l” glyphs). Similarly, I don’t think the “a” in “aiin” is in any way linked with the “a” in “al”, or even with the “a” in “aiir” (because their usage and context patterns are so different).

Yet once you fully accept that this is the case, you’re more or less forced to follow a long path of uncomfortable reasoning that leads you right to the doorstep of an even more uncomfortable conclusion: that the cover cipher is largely formed of groups of letters. Which is to say, that a / e / i / o / y have no independent meaning except as part of the letters with which they are immediately paired or grouped, and that the Voynichese CVCV structure (to which linguists have clung for so long through a storm of criticism) is not definitive evidence of the presence of language, but is instead an artefact of the cipher system’s covertext – merely its misleading outer appearance, not its inner structure at all.

Furthermore, the VMs’ cunning encipherer occasionally adds in a “space-transposition cipher” after his “pairification” stage to prevent repetition of the pairs becoming just that little bit too obvious for his liking: for example, on page f15v, the first line’s “ororor” has been turned into “oror or“, while the second line’s “orororor” has been turned into “or or oro r“. To my eyes, the underlying sequential repetitions look very much as if the plaintext contains the oh-so-familiar “MMM”, “CCC”, “XXX” or “III” of Roman numbers, even circa 1450 a pattern so visually obvious to codebreakers that the verbose cipher system needed to be hacked yet further to conceal it.

Hmmm… four repeated Roman number letters, and four pairs in the or / ol / ar / al set apparently to hide repetitions – a coincidence? Or might it be that or / ol / ar / al in some way encipher m / c / x / i (though probably not in that order)? Well… I would be hugely unsurprised if this miniature four-pair cipher system turns out to have been designed specifically for this purpose in an earlier cipher, and that the mechanism was reused and adapted for the later (and far more complex) Voynichese cipher system that evolved out of it – that is, it remained in the encipherer’s personal cipher alphabet rather like a “cryptographic fossil”. (As a general aside, the idea that Voynichese popped into existence fully formed in the shape we now see it makes no engineering sense at all to me – something as tricksy and structurally complex must necessarily have gone through a fair number of stages of evolution en route.)

Incidentally: with spaces included, you see olol (51), arar (47), alal (37) and oror (23) – but take spaces out, and you get olol (186), arar (161), oror (87), alal (60), ololol (13), ararar (7), ororor (1), alalal (1)  and the orororor (1) mentioned above. At the same time, remove all the spaces and you see just four instances of okok and two of otot in the entire VMs, i.e. ol is followed by ol more than 50x more often than ok is followed by ok.

To be sure, this does not explain all the behavioural properties of Voynichese: ultimately, repetitive phrases like “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” (and “ur so qokedy daiin, m8 lol“?) are dancing to a quite different underlying beat. Whatever kind of token gallows characters turn out to encipher, I think it is extremely unlikely that they are a single letter substitution – some other kind of enciphering mechanism is going on there (I suspect some kind of in-page transposition cipher). Similarly, I’m pretty sure that “qo”, “d”, and “y” encipher tokens of a quite different nature again (here, I suspect that they match the three basic abbreviatory shorthand marks that were in active use in the Quattrocento, i.e. “qo” => subscriptio, “d” => superscriptio [macron], and “y” => truncatio).

Arrange all these smaller systems together, and I think that what is revealed is a multi-stage cipher architecture looking broadly like this:-

vmsciphersystem-v001

Now, I’ve had flak from a number of people over the years (ummm… mainly Elmar, truth be told, bless ‘im) who comment that this kind of arrangment seems far too complex to be right. The problem I have is how to convince such naysayers that what I present here is the end result of a basically sensible methodology – that of decomposing the heavily-structured nature of Voynichese into its constituent pieces, each of which is consistent with the (relatively low) level of cryptographic technique available before 1500. That is, the real cleverness we are up against here isn’t one of fiendish mathematical complexity, but of cunning arrangement of simple pieces – not of Albertian innovative technique, but of Filaretian innovative architecture.

All the same, even the best-designed house needs walls and a roof – and here, the main cipher properties arise from the use of verbose cipher to make a language-like covertext. Get around that, and I the rest of the structure’s secrets may very well yield to the repetitive numerical prodding that is statistical analysis. Here’s how to do it:-

(1) write a simple text filter to undo the space transposition cipher:-
–> (a) get rid of any spaces between [o | a] and [l | r] – i.e. transform “oro ror” into “ororor”
–> (b) get rid of any spaces between [or | ol | ar | al]  and [or | ol | ar | al] – i.e. transform “or al or” into “oralor”

(2) tokenize the text into the following units, making sure that you tokenize “qo” before anything else (i.e. “qok” must tokenize to “qo” + “k”, and not to “q” + “ok”). Of course, I may have got the precise details very slightly wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this is not less than 90% of the way there.

qo
eeee, eee, ee, ch, sh
ok, ot, of, op, yk, yt, yf, yp
ockh, octh, ocfh, ocph, yckh, ycth, ycfh, ycph
ol, or, al, ar, an, am
air, aiir, aiiir, aiiiir
ain, aiin, aiiin, aiiiin
aim, aiim, aiiim, aiiiim
ckh, cth, cfh, cph
eo, od  <--- these two are the wobbly ones that may need further thought!

Note that a number of additional single-letter tokens get left over (most notably s, d, y, l, k, t, f, p), but these are not paired, so that’s OK. My guess is that any left-over “o” and “a” characters are probably nulls or pen-slips.

(3) perform your statistical analyses on the set of (roughly 50) tokens output by stage 2.

Note that I don’t believe that this somehow “solves” Voynichese in a single step (becaus nothing connected with the VMs has ever been that simple before, and that is unlikely to change now). However, I do believe that removing the pairs like this removes arguably the most problematic set of confounding factors from the text, and hence that doing so should allow the productive use of statistics to crack the rest of the cryptographic problems associated with Voynichese.

“The Mysterious Case of the Voynich Manuscript”…

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Gifted and talented kids have a pretty tough time of it. Even when they do manage find an outlet for the stuff buzzing in their head (here’s my 5-year-old son’s first film, if you haven’t seen it already), what on earth can their perpetually-lagging-behind parents point them at to keep them stimulated? While there are some genuinely cool things out there (such as the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum), these sadly tend to be as rare as hen’s teeth. With gold fillings.

One nice thing I like to take Alex to is the interactive monthly meetings of the Surrey Explorers, our local Kingston branch of the NAGC (the “National Association for Gifted Children”). He enjoyed building robots with Dr Bobor of Mitsubishi (here’s Alex’s jet-powered kangaroo robot design), finding out about Lonesome George, making music with balloons, learning magic tricks, etc. This term, he’s really looking forward to Street Dance in September and (as you probably guessed already, CM readers) Codes and Ciphers in October.

On this general theme, here’s something I found yesterday when playing with the Scirus scientific search engine. This summer (I believe), an Australian gifted and talented support organization called G.A.T.E.WAYS ran a series of four Voynich Manuscript-themed days (costing about £100 per child) called “The Mysterious Case of the Voynich Manuscript“, hosted by microbiologist / researcher Dr Geoff Crawford. Session #1 was a introduction to the VMs, Session #2 summarized historical codes & ciphers, Session #3 looked at forgery and hoaxes, while Session #4 was set up so that participants could actually try to crack the VMs for themselves. Yes, I’d say that pitching the VMs to kids like this is pretty cool – good job, I hope it went well! 🙂

Incidentally, for ages I’ve been meaning to give a (rather more modestly-priced, it has to be said) Voynich lecture, possibly at Treadwell’s. However, over the last couple of years, it seems – somewhat paradoxically – that the more I learn about the VMs, the less there is to say. “Voynich history”? Wishful thinking. “Voynich theories“? Hallucinatory enigmatology. Which is not to say that I’m pessimistic: but, rather, that I’d rather now talk about what the VMs is rather than what it might be, as the latter seems not to have got us anywhere in 500 years. 🙁

All the same, I think that there are two huge lessons to be learnt from Voynich research (for both adults and children!): (a) how easy it is to make mistakes when trying to do something really difficult, however clever you are; and (b) how hard it is to join different types of evidence together to build persuasive arguments. Hmmm… I’m not sure how well a über-rationalist message like that would go down with a typical Treadwell’s audience, though. Oh well! 😮

“De Aqua” Voynich theory on YouTube…

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Following six years of arduous research, an unnamed 44-year-old German industrial technician has been trying (unsuccessfully) since 2005 to get his/her Voynich theory “De Aqua” published, either as a book or as an article. Frustrated by the lack of progress, last month he/she placed thirty-three sizeable chunks of it onto YouTube.

Of course, I fully understand that a busy person like you can’t really spare the time to trawl through several hours of German-text video presentation. So, to save you the bother, I’ve compiled a great big list of all highlights as seen from my chair [though here’s the final part (#33), which is a visual montage of all the interesting claims from the first 32 parts].

(1) Part #1 sets off with the basic format we’ll see throughout – endless pages of (almost entirely) German text fading in and out on a coloured background. Firstly, the top-level description of the theory gets presented: that the Voynich is actually entitled “De Aqua” (i.e. “concerning water“) and that the EVA transcription “otork” somehow translates as “aqua”. It then lists page after page of late-medieval things related to water. Part #2 asserts the author’s historical conclusions – that the VMs was written between 1525 and 1608 by four authors (in four writing systems), and that the underlying plaintext is German & Italian – before outlining the VMs’ known provenance since then.

(2) Part #3 is a bit of a scattergun attack on the 16th and early 17th centuries, with Kepler, Dee, Kelly, Paracelsus, Sir Francis Drake, Nostradamus, Isabella Cortese (who probably didn’t exist, incidentally), German mathematician Adam Ries, the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, etc etc all name-dropped in quick succession. Part #4 (only three minutes long, most of the others are closer to ten minutes each) links the three red shapes on f1r to (a) “Astrologie / Astronomie“, (b) “Fauna / Flora“, and (c) “Medizin“. No proof, no evidence, just presented as fact.

(3) Part #5 begins a lengthy discussion of medieval herbals, concluding that f2r depicts Lactuca virosa, f3r depicts a Spanish pepper, that f4v depicts an aubergine (i.e. that the VMs must post-date 1500). Part #6 continues in the same vein, while Part #7 argues that f33v depicts maize (which is where the claimed earliest date of 1525 comes in). Part #8 is broadly similar, lots more of the same.

(4) Part #9 has some nice pictures of things resembling the jars in the pharmacological section (though I couldn’t see references or dates for these?), as well as lots of parallels for details, including a nice little dragon (was this from the same Paris manuscript Sergio Toresella once mentioned?). Part #10 has many more parallels (including the famous “armadillo” [hah!] and the Novara coat of arms, etc), as does Part #11 which again returns to the VMs’ f25v dragon.

(5) Part #12 goes off the rails a bit, with claimed resemblances to body parts; Part #13 covers menstruation and the spongum somniferum (for which Caterina Sforza included a recipe, as I recall), though I can’t make out the yellow annotations to the marginalia on f66r (2:41 into the video); while Part #14 reads f77r as depicting the four elements.

(6) Part #15 gets back on track with astronomical parallels; Part #16 looks closely at the rather strange page f67v2 and proposes that the corner shapes are actually constellations (such as Pegasus); Part #17 goes off on a fairly pointless Giordano Bruno tangent; Part #18 looks at the zodiac pages (including a little discussion on the month names); Part #19 focuses mainly on the month names such as the Leo page (because of its Germanic-looking “augst” month name), though it beats me what Al Pacino is doing in there (4:02). 😮

(7) Part #20 looks at crowns and golden fleeces; Part #21 goes back to the zodiac nymphs, looking more at the structure of the pages, before moving on to discuss the 15th century “De Sphaera” by the deaf Milanese illustrator Cristoforo de Predis, who worked for the Sforza family (ah, them again).

(8) Part #22 (are you still reading this? Just checking!) compares the drawings in Quire 13 with Roman aqueducts and similar water structures; while Part #23 looks at Leonardo da Vinci’s take on water, compares (at 1:21) a detail on f79r with a sextant (Rich SantaColoma recently blogged that the same detail reminded him of early “swimming girdles”, though I suspect neither have it right), and discusses rainbows too. Part #24 discusses water nymph details (poses, rings, cross, horseshoe, spinning top, nail, etc).

(9) Part #25 focuses (rather unsatisfactorily, it has to be said) on various tenuous links with alchemy, with the only high point being the comparison between the balneo section’s “giant grapes” page (f83v) and a page in Das Buch der waren Kunst zu distillieren (1512).

(10) Part #26 is pretty thin apart from a fascinating parallel (0:53) between a detail of f76v and a drawing of Mercurius in Liber II of Giordano Bruno’s (1591) De Imaginum Compositione; Part #27 is even thinner; while Part #28 proposes that the nine-rosette page is a map of Italy with Venice in the middle (yes, I’d say) and Pompeii in the top left (no, as it was only rediscovered in 1748). [I’m not convinced by Valdarno and the Wasserturm, either.]

(11) Part #29 (Perfume and Plague) didn’t really work for me at all; while Part #30 (Hidden Characters in the Manuscript) only briefly gets interesting when looking (1:53) at similarities between our beloved MS408 and Medeltidshandskrift 47 (at Lund University in Sweden) – the discussion of the f17r and f116v marginalia seems superficial and unconvincing to me.

(12) Finally, in Part #31, our anonymous author gets to the point of his whole book – that (unless I’ve misunderstood him/her, which is always possible) some clever computer programmer out there should be able to make use of all the clever cribs he/she has amassed as a result of his/her long journey into the heart of the VMs’ pictures. Part #32 has his/her (fairly diffuse, it has to be said) bibliography; and Part #33, as mentioned above, is a sequential montage of all the visual identifications proposed in parts 1 to 32.

Quite why neither of the German Voynich E-bloggers (hi Elmar, hi Elias) has yet blogged about this I don’t know (perhaps they’re on holiday?): but from where I’m sitting in the UK, there’s plenty to say about it.

Firstly, it is pretty clear that the author has for some years sustained an intense (and independent-minded) assault on the VMs’ pictures – yet at the same time he/she seems quite unaware of many long-running problematic debates, such as the whole “heavy painter” issue. Had the plant on f4v not been overpainted blue, would his/her identification with “aubergine” have been so clear-cut?

In addition, while it’s fantastic to see someone wise to hidden details (such as the concealed people in f86v4, even though this is mislabelled as f68v4 in Part#7), overall I just don’t accept the idea that the VMs’ plants can be identified as solidly as he/she thinks – we’ve now had three or four generations of herbal researchers look at it, with each finding it bewildering in a new way. Furthermore, comparing drawings with modern plants (or even with interpretative drawings of modern plants) is of little use, as virtually every plant you can name has been extensively adapted and altered over the centuries by, ummm, cunning breeders.

While I’m sympathetic to the author’s project and research programme (it is, after all, more or less identical in intention to what I was trying to do with my own “The Curse of the Voynich”), where it falls down is in historical methodology: in this instance, you just can’t get the level of proof you would like from visual similarities, however many of them you try to amass. Has our unnamed author provided coherent and powerful evidence supporting the identification of MS408 as “De Aqua“? I don’t really think so – plants aside, the overwhelming bulk of the discussion is fairly lightweight, and does not gain any real traction on the real history of the manuscript despite the sheer mass of intertextual references.

All the same, there’s plenty of food for thought here (though I wish many of the manuscripts where so many of the nice illustrations were taken from had MS and page references to back them up) – but for all “WilfridVoynich“‘s hard work, the end result simply fails to produce the set of cribs he/she was aiming for. Sorry, but it’s not “De Aqua” as claimed (though, to be honest, I would be hugely unsurprised if the vertical column of letters on f76r does indeed somehow encipher “de aqua”).

The end result, though, is plainly a great personal achievement – and I would be delighted if some of the intriguing and bold visual connections he/she has drawn in it ultimately lead onwards to genuinely productive and useful future research within the overall VMs community. For all its faults and limitations, this is definitely the (virtual) Voynich book of the year for 2009! 😉