The Voynich’s alphabet and steganography…

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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…

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(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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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

Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete… aha!

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Right at the start of (1970) “Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions” (pp. xi-xiii), Frank Prager summarizes Gustina Scaglia’s research into how Brunelleschi’s ideas for machines spread. They posit a key missing manuscript (dubbed “The Machinery Complex“): but their discussion is fairly specialised, and so it is quite tricky to follow. Here’s my attempt at representing the argument – green boxes represent manuscripts that still exist, red boxes represent lost works, while blue boxes I’m not sure about:-

machinery-complex

Which is to say: while all the early Renaissance machine ideas ultimately stemmed from Brunelleschi, later machine authors (such as Francesco di Giorgio) relied not just on Taccola’s De Ingeneis but also on the missing “Machinery Complex” manuscript. However, nobody knows who wrote this or what subsequently happened to it – we can perceive it only by its shadow, hear it only by its echo in other manuscript and copyworks.

I think the reason that Prager & Scaglia’s text is a little confused is that, because the Machinery Complex ms has disappeared, they can’t quite make up their minds how much it influenced subsequent writers on machines such as Bartolomeo Neroni, Antonio da San Gallo, Oreste Biringuccio, and Pietro Cataneo. It’s an open question.

But here’s where it becomes a cipher history issue. As I mentioned here a few days ago, the text around what Prager and Scaglia call “the secret hoist” is written in an simple substitution cipher (one letter back in the alphabet) – but because this would have been seen as a childishly simple cipher by 1450, I infer that this ciphertext was not only present in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original (but now lost) Zibaldone, but also that he probably wrote it in the 1430s or, at a push, the 1440s.

There’s also a cipher / codicological element to this argument, based on the observation that the pages containing the secret hoist are separated by several pages in the later copy of the Zibaldone (by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s grandson Buonaccorso Ghiberti). My suggestion is that Buonaccorso received the folios out of order, but copied them in precisely the same order – had he deciphered the two “secret hoist” pages and grasped that they were referring to the same thing, my guess is that he would have put them back into their correct order.

All in all, then, my inference here is that the simple cipher on the secret hoist was in place in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original Zibaldone, and that even though Ghiberti himself died in 1455, we can probably date his missing Zibaldone to around the 1430s purely from the simplistic cipher used in it. (Of course, scientists hate this kind of art history “probabilistic proof”, but that’s how history works.)

So far, so marginal: but here’s my “aha” moment of the day, that propels all this into a different league.

One of the things I flagged in my book “The Curse of the Voynich” (pp.141-142) was that Antonio Averlino (Filarete) may have based his (now-lost) book of Engines (“when the time comes, I will mention all these engines“, etc) on this (also now-lost) Machinery Complex – and that some of these engines may well be visually enciphered in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal-B pages.

However, on further reflection, it seems I really didn’t go far enough: because Antonio Averlino almost certainly started his career in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshops, before suddenly leaving Florence in 1433 for Rome. If we were looking for someone to carry Brunelleschi’s ideas (via Ghiberti’s Zibaldone, probably written in the 1430s) into the world, we could surely do no better than look to Antonio Averlino – I strongly suspect that he was the intermediary.

So, the question then becomes: was Antonio Averlino the author of the Machinery Complex? I strongly suspect that he was, and that the Machinery Complex will turn out to be a synthesis and development of Ghiberti’s ideas as seen from Averlino’s edgy and ambitious perspective – that is to say, that the Machinery Complex will turn out to be Averlino’s missing book of Engines. And if it also turns out (as I suspect it will) to be the case that this Machinery Complex lies visually enciphered in the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal-B pages, what an extraordinary story that would be…

PS: as a footnote for further study, the only other paper I have found on the Machinery Complex was on The Art of Invention bibliography webpage: Gustina Scaglia’s (1988) “Drawings of forts and engines by Lorenzo Donati, Giovanbattista Alberti, Sallustio Peruzzi, The Machine Complex Artist, and Oreste Biringuccio“, Architectura, II, pp. 169-97. Definitely a paper to go through to see what conclusions Scaglia had reached about this intriguing missing document. But please let me know if you find any other references!

Excellent Codex Seraphinianus article…

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Too much typing yesterday, hence this ultra-brief post. 🙂

If (like me) you’re fascinated by the Codex Seraphinianus, I think you really, really need to read the article “THE CODEX SERAPHINIANUS – How Mysterious Is A Mysterious Text If The Author Is Still Alive (And Emailing)?” by Justin Taylor from the May 2007 edition of The Believer magazine.

Taylor even includes something which hadn’t previously appeared in print – part of an English translation of the French translation of Italo Calvino’s introduction (entitled “Orbis Pictus”) to the original Italian edition of the Codex Seraphinianus. Plenty of nice discussion of parallels with J. L. Borges’ works, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the playful machines of Serafini’s fellow Milanesi Bruno Munari, and even Leo Lionni’s “Parallel Botany” (of which I have a copy on my bookshelf).

Enjoy! 🙂

Review of “Stigmata”…

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The film Stigmata (1999) presses a whole lot of my buttons. At the time it was originally released, I had been researching my own novel built on broadly the same premise:  a globetrotting protagonist hunting down miraculous statues and people claiming to have duplicates of Christ’s stigmata (though that’s basically where the similarities ended). And so I was fascinated to see how the film-makers went about bringing this to life.

stigmata-small

Even though the story and script (by Tom Lazarus, the not-quite-so-famous brother of Paul Lazarus III, director of Westworld & Capricorn One) didn’t itself think far out of the [confession] box, something magical happened in the art direction and cinematography: the use of colour, focus, light, time, sets, costume, and even make-up were all exemplary. For me, watching Stigmata was at times like being artfully collaged to death, machine-gunned with photographically (and geometrically) perfect moments: a tick on a piece of paper, Patricia Arquette lying underwater, a blood drop in a pool, blood being drawn, a blood centrifuge – all elegant, spare, swift, and focused. I highly recommend the film to anyone purely to enjoy its five-star visual treatment.

As a writer myself, however, I think the film’s problems stemmed right from the initial plotting – basically, having a priest-scientist (Gabriel Byrne) investigate the stigmata being suffered by a young atheist-hairdresser (Patricia Arquette) beneath a Vatican conspiracy managed by his control-freak boss (Jonathan Pryce) never worked as a setup for me… all too staged / stagey. The walls between the characters stopped the emotional side of the film from developing in a satisfactory way: I also didn’t much like the St Francis of Assisi (arguably the most famous stigmatic?) resolution, but you’d have to see that for yourself to see if you agree or disagree.

Watching this film a decade on, it feels a bit dated: could it be that the Da Vinci Code (and its flood of [make]-me-[rich]-too ripoffs) made the whole notion of devastating-secrets-that-would-topple-the-Church-were-they-to-be-made-public seem lightweight? And I kept wondering: was Holy Blood Holy Grail ultimately to blame?

Regardless, the film set me thinking about the kind of ur-story towards which Tom Lazarus was reaching, with his ancient Aramaic codex (based loosely on the Coptic Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas) triggering high-stakes factional infighting within the Vatican, with the supernatural subtext that The Truth Will Out (even beyond death).

Yes, it’s undoubtedly a cliché: and the overarching literary / cultural template at play is pretty easy to sketch out:-

  • concealed message left by an ancient (implicitly perfected) person, that requires…
  • deciphering and translation by (extremely proficient) domain experts, to expose…
  • long-held lies behind contemporary doctrinal messages, which are supported by…
  • powerful present-day conspiracies trying to maintain the (morally untenable) status quo.

Historically, does this sound familiar? After all, it is not vastly different to the entire back-story of the Renaissance (particularly during the Quattrocento). There, you had people scouring the known world for lost or concealed messages left by the Greco-Roman civilizations, to be deciphered by humanist scholars for their presumed wise (and frequently contrarian) messages.

And so I would argue that HBHG-style searches for enciphered traces of a ‘real Jesus’ are arguably little more than back-projecting our present-day cultural insecurities onto early Renaissance cultural insecurities – their search for lost classical wisdom was no different. One irony, though, is that things like the Turin Shroud (which I blogged about here and here) offer us glimpses of an entirely parallel kind of lost Christian history, far beyond the conceptual reaches of most contemporary conspiracy theorists.

What I personally fail to understand, though, is how this whole wonky ‘enciphered anti-doctrinal message’ meme has managed to endure the centuries as a literary conceit. Even my new best friend François Rabelais satirized this none too subtly in Chapter 1 of Book 1 of his alcohol-obsessed Gargantua and Pantagruel:

The diggers struck with their picks against a great tomb of bronze… Opening the tomb at a certain place which was sealed on the top with the sign of a goblet, around which was inscribed in Etruscan letters, HIC BIBITUR, they found nine flagons, arranged after the fashion of skittles in Gascony; and beneath the middle flagon lay a great, greasy, grand, pretty, little, mouldy book, which smelt more strongly but not more sweetly than roses.

Rabelais goes on to offer (“with much help from my spectacles“) his translation of the “Corrective Conundrums” found in that stinky little tome, all of them nonsensical and presumably meant to resemble some kind of vaguely prophetic quatrain-based literary genre popular in France at the time (Nostradamus fans, take note):-

The year will come, marked with a Turkish bow,
And spindles five and the bottoms of three pots, […]
This age of hocus-pocus shall go on
Until the time when Mars is put in chains

So… even though this concealed-text plot pattern was a hoary old chestnut by 1530, can anyone really explain to me how come it continues to drive a low-brow literary industry nearly five centuries later? For me, the big mystery here centres on the apparent lack of cultural progress: does Dan Brown’s success actually prove that we have learnt practically nothing in half a millennium?

Consider that your cipher mystery for the day… 🙂

Early American ciphers…

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It’s not really my historical bag, capice?, but some early American ciphers popped their heads over my virtual parapet in the last few days, and I thought I ought to pass them on…

(1) On Christmas Day 1801, Thomas Jefferson received a cipher challenge from “Pennsylvania mathematician Robert Patterson”, that remained unbroken for two centuries. Here’s the cipher itself: according to a comment and example given by “A nonny bunny” on Bruce Schneier’s blog, for “helloworld”, the plaintext would first becomes columnar-transposed to “lrhweollod”, which secondly gets shifted into positions 3 and 2 (the “3” and “2” of the key), and padded with nonsense, before finally being read off in the same c0lumnar-transposed kind of way

1 hw 3 lr 32 ablr
2 eo 1 hw 11 khwl
3 lr 2 eo 20 eoyu
1 ll 1 ll 11 llty
2 od 2 od 20 odtr

I’ve underlined the plaintext (“helloworld”), the key sequence (32,11,20) and the ciphertext (akelobholdlwyttrluyr) to make it a little clearer what’s going on (the original comment lost the formatting). But it’s nice to see a relatively pure transposition cipher out in the wild. 🙂

(2) Here’s a ciphered letter from John Adams  to John Jay dating from 1783-1785. There are a fair few web pages on John Jay’s codes and ciphers, as well as on Thomas Jefferson’s own codes and ciphers. John Jay and the agent Silas Deane also used invisible ink-style trickery (according to this CIA page, followed by more on the various ciphers used).