I’ve had some nice emails in the last few days from all kinds of historical codebreakers, which set me thinking: what kind of person would be able to solve any of the mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript? I mean, anyone can look at it – but what kind of a mind would stand any chance of being able to solve it?

Perhaps the first thing to consider is whether you can genuinely appreciate it: not as a ‘work of art’ (only someone who hasn’t been to a proper art gallery could call the VMs ‘beautiful’), but as an artefact of puzzling beauty. I find the way that it manages to encompass so many opposites simultaneously analogous to ultra-complex chess problems (such as V.Korolkov’s near-unbelievable 1937 study):-

• Left-to-right and right-to-left aspects… but neither dominating
• Features that suggest Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, Occitan, Slavic… but none dominating
• Old and new, traditional and contemporary, medieval & Renaissance… but none dominating
• Language, shorthand, cipher… but none dominating

…and so on. The knee-jerk academic reaction to each of these aspects is reductivist: to reduce the problem space by forcing a choice, for how can (for example) a thing be both medieval and Renaissance?

Yet my personal Voynich “moment of Zen” came when I stopped trying to wrestle with these opposites, i.e. when I stopped trying to force the evidential pendulum to swing to a single side. The way I now see it is that all these complex aspects are not inherently contradictory or paradoxical, but are instead just different sides of the thing itself, if not also different sides of the person behind it.

I therefore think that the people who will solve the VMs will be those who can manage to abandon their intellectual need for certainties, for I believe the answers will ultimately emerge from combining and working with all these ambiguities and uncertainties, not in fighting against them.

Realistically, however, very few people can manage this trick, as it goes against almost everything you’ve been taught. Perhaps the key attribute you’d need to cultivate is intuition: I’ve blogged elsewhere about how entrepreneurs need intuition, which I define as “the means by which we combine uncertainties” – perhaps Voynich researchers are utimately much the same?

It’s time once again for that dizzying [*] highpoint of the Cipher Mysteries calendar – the London Voynich Winter pub meet.

As normal, I’m more than happy to adjust the precise date to fit around any visiting Voynichero’s schedule (or perhaps if you just happen to be stuck in one of our wonderfulle historycke aero-portes), so please say ASAP if you plan to be passing through London over the next 2-4 weeks and would like to come along too.

The current plan – as far as it goes – is to meet up at the historic Dog And Duck in Soho one Sunday afternoon in January (i.e. the 9th, 16th, or 23rd), and to then go on for a Chinese meal at the excellent New Mayflower on Shaftesbury Avenue, where a certain ‘Mr Voynich’ once had his antiquarian bookshop. Unless you have a better idea?

If you’d like to come along, drop me an email saying which dates you can do, and I’ll try to set something up accordingly.

Hope to see you there – cheers!

[*] if you drink too much alcohol, that is. Though I try not to…

This is the point in the calendar when it’s traditional for bloggers to gloss over how miserable the preceding year has been, by devising some clever rhetorical formulation which gives all the appearance of optimism for the coming year, but which actually says nothing of real substance. I’ve even done this myself in the past (*sigh*), but now I’m solid enough with blogging to really grasp its tropes and limitations, I can aim to transcend all that faux positivism and to tell it like it is.

For 2010, ‘The Year In Voynich’ has been somewhat disappointing, particularly relative to my predictions for it: last Christmas, I was convinced that proper write-ups of the VMs’ vellum radiocarbon dating and of its McCrone ink microscopy (both following on from the ORF VMs documentary) would be major steps forward for the field; that these would clear some dead wood from the research forests; and, when considered together, might just form a tasty enough dangly maggot to tempt a big fish from the pool of contemporary historians to take a punt on the Voynich Manuscript. All plausible ideas on my part: but all so wrong, all brutally pareidolic.

Well… I now hear news that Dr. Gregory Hodgins at the University of Arizona is writing up the radiocarbon dating for submission in an (as-yet-unspecified) journal during January 2011, so perhaps things will start moving back on track then. Perhaps not, of course, but we shall see… fingers crossed, all the same. Just pretend I got the year wrong in my previous post, OK?

Finally, there’s a recent quote from Victor D. Huliganov that “the only way to win as a linguist with the Voynich manuscript is not to play” (appropriating the famous quote from the film War Games that “the only winning move [in nuclear war] is not to play”). Now this worries me: even though I’m 99% certain that linguists are on a losing game with the VMs (it’s an historical ciphertext, not a language, duh), it concerns me that other types of academics might use this as an excuse not to engage with it. So if anyone unexpected happens to ask you about the VMs during 2011, can I please ask you to tell him/her that:-

• It’s a genuinely old object, so normal forensic historical techniques should apply perfectly well to it
• We continue to untangle its complicated codicology and (probably 15th century) palaeography
• We’ve also made reasonable progress in grasping its provenance back to circa 1600-1610
• Though it’s anomalous in many respects, it’s not as if it’s alien – it’s just a damnably tricky artefact
• Contrary to widespread misinformation, there’s no direct evidence that it is a hoax because…
• Absence of evidence (of meaning) is not evidence of absence (of meaning)

Anyway, I’ve actually got far more interesting research leads to follow than I did last December, so I’m looking forward to 2011 in my own sweet way. Which is not to say I’m massively optimistic that they’ll bear fruit, but I’m going to keep on trying regardless, and I hope you do too. So have a Merry Christmas and – however you choose to spend your time – a revealing New Year! 🙂