"Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages"…

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I happened upon the following post a few days ago here, and thought I ought to reproduce it here for anyone that’s interested (the cryptography history lane tends to be filled with caravans, and as a result is somewhat slow-moving). When the volume finally appears (in 2009?), I’ll be just as interested in the paper on the Voynich Manuscript as the rest of it. Having said that, I’m a bit concerned that Kahn is not only misspelt but a little bit misrepresented (for instance, Kahn discusses medieval Arabic cryptology on pp.89-99) in the blurb.

Oh, and they’re not interested in publishing two papers on the VMs in the same volume. Just so you know not to offer them one (like I did, *sigh*).

* * * * * * * *

Call for contributions for a volume of collected essays:

Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages

This call is designed to expand and enhance an essay collection that is based on two panels entitled “Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages,” which took place at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI, in 2006 and 2007.
It seeks to fill a major gap in the study of codes and ciphers in the medieval world. The codes and ciphers of the Middle Ages have received little or no modern scholarly attention. David Khan’s 1181-page volume _The Code-Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet_, for example, devotes a mere thirty-four pages to the ancient and classical world, and little more than one sentence to the Middle Ages, claiming that “ciphers, of course, had been used by monks throughout the Middle Ages for scribal amusement” (106). But the construction and use of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematical secrets in the Middle Ages were much more than amusement: they were central to intellectual culture as modes of concealing dangerous, magical or secret information, and as a means of connecting oneself to the divine. As such, they appear in the writings of major figures ranging from Isidore of Seville to Hrabanus Maurus, Alcuin and Hildegard of Bingen. They also figure in the manuscripts of lesser known students of magic in Heidelberg, and numerous anonymous texts and manuscripts including Anglo-Saxon riddles, Old Norse literature and runes, and the computus. Clearly, codes and ciphers were a multilingual, cross-period, inter-cultural phenomenon in the Middle Ages; they warrant more scholarly attention. Given current emphases on “security,” and the proliferation of forms of encryption on the internet, fostering scholarly discussion of history of cryptography seems especially relevant to the 21st century. Current contributions address the uses of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematics in the writings of Hildegard, the Voynich Manuscript, Anglo-Saxon riddles, Hrabanus Maurus’ _In honorem sanctae crucis_, the Pseudo-Bedan _Propositiones_ and the _Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes_ attributed to Alcuin. While we welcome contributions on any aspect of codes and ciphers in any period of the Middle Ages, we are especially interested in essays that will widen the scope and increase the depth of the collection.

Please submit detailed abstracts or drafts of essays (style: CMS 14th edition) by 1 July 2008 to: Sharon M. Rowley at [email protected] or [email protected]

Enigmatic Instrument…

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Here’s a nice bit of craft by someone called “iisaw” (Eric Coyote Elliott), who’s made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website – click on the picture there for a detailed view.

enigmatic_instrument_by_iisaw_mini

As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA font) when etching enigmatic script on his enigmatic instrument. He writes:-

This “Cosmolabe” is a prop for a movie. The fifteen circular symbols on the front represent different worlds and the signs on the outer rim are components of magical runes used to travel between the worlds. The instument itself is a way to calculate which runes need to be used for opening gates between specific places.

Cool! What’s also nice is the way that it mirrors many of the circular diagrams in Quire 9. As to the text, I can see “qoksheedy” (which only appears on f108v) there, though the phrase it is in does not: so it looks to me like he’s done a nice job of simulating Voynichese, possibly even better than Gordon Rugg’s grilles ever did. 🙂

Voynich Manuscript and Chelsea FC…(?!)

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Yes, I’m probably just as amazed as you are: that a lowly pop-culture artefact such as the VMs could ever be plausibly mentioned in the same sentence as Chelsea FC. Tolstoy or Chekhov (the writer, not the Star Trek navigator, you fooool) maybe: but… the Voynich Manuscript? Naaah.

Yet in post #566 on “The Intelligent Forum” at CFCnet forums, long-time forum member “Hanuma” writes:

“We weren’t the first or last side to struggle against [Liverpool], so Rafa hardly worked out the Voynich Manuscript when he went all-out defence and hoped for the best.“

Stunning stuff! 🙂

"The Voynich Prophecy"…

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Well, we now have a name for Richard Douglas Weber’s forthcoming Voynich novel: “The Voynich Prophecy”. His author page on the Publisher’s Marketplace site seems to describe his novel as a euro thriller with a kind of neo-Nazi alchemy twist: he’s also posted up a four-minute video montage on YouTube for the book, where it is described as an “occult conspiracy thriller”.

Curiously, Weber’s whole media approach to novel promotion / marketing seems quite opposite to the kind of thing novelists have been doing. I went to a lecture in the Borders in Kingston a few days ago given by the very pragmatic Alison Baverstock (soft-promoting her actually very good book “Marketing Your Book: an author’s guide“): sadly, the best current advice she had for authors seemed to be to try to make press out of your personal circumstances, the examples given being (a) losing half a limb (b) sleeping with a celebrity, or (c) having police take over your house during an armed incident.

As for me, I feel caught in the no-man’s land between these two extrema: while I have no huge faith in the traditional book-selling industry’s agenda and methodologies in the age of the Internet and digital print, I’m still just that bit too old-fashioned to montage loads of borrowed images on YouTube. But I have an MBA: and MBAs are forever looking for a “middle way” that finesses the best of both worlds, rather like intellectual historians steering a path between unreliable accounts. Hopefully I’ll find my own answers in the end…

The Big Fat List (of Voynich novels)…

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I’ve been meaning to put this Big Fat List of English-language Voynich-related novels together for a while: I’ve appended links to the most significant review / blog mentions I’ve made about them. I’ll update this every once in a while, so please feel free to drop me a line if you have or know of a Voynich-themed book you think should be mentioned or reviewed.

English-language Voynich novels in print:

“Return of the Lloigor” by Colin Wilson in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969) [mentioned here]
The Face in the Frost John Anthony Bellairs (1969) [mentioned here]
Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone Max McCoy (1994) [mentioned here]
The Grinning Ghost Brad Strickland (1999) [mentioned here]
Enoch’s Portal A.W.Hill (2001) [my review]
Popco Scarlett Thomas (2004) [my review]
The Magician’s Death Paul C. Doherty (2004) [mentioned here]
Shattered Icon (2004) / Splintered Icon (2006) Bill Napier [mentioned here]
Codex Lev Grossman (2005) [mentioned here]
Vellum Matt Rubinstein (2007) [my review]

Forthcoming Voynich novels:

“The Castle of the Stars” Enrique Joven [mentioned here and here]
“The Source” Michael Cordy [mentioned here]
“In Tongues of the Dead” Brad Kelln [mentioned here]

Voynich novels in development (working titles where known):

Richard D. Weber [mentioned here and here]
Bill Walsh [mentioned here]
William Michael Campbell (“The Voynich Solution”) [mentioned here and here]
Andrea Peters (“I’m Sorry… Love Anne”) [mentioned here]

Uptown top (Google) ranking…

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Back in the early days of this blog (i.e. last Autumn), Voynich News ranked at about 150th if you did a Google search for “Voynich” – not bad out of 230,000 pages, but certainly with room for improvement. 🙂

Earlier this year, it clawed its way up to about 20th, and then last month up to about 12th: it now it appears anywhere between 1st and 11th (!). I don’t really have any sensible idea why Google’s rankings move around so much: perhaps all the sites are close-to-equally ranked, and the fluctuations arise from a butterfly beating its wings beside an overheated Mountain View server. Yet it seems that this particular butterfly is working especially hard at the moment…

As for the pages that usually rank above Voynich News: well, the Wikipedia entry deserves its place (despite its unbearable focus on the massed ranks of the possible), while I have nothing but praise for Rene Zandbergen’s majestic site. But most of the rest of them are starting to look a little bit old and unmaintained: for instance, John Baez’s Voynich page dates back to January 2005, while the World Mysteries Voynich page seems essentially unchanged from 2003. Admittedly the Crystalinks VMs page has improved over time, but it is still fairly unhelpful.

I suppose this gets to the core of what annoys me most: there isn’t a single Voynich page out there that I would comfortably call “helpful”, apart perhaps from the “Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript” blog entry I put up here a while back (and even though this gets to the point and is reasonably brief, it is still twice as large as it really ought to be). To be honest, I’d write a whole book in that style if I could sustain it for more than three pages… but I suspect I probably couldn’t. Oh well.

Google, of course, has no obligation to direct people either to helpful or to unhelpful sites: it is merely trying to “Do No Evil” (“Eidolon V“? “Devon Oil“?) in its quirky SMERSH-like way, and if its Byzantine page ranking algorithm somehow manages to get you a bit closer to where you want to go, so much the better. Maybe I should find a way of convincing Google’s automated tools to put up some helpful sitelinks (the mini-list of links you sometimes see below search results) for Voynich News: but that’s a mountain to climb another day…

"You Can Look At The Pictures"…

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If you haven’t yet been properly introduced to the enjoyable confusion surrounding the Voynich Manuscript, you might well enjoy this very brief New York Times article from 1999 by Michael Pollak, entitled “Can’t Read It? You Can Look at the Pictures“.

I particularly enjoyed the soundbite from William R. Bennett Jr., who nicely points out that ‘‘The manuscript itself seems to have the attraction of a poisonous flower“. And so we’re back to that whole Little Shop of Horrors thing again… oh well!

More on Dan Burisch…

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A month ago, I posted up a blog entry about Dan Burisch’s claimed decryption of the Voynich Manuscript, which a surprisingly large number of people have since read (my blog entry, not the decryption). Burisch claimed that an alien called “#3-15” held by the secret organization known as “Majestic” (presumably an updated version of Majestic-12) had decrypted the VMs, and that its plaintext turned out to be a message from the far future placed in the hands of Roger Bacon 700 years ago about the amazing inventions Dan Burisch has yet to make in the near future: but that whole decryption has been placed in “File 21” somewhere in Europe, and you can’t see it, sorry.

As odd arguments go, this is a thing of curious beauty. Let’s see: an alien (who you’ll never meet) held by the (alleged) modern inheritors of a secret organization (most of whose founding documents appear to have been forged) has decrypted a (probably 15th century) cipher document, revealing that it was written down in (a mangled & ciphered) Hebrew by Roger Bacon (in the 13th century), to whom the actual content was passed from the far future, and which concerned the (yet-to-happen-but-surely-must-be-soon) inventions and discoveries made by Dr Dan Burisch, except that you can’t see the decryption apart from four (frankly rather wobbly) words. Fantastic or fantastical? You decide.

Putting on my historical hat… if (like me) you read papers on Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico, you often run into very similar problems trying to parse what is being said. Though Averlino’s libro is on one level a kind of encrypted autobiography, it simultaneously functions both as an allegorical novel and as an historical-novel-within-a-novel. Which is to say that readers constantly have to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what is contructed. Would a modern librarian place such a book in fiction or non-fiction?

Of course, Averlino was not crossing those kind of artificial boundaries, because they had not yet been drawn up. Early Renaissance thought was very fluid, very undifferentiated: perhaps the humanistic conceit of trying to gain eternal fama (fame) through their works made sense because the rigid scientific constructions of time we now rely upon had not yet been put in place – perhaps the distant past and remote future somehow felt closer then than they do these days.

In those terms, maybe Dan Burisch’s conception of time is so, errm, alien to us in that it is, rather like Averlino’s, quite undifferentiated and continuous in a vaguely pre-scientific way: a kind of sci-fi reprise of the early Renaissance mind. Perhaps Burisch somehow experiences past and future events all overlapping and concertinaed together, like a kind of strange temporal synaesthesia. Or perhaps he’s just mad, who knows?

Anyway, we have an update on the story. According to a message apparently from Dan Burisch forwarded yesterday to The Golden Thread BBS, “the policy of the Eagles Team [is now] not to comment on the contents of the Voynich Manuscript“, because “it contains such dangerous information, going to prison or being executed would be preferable to disclosing it“. Furthermore, “When I said to you [Fran?] the annotations to Folio 21 [“File 21”?] were not dangerous, I meant it in the context of you seeing it. I never intended you to post it. I apologize to you for the miscommunication, and to the public about the cryptic nature of this post. With this, that is the way it must FOREVER stand.” Which presumably means he won’t post anything more on the subject of the VMs: a shame, as I’d like to know what it said.

The Internet is a strange place: these days, you can tell people think something is interesting not when you find a hundred banal blog entries pointing to it, but rather when you discover that it has been appropriated as a plot element in several online alternate-reality role-playing games. In those terms, the whole Dan Burisch saga to me most resembles neither a conspiracy nor a pathology, but instead a kind of fat-rulebook sci-fi RPG played out between a small group of dungeon masters and the opposing team, “the public”. Roll that octahedral die one more time, baby…

UPDATE: Yet more on Dan Burisch…

"In Tongues of the Dead"…

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Another Voynich-themed novel is announced: “In Tongues of the Dead“, written by Canadian author and forensic psychologist Brad Kelln, to be published by ECW Press in October 2008. It’s his third book (“Lost Sanity” and “Method of Madness” were his others, with some kind of Dead Sea Scrolls prophecy hook to the second one). According to Kelln’s blog, in his day-job he is “a consultant to the Halifax Police and the Nova Scotia RCMP on hostage negotiation“.

In his soon-to-be-published book, an autistic child visiting the Beinecke library is miraculously able to read the VMs… revealing it as “the bible of the Nephilim”. The manuscript then gets stolen, the (presumably) bad guys in the Vatican chase the various protagonists across the world, but they get helped out by a plucky Canadian psychologist doctor guy with a sick child: and whatever happens at the end happens at the end.

Perhaps I’m just feeling a bit negative because the ECW Press blurb describes the VMs as “a 400-year-old document” (I don’t think so, sorry), but this whole book does sound a bit join-the-dots to me. Look: the Voynich Manuscript is a fantastic cipher mystery, but there’s absolutely no reason to think it has any religious (let alone sacrilegious) content. My old friend GC once tried to argue that a couple of the women in the water section were holding things that might possibly be crosses: but that is a pretty thin reed to be balancing any kind of sophistical superstructure upon.

Cryptographically and historically, I think that Kelln should have instead built his story around the Rohonczi Codex or Rohonc Codex, A.K.A. Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (“The Hungarian Academy of Sciences“) MS K 114. This has 448 pages filled with as-yet-undeciphered text, is thought to have been written on Venetian paper from the 1530s, and has 87 illustrations apparently depicting “religious, laic, and military scenes” (according to Wikipedia). There’s a complete set of scans here.

Older historians thought this codex was simply a hoax: but it actually has a lot of order and structure, all of which seems to point to its being meaningful in some unknown or unexpected way. At the Warburg Institute recently, Professor Charles Burnett mentioned to me in the lunch queue that a European scholar (whose name I half-remember as “Gyula”, so might well be Hungarian?) is just about to publish a paper on the Rohonc Codex: a proper academic perspective on this would be very welcome, as just about all the hypotheses circling around it seem fairly lame.

To be brutally honest, if I was Kelln’s publisher, I’d negotiate with him to drop the Voynich Manuscript angle, and to rebuild the first part of the story around Budapest (a far more intriguing town than New Haven I would say, having spent time in both) and the Rohonc Codex. But what do I know?

Incidentally, there’s a conference currently running at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the fascinating reign of King Mathias. Yet another event I would have loved to attend. *sigh*

Hidden writing on f1v…?

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I’ve spent a long time (though “far too long” probably covers it better) hunting down obscured fragments of text in the Voynich Manuscript: so my Spidey-sense tingled almost uncontrollably when I saw a claim for hidden text on f1v in the “Marginal Writing” picture gallery on Glen Claston’s Voynich Central.

I’d never heard of this before: just to be sure, I checked Reuben Ogburn’s 2004 page on “Writing in and around plant illustrations” in case it had slipped in there, but no sign. If you run this through Jon Grove’s colour separator filter, you can see that the brown ink used for the drawing and the brown paint used to fill it in are very slightly different: in the image below, the white area is where the filter thinks the overpainting happened.

But is there writing beneath? If you squint at the topmost image here long enough, you can start to make out something that might almost be writing. But if you filter it slightly differently, I think the answer emerges: the “signal” (below) appears to be not writing, but only compression artefacts from the MrSID wavelet encoding. Sorry, guys: false alarm! (Though next time I’m at the Beinecke, I’ll have another quick look, just to be completely sure…)