Who will solve the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript?

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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?

Navajo Voynich theory…

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Could the Voynich Manuscript really be anything to do with the group of supernatural beings who allegedly visited the Navajo homeland in 1996, as documented by Maureen Trudelle Schwarz in her 1998 Ethnohistory paper “Holy Visit 1996: Prophecy, Revitalization, and Resistance in the Contemporary Navajo World“? Her abstract begins:-

“In the spring of 1996 supernaturals visited the Navajo homeland to deliver a prophetic message of potential import to all Navajo people. In response, thousands of Navajo made pilgrimages to the site, while others had ceremonies conducted in their home communities and ceremonial practitioners made pilgrimages to the Navajo sacred mountains. In national recognition of the event, the Navajo Nation Unity Day of Prayer was established.”

Now, this other person’s “Restore The World” website thinks that the Voynich Manuscript (specifically the Quire 13 “balneo” section) documents the Navajo belief that the “First Man” escaped the flood by planting a cedar tree, then a pine tree, then a male reed, then finally a female reed. So somehow the VMs is caught up with an impending (2012) world flood, these visiting supernaturals, and the Navajo: a pretty potent cocktail of concepts to be mixing together!

OK, visual correspondence with some Q13 pages is a pretty thin reed to be building end-of-the-world-flood theories upon, but… it is what it is. Enjoy!

Jan 2011 Voynich pub meet…?

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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…

Leonardo latest news…

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Once again, Leonardo da Vinci has been in the news. Firstly, a local journalist found a fragment of Leonardo’s writing in Nantes library, which had received it in 1872 along with 5,000 other documents (including an unknown Mozart score) from “wealthy collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchère“. It hasn’t yet been transcribed or translated, so I couldn’t possibly comment on whether it describes a cleverly enciphered herbal manuscript (à la Edith Sherwood). Still, there must be at least 10,000 people in the world [including me, *sigh*] who can decipher his (actually fairly clear) handwriting / shorthand, so we shouldn’t have too long to wait, should we?

Somewhat more extraordinary is enthusiastic TV historian Silvano Vincenti’s claims that Leonardo da Vinci hid a secret (if somewhat short) message in Mona Lisa’s eyes, which he’ll be revealing fully next month (Jan 2011). He says:

“Invisible to the naked eye and painted in black on green-brown are the letters LV in her right pupil, obviously Leonardo’s initials, but it is what is in her left pupil that is far more interesting. […] It is very difficult to make them out clearly, but they appear to be the letters CE, or it could be the letter B.”

What’s more…

“Under the right-hand arch of the bridge seen in the background, Leonardo also painted 72 or L2, another possible clue. Two expert painters we consulted on this tell us that all these marks, painted using a tiny brush and a magnifying glass, cannot be an error.”

OK, let’s have a look for ourselves:-

What should quickly be apparent is that the craquelure on the Mona Lisa’s eyes differs significantly from the paint surrounding it. Specifically, if you also notice that the long crack that runs either side of her right pupil (i.e. the above-left eye) seems to have been painted over, all of this would seem to be a bit of an art history giveaway that both eyes underwent ‘restoration’ (which is always an interpretative and, sadly, often damaging process) at a much later date – in fact, probably 50+ years later, wouldn’t you say? Which, given that Leonardo was commissioned in 1503 and died in 1519, would seem to rule him out.

Hence, I sincerely hope that Silvano Vincenti has engaged not just “expert painters” but also expert art historians to test out his intriguing ideas. Or else he may well make himself look a bit of a fool. Oh well! 🙁

A Merry Cipher Mysteries Christmas to you!

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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! 🙂

Well, here’s where the answer may be found…

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For a while, I’ve had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn’t work out how to scratch.

You see… about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of what was going on, and even asked their opinions on what Milan should do – Big Tent politics, Quattrocento-style. These representatives then wrote copious letters back to their rulers, passing on as many of Milan’s secrets as they could remember. Fascinating stuff, so I made a mental note to look the reference up again, because it would be a great place to see if I could find a critical edition of whichever of those despatches still existed, to use them to read around critical dates in my reconstructed Averlino/Voynich narrative, to see if any detail either strengthened or refuted my hypothesis.

But do you think I could ever find that book again? That’s right – not a hope.

So anyway, I’d practically given up on finding those despatches when, while (inevitably) looking for something completely different  this evening, I stumbled upon one stonkingly huge set of them. The sixteen volume series is entitled Carteggio degli oratori mantovani alla Corte Sforzesca (1450-1500), with each slab containing 500 to 700 pages of letters sent from Milan back to the Gonzaga court in Mantua. The ones that seem to have been published so far are:-

1. 1450-1459 / 2. 1460 / 3. 1461 / 4. 1462 / edited by Isabella Lazzarini
5. 1463 / edited by Marco Folin
6. 1464-1465 / 7. 1466-1467 / 8. 1468-1471 / edited by Maria Nadia Covini
10. 1475-1477 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
11. 1478-1479 / edited by Marcello Simonetta
12. 1480-1482 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
15. 1495-1498 / edited by Antonella Grati, Arturo Pacini 

For me, the two most interesting things to look at would be the reception in Milan of the De Re Militari incident which happened sometime in 1461 [Vol.3]; and also August / September  1465 [Vol.6], which is when Domenic Dominici the Bishop of Brescia rode into Milan with his copy of what is now known as ‘Vat. Gr. 1291’ (René Zandbergen’s favourite circular Byzantine nymph-fest, which Fulvio Orsini would then buy), before then leaving  for Rome with (I strongly suspect) Antonio Averlino in tow.

Of course, any other fleeting mention of Antonio Averlino / Filarete in the 1450-1465 volumes of these despatches could well turn out to be extraordinarily useful, never mind any rumours or talk of a mysterious unreadable herbal as well! 🙂 One day I’ll get a chance to go through these myself (because the British Library has a copy of all of the above), and who as yet knows what’s there to be found?

In the meantime, please leave a comment here to tell me if there are any other sets of despatches published or currently being edited that were sent out from Francesco Sforza’s ‘Big Tent’ in Milan circa 1450-1465, thanks very much!

Klaus Schmeh Voynich audio interview…

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Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 – Klaus’ VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich Manuscript. This was prompted by his Voynich talk at the 14th European Skeptics Conference in Budapest earlier this year (2010).

In fact, it’s quite revealing to see how far he has come from a 2008 German skeptic conference he also talked at (discussed here) [where he fell in behind the mainstream 16th century hoax position] and a 2008 article he wrote (which I reviewed here): it’s nice to see that he’s moved from seeing pretty much everything Voynichese as a combination of pseudoscience and pseudohistory to a rather more nuanced (and realistic) position.

But all the same, looking forward, to where should Voynich skepticism go from here? From what we now know, I’d say there are no obvious grounds for a hardcore skeptical position any more – the vellum seems genuinely old, with the ink freshly written on it, and the radiocarbon dating broadly meshing with the kind of evidence I’ve been working on for the last 5+ years, vis-à-vis:

  • The ‘4o’ verbose pair’s brief appearance in various Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1456 (see The Curse Of The Voynich pp.175-179)
  • The parallel hatching which I suspect pretty much forces a post-1440 date if it was made in Italy, or post-1410 if Germany
  • The two 15th century hands in the marginalia which pretty much force a pre-1500 date for the VMs
  • Sergio Toresella’s very specific dating claim, based on his lifetime with herbal manuscripts – that it was made in Northern Italy (probably Milan or the Venice region) around 1460

The swallow-tail merlons on the two castle walls (on the nine-rosette page) that Klaus mentioned in the podcast have actually been debated for at least a decade: although these don’t prove that the Voynich Manuscript was constructed in Northern Italy (where they were an unmissable feature of many castles), they clearly do help to shift the balance of probability that way away from Germany (the #2 candidate region).

And I suppose this is where all this is going: by carefully combining all these pieces together, we can now try to think about the Voynich in terms of probabilities. Even if you discount my Antonio Averlino hypothesis, I don’t honestly mind being what I call “the right kind of wrong” – i.e. looking in the right culture, place, and time, but perhaps finding a false positive to match a very specific forensic profile. Just so you know, I’d currently rate the likelihood of the VMs’s origin’s being Northern Italy at ~80%, Savoy ~10%, Germany ~5%, and anywhere else ~5%.

Hence, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that they’d just uncovered a fifteenth century letter clearly describing the Voynich Manuscript as having been written by Giovanni Fontana, Cicco Simonetta, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, or any one of the hundreds of other desperately clever Northern Italian polymaths who were right there at the birth of the Renaissance, I’d be utterly delighted: for I think that is the cultural milieu linking pretty much all the strands of tangible (as opposed to merely suggestive) evidence to date.

The notions that we know nothing about the VMs and/or that it is somehow destined to be proven a meaningless hoax are not ‘skeptical’ in the true sense of the word: rather, they are postmodernist non-positions, uncritical ‘meh‘s in the face of the interconnected mass of subtle – but nonetheless tangible – historical evidence VMs researchers have carefully accumulated. In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I think the real “beliefs that are taken for granted by most of the population” at which skeptics should be pointing their weapons of mass deconstruction are not this kind of painstakingly-assembled gear-train, but the widely-disseminated (and utterly fallacious) claim that the VMs is a 16th century hoax for financial gain.

In a way, this would turn Klaus’ own skeptical research chain back on itself – and in so doing would hopefully set him free. “More Schmeh, less meh“, eh? 🙂

“The Cadence of Gypsies” on its way…

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Here comes another book to add to my Big Fat List of Voynich novels: the just-about-released-any-day-now The Cadence of Gypsies by Barbara Casey. It has a fairly straightforward setup:

On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written by her birth mother in an unknown language. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.  Carolina is accompanied by three extremely gifted but mischievous  students the FIGs from Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women.  In an effort to help their favorite teacher, the FIGs will have to use their special abilities to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, the most mysterious document in the world, and the one thing that is strangely similar to what Carolina was given. Their search will take them into the mystical world of gypsy tradition and magic, more exciting and dangerous than any of them could have imagined.

So… yes, it’s more Voynich teen fiction, continuing the mini-wave started by the sparky “That’s Life, Samara Brooks”. Enjoy!

First photograph by Durer of a Da Vinci drawing? Riiiiight…

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You may have heard the curious story from May 2008 about how Sotheby’s withdrew a picture from auction that was suspected of having been optically captured by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1790s, some 30 years before the first ‘official’ photo was taken. Photography historian Dr Larry J. Schaaf speculated that this was so “based on the letter ‘W’ that – on close inspection – can be seen inscribed in an ‘unidentified hand’ in the bottom-right corner of the image and four others” in an album of early images known to have been owned by Englishman Henry Bright.

While this is a neat little narrative built on a tiny handwritten feature in the margins, it’s – quite frankly – just not crackpot enough to make the grade here. Here at Cipher Mysteries Towers, our palettes have become accustomed to overspiced Voynich Manuscript and Phaistos Disc theories, typically high-Scoville historical decoctions that would blow most historians’ mouths off. So, all I can say to all you photographic pseudo-historians out there is – guys, guys, you’re going to have to do better than that to make the front page here.

And so it is with a sense of both pride and awe that I doff my cap to Welshman Roger Davies. His theory – which is his, and his alone, so far as I can make out – is that Dürer’s 9-inch high 1514 engraving meisterwerke “Melancholia #1” is actually a photograph of a large (but lost) drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, probably with an exposure time of several days.

What first alerted Davies was the facial similarities between Albrecht Dürer’s cherub and a Leonardo cherub in a “sketch held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, France“. He then sketched out Dürer’s perspective, only to discover an underlying 532-point circle which trickily aligns to a good number of the picture’s features in a ‘sacred geometry’ kind of way. Davies then points to 1480 (34 years back from 1514, where 34 is the total of each line of Dürer’s magic square in the picture) and 2012 (532 years forward from 1480), but then corrects the figure to 2001, midway between the 1997 Montserrat volcanic events and the 2004 Asian tsunami.

Are you following all this?

With more than an echo of Wilfrid Voynich’s connecting the VMs with Roger Bacon and John Dee, “Davies believes that the artist must have possessed an extensive knowledge of mathematics, alchemy, geometry, astronomy and optics to, first, conceive the drawing and then photograph it onto a light-sensitive copper plate inside a camera obscura. The only person with such skills, according to Davies, was Da Vinci.”

Not yet convinced by this? “Dürer’s connection with Da Vinci also lies in their sharing the same ‘mentor in mathematics’, Luca Pacioli“, the article continues. Well, that settles it, then. 🙂

(Note that the online article is in four pieces but the internal links are broken: so here are direct links to pages 2, 3, and 4 of it).

Leonardo’s unexpected elephant…

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OK, much as I deplore the relentless, adulatory stripmining of Leonardo da Vinci’s works, I do rather enjoy seeing infra-red images of paintings, glimpsing the construction marks left beneath the surface. And so I have nothing but good things to say about Discovery News’ series of infra-red images of Leonardo’s “Adoration of the Magi”. I like the detailing on the feet, and especially the unexpected sketch of an elephant. Enjoy!

The person who made the discovery was Maurizio Seracini, helpfully described by Discovery News as “the only non-fictional living character mentioned in ‘The Da Vinci Code’“. Though I’m pretty sure that doesn’t appear on the top line of his CV! 😉