Review of Latayne Scott’s “Latter-Day Cipher”…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

Here’s yet another cipher-tinged literary genre I wasn’t previously aware of – the ex-Mormon novel. As a just-released exemplar,  “Latter-Day Cipher” by ex-Mormon Latayne Scott (author of “The Mormon Mirage”, so her overall position should be no great surprise) appears to do a pretty good job of tackling contentious Mormon issues – along the lines of ‘if certainty is God-given, why do His interpreters on earth keep changing their minds?’

Her novel has a socialite killed with “strange markings carved into her flesh and a note written in a 19th Century code“: and so, of course, it is to the alphabet of the Anthon Transcript that her title appears to refer [Update: it actually refers to the phonetic Deseret Alphabet, developed in the 1850s to teach English to immigrants. Thanks for the correction, Latayne!] Sounds like quite a fun read to me (though perhaps 12 million Mormons may beg to differ).

Actually, this all reminds me of an unexpected parallel I forgot to mention in that previous post… between the golden plates and the Anthon Transcript (that signalled the founding of the Mormon Church) and the Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscripts (that signalled the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). How similar yet dissimilar!

Incidentally, everyone knows about famous Mormons (such as the Osmond family, Matthew Modine, and Ted Bundy) but what about famous Golden Dawn members? Well… Aleister Crowley aside, the GD had as members [according to Wikipedia, so be ready with your pinch of salt] the poet Yeats, Bram Stoker, Gustav Meyrink, Arnold Bennett, and Edith Nesbit (yes, she of “The Railway Children” fame). Just so you’re prepared for the next pub quiz! 🙂

Jody Maat’s “Old Dutch” Voynich theory…

by ⋅ 16 Comments

Would we recognize the solution to the Voynich Manuscript even if it was right in front of us?

Some people believe that it continues to evade us because our expectations of where we should be looking are wrong: in other words, that, pace Henri Atlan (as quoted by Cornelius Castoriadis), we have got into the habit of looking beneath lampposts for our key because that’s where the light is better. The corollary is that after all this time, the actual solution is more likely to be lurking in the darkness, surely?

I’m not so pessimistic: we “moderns” have managed to use the primary evidence (i.e. that which is disclosed by the manuscript itself) to accrete a fairly substantial body of codicological evidence, which any new theory would need to address. While this hardly amounts to a monoptic “mainstream” viewpoint (just look at the debates I’ve had with Glen Claston), to a very significant degree it isn’t something you can easily brush aside. Yet the fact that Glen and I now broadly agree on most of the evolutionary stages through which the VMs passed en route to its final state is both wonderful (given our long-standing differences) and worrying (because it bolsters any tendency to intolerance).

And so our ongoing challenge is to work out whether our knowledge about the VMs is more solid and advanced than ever before (if we’re basically right), or more fragile and misguided (if we’re basically wrong). Still, we all persist in chipping away at the sheer face, hoping to trigger some kind of epistemological avalanche, whereby removing one tiny stone releases an entire cascade of unexpected evidence. As always, progress remains slow: but is this because the Voynich Manuscript’s encryption system is so hard, or because we’re hacking away at completely the wrong mountain?

Every once in a while, entirely unknown Voynich theorists swing into view: these have often been looking at and thinking about the Voynich Manuscript for years (if not decades), and bring with them a kind of fresh air of hope (privately, many Voynich researchers are jaded and pessimistic, but that’s a bit of a secret), but also fairly unsophisticated claims that we have seen close variants of in the past.

So, in the big scheme of things, Jody Maat’s newly-proposed way of reading the Voynich Manuscript is actually remarkably familiar: his interpretation of Voynichese as a kind of vaguely polyglot “Old Dutch” (it plainly isn’t “Old Dutch” otherwise) reprises Leo Levitov’s claims in very many ways, though you can also find echoes in it of various other Middle European Voynich ‘translation’ claims we’ve seen over the years – for example, Jim Child’s theory and Beatrice Gwynn’s theory.

All the same, just as with Brumbaugh in the 1970s, there are places where Jody’s reading does seem briefly to make sense, as if the pages were lit by a flickering candle: but having myself tried to duplicate his reading on other pages, this only seems to happen once or twice per page – not statistically significant. Just as with Levitov (and with Leonell Strong’s decipherment, to be honest), only by dramatically lowering the quality bar of what you are prepared to accept as “language” does it even remotely make sense.

I have often heard it said that it would somehow ‘make sense’ for a cipher’s plaintext to be written with copious misspellings – because, for example, it was the profusion of stock phrases (such as “HEIL HITLER”, of course) and formulaic weather reports that most helped the Allies crack Enigma. However, to do this to the degree required here would imply an anachronistic level of cryptographic sophistication. And for it to makes sense as a language would require a yet lower quality bar, dipping ever closer to nonsense or babble.

I’m sorry, Jody: for all your desire to read the Voynich Manuscript and the considerable empathy you feel with its subject matter, drawings, and author, I honestly don’t think this is the answer. The subtle genius of the Voynich Manuscript – and this is something that I’ve been pointing out for years – is that it was written in a cipher which had been constructed to resemble an unknown European language. What you are reading, then, is the covertext: the letters on the surface, while the actual meaning swims just beneath.

Please don’t feel bad about your having fallen into a deep intellectual trap – you are in excellent company!

The Anthon Transcript…

by ⋅ 25 Comments

At the heart of the founding mythology of the Mormon Church sits a small fragmentary document called the Anthon Transcript. The claim linked with it is that it was copied from gold plates revealed by angels to the 18-year-old Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr in 1823, and that its “Caractors” were written in the “reformed Egyptian” of the (otherwise unknown) “Nephite” people, who had (allegedly) emigrated to America from Jerusalem two and a half millennia earlier.

Of course, extraordinary claims need at least some kind of evidence – and so the key historical question is whether or not the Transcript provides that. The other pages of the transcript (if they existed at all) have long disappeared, while the eponymous Professor Anthon (who had originally been said to have somehow verified Smith’s translation) later reported “that the marks in the paper appeared to be merely an imitation of various alphabetical characters, and had, in my opinion, no meaning at all connected with them“. After the Transcript had been shown to Charles Anthon, its “translation” was carried out by Joseph Smith who acted as a “seer” to channel it: to do this, Smith used either a giant pair of golden spectacles (that had been found with the golden plates), or one or two stones placed in the bottom of an upturned tall hat, the latter a scrying technique he used before and after 1823 when searching for buried treasure.

Regardless of all that, my particular interest in the Anthon Transcript is as a cipher historian looking at a single contentious document. Back in 2004, I exchanged a number of emails with Richard Stout, who has researched extensively on this subject to build up his own (very specific) claims. However, what follows below relates to my own opinion of what we can learn about the Transcript purely from its alphabet, and is competely independent of Richard’s ideas and interpretations. (And no, I’m neither a Christian, a Mormon, nor even an ex-Mormon.)

anthon-transcript-small

What kind of document is this? Much as people ask of the Voynich Manuscript, is it shorthand, cipher, a lost ancient language, or some kind of deception? Furthermore, is it an original document, a copy of a document, a copy of some letter-shapes from a real document, or a purely made-up thing? The hope here is that we can use its alphabet to help resolve any of these open questions: so let’s see what we find…

Are the letters shorthand? Just about anyone who has grasped the history of shorthand would quickly conclude that it is not a tachygraphic (“fast writing”) system, insofar as it is (as can be seen from the many fussy and overflourished letter-shapes) clearly not optimized for writing speed. Because it appears neither concise, memorizable, speedy, nor unambiguous, it’s a pretty poor match for the whole idea of shorthand.

It should be clear, then, that the Transcript itself was not written in a shorthand system: yet I do hear what Richard Stout says when he suggests links between individual Anthon Transcript letters and letters taken from a whole range of shorthand systems (apparently including many Tironian notae).

Yet I must caution that even an apparently well-defined character can trace out multiple independent paths through time. As a prime example, Stout notes that the filled-in box shape (which appears three times in the Anthon Transcript) appears in William Addy’s (1618-1695) shorthand system, where it denotes the word “altogether“. Addy’s system (first printed in 1684) was based on Jeremiah Rich’s earlier system: curiously, Addy later published a shorthand version of the Bible (1687), though this was perhaps stenographic oneupmanship to trump Rich’s shorthand version of the New Testament (1673-1676). The problem we have is that, as we saw here only a few days ago, Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 also includes a solid square in its first alchemical cipher alphabet… some 250 years before Addy. So, what was the actual source for the Transcript’s filled square shape – 15th century alchemy, or late 17th century stenography?

All the same, Isaac Pitman’s “History of Shorthand” (I own a copy of the 3rd edition) describes Jeremiah Rich’s system as being “encumbered with long lists of arbitrary characters to represent words which could not be written in any moderate space of time by their respective letters” (p.22), an “absurdity” whose “practice seems to have been at its height in the days of Rich” (p.23), with its 300 “arbitraries“. To Pitman’s roving historical eye, Rich’s follower Addy merits only a single paragraph (p.26). But helpfully, Pitman continues with a long list of people who produced related systems: Nathaniel Stringer (1680), William Addy (1695), Dr Doddridge (published in Oxford in 1805!), Farthing (1654), George Delgarno (1656), Everardt (1658), Noah Bridges (1659), William Facy (1672), William Mason (1672), John West (1690), Thomas Gurney (1751) [though Gurney finally dropped the arbitraries!]… and notes that Rich’s system (and/or its many variants and descendants) were still being taught early in the 19th century.

So it would seem that Stout is broadly on target with comparisons with the over-complex systems initially devised by Rich and Addy. I think it would be fair to say that if the Anthon Transcript’s alphabet can at all be said to have a parentage, it lies in the family of overcomplex shorthand systems deriving from Jeremiah Rich, and specifically in the ornate (and occasionally impractical) arbitrary signs added to them.

There must have been more than a hundred subtly different (usually plagiarised) shorthand systems based on Jeremiah Rich’s original, with many of them still in surprisingly active use circa 1823: and so I would predict that finding the closest match to the source of (or the inspiration for) the Anthon Transcript would likely be a perfectly possible (if painstaking) job, given a copy of Pitman’s book as a starting point.

Are the letters Tironian notae? Stout suggest comparisons between various individual Transcript letter-shapes and the sprawling array of Tironian notae accumulated over the centuries. However, my judgment is that you could construct visual correlations between just about any non-pictographic alphabet and Tironian notae: and so I’m very far from convinced that there is any immediate causality implicit in the choice of letter shapes.

Are the letters “reformed hieroglyphics”? Given that I place the Anthon Transcript’s alphabet firmly within the visual & stylistic tradition of arbitrary-loaded shorthands (which themselves all ultimately derive from Jeremiah Rich’s mid-seventeenth century shorthand system, even if the Anthon Transcript’s text is apparently not written in a shorthand system), I have to say that I am at a loss to see any conceivable connection with hieroglyphics (or even with Demotic, for that matter).

Are the letters written in an Old Irish shorthand? Richard Stout points to one shape in particular (you can see an example on line 2 of the Anthon Transcript, two glyphs to the right of the filled square) comprising two left-curving lines joined by a horizontal line: he points to a resemblance with an Irish glyph used on “page 311” of the late fourteenth century Book of Ballymote, and continues by pointing to resemblances between rows of dots elsewhere in the same manuscript and in the Anthon Transcript.

Yet dots were used by medieval monks across Europe to encipher vowels: so I’m far from sold on the idea that rows of dots (which, in any case, were used a quite different way in the Transcript) link this to the Book of Ballymote at all.

Stout’s proposed Irish manuscript connection seems to be an apologium for other Mormon cipher claim, in which the other main source document was allegedly written in some kind of old Irish writing. But I don’t really see that connection here at all: before I get too excited about a single letter-shape, I’d want to have trawled through the relevant shorthand archives first.

Are the letters a cipher alphabet? The Anthon Transcript seems quite ill-judged for this, too: what on earth would any cipher alphabet be doing with a nine-vertical-strokes-plus underline shape (line 2)? This seems to be unnecessarily showy – and in fact, I would suggest that this sort of “prison-cell counting” shape is more the kind of thing you would see in a child’s made-up cipher to denote ’10’ (or possibly ‘X’).

Regardless, the whole document could possibly be written in a cipher: and so I think it would be a good idea to subject a transcription of the Transcript to some statistical tests. It would be more credible were this to be done by someone outside of the Mormon Church (in contrast to previous attempts, according to Wikipedia). It’s true that there are some repeated patterns inside the Transcript, sure: but might these amount to complete words, phrases, or even sentences? Right now, I’m not sure: it looks fairly fragmentary to me.

Are the letter-shapes all fake? I don’t think so: to my eyes, they do give the impression of forming a moderately coherent set of “characters” copied from one or more existing shorthand documents, but with child-like cipher shapes added, very probably to give the whole thing slightly more of an ‘exotic’ feel. More than anything else, I think it is this awkward blend of the nuanced and the naive that makes it seem unconvincing as a real piece of text.

Because the ratio of arbitraries to simple strokes also seems quite high to my eyes, I would also be unsurprised if the author had cherry-picked the interesting-looking letter-shapes from a shorthand source.

In summary, probably the least controversial inference you can draw from the lettershapes is their post-1650 dating: the embellished “H” shape and the probable links with Rich-family shorthand letter-shapes indicate that this is in no way ancient.

In the absence of any other credible information, the most likely story I can reconstruct is that the “caractors” in the Anthon Transcript were copied in no particular order from a shorthand Bible (or possibly a shorthand diary), with various other letter-shapes added to make the overall alphabet look more ‘exotic’, or even “hieroglyphic” (even though, to our modern eyes, these singularly fail to have the desired effect). I would also be fairly unsurprised if the same shorthand Bible itself was subsequently used as a prop to convince skeptics – in short, that this was the Detroit Manuscript itself (but which, like the rest of the Anthon Transcript, subsequently disappeared from sight).

Of course, a single good piece of evidence could well refute all of this… but I haven’t seen it yet.

What do you think?

Post update: a very big thank you! to Richard Stout for suggesting corrections to the first two paragraphs – much appreciated! 🙂

Is this the way to Armadillo?

by ⋅ 49 Comments

Here’s a vogue-ish detail from the Voynich Manuscript – the (claimed) “armadillo” in the middle-left margin on page f80v. Of course, if this can be proven to be intentionally depicting an animal from the New World, then a lot of other dating evidence becomes secondary. But of course, this kind of controversy is nothing new: you only have to think of the decades-long hoo-ha over the (claimed) New World sunflowers.

catoblepas-enhanced

Armadillo proponents “read” this image as having a tail (on the left), three legs (with the left foreleg therefore tucked behind the head on the right), and a kind of upside-down armoured armadillo head facing backwards (with a sort of smiley cartoon mouth). Fair enough.

By way of contrast, I argue that because everything else in Quire 13 appears to be water-related (plumbing, baths, steam, rainbow, pools, etc), this is probably a depiction of a catoblepas – a fearsome creature Leonardo da Vinci (and doubtless many of his contemporaries) believed lived at the source of the Niger river, and whose bull-like head was so heavy that it permanently hung down to near the ground.

Specifically: what appears to the pro-armadillo contingent to be a tail (purple arrow), I read as a left rear leg, making all four legs visible – and what they read as an armoured armadillo head, I read as a pair of bull-like flat horns at the back of a down-turned head.

catoblepas-enhanced-annotated

All the same, it’s not like I can’t ‘see’ the armadillo: it’s a lot like one of those optical illusions (such as the famous old lady / young girl drawing) where you can flip between two parallel readings almost at will.

But the odd thing here is that both the armadillo and the catoblepas might be equally correct. It doesn’t take a great deal of sophisticated codicology to look at the line strengths (in the areas ringed blue above) and note that a few key lines are in a darker ink, quite different from the ink used for the wolkenband-like decoration just below it. Could it simply be that some 17th century owner (for whom the catoblepas was probably never part of their conceptual landscape) thought this picture somehow resembled an armadillo, and emended it to strengthen that resemblance? I think that this is very probably precisely what happened here.

Now, this is precisely the kind of contingent, layered, conjectural historical explanation (basically, an intellectual history of art) that Richard SantaColoma has long enjoyed lambasting. Specifically, he sees any explanation that appeals to layered codicology as fully worthy of his scorn – as though it’s merely constructed as an apologium to keep the faith with the existing ‘mainstream’ dating evidence.

But actually, layered codicology hypotheses are among the most brutally (and easily) testable of historical ideas – unless two layers of ink added many decades apart just happened to use exactly the same raw materials (and in the same proportions), we will ultimately be able to differentiate them… or not.

However, unless people explicitly propose such layering hypotheses, nobody would think to do such tests – they’d perhaps spend all their codicological efforts on f116v (a valid investment, to be sure, but it’s only one of many possible areas of the Voynich Manuscript that should be tested for revealing information).

Indeed, the whole point of such historical hypotheses is not to prove historical narratives in and of themselves, but rather to lay the underlying ideas open to physical mechanisms of disproof. Bluntly put, any given hypothesis is usually of little or no value if it cannot be specifically disproved (because direct causative proof is as rare as hen’s teeth in history).

In the absence of any suitable tests on f80v, however, both viewpoints (and indeed all other fairly sensible viewpoints) remain in a suspended state of vague possibility, hypothetical kites floated carelessly into an unthreatening breeze.

Hmmm… how I long for such tests!

The Voynich’s alphabet and steganography…

by ⋅ 13 Comments

Having examined many historical ciphers over the last few years, I’d say that there are only a handful of ways in which individal ‘cipherbets’  (i.e. “cipher alphabets”) are typically constructed. The big fallacy is to think that people building ciphers are only concerned with a need for long-term message security, when actually there are plenty of other important short term needs they have to attend to, such as: ease of construction, usability, speed of deciphering, aide-memoires, etc. Broadly speaking, these needs express themselves in the following aspects of the cipher alphabet:-

  1. Symmetrical – where the letter-shapes are based around a geometric / symmetrical pattern
  2. Incremental – where the cipher alphabet is adapted from a pre-existing cipher
  3. Practical – where the letter-shapes are optimized for speed of writing
  4. Stylistic – to give an overall effect of looking exotic / strange / occult / ancient
  5. Mnemonic – where letter-shapes contain associative reminders about the plaintext letter
  6. Steganographic – where letter-shapes hide visual hints as to the plaintext shape
  7. Deceptive – where letter-shapes vary in subtle ways to hinder transcription / decipherment
  8. Distracting – where letter-shapes are constructed to resemble a different type of text

Apart from ‘pure’ symmetrical ciphers (such as the various pigpen and Masonic ciphers, or indeed Edward Elgar’s Dorabella cipher alphabet),I would say that most cipher alphabets tend to present a blend of only two or three of these, which you can sensibly read as reflecting the most pressing needs of the encipherer. As brief examples, you might note that many of the Sforza ciphers were primarily [incremental + practical] (and occasionally stylistic, such as the 1464 cipher for Tristano Sforza), while I’d predict that Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 will turn out to be [mnemonic + stylistic].

What, then, of the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher alphabet? Of course, the hope is that if we can classify its cipher alphabet, we might be able to “read” the needs of its encipherer.

The first thing to note is Steve Ekwall’s extraordinarily specific claim about the four gallows shapes: he asserts that these four shapes (and their four ‘ch’ strikethrough versions) specifically depict the eight folding states of the deciphering paper key – basically, that these are mnemonic. While that would make a lot of sense, debating that in sufficient detail is something I’ll take on another time.

Regardless, my position on the Voynich Manuscript’s alphabet is simply that it is a tour de force of cipher construction technique, insofar as I think you can see traces of symmetrical, incremental, practical, stylistic, steganographic, deceptive and distracting aspects (which, curiously enough, would make Ekwall’s mnemonic the only one missing from the list). Here they are in more detail:-

  • Symmetrical
    The four gallows shapes exhibit an explicit structural symmetry – one leg or two legs, one loop or two loops.
  • Incremental
    The four strikethrough gallows look to have been developed from an earlier (probably less secure) cipher system based purely on the four simple gallows. I also suspect that the “e / ee / eee / ch / sh” letter-shapes represent vowels, and that they were in some way incrementally adapted from a variation of the “dots for vowels” ciphers used by some medieval monks.
  • Practical
    The Voynich Manuscript’s letter-shapes have been consciously constructed for ease and speed of writing, far more so than typical cipher alphabets of the time.
  • Stylistic
    I would argue that the overall form of the alphabet has been designed with older (non-cipher) alphabets in mind – that is, that the stylistics of the letter-shapes was deliberately chosen to resemble an archaic (but lost) alphabet.  Note (mainly for Elmar Vogt): I do not therefore believe that the Voynich Manuscript was meant to resemble an enciphered medieval herbal, but rather that it was meant to ressmble an unenciphered herbal written in an archaic (but lost) language. I fail to see how this makes it unlikely to be smuggled past Venetian border guards… but that’s an argument for another day!
  • Distracting
    As I argued in The Curse and elsewhere on this blog, I am convinced beyond any doubt that the “aiir” and “aiiv” cipher letter groups in the VMs are specifically meant to resemble medieval page references (i.e. “a ii v” denotes “[quire] a, [folio] ii, v[erso]”), but that this is meant to distract contemporary eyes from looking in detail beyond that.
  • Deceptive
    I believe that the actual Arabic numbers enciphered by the “aiiv” family are to be read from the shape and position of the final flourish of the “v” – and that whereas the (earlier) Currier A pages used a system based on the position of the flourish, the (later) Currier B pages used a system based on the shape of the flourish. This would also point to incremental cipherbet change during the overall writing process!

There is one further one to discuss – steganographic. If you stare at the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher alphabet long enough, I contend that you will (eventually) grasp the logic underlying most of the letter-shapes (as per the discussion above). However, you are still left with a few odd “spares” (such as “4o”, “8” and “9”) that don’t fit into the symmetric families and groups described above. What is going on with them?

In The Curse, I argued (based on the statistics) that “4o” was probably encoding a word-initial abbreviation sign: what I now think is fascinating is the notion that the letter shape for the “4” might also be steganographically hiding a horizontal stroke, as an aide-memoire to the decipherer.

Similarly, I argued (also based on the statistics) that the “8” shape and the “9” shapes were probably encoding word-middle and word-final abbreviation signs (respectively): similarly, I think that these are steganographically hiding a curved half-loop at the top of each of them, the typical mid-Quattrocento sign denoting contraction and abbreviation. I’ve marked these hidden strokes in red below:-

qokedy-highlighted

Actually, I suspect the author might possibly have given a little bit of the game away on page f2r, via a slip of the pen: para 2 line 3 word 1 is “4oP9” with a curved contraction half-loop added over the “o”, which I think might well denote a contraction of “4o” + “oP” + “9”. But that, too, is another story. 🙂

All in all, I’d say that if the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher system turns out to have broadly the same degree of subtlety and roundedness exhibited by its cipher alphabet, then no wonder it has remained unbroken for centuries. It has not only the Everest of cipher systems, but also the Rolls Royce of cipher alphabets!

Some new Voynich Manuscript blogs…

by ⋅ 8 Comments

(1) A big hello to Rich SantaColoma as he emerges from the VMs “List Closet” into the bright(-ish) light of the blogosphere. His “New Atlantis Voynich Theory” blog sets out his basic stall – which is that, thanks to his “Nagging Sense of Newness” about the Voynich Manuscript, he harbours strong doubts that it is anywhere near as old as mainstream Voynich researchers (such as, errrm, me, apparently) think it is.

The truth is that historians have basically frittered the last century away on foolish conceits (such as the Roger Bacon thing, the Dee-and-Kelley thing, or the it’s-a-hoax-because-the-NSA-can’t-break-it thing), and so until such time as a single proper codicological and palaeographical analysis comes along to define the research problem properly, we’ll remain in the same old evidential free-fall.

As for me, I’m sticking with John Manly’s assessment (that the quire numbers were added in the 15th century) as a basic starting point for the dating: and if that turns out to be wrong, then so be it. That doesn’t make me “mainstream”, just… old-fashioned, I guess. 🙂

Incidentally, it’s a little-known fact that the Beinecke’s catalogue originally listed MS 408 as fifteenth century, but that in the 1970s (perhaps as a result of Brumbaugh’s wobbly claims?) this got extended forwards to the sixteenth century… I suspect they got it right the first time round.

PS: Rich, given that I think Q13 has a water theme, I’m sticking with the catoblepas (with its heavy head hanging down) rather than the armadillo – given that even Leonardo wrote that the catoblepas was found at the Nigricapo [the source of the Niger river], it was very much part of the mental landscape of the Florentine Quattrocento.

(2) And another big hello to (the apparently email-address-less?) “acevoynich” and [his/her] eponymic “acevoynich’s blog“. Though given [his/her] apparent inability to find Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich Manuscript Mailing List, The Journal of Voynich Studies, voynich.nu, the Voynich Wikipedia site, the Voynich dmoz entry, etc (let alone D’Imperio or The Curse) I have to say I’m somewhat dubious that [he/she] is, as [he/she] claims, actually writing a “thesis”. Does [he/she] really have a research question in mind, or is [he/she] just a [troll/trollette]? Hmmm…

Still, acevoynich feels confident to ask the five key W-questions of the big V-manuscript: who, what, where, when, why. Again, I refer the honourable member to my previous answer: and add that until such time as we have the forensic side (the “What happened?” question) considerably more locked down than it is at the present, I suspect that these W’s are (sad as it is) actually more harmful than helpful. Oh well! 🙁

Regiomontanus and Filarete…

by ⋅ 17 Comments

While browsing through the Whipple Museum’s interesting webpages on Regiomontanus just now, I was struck by a behind-the-scenes connection that might possibly lead to the source of some of the Voynich Manuscript’s images…

In 1465, Antonio Averlino (better known as ‘Filarete’) left Milan with a letter of recommendation from his friend Filelfo in his pocket, with the intention of travelling to Istanbul to work as an architect there. I have argued (from his defaced 1445 dedication on his doors on St Peter’s Basilica, see Curse p.120) that he travelled from there to Rome – it is hardly unlikely, particularly given that Vasari believed Averlino died in Rome 1469. Note also that that Averlino may well have accompanied Domenic Dominici (the bishop of Brescia) who took the beautifully-illustarted copy (now known as Vat. Gr. 1291) of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables from Brescia to Rome in September 1465 – this is the codex which Rene Zandbergen has strongly argued was some kind of visual source for the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac ‘nymphs’.

Now… today’s particularly intriguing observation is that the highly influential astronomer / astrologer Regiomontanus (1436-1476) lived in Rome until 1467: between 1461 and 1465, he worked for Cardinal Bessarion at his palace (which was effectively a de facto Academy / humanities research centre), where he built astrolabes, sundials, etc for his patron.

regiomontanus-small

What is relevant here is that Bessarion was born in Trebizond and was a sch0olfriend of Filelfo – and so it seems extremely likely to me that Bessarion would have been one of the key people Averlino would have planned to meet in Rome. It’s also important to note that Rome circa 1465 was not the sprawling metropolis it now is: a meeting would doubtless have been arranged.

So, if you accept that Averlino was in Rome 1465, and that he would have wanted to meet Bessarion, I think it is almost inevitable that he would have met Regiomontanus at some point. I have previously noted that Regiomontanus’ ephemerides (both in print and in manuscript, such as MS Prag 742) contained information connecting the stars with agriculture: and it is well-known that his tables also detailed appropriate positions of the moon for blood-letting. However, what is perhaps even more interesting for us is what he omitted from his tables (for that truly would be a secret), and which he apparently failed to complete before his relatively early death.

The data that was was missing was a special commentary (somewhat like a Director’s Cut?) on using astrology for medicine, for human births, and for foretelling the future. It seems seem extremely likely to me that this would have been based on the sign (and very possibly the degree) of the moon, and based on earlier (probably Arabic) works, probably via one of Pietro d’Abano’s manuscripts.

Could it be that the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac pages, with their 30-item one-per-nymph datasets, encode the same data that Regiomontanus promised (but never delivered)? And might it have been that Regiomontanus got that per-degree data from Antonio Averlino in Rome around late 1465 – or might Averlino have instead got it then from Regiomontanus?

Of course, the spooky thing here is that this is basically what Steve Ekwall said was encoded in the zodiac nymphs. But you knew that already, right?

PS: did anyone ever find an online copy of Vatican MS 1906?

Steve Ekwall’s Folding Key…

by ⋅ 21 Comments

Though many people with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript will have vaguely heard of Steve Ekwall and his claims that, back in June 2000, an Excitant Spirit showed him how to make a “Folding Key” to help disentangle the Voynich’s knotted ciphertext, very few have any real idea what he’s talking about. In fact, I might just be the only one. And so I thought it might be good to YouTube-ify a short film explaining what Steve Ekwall was saying. (Specifically, how his “Folding Key” works).

As far as what you’re supposed to do with it… he believes that a Voynichese gallows character tells the decipherer to fold / flip the device to that state, an EVA ‘e’ character says to advance the device to the next state, while an EVA ‘ch’ glyph says to ‘flip’ the device to the opposite state (i.e. state 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 <–> state 5 / 6 / 7 / 8). Make of all that what you will!

If you want to print out your very own folding key, there’s a Folding Key PDF on my Compelling Press website: and for those who have yet to experience Steve’s original webpages, here are links to my copy of his main web-page, and to his additional “Folding KEY 101” page (though apologies for all the dead links there!)

The Voarchadumia & John Dee…

by ⋅ 12 Comments

Once upon a time (in 1518), a Venetian called Giovanni Agostino Pantheo put himself into hot water by writing a work on alchemy (the Ars Transmutationis Metallicae). Yet essentially unrepentant, he went on to publish (in 1530) a further book on alchemy called the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam: this was largely a reprise of his 1518 book but dressed in additional historical garb for an air of antiquity and authority. Yet given that his word “Voarchadumia” was a mash-up of Hebrew and Chaldean (meaning something vaguely about making gold), it has to be said that Pantheo’s take on history was probably no less spurious than his artificially-constructed title.

Still, the Voarchadumia covers languages, alchemy, metallurgy, and various other topics: intriguingly, the well-regarded alchemy expert Adam McLean is currently working on a translation of it, and plans to be finished by the end of this year. Probably because it is currently only in Latin, the Voarchadumia seems to be one of those books which people often claim to have read, but which in fact they have only read about. Which makes it fertile soil for the weed-like seeds of misremembered half-stories to flourish in…

For example, the two most-repeated tales about the Voarchadumia concern its influence on John Dee: in one, Dee’s (1564) Monas Hieroglyphica symbol allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia, while in the other, Dee’s Enochian alphabet allegedly appeared first in the Voarchadumia. Are these true?

Well… it’s certainly true that Dee had his own copy of the Voarchadumia (which is now in the British Library, complete with Dee’s annotations!) However, having just gone through a scan of a 1550 edition of Voarchadumia, I can say that the first story seems just flat wrong (though please tell me if the symbol appears in a different edition!), while Dee’s angelic alphabet (though note that Dee didn’t actually call this “Enochian”) similarly fails to make any obvious appearance there.

Even so, what does appear on leaves 15v and 16r in Pantheo’s Voarchadumia, however, is an alphabet attributed to Enoch (“Antiquiores autem hi:& concessi Enoch“, to be precise) which has many visual similarities to Dee’s Enochian in its stroke structure and stylistics… even if none of the actual glyphs does actually match. Saying that the two are the same would be an easy mistake to make if you weren’t being careful.

A further angelic alphabet (marked “Angelicum“) appears in James Bonaventure Hepburn’s (1573-1620) early 17th century Virga Aurea, which contains 70 secret or ancient alphabets: Adam McLean discussed this alphabet in The Hermetic Journal in 1980, and even translated the (tiny) amount of text on the engraving depicted beside it. Even Athanasius Kircher subsequently wrote on angelic languages!

But angelic languages first appeared prior to the Voarchadumia, both in Trithemius’ Steganographia Polygraphia (where the prototypical stylistic blend of Arabic and Ethiopic lettering common to these Angelic Alphabets seems to have emerged first) and in Agrippa’s three Coelestis, Malachim, & Transitus Fluvii alphabets – according to Wikipedia, the Transitus Fluvii alphabet first appeared a decade before Agrippa (you may also have seen this in the Blair Witch Project!) It has been claimed that Pantheo formed the Voarchadumia’s second alphabet by munging together these three Agrippan alphabets, with fairly sensible historical reasoning, I’d say.

All in all, it should be clear that Dee did not invent the idea of an angelic or Enochian language – but then again, neither did Pantheo. And furthermore, I don’t believe that angelic languages were common in Dee’s time – though this runs contrary to the Wikipedia Enochian page, which cites Tobias Churton’s [very enjoyable] book “The Golden Builders” as support (but I can’t find any substantial reference there at all). My own reading of the evidence is that the notion of talking to angels in their own angelic language (for that was their purpose) was no more than a marginal, post-rationalized (if affectedly pious) Renaissance reworking of the kind of nigromancy still widespread in the Trecento and Quattrocento.

And so for me, the central issue about Dee is whether he was using the notion of angelic language in a fully necromantic sense (as modern occultists believe, following Aleister Crowley et al), or in a fully steganographic sense (pace Trithemius and possibly Agrippa), or perhaps some kind of epistemologically-confused mix of the two. This is hugely tricky and contentious, because it goes right to the heart of Dee’s entire Renaissance project – i.e. was he scientific or occult? Did Casaubon really have any right to label Dee a Faustian conjuror?

What do you think?

Early modern palaeography source books…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

For ages, I’ve been planning to devote a day at the British Library solely to the task of looking for matches for the Voynich Manuscript’s unusual quire numbers. There’s a long description of these quire numbers elsewhere on this website, but the short version is that they are “abbreviated longhand Latin ordinals in a fifteenth century hand”, and are one of the key things that point directly to a 15th century date:-

If we could find any other manuscripts with this same numbering scheme (or possibly even the same handwriting!), it would be an extraordinarily specific way of pinning down the likely provenance of our elusive manuscript, more than a century before its next mention (circa 1610). It would also give an enormous hint as to the archive resources we should really be looking in to find textual references to it.

But let’s not get too carried away – how should we go about finding a match, bearing in mind we haven’t even got one so far?

To achieve this, my (fairly shallow, I have to say) research strategy is to trawl through the following early modern palaeography source books, as kindly suggested by UCL’s Marigold Norbye:-

  • F. Steffens, Lateinische Paläographie (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929)
  • New Palaeographical Society   Facsimiles of Manuscripts &c., ed. E.M. Thompson, G.F. Warner, F.G. Kenyon and J.P. Gilson, 1st er. (London, 1903-12);  2nd ser.  (London, 1913-30)
  • Palaeographical Society   Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, ed. E.A. Bond, E.M. Thompson and G.F. Warner, 1st ser. (London, 1873-83);  2nd ser. (London, 1884-94)
  • S.H. Thomson, Latin Bookhands of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969)
  • G.F. Hill, The Development of Arabic Numerals in Europe exhibited in sixty-four Tables  (Oxford, 1915)
  • Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, by Charles Samaran and Robert Marichal. etc.

To which I would add (seeing as it was written by Michelle Brown, who was for many years the Curator of Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, so it seems a little ungracious not to include it)…

  • Brown, Michelle. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts: From Antiquity to 1600. London : British Library, 1990.

…as well as the Italian equivalent of Samaran and Marichal’s work…

  • Catalogo dei manoscritti in scrittura latina datati o databili per indicazione di anno, di luogo o di copista. Torino, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1971 Bird-Special Collections Z6605.L3 C38 f

…and a more general bibliographical reference work…

  • Boyle, Leonard E. Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Even though this might seem like a very large set of source books to get through in a day, no more than 5-10% of each is likely to be acutely relevant to the 15th century, so it should all be (just about) do-able. And I think that several of them may well be on open shelves in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Room at the BL, which should help speed things along.

Yet all the same, do I stand any significant chance of uncovering anything? Well… no, not really, I’d have to say. But that’s no reason not to try! And the bibliographic side of the trawl may well yield a more specific lead to follow in future, you never know.

All I need to do, then, is to free up an entire day from my diary… oh well, maybe next year, then. =:-o