"The Spiderwick Chronicles" and the VMs…

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You may not have heard of them, but the six books in The Spiderwick Chronicles – stories that follow a group of kids in their everyday struggles with elves, goblins and boggarts – have (according to a piece in this week’s MCV, which seemed to have been written by Vivendi’s PR folk) sold six million copies worldwide, more than a million of which were in the UK. Oh, and the US box office release of the movie grossed nearly $25m: and there’s a computer game imminent, too.

LA-based blogger Martin van Velsen caught the film’s opening: and was struck by the title-sequence, during which Arthur Spiderwick constructs a book, one page every day, by gluing down small objects and animal (mostly insect) parts and writing a commentary around them. Martin wonders if the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript (both of which he describes as “pure works of fiction, a flight of fantasy out of control… [yet] based… on the real world“) were effectively the real Spiderwick Chronicles.

“When browsing the Voynich Manuscript I tend to find myself wonder what was drawn true to life and what was made up. More importantly, did the author deliberately stay on the edge as to lure the reader into believing some of the imaginary depictions are actually real?”

All good thoughts. He ends his blog with a rather splendid quote from H. P. Lovecraft:-

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

This whole blog entry warmed my heart, simply because here we have a blogger who really gets the Voynich. OK, he’s into H. P. Lovecraft and Luigi Serafini too, so it wasn’t a massive jump sideways: but all credit to him regardless. 🙂

Unreadable Chinese, revisited…

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Back in 1991, sardonic linguist Jacques Guy concocted a deliberately false theory about the Voynich, “to demonstrate how the absurd can be dressed in sensible garb“. His “Chinese Hypothesis” had Marco Polo bringing back two Chinese scholars to Venice, who wrote down their encyclopaedic knowledge into a book in some semi-improvised European script… you guessed it, Voynichese. He never believed his pet canard for a moment: it was a rhetorical gesture to the interpretative folly – which I call “the curse” – that surrounds the study of the manuscript.

But then in 1997, Brazilian computer science professor Jorge Stolfi pointed out that, actually, Voynichese as transcribed does share a lot of statistical properties with Mandarin Chinese texts. Though technically true, the problem is not its stats, but rather that the Voynich Manuscript is (with very little doubt) a fifteenth century European cultural artefact. Stats only indicate correlation, not causation: so all Stolfi’s results really say is that the Voynich Manuscript transcription correlates moderately well with certain Mandarin Chinese transcriptions. But lifting the abstracted text out of its codicological and stylistical contexts can easily give rise to the kind of plucking fallacy Gordon Rugg’s work suffers from. Is the statistical similarity Stolfi found in the texts themselves, or in the methodology used to design the two transcriptions? I suspect it may well be the latter: the map is not the territory.

So why am I so fascinated by the news that some indecipherable Chinese texts have recently been found? They don’t look anything like Voynichese (and why should they?): but they do look like a pictographic script not entirely dissimilar to Chinese. Their finder, 38-year-old Zhou Yongle, suspects they might be written by the Tujia, a large ethnic minority in mainland China which has a spoken language but (as far as anyone knew) no written one. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia asserts that Tujia is a Tibeto-Burman language with some similarities to Yi: but – come on – you’d have to be a pretty h4rdc0re linguist to know or care what that means.

No: what I find intriguing is that these texts do look precisely like the kind of cultural artefacts you would expect, with (real) Chinese annotations and marginalia. If Jacques wants a proper historical linguistic puzzle to get his teeth into, then this would surely be exactly the right kind of thing for him: honestly, where’s the fun in devising a Sokal-like hoax at self-mystificating Voynichologists, when they’re already more than capable of tying themselves in knots over essentially nothing?

Of course, we mustn’t forget the possibility that Zhou Yongle may (for whatever reason) have faked these unreadable documents. You may not have heard of the huge “paper tiger” scandal in China recently over photos of the South Chinese Tiger, believed to have been faked by hunter Zhou Zhenglong; or indeed the whole issue of the 1421 (1418/1763) map hoaxery, as ably deconstructed by Geoff Wade et al. Were all three simply ‘Made In China’? It’s a good question…

"Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can"…

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If you like Voynich-themed short stories, there’s most of one posted on the Analog website here. It’s called “Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can”, by Thomas R. Dulski: I mentioned it here a few days ago. Of course, the extract stops just at the point the story starts getting interesting, to try to get you to buy a copy of the April 2008 issue (where it appears in full): but that’s fair enough, I suppose.

Voynichologically, a few minor typos (“Athansius”, “Kirchner”, “Baresche”, etc), but it’s basically all there. Yet to my jaded eyes it reads like a brandname-laden faux-noir short story and a Wikipedia article whose pages have all been shuffled together, not unlike Herbal A and Herbal B.

Turning the whole Big Jim/UFO/Voynich link on its head (as the remainder of the story undoubtedly does) is a nice idea: but writing Voynich fiction is a desperately hard balancing act, and I can’t help but feel the attempt to shoehorn plot and history into a short story needs a lighter touch than this.

Two alternative histories vying for the mainstream…

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One noticeable thing about the Voynich Manuscript is how theories and hypotheses in the ‘cloud of the possible’ surrounding it are perpetually trying to enter the mainstream consciousness. From Gordon Rugg’s “Verifier” nonsense, to John Stojko’s Old Ukrainian, to Leo Levitov’s Cathar make-belief, even though they give it their best shot, the ramshackle pile of fairground cans they’re aimed at mysteriously fails to topple.

But this is far from unusual: many other well-known alt.history topics have resisted the best attempts of the gifted and brilliant to bring them to heel. And seeing as two separate assaults on these had stepped into the limelight this week, I thought I’d blog away, see where it goes…

First up is a new assault on the secret history of the Knights Templar here, published as a series of DVDs: its author, Barry Walker, has been researching neolithic sites for decades, and claims to bring out a whole new connection between these and the Knights Templar. DVD#1 opens up a new cave in Royston (to go with the well-known Templar-esque cave that is a tourist spot already): the subsequent 11 DVDs planned are described in fairly open terms.

The problem with this is that if you have already read Sylvia Beamon’s excellent “The Royston Cave: Used by Saints or Sinners?” (there’s a well-thumbed copy on my shelf), you’d know (a) that Sylvia has long pointed to sites within Royston that should be examined; (b) that these are likely to be little more than abandoned cellars; and moreover (c) that according to most Templar historians, the UK was only ever of marginal interest (as compared to, say, Languedoc).

I’d love it to be true that there was some kind of subtle iconological connection between the Knights Templars and neolithic sites: but I have to say this is right at the edge of the possible, if not over it. To be honest, unless there’s some truly amaaaaaazing evidence here, I think I’d rather buy into something a bit more plausibly mad (like the whole Titanic “insurance fraud” conspiracy theory) than this. All the same, a meagre £19.99 will buy you the first two DVDs of “The Quest”: and I’m sure it would be an entertaining diversion, if you like that kind of thing.

Second up is a rather more pleasantly gritty work of historical obsession. Tudor Parfitt spent 20+ years trying to track down the lost Ark of the Covenant: and, incredibly, appears to have found its 700-year-old duplicate/replacement in Harare. His book (“The Lost Ark of the Covenant“, to be published on 3rd March 2008 by HarperCollins) details the driven and (unavoidably) Indiana Jones-esque path he took along the way.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy with the ‘verie parfit Tudor’: he has clamped the meagre historical clues available to him in his bulldog-like jaws, and repeatedly stepped sideways with the subtle literary and DNA evidence available to him to give them colour, shape, depth – and hopefully to find the truth behind them all, whatever it happens to be. Though the hardback is £18.99 (if, inevitably, cheaper at Amazon etc), it’s something I’ll definitely be ordering: and will (of course) review here.

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day Two…

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It’s been a rollercoaster of a day for me at the Warburg Institute on the Early Modern Research Techniques course, like being given the keys to the world twice but having them taken away three times. I’ll try to explain…

Paul Taylor kicked Day Two’s morning off in fine style, picking up the baton from Francois Quiviger’s drily laconic Day One introduction to all things Warburgian. My first epiphany of the day came on the stairs going up to the Photographic Collection: an aside from Paul (that the institute was “built by a madman”) helped complete a Gestalt that had long been forming in my mind. What I realised was that even though the Warburg’s “Mnemosyne” conceptual arrangement was elegant and useful for a certain kind of inverted historical study, it was actually pathological to that entire mindset. Essentially, it seems to me that you have to be the “right kind of mad” to get 100% from the Warburg: and then you get 100% of what?

(The Warburg Institute is physically laid out unlike any other library: within its grand plan, everything is arranged neither by author, nor by period, nor by anything so useful as an academic discipline, but rather by an arbitrary conceptual scheme evolved to make similar-feeling books sit near each other. It’s not unlike a dating service for obscure German publications, to make sure they keep each other company in their old age.)

My second epiphany arrived not long afterwards. On previous visits, I’d walked straight past the Warburg Photographic Collection, taking its darkness to mean that it was closed or inaccessible: but what a store of treasures it has! My eyes widened like saucers at all the filing cabinets full of photographs of astrological manuscripts. I suddenly felt like I had seen a twin vision of hell and purgatory at the core of the Warburg dream – both its madness and its hopefulness – but had simultaneously been given the wisdom to choose between them.

It was all going so well… until Charles Hope (the Warburg’s director) stepped forward. Now: here was an A* straight-talking Renaissance art historian, sitting close to the beating heart of the whole historical project, who (Paul Taylor assured us) would tell it like it is. But Hope’s message was both persuasive and starkly cynical: that, right from the start, Aby Warburg had got it all wrong. And that even Erwin Panofsky, for all his undeniable erudition, had (by relying on Cesare Ripa’s largely made-up allegorical figures) got pre-1600 iconology wrong too. With only a tiny handful of exceptions, Hope asserted that Renaissance art was eye candy, artful confectionery whipped up not from subtle & learned Latin textual readings (as Warburg believed), but instead from contemporary (and often misleading and false) vulgar translations and interpretations – Valerius Maximus, Conti, Cartari, etc. And so the whole Warburgian art history research programme – basically, studying Neoplatonist ideas of antiquity cunningly embedded in Renaissance works of art – was dead in the water.

To Hope, the past century of interpretative art history formed nothing more than a gigantic house of blank cards, with each card barely capable of supporting its neighbours, but not of carrying any real intellectual weight on top: not unlike Baconian cryptography (which David Kahn calls “enigmatology”). All of which I (unsurprisingly) found deeply ironic, what with Warburg himself and his beloved Institute both being taken apart by the Warburg’s director.

The second step backwards came when I tried to renew my Warburg Institute Reader’s Card: you’re not on the list, you can’t come in. (Curiously, there were already two “Nicholas Pelling“s on their computer system, neither of them me.) It seems that, without direct academic or library affiliation, I’m now unlikely to be allowed access except via special pleading. Please, pleeeease, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease… (hmmm, doesn’t seem to be working, must plead harder). If I had a spare £680 per year, I’d perhaps become an “occasional student” (but I don’t).

My third (and final) step backwards of the day was when I raced up to the Photographic Collection both during the afternoon tea-break and after the final lecture and had an Internet-speed finger-browse through the astrological images filing cabinets. Though in 20 minutes I saw more primary source material than I would see in a fortnight at the British Library, I ended up disappointed overall. Yes, I saw tiny pictures of a couple of manuscripts I had planned to examine in person next month (which was fantastic): but there didn’t seem to be anything else I wasn’t already aware of. Rembrandt Duits has recently catalogued these mss in a database (though only on his PC at the moment), so perhaps I’ll ask him to do a search for me at a later date…

Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seemed to me that even though old Warburgian/iconological art history is basically dead, the new art history coming through to replace it revolves around precisely the kind of joint textual and stylistic interpretation I’m doing with the Voynich Manuscript, with one eye on the visual sources, and the other on the contemporary textual sources. Yet the problem with this approach is that you have to be an all-rounder, a real uomo universale not to be fooled by spurious (yet critical) aspects along the way. All the same, though I’m no more than an OK historian (and certainly not a brilliant one), I’m now really convinced that I’m looking at a genuinely open question, and that I’m pointing in the right kind of direction to answer it.

Don’t get me wrong, Day Two was brilliant as a series of insightful lectures on the limits and origins of art historical knowledge: but I can’t help but feel that I’ve personally lost something along the way. Yet perhaps my idea of the Warburg was no more than a phantasm, a wishful methodology for plugging into the “strange attractors” beneath the surface of historical fact that turned out to be simply an illusion /delusion: and so all I’ve actually lost is an illusion. Oh well: better to have confident falsity than false confidence, eh?

As a curious aside, for me this whole historical angle on the Warburg also casts a raking light across the “Da Vinci Code”. The book’s main character (Robert Langdon) is a “symbologist”, a made-up word Dan Brown uses to mean “iconologist”: and as such is painted on the raw canvas of the Warburg ‘project’. What cultural archetype is the ultra-erudite, friendly (yet intellectually terrifying) Langdon based upon? A kind of Harvardian Erwin Panofsky? In my mind, the “Da Vinci Code” (and its ‘non-fiction’ forerunner, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”) both sit astride the ebbing Warburg wave, both whipping at the fading waters: and so the surge of me-too “The [insert marketing keyword here] Code” faux-iconology books and novels is surely Aby Warburg’s last hurrah, wouldn’t you say?

R.I.P. 20th Century Art History: now wash your hands. 🙁

Voynich news-bites…

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Some tasty bite-sized morsels for you: don’t eat them all at once, though…

The April 2008 edition of sci-fi monthly Analog has a 10,000-word Voynich-based story, “Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can” by Thomas R. Dulski. When super-bright billionaire’s daughter Pamela Roderick writes an academic book on the idea of UFOs, people are surprisingly OK: but when her second book claims that the Voynich Manuscript describes 15th century humans being taken on a journey into space, the people around her become more tense… Hey, any novelistic take on the VMs without a papal conspiracy or evil Jesuit priests is fine by me. 🙂

Incidentally, a key part of Eileen Reeves’ “Galileo’s Glassworks” surprisingly revolves around anti-Jesuit propaganda, most notably Johannes Cambilhom’s “Discoverie of the Most Secret and Subtile Practises of the Iesuites“, which claimed to dish the dirt on the Jesuits’ buried treasure, sadistic treatment of novices, sexual misadventures, and mad politicking. And the Jesuits had only been going 70 years at the time! Anyway…

Change of direction: here’s a cool picture called “Arizona” by ~HinoNeko / A. Brenner, depicting a young guy with a Voynich-themed T-shirt (basically, the centre of the ‘sun-face’ on f68v1). Yet more VMs things edging into the mainstream consciousness, one meme at a time…

Finally: I don’t know how I managed to miss the decade-old story of the Swedish parents who were fined for wanting to name their son “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116“, in a kind of pataphysical protest at Sweden’s child naming law. Amazing: a name that makes Voynichese look sane. 😉

Voynich euro-miscellany…

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Some European Voynichy things that have caught my eye recently: make of them what you will…

A 3-part Spanish-language documentary on the VMs written by Eric Frattini, and viewable online (just click the big green buttons). Voynich News regulars will recognize him as the author of Voynich-themed novel “El Quinto Mandamiento” (the fifth commandment), which I touched upon here.

Here’s some Italian poetry, including a couple of poems apparently on the Voynich (hence the image of the VMs’ nine-rosette page at the top). The first of the two starts something like “I have a strange form of nausea“: yup, that’s the VMs, alright. 🙂

On Tuesday (19th February 2008), there’s a program scheduled on German radio WDR 5/530 at 16:05 about our old friend Beinecke MS 408 (A.K.A. the Voynich Manuscript), presented by Sven Preger.

You might reasonably wonder whether this is all part of a diffuse European interest in the VMs: and I think you’d be right. According to Google Trends, the primary languages of people who Google for “Voynich” is (in descending order): French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Portuguese. Though I should also note that over the last 12 months (probably thanks to the novels by Enrique Joven and Eric Frattini) Spaniards searched for “Voynich” slightly more than the French. Anglophone interest in the VMs would appear to be practically nil (apart from Melvyn Bragg): which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing. I’m not sure which… you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Boole / Voynich Manuscript painting…

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Here’s a nice Voynich-themed oddity from the much-frayed edge between C.P.Snow’s “Two Cultures” of art and science.

A contemporary painter called Shardcore explores the history of science by painting famous scientists and historical scientific objects: and was so entertained by the notion that Ethel Lilian Boole – the daughter of the famous logician George Boole – came to own the Voynich Manuscript (she married Wilfrid Voynich, of course) that he decided to paint a picture celebrating it: and you can see the result here, together with a time-lapse recording of the painter as he painted it.

In Voynichological circles, this connection is old news: the website of my old Voynichian chum Jeff Haley is called The George Boole Fanclub, for precisely this reason. Incidentally, I have spent five years trying not to think of Julian Clary’s former life as The Joan Collins’ Fan Club (terrible, but surely better than “Gillian Pie-Face”?) whenever I see this, but as yet without success. Perhaps in another five years, when Julian Clary has become as horribly mainstream as Jim Davidson (sorry, but that’s how showbiz works)…

The quotation which adorns the picture is from George Boole: “Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought“. Which is nice. But it this true of Voynichese?

Codice Olindo, cipher thoughts…

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Yesterday, I posted up a low-resolution image of some Codice Olindo ciphertext: it appears to be a set of slightly-accessorized 8-directional arrows (and a few double-headed arrows, plus some additional shapes (punctuation?)). It struck me when I woke up this morning that – statistics aside – this might simply be a kind of arrow-based pigpen cipher, where the arrows point to the appropriate corner of the 3×3, and the accessorization indicates which 3×3 block to refer to.

Typically, modern-day code-breakers focus (if not over-focus) on the transcription and computer analyses. However, people are sometimes motivated by quite different things from pure security – the psychology is at least as important. Pigpen is easy because you can decrypt it very fast (an arrow-based pigpen would be at least as quick to read as a ‘proper’ one), and perhaps this is what Olindo Romano wanted. And it seems likely to me that he thought/thinks he’s cleverer than all the people around him (whether that’s true or not).

Of course, this is the kind of approach I have used when looking at the Voynich Manuscript, so it should come as no surprise that this is how I look at things. I wonder: if the Italian “mathematicians” who have deciphered this cipher plotted out the letters they have found on 3×3 arrow-pigpen grids, what would they find?

Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript…

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Every few days, I get asked to recommend a good introduction to the Voynich Manuscript (the ‘VMs’ for short). But each time this happens, my heart sinks a little: given the size and scope of historical research you’d need to have to properly grasp the subject, it’s a bit like being asked to recommend a good 5-page encyclopaedia. Or rather, as none such exists, like being asked to write one.

However, you can describe it in a paragraph: it’s a handwritten book that’s 230+ pages long, very probably about 500 years old, and filled with strange words and obscure pictures no-one can understand. I call it “a Scooby Doo mystery for grownups“, but one where everyone is trying to pin the blame on a different janitor: and so the story loops endlessly, as if on a lost satellite cartoon channel.

For once, the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page falls well short of being genuinely useful: the VMs is so contested, so politicized, so intensely rubbish that the whole neutral tone Wiki-thing fails to please (I gently satirized this in my VQ questionnaire). Bucketfuls of worthless opinions, and endless pussyfooting around: throw all that junk away, I say, and start from scratch. *sigh*

But if Wikipedia’s faux-scientific neutrality can’t get you started, what can? If (like me) you are a fan of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” (1911), your ideal introduction to the Voynich Manuscript might well be succinct, partial, and cynical (in fact, almost toxically so). In this vein, I heartily recommend “Folly Follows the Script“, an article by Jacques Guy (AKA “Frogguy“) in the Times Higher Education supplement from 2004. While ostensibly reviewing Kennedy and Churchill’s recent book on the VMs, Guy rips apart a lot of the pretension and falsity that now surrounds the manuscript, in particular Gordon Rugg’s much–vaunted (but actually resoundingly hollow) hoax papers. Which is, errrm, nice.

If you prefer lots and lots (and did I say lots?) of data, the best introductory site by miles is Rene Zandbergen’s excellent voynich.nu, in particular his “short tour“, and the even shorter tour. But frankly, it’s hard for most people to care about Newbold, Petersen, Friedman, Strong, Brumbaugh, O’Neill, Feely, Manly, and even John “The Brig” Tiltman unless you’ve already lurched over the line into Voynich-obsessive mania: none of them could read a word of the VMs, and they’re all long dead.

Alternatively, if you prefer a kind of gentle postmodern defeatism, I could happily recommend a very readable article by Lev Grossman called “When Words Fail“, which first appeared in Lingua Franca magazine way back in April 1999: sadly, nothing much of substance has changed in the intervening decade (or, indeed, over several preceding decades too).

This might seem a horrible thing to say, given that so much ink has been spilled (and, more recently, so many HTML tags wasted) on the VMs over the last century in the honest pursuit of this wonderful (yet devastatingly cruel) enigma. But we still know next to nothing of any real use: the kind of intensely Warburgian art-historical research I’ve been slaving over for the last six years seems totally alien to most ‘Voynichologists’, a title that perpetually hovers too close to David Kahn’s Baconian “enigmatologists” (see “The Codebreakers” (1967), pp.878-9), with their “deliriums, the hallucinations of a sick cryptology“.

All of which is to say that both cynicism and nihilism are probably good starting points for reading up on the VMs: a century of careless credulity has got us all nowhere. But this is not to say that I am pessimistic about any advances being made. In fact, I would say that “the Devil’s in the details” or the alternative “God is in the details” (both of which are sometimes attributed to Aby Warburg!) to flag that, beyond the superficial flurry of foolish and wishful opinions out there, I think there are things we can (and eventually will!) know about the Voynich Manuscript; but that for the moment these remain hidden in its vellum margins.

All of which is another story entirely…