Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

In the somewhat 2d world of anime fandom, fans (whether Weeaboo or Wapanese) express their like / preference / undying love for a specific female character within a given anime / show / political party / whatever by describing them as their ‘best girl‘, e.g. “Kim Pine = Totally. Best. Girl. Ever.”, or “Angela Merkel ist meine Best Girl” (possibly, though perhaps only if you happen to think German politics is a bit two-dimensional).

Are Voynich researchers as shallow as this? I wouldn’t like to say. But if you asked me for my personal vote for Voynich best girl (ok, “best nymph”), it would have to go to one of the three crowned zodiac nymphs.

There’s Miss Cancer (where I think the crown is clearly a later addition)…

…Miss Leo (where the crown seems original)…

…and Miss Libra (where I think the crown is also a later addition)…

Of the three, Miss Leo would appear to be the real deal, a specific ‘red letter’ day within the zodiac calendar that the author was so strongly attached to that he/she felt compelled to mark its date with a crown while composing the page (as if to prove my point, you can even see the red paint within the crown). And who, later, then also felt compelled to try to visually conceal its presence (to a certain degree, admittedly) by adding two spurious crowns to other non-red-letter day zodiac nymphs.

Hence Miss Leo is my Voynich best girl, original crown and all. And why ever would anyone think a different nymph could be better than that? I mean, what kind of Voyanese loser would say that one of those poxy balneo nymphs was his/her Voynich best girl? Now that would be completely insane, right? :-p

I recently had a nice day out in Whitstable (marred only by a little light rain and a touch overhoneyed squid tempura dipping sauce, upstairs at the otherwise excellent Crab & Winkle Restaurant). I only mention this because Whitstable’s Wetherspoons – The Peter Cushing – is named after the famous British horror actor (who had a house in the town for many years), famous for playing Grand Moff Tarkin and vampire hunter Van Helsing. And so some people might suspect Cushing’s Syndrome to be a condition involving, say, irrational fear of vampires.

Alas no! In 1912, the same year that Wilfrid Voynich was (supposedly) buying his now eponymous manuscript, it was American brain surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing (1869-1939) who described his patient Minnie as suffering from hypercorticism, though he originally assumed that this was some kind of polyglandular disorder. By 1943, this was known to be “an endocrinological syndrome caused by malfunction of the pituitary gland”, and was named Cushing’s Syndrome in H. W. Cushing’s honour.

So: all distracting mentions of sanguivoriphobia aside, how does Cushing’s Syndrome present? “Symptoms include rapid weight gain, particularly of the trunk and face with sparing of the limbs (central obesity). Common signs include the growth of fat pads along the collarbone, on the back of the neck (“buffalo hump” or lipodystrophy), and on the face (“moon face”).” It is also far more common in adult women than in adult men.

This should be just about enough of a trigger for long-suffering Voynich researchers to work out precisely where this is all leading…

Alexander N. Gabrovsky, Ph.D

It is a certain Alexander N. Gabrovsky, who styles himself as a “Medieval Consultant“, who is about to have a paper published in the Spring 2018 issue of “Source: Notes in the History of Art” (Vol. 37 No. 3). This paper – “Galenic Humoral Theory and Amenorrhea: Cushingoid Phenotype in a Fifteenth Century Illustrated Cipher Manuscript,” – which he asserts will be “one of the first peer-reviewed art historical perspectives on the Voynich Manuscript” will surely link the Voynich Manuscript (specifically its preponderance of Voynich nymphs, almost certainly) to the way Cushing’s Syndrome typically presents.

With my Art History hat on, I’ll be interested to see whether or not the whole “Cushingoid Phenotype” was ever depicted in a recognisable way in the centuries before 1912: it would be a strange paper were it not to even pose that question.

Gabrovsky describes himself as…

“[…]an American medievalist and hold a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (England), specializing in medieval literature, alchemical manuscripts, paleopathology (study of ancient diseases), history of art, Chaucer, and history of the occult sciences from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.”

Just a short note to let you know that Cipher Mysteries’ website’ comment facility is (hopefully) now working again. I had configured it to use an anti-spam WordPress plugin called Mollom, which had its support withdrawn on 2nd April 2018: and so since then all comments to the site had been mysteriously rejected. Thanks to Mark, Rene and others for flagging this issue to me.

More generally, since early least month I’ve been tied up trying to resolve a number of non-crypto (i.e. real-life) issues, so please accept my apologies if you have found both the website and me to have been less responsive than normal. =:-o

Pameo Pose’s Voynich apparel

In the meantime, here is a selection of Voynich apparel from Japanese company Pameo Pose.

Firstly, a Voynich EVA ‘P’ themed beret, which comes in cream and tan (though both variants are sold out). Note that they have chosen the crossed-through single leg gallows from the EVA alphabet, which (of course) means that the ‘c’ and ‘h’ either side are missing:

Secondly, a Voynich lace collar, though I guess you would only be able to tell that it is EVA close-up. It also comes in two colours, and is sold out (I prefer the funky ear-rings, myself):

Thirdly, a Voynich lace dress, a snip at 33480 yen:

Finally (and my favourite of the lot) is the Voynich dance team top, which uses the well-formed EVA ‘cPh’ as its logo:

Here’s the challenge: explaining what the Voynich Manuscript is usually involves explaining what it isn’t. However, this is so boring that anyone listening would rather disembowel themselves and eat their own entrails. But perhaps Internet memes will be able to achieve the impossible…

Thanks to a nice post on Marco Ponzi’s website, a new block paradigm candidate has presented itself: the short “Liber de Angelis”, the first eleven paragraphs of Cambridge University Library MS Dd.xi.45.

As Marco notes, this was transcribed and translated by Juris G. Lidaka in a chapter in Claire Fanger’s (1998) “Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Late Medieval Ritual Magic“. (The full treatise, which is undoubtedly a collection of smaller treatises, is called “Liber de Angelis, Annulis, Karecteribus et Ymaginibus Planetarum”.)

“The Experiment”

Incidentally, this collection has the distinction of having been mentioned by the writer M.R.James in his story “The Experiment: A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story“, first published in the Morning Post, December 31, 1931 (as discussed here). Republished in “A Pleasing Terror”, p.402 refers to “Bishop Moore’s book of recipes”
James’ story concludes:

Bishop Moore’s book of recipes is now in the University Library at Cambridge, marked Dd 11, 45, and on the leaf numbered 144 this is written:

An experiment most ofte proved true, to find out tresure hidden in the ground, theft, manslaughter, or anie other thynge. Go to the grave of a ded man, and three tymes call hym by his nam at the hed of the grave, and say. Thou, N., N., N., I coniure the, I require the, and I charge the, by thi Christendome that thou takest leave of the Lord Raffael and Nares and then askest leave this night to come and tell me trewlie of the tresure that lyith hid in such a place. Then take of the earth of the grave at the dead bodyes hed and knitt it in a lynnen clothe and put itt under thi right eare and sleape theruppon: and wheresoever thou lyest or slepest, that night he will corn and tell thee trewlie in waking or sleping.

However, given that we are not presently concerned with asking the dead for advice about treasure hunting, I leave this merely as an aside / exercise for the reader. 😉

What we are actually concerned with is whether the eleven paragraphs of the Liber de Angelis might somehow be the plaintext of a section of the Voynich Manuscript: so, without any further ado, here they are (as transcribed by Lidaka)…

Liber de Angelis

[1] Signum admirabile experimentorum dixit Messayaac & incipit cum adiuncto Altissimi & est mirabile signum & ualde admirandum in quo sunt secreta Altissimi. Per illud autem ludei operabantur, Caldei, Egipcij, & prudentes Babilonici. Cum igitur operare uolueris, fiat annulus Solis, ex auro fiat, in quo scribantur carecter & nomen angeli solis. & hoc annulus habeatur in omni sacrificio super minore digito sinister manus. Cartam itaque cum mente curiose & studiose custodire in loco mundissimo, & inuolue in rubeo serico.
[2] & hec sunt opera annulus Solis. Cum itaque secundum annulum Solis die dominice ieiunes usque ad noctem, nocte autem facies sacrificium de quada aue non domestica prope litus aque decurrentis, & cum eiusdem auis sanguine scribe carecter & nomen angeli Solis in carta uirginea, & hanc tecum porta. Et cum uolueris transire de vna terra in alteram, depinge in terra carecter Solis & nomen angeli eius, & statim veniet equus niger qui portabit te vbicumque uolueris. Tene tamen cartam in manu dextera & annulum in manu sinistra.
[3] Sicus prius, habeas carecter & nomen angeli eius & scribantur in annulo, & ieiunes in die Lune quo fit annulus Lune, sicud fecisti in annulo Solis, in quo si operare uolueris continuo, sacrificabis anguillam flumalem, cuius sanguine scribe carecter Lune & nomen angeli eius in pelle tue, & inuolue in pelle anguille & reserua vt cum volueris ut appareat flumen uel arbor cum fructu, scribe in terra nomen angeli & nomen fructus, & uoca angelum carta aperta, & apparebit, Si uis ut non appareat, claude cartam.
[4] De annulo Martis. Fiat sacrificium de aue rapaci intra domum ad ignem, et scribe cum eiusdem sanguine in pelle eiusdem nomen angeli & carecteris. Et cum uolueris ut appareant milites armati uel castella uel lubricus ludus, uel ut vincas in prelio, fac caracterem & nomen angeli in terra & appari cartam & apparebit & faciet que preceperis, & cum clauditur carta recedet & cessabit.
[5] Totum fac ut de alijs, sacrificium fiat de uulpe uel de cato in loco deserto, scribe careterem et nomen angeli in fronte – vinces in omni placito. Tene cartam in manu.
[6] Fac sacrificium de gallo, karetter & nomen angeli scribe in pelle, intelligi, in quo inuoluas denarium, & qociens ipsum donaueris reuertetur.
[7] Fac sacrificium de columba alba viuente, carecterem & nomen angeli eius scribe in pelle leporis, quod si mulieri ostenderis sequentur te uelociter.
[8] Totum ut supra. [Damage to leaf has left a small section unreadable here.] Sacrificium de capra inter vepres, carecterem & nomen angeli scribe in percameno veteri. Cum uolueris inter duos odium mittere, eorum nomina in percameno, codem carecterem & nomen angeli in pelle capre, ut predicatur. Cum uolueris aliquem intoxicare, in eius potu intinge annulum Saturni: cum idem potauerit intoxicabitur.
[9] Nunc de generalibus mandatis restat docere. Annulus Solis in omni sacrificio habeatur, & annulus Febe, in quo nomen angeli ipsius; Febe tam in memoria habeatur quam in opera. & fiat sacrificium in circulo infundali, prius scriptus carecter, & in medio magister dicat: ‘Oya, sacrificium tue laudis suscipe’, proiciens carnes extra circulum. In qualibet autem operacione, nomen angeli inuocetur & annulus in digito habeatur. Carte uero mundissime reseruentur, nec in noctis tenebris aperiantur nisi operis necessario ingrauerit.
[10] Nunc de annulis. Annulus Solis ad equum & fiet de auro. Annulus Lune ex argento ad fluuium. Annulus Martis ex ere ad uictoriam in bello. Annulus Mercurij ex cupro ad scienciam. Annulus Iouis ex electro ad denarium. Annulus Veneris ex plumbo ad amorem. Annulus Saturni ex ferre ad odium. Annulus Capitis Draconis ex calibe ad toxicandum.
[11] Hox signum mirabile est experimentum magistri Messayaac de secretis spirituum planetis, secundum mencionem, & sumitur sic. Omitto nomina angelorum cum carecteribus suis (que incipiunt sic: Storax, Abamecta, Paymon, cum ceteris) propter certam causam hic scribenda.

It’s Not by Osbern Bokenham

Though it was once thought to have been written down by Augustinian poet-monk Osbern Bokenham, Lidaka dismisses this quickly. But as a nice point of history, Osbern Bokenham did once conceal his identity in the chapter initial letters (much as in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) as discussed here:

On 1st May 1456 he wrote Dialogue betwixt a secular asking and a Frere (friar) answering at the grave of Dame Joan of Acre. This is a very important source for the history of Clare Priory. This manuscript, which still exists, is written in both Latin and English, and richly decorated on parchment. Another of his works was called Mappula Anglicae, which covered the rhymed lives of English saints such as Cedde, Felix and Oswald.

It contained seventeen chapters, and was anonymous, except that Bokenham stated that, if taken in sequence, the first letter in each chapter spelt out the name of the author. It reads OSBERNUS BOKEN_HAM. Chapter 15 is missing.

[Yes, it does indeed look from that as though it was actually Chapter 14 that was missing, but let’s not quibble.]

It’s Actually by William Bokenham

Though the surname of the Liber de Angelis writer was clearly Bokenham, Lidaka points out that the author’s first name was William, and that he was copying various small treatises, not composing them. Moreover, given that two works dealing with urine (that most multispectral of medieval medical staples) by a William Bokenham are in Wellcome MS 408, and that in them he claimed to be “a doctor with a degree from Bologna” as well as “a monk at Norwich Holy Trinity (or St Giles)”, we would seem to have our copyist locked down quite solidly.

From internal evidence (the ‘Oya’ in paragraph #9), Lidaka suggests that the Liber de Angelis version being copied may well have been derived from an earlier French language version: and separately that the ultimate source of at least some of the tracts could perhaps be Arabic. In which case, it might be a good idea to get acquainted with David Pingree’s “The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe” (Ladaka’s note #14). [Jim Reeds is also mentioned in note #20, crypto-history fans.]

Personally, I’m also a little suspicious of the “karetter” in paragraph #6 as being a possible linguistic tell.

And Now We’ve Done All That…

…I’ll compare this with the Voynich Manuscript’s planets in a follow-on post, 1300 words is quite enough for the moment. 🙂

I’ve just watched a sort-of-mostly-interesting voynich.ninja interview with Adam Lewis, whose senior thesis at Puget Sound I mentioned here a few days ago.

However, one particular part of his argument (as presented in the interview, at least) made no real sense to me at all: that even though the Voynich offers (Lewis says) a decent-sized corpus of text to work with [in fact, it’s possibly the largest ciphertext from the pre-machine-cipher era], its text style is somehow too ‘samey’ for linguists to find the weak link in (and hence crack).

In fact, we have (at least) two ‘languages’ to work with, better known in Voynich circles as Currier A and Currier B (named after the distinguished US code-breaker Captain Prescott Currier, who first noted them in the 1970s), though it remains an open question as to whether or not they are closer to ‘dialects’ than distinct ‘languages’ per se. Hence I’m not entirely convinced by Lewis’s argument.

Regardless, might there be some subtle thread (whether linguistic, cryptological, or whatever) connecting two different blocks of text that we can trace between the two pages they appear on? Might we be able to find a tentative internal Voynichese text match (be it ever so small) to cast some faint light on both parts, in precisely the way that Adam Lewis asserts that we cannot?

Well… I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth attempting, so let’s give it a go, eh? 🙂

Three Pages, One Plant?

I believe that most Voynich researchers would agree that – very unusually – a single plant seems to appear in three separate places in the manuscript: f17v, f96v, and f99r. Long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers may also remember that I posted about these pages back in 2013.

Note that identifications of the plant are somewhat nebulous and unsure:
* Dana Scott – wild buckwheat (Ellie Velinska tends to agree with this, or perhaps bryony)
* “biologist from Finland” – – Rumex acetosella? or Smilax aspera (=common smilax) or Smilax excelsa. Or Dioscorea communis / Tamus communis?
* Peter – Tamus communis or Smilax aspera
* MarcoP – Cadamosto’s “vitis nigra” (black vine) commonly “tamo” (“vitis nigra tamo dice lo vulgo”), i.e. Tamus communis
* JKP – suggests many different plant matches
* Kieran Coughlan – Creeping Nightshade (Solanum Dulcamara)
* Edith Sherwood – yam (even though yam is post-Columbus) – and she thinks she can see Leonardo da Vinci’s signature hidden in its hairy roots. As always, make of that what you will.

(Doubtless there are many more to be found, but that’s the point where I lost interest.)

Codicologically: even though f96v and f99r would at first appear to have had a pair of pages inserted between them at some stage (i.e. f97 and f98), they ended up facing each other in the Voynich’s final state. Moreover, f96v is the last page of quire 17, and f99r is the first page of quire 19: my best reading (that I put forward in 2012 in Frascati) is that there was never any such pair of inserted pages, but that instead someone else had previously misnumbered the final two quires (Quire 19 and Quire 20), and that the two extra pages there were added to account for the ‘Quire 18’ that was never actually there. Perhaps none of this is actually important: but I think there’s a good chance that – contrary to their final folio numbering – f96v and f99r have sat facing each other for some time, perhaps even in the original gathering order.

Anyway, comparing the blocks of text reveals something I think is rather unusual, and which may possibly come as a surprise to many who look more at the drawings than at the text: that even though they share the same plant drawing, they really are – when you look a little closer – very different indeed from each other.

f17v

1. pchodol.chor.fchy.opydaiin.odaldy
2. ycheey.keeor.cthodal.okol.odaiin.okal
3. oldaim.odaiin.okal.oldaiin.chockhol.olol
4. kchor.fchol.cphol.olcheol.okeeey
5. ychol.chol.dolcheey.tchol.dar.ckhy
6. ockhor.or.okaiin.or.otaiind
7. sor.chkeey.paiir.cheor.os.s.aiin
8. qokeey.kchar.ol.dy.choldaiin.sy
9. lcheol.shol.kchol.choltaiin.ol
10. oytor.okeor.okar.okol.daiir.am
11. qokchey.qokaiir.ctheol.chol
12. oy.choy.kaiin.chckhey.ol.chor
13. ykeor.chol.chol.cthol.chkor.sheol
14. olor.okeeol.chodaiin.okeol.tchory
15. ychor.cthy.chshky.cheo.otor.oteol
16. okcheol.chol.okeol.cthol.otcheolom
17. qoain.shar.she.dol.qopchaiin.cthor
18. otor.cheeor.ol.chol.dor.chr.oreees
19. dain.chey.qoaiin.cthor.cholchom
20. ykeey.okeey.cheor.chol.sho.odaiin
21. oal.sheor.sholor.orshecthy.cpheor.daiin
22. qokeee.dar.chey.keeor.cheeol.ctheey.cthy
23. chkeey.okeor.shar.okeom

A list of mildly distinctive features of f17v might well include:
* the “ol.olol” repetition on line 3
* the single-leg gallows on line 1 (possibly a Neal Key?) and on line 4. (Might line 4 in fact be the start of a second paragraph?)
* note that the single-leg gallows on line 17 also looks like it might be the top line of a paragraph
* the “qoain” on line 17 (this appears only 7 times in the manuscript) and “qoaiin” on line 19 (this appears only 23 times)
* the “autocopied”-like choldaiin/choltaiin pair on lines 8 and 9
* chol appears 11 times (as itself and within other words)
* chol.chol (line 13) appears 39 times in A pages but only a single time in B pages

f96v

1. psheossheeor.qoepsheody.odar.ocpheeo.opar.ysarorom
2. yteor.yteor.olcheey.dteodaiin.sary.qoches.ycheom
3. dcheoteos.cpheos.sor.chcthory.cth.ytchey.daiin
4. dsheor.sheey.teocthy.ctheodody
5. tockhy.cthey.ckheeody.ar.cheykey
6. yteeody.teodar.olchey.sy
7. sheodal.chorory.cthol
8. ycheey.ckheal.daiin.s
9. oeol.ckheor.cheor.aiin
10. ctheor.oral.chor.ckhey
11. sar.os.checkhey.socthh
12. sosar.cheekeo.dain
13. soy.sar.cheor

Here:
* the four single-leg gallows (p) on line 1 could very easily be flagging Neal Keys in some way (e.g. [p] + “sheossheeor.qoe” + [p])
* there are only three instances of “yteor” in the whole manuscript, and line 2 has two side by side
* the way that “s” is used as the first character of lines 11-13 gives the appearance of being filler in some way (e.g. a null)
* there’s also an autocopyist-style diagonal set of “sar”s on lines 11-13 (sar / sosar / soy.sar) that also looks like filler
* the repetition of ctheodody and ckheeody on lines 4 and 5 makes it look as though ctheodody may have been a miscopying of ctheody

Hence even though the use of ‘language’ superficially appears similar to f17v (Currier-wise), there are very few actual similarities.

f99r, final paragraph

1. tolkeey.ctheey
2. ykeol.okeol.ockhey.chol.cheodal.okeor.olcheem.orar
3. okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey.daiin.okeols.aiin.olaiir.oolsal
4. qokeey.okeey.qokeey.okesy.qokeey.sar.sheseky.or.al
5. yshain.yckhey.octhey.dy.daiin.okor.okeey.shcthy.sh
6. ychor.ols.or.am.airam

Here, “qokeey.okeey.qokeey.okesy.qokeey” on line 4 is exactly the sort of repetitive garbage that reduces attempted linguistic decryptions to mush while simultaneously giving heart to hoax theorists and their CompSci tables.

A vs B, again

We can try categorize these three pages by revisiting Currier’s original notes on A and B,:

(a) Final ‘dy’ is very high in Language ‘B’; almost non-existent in Language ‘A.’
(b) The symbol groups ‘chol’ and ‘chor’ are very high in ‘A’ and often occur repeated; low in ‘B’.
(c) The symbol groups ‘chain’ and ‘chaiin’ rarely occur in ‘B’; medium frequency in ‘A.’
(d) Initial ‘chot’ high in ‘A’; rare in ‘B.’
(e) Initial ‘cth’ very high in ‘A’; very low in ‘B.’
(f) ‘Unattached’ finals scattered throughout Language ‘B’ texts in considerable profusion; generally much less noticeable in Language ‘A.’

Additional observations noted by Rene Zandbergen:

(g) The very frequent character combination ed is almost entirely non-existent in all A-language pages.
(h) The very common character combination qo is almost completely absent in the zodiac pages and the rosettes page, but appears everywhere else.
(i) The common character combination cho does not appear in the biological pages (and the rosettes page), but it does in other B-language pages.

From this, we can say (somewhat uncomfortably) that:
* f17v is a definitely-Currier-A page (it has lots of “chol” and “chor” instances, as well as cth- words)
* f96v is a sort-of-a-Currier-A page
* f99r is a sort-of-a-Currier-B page

And so we get to the awkward situation I highlighted back in 2013, that A vs B is far too simplistic to be a globally useful razor, and that we also don’t yet have a good ‘roadmap’ for how the ‘language’ used in the Voynich Manuscript evolves and changes through its pages. Which is essentially why I think that Adam Lewis is being too reductive when he claims that Voynichese is too samey across its pages to be crackable – the actual situation would seem to be that Voynichese is actually too unsamey for anyone to get a grip on.

But is there a match?

Back in 2013, commenter Šuruppag suggested on my original page that there might possibly be a very short match between all three blocks of text. Specifically (as transcribed above):

* f17v line 5: ychol.chol.dolcheey
* f96v line 2: yteor.yteor.olcheey
* f99r line 3: keey.keeor.okeey

Šuruppag continued:

A nice little sequence that occurs once in each passage. Seems to show similar pattern and characters.
Perhaps this sequence (possibly the name of the plant?) shows us the evolution of the cipher. Feel free to criticize if you don’t think so.

I would add that there’s reasonably good evidence (I flagged this in The Curse of the Voynich in 2006) that “-y” may mark where a longer word has been truncated: and so “keey” on f99r could very easily be a (slightly) truncated version of “keeor”. In which case we might wonder whether “yt” on f96v is enciphering the same underlying letter as “k” on f99r.

Again, in Curse in 2006 I proposed that EVA ok / ot / yk / yt (all of which appear prominently in label-driven sections such as the zodiac pages, e.g. “otolal”) might well be verbose cipher pairs, whereas EVA t / k (i.e. where not immediately preceded by o or y) might well be some kind of transposition cipher where a different letter gets inserted from elsewhere in the text (t and k are basically interchangeable in almost all circumstances). This makes me suspect here that the last word of the phrase on f99r should actually be olkeey rather than okeey, because “ok” would then be a verbose cipher whereas “olk” would be parsed as “ol-k”.

I also wrote in Curse that I thought not only that EVA e / ee / eee / ch shapes were verbosely enciphered vowels, but that their mapping and use seemd to change between A and B pages. So I for one would not be hugely disturbed if it were to be the case that EVA “e-or” in f96v reappears as EVA “ee-or” in f99r.

And finally, I have also proposed that where Voynichese words start with “d-“, this may well turn out to be a signal that a longer word has been split up into two shorter words. (For example, I suspect that daiin daiin sequences encipher groups of Arabic digits that should be joined together.)

Putting all these fragments together, I wonder if perhaps the three lines (if the various miscopyings were corrected, and the f99r -y rectified as -or, and the words reassembled) were originally supposed to be parsed as:

* f17v line 5: ychol..chololcheey – – – or perhaps “ychol.ychololcheey”
* f96v line 2: yteor.yteorolcheey
* f99r line 3: keeor.keeorolkeey

Hence it seems to me that what might well be going on in the f99r line is that three “k”s are being used to stand in for yt / yt / ch respectively, i.e. that the encipherer is using a transposition (i.e. replacement from elsewhere in the text) cipher trick rather than f96v’s verbose cipher trick to encipher the same plaintext word.

But what then of f17v’s text? My best current guess is that this version may well be closer still to the same small block of plaintext being enciphered on all three pages.

One cipher alphabet, multiple verbose ciphers?

More awkwardly than all of the above, the above seems to suggest that chol in the first page be the same as eor in the second page and eeor in the third page: that is, that even though the Voynichese letters are the same across different pages, the arrangement of verbose ciphers using those covertext letters may well be changing. Is our inability to read Voynichese then largely a consequence of multiple verbose cipher arrangements having been used?

When this kind of Voynichese discussion comes up, I often think back to my late (and intensely argumentative) friend Glen Claston. When he was building up his Voynichese transcription, he often noticed (as he mentioned to me a couple of times) that the patterns and styles of words would “shift” every few lines or paragraphs, as though it internally changed into a different gear or mode. He was never able to quantify this shift more precisely (even though he was a keener observer than almost everyone), but perhaps there lurks at the heart of Voynichese some kind of verbose cipher modality – not enough to disrupt the overall “look” (i.e. of the covertext), but more than enough to throw the decryptor hounds off the crypto-scent.

That is, perhaps what these three lines is trying to tell us is that we should be looking not for a single global verbose cipher key (as might be suggested by the way that the covertext consistently uses a relatively small set of cipher glyphs), but for a number of different (and rather more localized) verbose cipher keys. Voynichese’s covertext may be formed from a single set of glyphs across all its pages, but might the complexity around the different blur of Currier ‘languages’ actually be telling us that there are multiple encryption schemes in use?

If that is correct (to even some degree), what would we need to do to get under Voynichese’s skin? I’ve often spoken of the need to try to map Currier A usage to Currier B usage (to try to identify equivalent sequences in the two parts), but perhaps this is only 5% of the larger challenge, and moroever a step that makes no sense until the verbose ciphers have been even partially mapped – for it could very well be that a part of a single page might well need to be remapped to a different part of the same page in order to be able to parse it, let alone read it. Perhaps the first step should be to try to find examples of Voynich Manuscript pages that exhibit Clastonian multimodality (i.e. where there is an apparent shift in the system within the page), and see if we can quantify how the changes in behaviour work in practice, just so that we can even try to parse what is going on.

Tricky, though. 🙁

Incidental news: Cipher Mysteries recently had its 25,000th comment, while it has now also had close to three million page views. Which is nice. (Just thought I’d mention it in passing.) The remainder of the post is for tying up various Voynich threads that aren’t each enough for a whole post of their own.

Edith Zimmerman

Here’s a Voynich amuse-bouche: any page with drawings taken from the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 13 that includes the following quote is more than OK by me:

Anyway, so then we got to the part in our performance where Shelly and Mathilde stand in giant pipes covered with rhinestones. They hold up large balloons that have fishtails dangling off them, Chinese dragon-style.

Voynich LOL

An example of the per-section language use in Voynichese is that the word EVA “lol” appears far more often in quires Q13 and Q20 than anywhere else. Here’s the lol cluster in the top paragraph of f77r (1 x loly, 3 x lol, all at the end of lines):

Aside from Q13, EVA lol also appears here: f48v f86v6 f103r/v f106r f107r/v f111v f113v f115r f116r. Incidentally, the first word of the last paragraph of f116r (which I suspect contains a colophon from the author) seems to me to be the same kind of thing as the heavily digraph-structured labelese words, though with the extra twist of EVA l sometimes standing in for ol, as I discussed elsewhere):

Brian Hendley

The recent talk of Canadian academics’ rogue AI’s preparing for the enslavement of Mankind by solving Voynichese triggered some memories in the head of Brian Hendley, a philosophy professor at the University of Waterloo:

Your recent story about deciphering the mysterious Voynich manuscript took me back to my graduate school days at Yale and my dissertation supervisor, Bob Brumbaugh. Bob was a recognized Plato scholar but he did have a crack at deciphering the Voynich manuscript, resulting in some published articles and a book, “The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich ‘Roger Bacon’ Cipher Manuscript.” I recall Bob saying that you could spend your entire scholarly career trying to decipher the Voynich.

Ain’t that the truth, eh? *sigh*

Gerard Cheshire (yes, again)

Polyglot linguistic Voynich theorist Gerard Cheshire (whose theory I discussed here back in 2017) has hurtled into 2018 even more convinced of his utter rightness (and of everyone else’s abject wrongheadedness).

If you really, really want to read his all-new polyglot interpretation of the nine rosette page (which he calls “Tabula regio novem”, which I don’t believe is grammatical Latin, whatever Google Translate may say) which is all about Italian volcanoes, it is online here.

For those whose appetite for such things would be easily assuaged by a single dim sum, here is Cheshire’s elucidation (I hesitate to call it a decryption or translation) of the text around the bottom-left (SW) rosette:

om é naus (people and ship)
o’monas (in unity)
o’menas (take charge)
omas (mothers/babies)
o’naus (of ship)
orlaus [orlas] (to protect)
omr v asaæe [vasaie] (life-force pots: pregnant bellies)
or as (yet in)
a ele/elle a (he/she at)
a inaus [inauspitica] (inauspicious/unfavourable),
o ele e na (he/she is in)
æina (a/one)
omina (omen)
olinar (to look)
n os aus (it is)
omo na moos (man not mouse)
é ep [epousee] as (and embrace)
or e ele a opénas (an opening)
os as ar vas (thus you go)
opas (but carefully)
a réina (to the queen)
ol ar sa os aquar aisu na (to facilitate not getting wet with seawater).

J. Michael Herrmann

One little-noted Voynich theory from last year was J. Michael Herrmann’s The Voynich Manuscript is Written in Natural Language: The Pahlavi Hypothesis. Exactly as it says on the tin, it’s a linguistic Voynich theory:

Here, we provide evidence that the VM is written in natural language by establishing a relation of the Voynich alphabet and the Iranian Pahlavi script. Many of the Voynich characters are upside-down versions of their Pahlavi counterparts, which may be an effect of different writing directions. Other Voynich letters can be explained as ligatures or departures from Pahlavi with the intent to cope with known problems due to the stupendous ambiguity of Pahlavi text.

Herrmann followed that with his 2018 paper The Cannabis Page of the Voynich Manuscript. This finesses some of the claims in the 2017 paper, now suggesting that Voynichese uses an “alphabet that has similarities to Pahlavi and Mandaic script”.

The “Cannabis Page” referred to in the title is f16r:

In Herrmann’s translation (which is accompanied by extensive notes, presumably to help readers overcome the “stupendous ambiguity” of Pahlavi), the first paragraph of f16r emerges as a tirade against the evils of cannabis:

Cannabis [is] vain. Stay away from the impudent crowing man. The pipe is a debasement. Jaundice [is] the overly happy face of the adherent. [He is] puffed up with pride. Security does not come [to him]. In the evening peace of mind does not come [to him, as] the serpent of nightly lust spoils him. [What is] concealed,
will become public.

If you are interested, Herrmann’s rendering of the first paragraph of f1r is as follows:

(1) The humble grass shames you. Obediently hold the law. You cry for help for the tribunal commanded (2) for being insolent. Verily, you are frightened out of your wits by the troops in fury. Crowds and crowds of abled ones. (3) Woe, the well ordered line (of troops) is driving forward. If you see this, you will. Don’t start to count and to number the men, woe! (4) Refrain form [sic] the uneducated baldhead, the storyteller, the teaching of the “light bringer”. Remember the time of the fathers. (5) Heaven shield those who are weak for debasement. The man of doubt guide right.

If only I had an open letter I could use, if only… :-/