“The True Path of Alchemy” is *not* the VMs…

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A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that “The True Path of Alchemy” is not the VMs (confirming Rene’s suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny resemblance to the VMs was, shall we say, rather less than 100% accurate. All the same, the affair is not completely closed just yet…

The manuscript of “The True Path of Alchemy” currently lives in the National Museum Library in Prague (though it doesn’t appear in any of their online catalogues). The first person to write about it in any detail was Otakar Zachar, whose 112-page 1899 monograph “Mistra Antonia z Florencie Cesta spravedlivá v alchymii” is available online (you can download it as a set of six 20-page PDFs). As an aside, “Otakar” was the name of Rudolph II’s pet lion, whose death in 1612 was (reputedly) seen as a portent of Rudolph’s own death later that year. Just so you know! 🙂

Zachar’s monograph contains (facing p.47) only one rather underwhelming scan of the original manuscript’s text: click on the following cropped & enhanced thumbnail to see a larger version:-

TruePath-f22v-f23r
“The True Path of Alchemy” f22v and f23r

Unless I’m hugely mistaken (no laughing at the back), the True Path appears to be written not in Italian or Latin but in Czech / Bohemian in an apparently 15th century hand, with the folio numbering in a standard 16th century hand.

Zachar also includes (facing his page 24) an image of a flask with a crown, which unfortunately appears as a near-black page in the scan (though you can just about resurrect it using fairly heavy image enhancement):-

TruePath-flask
“The True Path of Alchemy”, flask with a crown

According to note 43 on this webpage, a more up-to-date article on the Ms by V Karpenko appeared in Ambix 37, 61 (1990), which I shall try to read. Karpenko mentions that the ms contains 13 questions for telling whether an alchemist is false. Presumably #1 is: “does he/she claim to be an alchemist?” 🙂

As to attribution, one webpage I found seems to claim that the manuscript was actually written by Jan z Lazu (A.K.A. “Laznioro”, reputedly the first Czech alchemist) [the claim appears here as well]: but as my Czech extends no further than occasional words such as “rukopisu” (manuscript), I couldn’t say whether that relates to authorship, translation, or adaptation. Perhaps my Czech mate Hurychnioro will have a look and tell me how badly I’ve got it wrong. 🙂

I then went hunting for the MS reference in the scans of the National Museum Library’s card index, where Zachar’s book merits five cards (is that five copies? or five cross-references?): the card annotations mention “86 J 121”, “Schiller 294”, and “Zeyer 1977”. However, even though “86 J …” appears to be a plausible-looking shelfmark for the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze, searching for “86 J 121” in the Manuscriptorium returned no hits. Oh well!

Rene Zandbergen also very kindly sent over the GIFs absent from the voynich.nu site: unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious mention of the “True Path” there. Really, to identify any manuscript in the Kunstkammer inventory (whether the True Path or even the Voynich Manuscript!), you’d need to know how it was bound (i.e. whether the cover was red or white leather etc) and what else was bound in with it. Zachar and/or Karpenko may well have included this information, of course, but I’ve yet to get quite that far. 🙁

And so… back to Bolton, where this all started.

If you compare the basic factuality with Bolton’s floridity, I think you’d have to conclude that the two don’t quite gel:-

  • “1475” – should have been 1457 (d’oh!)
  • “beautifully illuminated” – though there are some pictures and illuminated letters, from the poor quality of the handwriting I’d be fairly surprised if they were “beautiful” per se
  • “rare” – given that it’s the only extant copy, perhaps we’ll give Bolton the benefit of the doubt on this one 🙂
  • “couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language” – the jury’s out, as Karpenko seems to gives the impression that the text is a touch more rational than most alchemical texts. All the same, an alchemy text that’s not exceedingly obscure is probably a fake, so perhaps this is just Bolton being tautologous. 🙂
  • “library of Wresowitz” – Rafal Prinke highlights a good-sized 1855 article on Czech alchemy by Ferdinand Mikovec in the periodical “Lumir”, which says that Vaclav Vresovec z Vresovic (d. 1583) bequeathed his library (containing various alchemical mss) to the town council of Mala Strana in Prague. However, even though linking “The True Path” to this collection would be a good guess, I saw no mention at all of Counsellor VVzV in Zachar’s monograph, so I’m a little skeptical…
  • “high price” – without any textual source, this may well be another Boltonian ’embellishment’, let’s say. 🙂

Despite my obvious disappointment that the True Path hasn’t turned out to be an early sighting of the Voynich Manuscript, I remain optimistic that it might yet turn out to be linked with Filarete. For example, 1457 is a perfect match for when the Florentine claimed to have been collecting and writing his little books of secrets in his (ample) spare time. It may well be that nobody to date has thought to examine “The True Path of Alchemy” specifically with a Filarete hypothesis in mind – might there be some textual ‘tell’ hidden in there? There’s only one way to find out…

Finally, Zachar includes (pp.91-95) a decent chunk of Latin taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 that relates to this manuscript. Thanks to the online magic of Manuscriptorium, I can see that these Observationes quaedam circa suprascriptum processum Bohemicum appear on pages 129r to 153r, and that they were written at the beginning of the 17th century (the text specifically mentions “1606”). Later on I’ll ask Philip Neal if there’s anything hugely interesting there – though the chances are quite small, you never know until you look!

Earliest archival reference to the Voynich Manuscript…???

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A vast constellation of curious books revolves around the hazily uncertain core of the Voynich Manuscript: as with most things, some are outright good, some are just plain bad, while most live in a mixed-up zone in the middle.

Henry Carrington Bolton’s (1904) ” The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II” is a poster-child for that mixed-up zone – equal parts fact and fiction, Bolton’s oeuvre contains more than a dash of both historical sense and hysterical nonsense. Though it does go on to cover many varied aspects of Rudolph’s court, the first half of it amounts to a greatest-hits compilation of the credulous alchemical mythology surrounding John Dee’s Bohemian adventure – “Now That’s What I Call Bohemian Alchemy #1“, if you like. 🙂

However, for all the hallucinogenic tableaux he conjures up via the shewstone of his historical imagination (and for all the brazen liberties he takes with the facts), Bolton clearly did go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate his Ikea mansion out a lot of, well, basically good stuff. Hence the reader (though often deeply suspicious) finds hundreds of genuine factual nuggets embedded into the walls of the proto-scientific passageway Bolton has tunnelled through the Rudolfine era.

So, my question to you is this: is the following particularly shiny nugget (pp.37-38) gold or lead?

[...] when conversation was interrupted by the
entrance of Martin de Rutzke, bringing with him a beautifully
illuminated and rare manuscript rescued at the dispersal of
the library of Wresowitz, who was reputed to have been a
successful experimenter. The work was entitled "The True

Path of Alchemy," and was written by Antonio of Florence
in the year 1475; being couched in exceedingly obscure and
mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black
art, it was particularly admired by Rudolph who ordered his
treasurer to pay the high price demanded for it, and instructed
his librarian to add it to his valuable collection.

For a start, this “beautifully illuminated and rare manuscript… couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language, hinting only at the secrets of the black art” bought by Rudolph for a “high price” does sounds terrifically like the Voynich Manuscript as described by Dr Raphael Mnishovsky (according to Johannes Marcus Marci in 1665).

Furthermore, even if I just happened to have a time machine in my shed I could barely have engineered a more blatant archival link between Rudolph II and a mid-Quattrocento Florentine called “Antonio”. (Note that Antonio Averlino is reported by Giorgio Vasari to have died in Rome around 1469, but given that there is no documentation to support or refute this, 1475 is entirely possible.)

As far as the book’s 16th century provenance goes, Wolfgang von Wresowitz died on 21st March 1569, while Bernhard Wresowitz died in 1571, and presumably the alchemical “library of Wresowitz” Bolton mentions was dispersed not long after: Rudolph moved his court to Prague in 1583, but it would probably take someone like Rafal Prinke to trace the Wresowitz alchemical library connection any further.

All in all, the big research question then becomes: did Bolton just make up this whole thing (the document name, author name, date, price, and provenance), or was he reporting something he found while trawling relevant books for intriguing-sounding alchemical stories? He comments elsewhere that he made use of the books by Czech historian Josef Svatek (1835-1897), so perhaps that’s one place to start.

Normally, the first proper place one would look for this would be the 1607-1611 Kunstkammer inventory drawn up by miniaturist Daniel Fröschl, as described in detail in Rotraud Bauer and Herbert Haupt’s (1976), “Die Kunstkammer Rudolfs II“. Unfortunately, the relevant gifs have long disappeared from the voynich.nu Bauer-Haupt page, so doing this will probably require someone (i.e. probably me) to spend a day at the library. However, I should also caution that, because Rudolph II may well have presented the same book to Sinapius around 1608 when he gave him the “de Tepenecz” title (i.e. while Fröschl was drawing up the inventory), it is entirely possible that it may not appear there – so, absence of evidence there would (as ever) not be evidence of absence.

However, the problem with this is that Fröschl’s inventory was completely unknown to historians until the middle of the twentieth century, and hence was unknown to Bolton: so, whatever Bolton’s source for this story, the one place we can be sure it didn’t (directly) come from is that inventory.

But all the same: if not there, where on earth did Bolton happen to read about “The True Path of Alchemy“? If we could answer that question, we might well be able to find out about the Voynich Manuscript’s very early history… definitely worth a closer look, I’d say… 🙂

PS: quick reminder not to forget the London Voynich pub meet at 5pm tonight!

PPS: thanks to a high-speed reply from Rafal Prinke, it now looks as though this is not (after all) the Voynich Manuscript (which is a shame, but what do you expect if you rely on Bolton?) – and possibly closer to a chicken nugget than to a gold nugget. Even so, expect a further post on this shortly! 😮

Voynich cipher structure…

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What (in my opinion) has scuppered just about every code-breaking assault on the VMs to date has been the faulty presumption that you don’t need to worry about anything so boring as “getting the history right first”, because the statistical analysis fairy will fly in waving her +10 Wand of ANOVA and somehow sort it all out. Errrm… won’t she?

Yet even as early as 1931 John Matthews Manly pointed out that the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers were clearly written in a 15th century hand – hence it couldn’t easily post-date 1500. So why do people still persist in using their stats tricks to hunt for complex mechanisms (such as Vigenère polyalphabetic ciphers, and even the dreaded Cardan grille – though personally, I’d rather have a nice mixed grille) that weren’t invented till nearly a century later? Whatever cryptographic arrangement you propose yielded the VMs’ distinctively structured behaviour should be consistent with the limited palette of techniques available to a cipher-maker circa 1450-1500.

In short, history says (whether you choose to listen to it or not) that we shouldn’t hypothesize some single high-powered cipher trick – rather, we need to look for a set of simple techniques consistent with Quattrocento knowledge of cryptography blended together in a devious (and probably subtly deceptive) way.

Even so, 50 years of statistical hackery later, it seems pretty clear that the cryptographic stats fairy hasn’t worked her spell as hoped. But why should her (usually pretty good) magic have failed so abysmally?

Well… if you delve a little deeper into theoretical statistica, you find the theorists’ nimble “get-out clause” – that the presence of so-called confounding factors can disrupt all the neat assumptions underlying stats’ mathematical models. These factors, in a nutshell, are ways in which individual samples within your overall dataset are causally linked together locally in non-obvious ways that make the global numerical tests go wrong… really quite badly wrong, in fact.

Unsurprisingly, I believe that the presence of confounding factors is precisely the reason that the standard statistical toolbox continues to draw so much of a blank with the VMs – that is, the individual letters / glyphs are silently linked together in ways that act as local confounding factors to any global analytical pass. But if so, what exactly are those pesky linkages?

My conclusion is that the bulk of the, errrm, ‘confundity‘ arises because the “vowel” glyphs (a / e / i / o / y) are like many Budapest workers – they only get to pay their rent by holding down two or more different jobs at the same time (though normally only one job at any given moment). For example, I don’t believe that the “o” in “qo” has anything at all to do with the “o”s in “ot”, “or” or “ol” (you can tell this because “qol” only pops up in those later sections where you find free-standing “l” glyphs). Similarly, I don’t think the “a” in “aiin” is in any way linked with the “a” in “al”, or even with the “a” in “aiir” (because their usage and context patterns are so different).

Yet once you fully accept that this is the case, you’re more or less forced to follow a long path of uncomfortable reasoning that leads you right to the doorstep of an even more uncomfortable conclusion: that the cover cipher is largely formed of groups of letters. Which is to say, that a / e / i / o / y have no independent meaning except as part of the letters with which they are immediately paired or grouped, and that the Voynichese CVCV structure (to which linguists have clung for so long through a storm of criticism) is not definitive evidence of the presence of language, but is instead an artefact of the cipher system’s covertext – merely its misleading outer appearance, not its inner structure at all.

Furthermore, the VMs’ cunning encipherer occasionally adds in a “space-transposition cipher” after his “pairification” stage to prevent repetition of the pairs becoming just that little bit too obvious for his liking: for example, on page f15v, the first line’s “ororor” has been turned into “oror or“, while the second line’s “orororor” has been turned into “or or oro r“. To my eyes, the underlying sequential repetitions look very much as if the plaintext contains the oh-so-familiar “MMM”, “CCC”, “XXX” or “III” of Roman numbers, even circa 1450 a pattern so visually obvious to codebreakers that the verbose cipher system needed to be hacked yet further to conceal it.

Hmmm… four repeated Roman number letters, and four pairs in the or / ol / ar / al set apparently to hide repetitions – a coincidence? Or might it be that or / ol / ar / al in some way encipher m / c / x / i (though probably not in that order)? Well… I would be hugely unsurprised if this miniature four-pair cipher system turns out to have been designed specifically for this purpose in an earlier cipher, and that the mechanism was reused and adapted for the later (and far more complex) Voynichese cipher system that evolved out of it – that is, it remained in the encipherer’s personal cipher alphabet rather like a “cryptographic fossil”. (As a general aside, the idea that Voynichese popped into existence fully formed in the shape we now see it makes no engineering sense at all to me – something as tricksy and structurally complex must necessarily have gone through a fair number of stages of evolution en route.)

Incidentally: with spaces included, you see olol (51), arar (47), alal (37) and oror (23) – but take spaces out, and you get olol (186), arar (161), oror (87), alal (60), ololol (13), ararar (7), ororor (1), alalal (1)  and the orororor (1) mentioned above. At the same time, remove all the spaces and you see just four instances of okok and two of otot in the entire VMs, i.e. ol is followed by ol more than 50x more often than ok is followed by ok.

To be sure, this does not explain all the behavioural properties of Voynichese: ultimately, repetitive phrases like “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” (and “ur so qokedy daiin, m8 lol“?) are dancing to a quite different underlying beat. Whatever kind of token gallows characters turn out to encipher, I think it is extremely unlikely that they are a single letter substitution – some other kind of enciphering mechanism is going on there (I suspect some kind of in-page transposition cipher). Similarly, I’m pretty sure that “qo”, “d”, and “y” encipher tokens of a quite different nature again (here, I suspect that they match the three basic abbreviatory shorthand marks that were in active use in the Quattrocento, i.e. “qo” => subscriptio, “d” => superscriptio [macron], and “y” => truncatio).

Arrange all these smaller systems together, and I think that what is revealed is a multi-stage cipher architecture looking broadly like this:-

vmsciphersystem-v001

Now, I’ve had flak from a number of people over the years (ummm… mainly Elmar, truth be told, bless ‘im) who comment that this kind of arrangment seems far too complex to be right. The problem I have is how to convince such naysayers that what I present here is the end result of a basically sensible methodology – that of decomposing the heavily-structured nature of Voynichese into its constituent pieces, each of which is consistent with the (relatively low) level of cryptographic technique available before 1500. That is, the real cleverness we are up against here isn’t one of fiendish mathematical complexity, but of cunning arrangement of simple pieces – not of Albertian innovative technique, but of Filaretian innovative architecture.

All the same, even the best-designed house needs walls and a roof – and here, the main cipher properties arise from the use of verbose cipher to make a language-like covertext. Get around that, and I the rest of the structure’s secrets may very well yield to the repetitive numerical prodding that is statistical analysis. Here’s how to do it:-

(1) write a simple text filter to undo the space transposition cipher:-
–> (a) get rid of any spaces between [o | a] and [l | r] – i.e. transform “oro ror” into “ororor”
–> (b) get rid of any spaces between [or | ol | ar | al]  and [or | ol | ar | al] – i.e. transform “or al or” into “oralor”

(2) tokenize the text into the following units, making sure that you tokenize “qo” before anything else (i.e. “qok” must tokenize to “qo” + “k”, and not to “q” + “ok”). Of course, I may have got the precise details very slightly wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this is not less than 90% of the way there.

qo
eeee, eee, ee, ch, sh
ok, ot, of, op, yk, yt, yf, yp
ockh, octh, ocfh, ocph, yckh, ycth, ycfh, ycph
ol, or, al, ar, an, am
air, aiir, aiiir, aiiiir
ain, aiin, aiiin, aiiiin
aim, aiim, aiiim, aiiiim
ckh, cth, cfh, cph
eo, od  <--- these two are the wobbly ones that may need further thought!

Note that a number of additional single-letter tokens get left over (most notably s, d, y, l, k, t, f, p), but these are not paired, so that’s OK. My guess is that any left-over “o” and “a” characters are probably nulls or pen-slips.

(3) perform your statistical analyses on the set of (roughly 50) tokens output by stage 2.

Note that I don’t believe that this somehow “solves” Voynichese in a single step (becaus nothing connected with the VMs has ever been that simple before, and that is unlikely to change now). However, I do believe that removing the pairs like this removes arguably the most problematic set of confounding factors from the text, and hence that doing so should allow the productive use of statistics to crack the rest of the cryptographic problems associated with Voynichese.

“The Mysterious Case of the Voynich Manuscript”…

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Gifted and talented kids have a pretty tough time of it. Even when they do manage find an outlet for the stuff buzzing in their head (here’s my 5-year-old son’s first film, if you haven’t seen it already), what on earth can their perpetually-lagging-behind parents point them at to keep them stimulated? While there are some genuinely cool things out there (such as the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum), these sadly tend to be as rare as hen’s teeth. With gold fillings.

One nice thing I like to take Alex to is the interactive monthly meetings of the Surrey Explorers, our local Kingston branch of the NAGC (the “National Association for Gifted Children”). He enjoyed building robots with Dr Bobor of Mitsubishi (here’s Alex’s jet-powered kangaroo robot design), finding out about Lonesome George, making music with balloons, learning magic tricks, etc. This term, he’s really looking forward to Street Dance in September and (as you probably guessed already, CM readers) Codes and Ciphers in October.

On this general theme, here’s something I found yesterday when playing with the Scirus scientific search engine. This summer (I believe), an Australian gifted and talented support organization called G.A.T.E.WAYS ran a series of four Voynich Manuscript-themed days (costing about £100 per child) called “The Mysterious Case of the Voynich Manuscript“, hosted by microbiologist / researcher Dr Geoff Crawford. Session #1 was a introduction to the VMs, Session #2 summarized historical codes & ciphers, Session #3 looked at forgery and hoaxes, while Session #4 was set up so that participants could actually try to crack the VMs for themselves. Yes, I’d say that pitching the VMs to kids like this is pretty cool – good job, I hope it went well! 🙂

Incidentally, for ages I’ve been meaning to give a (rather more modestly-priced, it has to be said) Voynich lecture, possibly at Treadwell’s. However, over the last couple of years, it seems – somewhat paradoxically – that the more I learn about the VMs, the less there is to say. “Voynich history”? Wishful thinking. “Voynich theories“? Hallucinatory enigmatology. Which is not to say that I’m pessimistic: but, rather, that I’d rather now talk about what the VMs is rather than what it might be, as the latter seems not to have got us anywhere in 500 years. 🙁

All the same, I think that there are two huge lessons to be learnt from Voynich research (for both adults and children!): (a) how easy it is to make mistakes when trying to do something really difficult, however clever you are; and (b) how hard it is to join different types of evidence together to build persuasive arguments. Hmmm… I’m not sure how well a über-rationalist message like that would go down with a typical Treadwell’s audience, though. Oh well! 😮

“De Aqua” Voynich theory on YouTube…

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Following six years of arduous research, an unnamed 44-year-old German industrial technician has been trying (unsuccessfully) since 2005 to get his/her Voynich theory “De Aqua” published, either as a book or as an article. Frustrated by the lack of progress, last month he/she placed thirty-three sizeable chunks of it onto YouTube.

Of course, I fully understand that a busy person like you can’t really spare the time to trawl through several hours of German-text video presentation. So, to save you the bother, I’ve compiled a great big list of all highlights as seen from my chair [though here’s the final part (#33), which is a visual montage of all the interesting claims from the first 32 parts].

(1) Part #1 sets off with the basic format we’ll see throughout – endless pages of (almost entirely) German text fading in and out on a coloured background. Firstly, the top-level description of the theory gets presented: that the Voynich is actually entitled “De Aqua” (i.e. “concerning water“) and that the EVA transcription “otork” somehow translates as “aqua”. It then lists page after page of late-medieval things related to water. Part #2 asserts the author’s historical conclusions – that the VMs was written between 1525 and 1608 by four authors (in four writing systems), and that the underlying plaintext is German & Italian – before outlining the VMs’ known provenance since then.

(2) Part #3 is a bit of a scattergun attack on the 16th and early 17th centuries, with Kepler, Dee, Kelly, Paracelsus, Sir Francis Drake, Nostradamus, Isabella Cortese (who probably didn’t exist, incidentally), German mathematician Adam Ries, the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, etc etc all name-dropped in quick succession. Part #4 (only three minutes long, most of the others are closer to ten minutes each) links the three red shapes on f1r to (a) “Astrologie / Astronomie“, (b) “Fauna / Flora“, and (c) “Medizin“. No proof, no evidence, just presented as fact.

(3) Part #5 begins a lengthy discussion of medieval herbals, concluding that f2r depicts Lactuca virosa, f3r depicts a Spanish pepper, that f4v depicts an aubergine (i.e. that the VMs must post-date 1500). Part #6 continues in the same vein, while Part #7 argues that f33v depicts maize (which is where the claimed earliest date of 1525 comes in). Part #8 is broadly similar, lots more of the same.

(4) Part #9 has some nice pictures of things resembling the jars in the pharmacological section (though I couldn’t see references or dates for these?), as well as lots of parallels for details, including a nice little dragon (was this from the same Paris manuscript Sergio Toresella once mentioned?). Part #10 has many more parallels (including the famous “armadillo” [hah!] and the Novara coat of arms, etc), as does Part #11 which again returns to the VMs’ f25v dragon.

(5) Part #12 goes off the rails a bit, with claimed resemblances to body parts; Part #13 covers menstruation and the spongum somniferum (for which Caterina Sforza included a recipe, as I recall), though I can’t make out the yellow annotations to the marginalia on f66r (2:41 into the video); while Part #14 reads f77r as depicting the four elements.

(6) Part #15 gets back on track with astronomical parallels; Part #16 looks closely at the rather strange page f67v2 and proposes that the corner shapes are actually constellations (such as Pegasus); Part #17 goes off on a fairly pointless Giordano Bruno tangent; Part #18 looks at the zodiac pages (including a little discussion on the month names); Part #19 focuses mainly on the month names such as the Leo page (because of its Germanic-looking “augst” month name), though it beats me what Al Pacino is doing in there (4:02). 😮

(7) Part #20 looks at crowns and golden fleeces; Part #21 goes back to the zodiac nymphs, looking more at the structure of the pages, before moving on to discuss the 15th century “De Sphaera” by the deaf Milanese illustrator Cristoforo de Predis, who worked for the Sforza family (ah, them again).

(8) Part #22 (are you still reading this? Just checking!) compares the drawings in Quire 13 with Roman aqueducts and similar water structures; while Part #23 looks at Leonardo da Vinci’s take on water, compares (at 1:21) a detail on f79r with a sextant (Rich SantaColoma recently blogged that the same detail reminded him of early “swimming girdles”, though I suspect neither have it right), and discusses rainbows too. Part #24 discusses water nymph details (poses, rings, cross, horseshoe, spinning top, nail, etc).

(9) Part #25 focuses (rather unsatisfactorily, it has to be said) on various tenuous links with alchemy, with the only high point being the comparison between the balneo section’s “giant grapes” page (f83v) and a page in Das Buch der waren Kunst zu distillieren (1512).

(10) Part #26 is pretty thin apart from a fascinating parallel (0:53) between a detail of f76v and a drawing of Mercurius in Liber II of Giordano Bruno’s (1591) De Imaginum Compositione; Part #27 is even thinner; while Part #28 proposes that the nine-rosette page is a map of Italy with Venice in the middle (yes, I’d say) and Pompeii in the top left (no, as it was only rediscovered in 1748). [I’m not convinced by Valdarno and the Wasserturm, either.]

(11) Part #29 (Perfume and Plague) didn’t really work for me at all; while Part #30 (Hidden Characters in the Manuscript) only briefly gets interesting when looking (1:53) at similarities between our beloved MS408 and Medeltidshandskrift 47 (at Lund University in Sweden) – the discussion of the f17r and f116v marginalia seems superficial and unconvincing to me.

(12) Finally, in Part #31, our anonymous author gets to the point of his whole book – that (unless I’ve misunderstood him/her, which is always possible) some clever computer programmer out there should be able to make use of all the clever cribs he/she has amassed as a result of his/her long journey into the heart of the VMs’ pictures. Part #32 has his/her (fairly diffuse, it has to be said) bibliography; and Part #33, as mentioned above, is a sequential montage of all the visual identifications proposed in parts 1 to 32.

Quite why neither of the German Voynich E-bloggers (hi Elmar, hi Elias) has yet blogged about this I don’t know (perhaps they’re on holiday?): but from where I’m sitting in the UK, there’s plenty to say about it.

Firstly, it is pretty clear that the author has for some years sustained an intense (and independent-minded) assault on the VMs’ pictures – yet at the same time he/she seems quite unaware of many long-running problematic debates, such as the whole “heavy painter” issue. Had the plant on f4v not been overpainted blue, would his/her identification with “aubergine” have been so clear-cut?

In addition, while it’s fantastic to see someone wise to hidden details (such as the concealed people in f86v4, even though this is mislabelled as f68v4 in Part#7), overall I just don’t accept the idea that the VMs’ plants can be identified as solidly as he/she thinks – we’ve now had three or four generations of herbal researchers look at it, with each finding it bewildering in a new way. Furthermore, comparing drawings with modern plants (or even with interpretative drawings of modern plants) is of little use, as virtually every plant you can name has been extensively adapted and altered over the centuries by, ummm, cunning breeders.

While I’m sympathetic to the author’s project and research programme (it is, after all, more or less identical in intention to what I was trying to do with my own “The Curse of the Voynich”), where it falls down is in historical methodology: in this instance, you just can’t get the level of proof you would like from visual similarities, however many of them you try to amass. Has our unnamed author provided coherent and powerful evidence supporting the identification of MS408 as “De Aqua“? I don’t really think so – plants aside, the overwhelming bulk of the discussion is fairly lightweight, and does not gain any real traction on the real history of the manuscript despite the sheer mass of intertextual references.

All the same, there’s plenty of food for thought here (though I wish many of the manuscripts where so many of the nice illustrations were taken from had MS and page references to back them up) – but for all “WilfridVoynich“‘s hard work, the end result simply fails to produce the set of cribs he/she was aiming for. Sorry, but it’s not “De Aqua” as claimed (though, to be honest, I would be hugely unsurprised if the vertical column of letters on f76r does indeed somehow encipher “de aqua”).

The end result, though, is plainly a great personal achievement – and I would be delighted if some of the intriguing and bold visual connections he/she has drawn in it ultimately lead onwards to genuinely productive and useful future research within the overall VMs community. For all its faults and limitations, this is definitely the (virtual) Voynich book of the year for 2009! 😉

Hungarian Voynich summer camp…!?

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I picked up on this a few weeks ago, but thought that the combination of Google Translate and my screen-weary eyes was somehow deceiving me – for who on earth would be interested in going along to a week-long Voynich summer camp in a sparsely-furnished flat in Budapest [site in Hungarian]? The site had to be some kind of prop for an Hungarian RPG, surely?

However, it turns out that (despite the slightly jarring pen-name “Hartree-Fock Cares”) this is no joke, and is actually starting very shortly (Monday 24th August 2009). After I left a brief comment on the site just now, Miklos Vincze enthusiastically replied on behalf of the “organizing committee”:-

About the camp: This is an amateaur, self-organizing little summer school, with a few enthusiastic MA, MSc and Grad school students, and even postgrads – linguists, coders, physicists, who decided to spend a week with some research on this manuscript, just for the fun of it. For this purpose we rented a flat right in the middle of Budapest, which we will occupy permanently for a week, starting with the evening of August 24. We are planning to do some projects based mostly on word structures and on various properties of word distributions in the text. Also we would like to identify some of the plants as well, with the help of one of Hungary’s leading herbarists. I myself will try to expand Landini’s work on the autocorrelation patterns in the manuscript, and compare it with different types of medieval texts. And we will work on a plenty of projects like this in our little summer school.

Sadly, all the cheap EasyJet seats between London and Budapest were snapped up long ago, so it would be a bit pricy to fly over for the day (however tempting, particularly as I like Budapest so much): but I’ve offered to do one or two Instant Messaging Voynich Q&A sessions for them during the week, as that seems like a nice compromise. As Barry Norman used to say, “and why not?”

If any other Voynich experts reading this would like to donate an hour of their time for some similar IM-based Voynichological Q&A, I’m sure our Hungarian chums would be similarly delighted at the offer. Who knows, we might also even find some way of squeezing in some international Voynich IM’ing at the pub meet on Sunday. 🙂

Jaume Deydier’s “livre de raison”…

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Though I have a good-sized review of James Amelang’s fascinating book “The Flight of Icarus” in the pipeline, I couldn’t resist posting about one tiny Provençal / Occitan item that popped up there…

One of the many mysteries sustaining the Voynich Manuscript mythology is something which you’d have thought would be easy to sort out: a set of month names apparently added by a later owner to what VMs researchers call the “zodiac pages”. Here’s a set of annotated images I made of them a few years ago (which I ought to move over to this site soon), together with an explanation of why I think these are written in some form of Occitan.

When in 1997 Jorge Stolfi had much the same thought, he asked some Occitan researchers if they had any 15th-16th century texts with month names in: even though there are almost no such extant texts (because official documents were all written in French or Latin, while Occitan itself was in sharp decline), the closest match produced by this was from 15th century Toulon. Hence, for years I’ve wondered… what document was that, then?

Well… it looks like it’s listed in James Amelang’s book (p.281) – the bourgeous farmer Jaume Deydier from Ollioules (Var) near Toulon, who wrote his livre de raison (family chronicle) between 1477 and 1521. Helpfully, Amelang lists some page references (40-42, 230, 250-251) in Charles de Ribbe’s (1879) Les familles et la société en France avant la Révolution. Deydier’s first entry begins: “En nom de Nostre Senhor Dieu Jésus-Christ, et de la siena gloriosa Mayre, et de la sancta Cori ce-restial de Paradis, invocant loqual in tota bona et perfiecha obra si deu invocar, car del processis tout ben, nobilitat et profiech, Estament de mi, Jaume Deydier, natiff de Tholon, aras abitant en aquest present luoc d’Olliol.”

Digging deeper, de Ribbe’s (1898) La société provençale à la fin du moyen âge: d’après des documents inédits‎ has more on Deydier. For example, pp.453-454 has an extract from Deydier’s 1521 will, beginning: “Per memoria als successors de mi Jaume Deydier, expressamen à Jacques, mon obeyssant fils.”

Rather more recently than de Ribbe, there’s a 54-page book/article by Paul (or Gustave?) Roux titled Le Livre de raison de Jaume Deydier: un document d’une grande importance pour la Provence (1983), which appears to be an offprint from ‎Bulletin de la société des amis du vieux Toulon et de sa région, n°105‎.

All the same, you should be aware that there is a sizeable (if somewhat isolated?) French-language literature on the whole livre de raison genre, of which Deydier’s chronicle is merely one example. For example, if you go through this 2002 paper by Jean Tricard, you’ll find a decent-length literature list (Note 1). Tricard also comments (Note 5) that although de Ribbe launched the study of this genre, this was “pas toujours avec la plus grande rigueur scientifique d’ailleurs“, which I’m sure you can translate for yourself. 🙂

So – finally – back to the month names. Throughout all the fragmentary quotations from Deydier on the web, the only Provençal / Occitan month name I’ve found mentioned is “Septembre” (which is good, but which we knew anyway): however, without any idea of Deydier’s orthography etc, it’s a bit hard to tie this down any further.

Incidentally, Amelang cautions that many early modern popular / artisan historical autobiographical texts (the subject of his book) suffer both from a lack of a critical edition and from ‘selective’ (if not blatantly misleading) early translations: and so it is hard to be sure what we would find were we to look at Deydier’s chronicle for ourselves. Hence you might reasonably ask: is there a facsimile edition (or scans) out there of Deydier’s livre? Almost certainly not. Do I even have any idea of which library or collection holds Deydier’s original ms yet? No.

Even so, knowing what we don’t know is probably a (tiny) step in broadly the right direction.

Cipher Mysteries London pub meet…

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The day: Sunday 30th August 2009
The time: 5pm (or thereabouts)
The place: The Seven Stars, 53-54 Carey Street, Holborn, London WC2A 2JB
Nearest Tubes: Temple, Chancery Lane, Holborn
The purpose: convivial cipher history / mystery chat over a pint or two.

Please leave a comment if you’re planning to come! Looking forward to seeing you there…

PS: if it turns out to be too small or too dark, Plan B is to decamp to the Wetherspoons down the road. 🙂

PPS: please say if you happen to know Middlesex-based Voynich researcher Peter Mason’s phone number – he hoped to come along but I’ve managed to, ummm, tidy away his contact details. 😮  Thanks!

“Statistics can help decode VMs” shocker…

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Today’s New Scientist brings with it the vastly uninformative claim that…

“A STATISTICAL method that picks out the most significant words in a book could help scholars decode ancient texts like the Voynich manuscript – or even messages from aliens.”

True, it “could” – but you have to say that the overwhelming probability is that it (just like most other methods before it) will fall flat on its hairy statistical arse when applied to truly difficult things. And what are the real chances we’d be able to decode a putative alien language based purely on some statistician’s semantic say-so? Practically nil, I confidently predict: come on, people – decode dolphin language first and we’ll be convinced you’re onto something. (Hint: it has 200 words for “tasty” and 600 words for “fish”).

Honestly, statisticians like these simply don’t ‘get’ the Voynich Manuscript at all – they misread the EVA transcription (for example) as a regular, smooth surface for analysis, while completely failing to see that the VMs is an object that has been constructed to mislead, not to communicate.

As Alfred Korzybski noted long ago (but few now bother to consider), “the map is not the territory“. *sigh*