Voynich nymphs = pigeage à pied?

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Here’s a novel Voynich theory I somehow missed along the way. ‘Oiram’, a Senior Member on David Icke’s Official Forums, suggested last October that the ‘balneo’ nymphs in tubs might actually be grape treaders, that the zodiac nymphs are illustrating a grape planting calendar, and that they all had a nice shower after they were finished to clean themselves up.

As with everything viticultural, there’s a 1000-franc phrase for grape-treading – “pigeage à pied” – which I thought you’d like to know. Gotta get that resveratrol hit, eh?

In Oiram’s defence, I have to say that page f83v (below) does indeed seem to depict nymphs treading grapes (can you see the grapes rolling along the pipework at the top left?), along with two stupendously large grapes in the foreground to press the point home:-

giant-voynich-grapes

Truth be told, I somehow doubt Quire 13 will turn out to be a secret book of grape planting. But it would be rather nice if it was, right? 🙂

Voynich project at the Big Walnut Science Fair…?

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Jacob Collard, a sophomore at Big Walnut High School (in Delaware County, Ohio), put together a Science Fair project entitled “Comparison of Grapheme Frequencies and Locations in Undeciphered Voynich Script and Geographically Similar Languages“. This so impressed the judges that he was asked to take it forward to the Central District Science Day at Columbus State Community College, where he won the “Best Linguistics Project for a High School Student Award” (according to this page). Congratulations to him!

Jacob now has four weeks before the “60th Annual State Science Day […] on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University” – if he’d like someone to cast a Voynichological eye over his work and perhaps suggest some fixes or improvements before May 9th, I’m sure I could find a ready volunteer. 🙂

Hmmm… how long before teachers start using the Voynich Manuscript in junior school to teach children how not to do history? It can be more valuable to know what to avoid, wouldn’t you say? 😮

The Oera Linda Book: a right proper hoax, I say…

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I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough to cover both historians posing as outsiders and outsiders posing as historians. 🙂

Yet probably the most dispiriting thing about nearly all the novel freethinking theories thus constructed (by either camp) is how boringly similar they tend to be, oxymoronifying the phrase “free thinker”. Did Alberti really write the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? [Hint: no.] Was Leonardo da Vinci really a Grand Master of the [insert made-up name] Secret Society? [Hint: also no.] Read (as I have done) a fair few of these and you’d rapidly come to the conclusion that most trains of thought out there run along well-oiled rails, with nary a point in sight. Point-less stuff, indeed.

Of course, if you try to revisit something / someone particularly well-documented, you face a dauntingly uphill challenge from the start: which is why oddly nebulous objects and obscure people attract the most attention (from both revisionist camps) – because for these, there’s that much less that needs to be explained away from the start before you can really go to town & have some fun.

In this general vein, here’s a nice (2000) article by Mark Newbrook from The Skeptic magazine (it’s on pp.42-47), which brings together literally dozens of fringe historical revisionist communities (Velikovskyists, Saturnists, Afrocentrists, Dravidian- / Mayan- / Latvian- / Hungarian- / Basque-/ Etruscan-centred histories of language, Dogon, etc) to highlight their common traits – most of which seem to centre on a misplaced faith in the fallacies of eighteenth-century linguistic / etymological thought. It has to be admitted that the devotion shown to following through these mad ideas is sometimes quite extraordinary. Did Jesus on the Cross really cry out in Mayan? [Hint: don’t even go there.]

It’s no great secret that most hypotheses floated to explain the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, and the Phaistos Disc match this overall template (i.e. of a simple linguistic misunderstanding taken to massive lengths). Even when top-drawer outsiders (David Icke, Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna etc) throw their lizard-skin top hats into the ring, the same tired old rabbits limp out… ‘Roger Bacon‘, ‘it’s the aliens wot dunnit‘, ‘hoax!’ and so forth.

Of all these , though, it is the “hoax” theorists that are stupendously annoying – not because they happen to be right or wrong (which is another question entirely), but because for the most part they use the idea as a kind of intellectual trick to sidestep the entire evidence corpus, preferring instead to revel in schadenfreude, poking fun at other researchers as they lock intellectual horns with the mute rhinoceros of meaninglessness (and lose the battle, of course).

In all these cases, the correct question to be asking is simply what kind of material, physical evidence would amply demonstrate the presence of a hoax – merely proving the possibility of a hoax (as Gordon Rugg famously tried to do for the Voynich Manuscript in 2004) is both hard work and vacuous. Or, if you prefer to stick with Popperian falsification, how can we actively disprove the notion that artefact X is ancient?

And so it all swings round to a resoundingly 19th century hoax, the Frisian Oera Linda Book (which I picked up on from Lady Goodman’s blog page). This describes all kinds of odd things (such as “Atland”, a 17th century revisionist Atlantis), and claims to have been written in 1256, but copied from texts some of which dated back as early as 2194 BC. Errrrm… “zeker niet, mevrouw“, methinks.

If you absolutely have to sample its purple faux historical prose, there’s an English translation here. To me, it all reads like a ‘worst-of‘ compilation of creative writing courses’ historical modules: but perhaps you’ll find some hidden depths there to which I’m blind. But is this a hoax? [Hint: for sure!]

Basil Brush and a (pre)cautionary tail…

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What picture might outsiders paint of Cipher Mysteries in their mind? A mid-town apartment filled with books, box-files, printouts, and eBay-bought sofas filled with a continual stream of cipher groupies all surreptitiously hoping to pick up on some innocuous clue to fabulous buried treasure?

Well… that’s presumably fairly close to what the script-writer on The (all-new) Basil Brush Show (on the CBBC channel) sees when he closes his eyes, as you can tell from Episode 7 of Series 6 called “Da Basil Code“, where Basil and his friends go on a Dan Brown-esque cipher scavenger hunt.

It starts with Basil talking about how his family have long sought after the mythical Golden Teacup of Cam-Oh-Mee-Lay (*sigh*), that can give you whatever you wish for; then, Basil’s evil cousin Mortimer just happens to steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to Basil’s flat; someone just happens to spill a cup of tea over poor M’ona, revealing a concealed message in a nearly-lost language; which ditzy Madison just happens to be able to read; which just happens to lead them to a series of clues (such a huge stone sarcophagus that just happens to be in the middle of Madison’s flat) ending in a disused dishwasher in Anil’s cafe. Anil then just happens to be a member of a millennia-spanning secret organization dedicated to guarding the Golden Teacup; but when everyone just happens to wish for too much materialist stuff (as they were warned not to do right from the start), the Golden Teacup breaks. But then they go off on another scavenger hunt (so that’s alright, then).

(Incidentally, every time I watch or read one of these trashy cipher tales, each “just happens” plot device makes my stomach tighten – they’re symptoms of underlying writing laziness.)

Now, I read “Da Basil Code” as a cautionary tail :-), for those Cipher Mysteries readers who just happen to be currently plotting / writing cipher-themed books / screenplays to consider carefully. Look – if this po-faced Da Vinci Code stuff is already clichéed enough to be thoroughly parodied for the viewing pleasure of 5-9 year-olds (and not even at the hands of the Simpsons scriptwriters, who have given us Homer’s talking astrolabe), then might it simply be that the whole scrungy idea has passed its sell-by date?

Not to put a bomb under your best-laid plans, but… boom, boom! 🙂

u r so qokedy daiin, m8 lol

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“You do realize“, added the man with the tinfoil hat, nodding thoughtfully on the webcam, “that he’s completely mad. For all his qualifications, there really is no reasoning with him.”

“Dave, please rest assured that I fully take your point”, said the journalist, disconnecting as fast as she possibly could. She slumped back in her chair, increasingly desperate for a drink, any kind of short-term alcohol hit to prop up her dipping blood sugar level. Only two more days to the copy deadline for her 2000-word Voynich Manuscript Sunday supplement article, and all Katrina had for her efforts was a rapid succession of dull talking heads, each with basically nothing of substance to say about the manuscript itself, all the while bristling with shirty hatred for anyone who happened to disagree with their pet theory. And, as a general rule, the more entertaining the shirtiness, the less tenable the theory would be.

‘Star Trek Dave’ from Seattle certainly matched that template to a T: OK, so he didn’t actually say the Voynich was written in Middle High Klingon, but he was more than happy to demonstrate the extensive statistical similarities between the two, and positively ecstatic to be given the opportunity to trash anybody at all who thought it was some kind of hoax. He claimed that the shiny hat was to stop his head overheating in the sun: all the same, she couldn’t help but notice the overcast sky behind him in the webcam. What… a… mess.

Numbly, Katrina scanned through the rest of the list of Voynicheros she had planned to interview today: ‘Scatty Duck’ from Kansas City (who believes it was a Mexican encyclopaedia, transcribed by a Venetian missionary); ‘Secretive Squirrel’ from Rotorua (who is sure that Leonardo wrote the A pages, while Nostradamus wrote the B pages); and the white-haired ‘Hoax Hacker’ from Guernsey (who has a talent for spinning every single piece of evidence to make it support his hoax theory, and whom everybody else seems to hates passionately).

Would any of these enthusiastic nutters have anything to say about the mystery to catch the interest of Sunday morning newspaper readers? Being brutally honest, the answer was an overwhelming No: and for a brief instant, Katrina felt a terrible, desolate sadness wash over her. It felt as though the manuscript itself was no more than a pawn to be moved around, a secondary affair destined to never quite satisfy the malformed emotional needs of all these heavy-hearted humanists. She felt a powerful urge to try to shake them all up: but then, as that brief red tide ebbed, saw that this would achieve less than nothing – knocking yourself out to help those who choose not to help themselves is an eternal lose-lose game. She was a journalist, not their therapist.

This was the point when she decided to put it all aside for the night, and to get horribly, miserably, pathetically drunk. Even by up-town wine bar standards, her first bottle – an acrid South African Pinotage blend – had no right to be so expensive: but by halfway through her second bottle, it was doing the trick, and was even starting not to taste quite so much like stalky drain cleaner.

She was giggling to herself now at the foolishness of it all, sitting in the corner sending incoherent text messages to friends who had said they might meet up with her during the evening. And was that sexy young barman avoiding her? “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” she had tapped in: once the predictive texting had learnt “qokedy”, she was able to spool out great chunks of nonsense Voynichese at high speed – and the more qokedy‘s she texted, the glumly funnier it all got (to her, at least).

Still alone at 11.30pm (she couldn’t guess why nobody had joined her), and thoughts of getting a taxi home were slowly starting to edge into those few corners of her brain not yet utterly dulled by alcohol. An odd, shivering sensation ran up and around her back, like a sniper’s jerky laser-sight aimed at her: with what little finesse she could muster, Katrina glanced inelegantly behind her, but there was nobody in that corner of the room. Well – nobody she could see, anyway.

That was strange, as it was normally only Class B drugs that made her feel paranoid, which is why she didn’t do them any more (that, and being paid a pittance to type trash). I must have picked up some kind of freak overproof Pino-skunk-otage, she thought: time to hit the road before the road hits me. And then her dirtbag Nokia with its blinged-up birthday cover trilled up, announcing a text message from perennial network favourite Mr “Number Knott-Recognized”:-

u r so qokedy daiin, m8 lol

“daiin”? Diane? Was her friend Diane bouncing some kind of Voynich txt joke back at her? Scrolling down, the odd msg continued:-

v old + v ciphered, got it?
plants=noise, humans=signal
i/ii/iii spin my wheel
time=now, u r 2/12!
u will shine, peace 2 u! :)

That was roughly the moment when the table decided to rush up, her head decided to rush down, and the two met halfway with an alarming thud.

She came to in the back seat of a black cab, rattling over the Euston Road on its way north towards Crouch End’s diesel-encrusted fug. As her eyelids slowly peeled apart, she realized that sitting opposite was Diane, furiously French kissing that wine bar waiter: she must have turned up late, seen Katrina doing her maudlin drunk thing in the corner, and improvised some alternative entertainment for herself. Bitch. At least she shared the ride home – well, the cab part of it, anyway.

Unsurprisingly, not long after that it all faded to a murky black once again.

The next morning brought ibuprofen, black coffee, and self-pity aplenty: Katrina crawled into work a little later than she should, blocking out all thoughts of that ghastly manuscript until she sat at her desk to power up her laptop.

And then she started to piece together the previous night’s events in the wine bar. That was when it came to her: what had that bizarre text said?

She scrabbled in her bowling bag’s pleat pockets for the mobile, clicked on the message inbox and… nothing was there. Empty. Zero. Zilch. Not so much as a single qokedy. What was going on?

Oddly, as her laptop desktop awoke it revealed that it had acquired a new background: a stylized sun-shape she vaguely recognized from one of the Voynich Manuscript websites. But this didn’t disturb her – rather, she felt strangely reassured by it, even slightly warmed. Sure, something odd had just entered her life by a side door – but whether it turned out to be some spooky X-Files thing, or some kind of practical joke courtesy of Echelon and the NSA, she didn’t really mind.

Whoever it was, she was rather glad of the company.

And that’s when she knew exactly how the rest of the article would go…

Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “biological paradox”…

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For a couple of weeks, I’ve been meaning to post about German Voynich blogger Elias Schwerdtfeger and what he calls the VMs’ “biological paradox”. His question is simple: why is it that the Voynich’s “biological” Quire 13 has both (a) complicated pictures of nymphs, tubes and baths, and (b) longwinded, redundant text? Surely, he asks, isn’t this combination somewhat paradoxical?

(To be honest, Elias’ post then goes off on a bit of a wild tangent: but given that it’s a good starting point and the whole issue of Q13 is a favourite of mine, I thought I’d step up to the line.)

Page f78r (one of the few that Leonell Strong was able to examine) has a number of good examples of this redundancy, in particular para 1 line 5’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy“, for which Strong’s 1945 worksheet #2 suggests the decryption “DUCTLE ROULLS THE GRAOTH COEMLI”.

This is the same piece of ciphertext about which Gordon Rugg asserted “This degree of repetition is not found in any known language“ (Sci Am, 2004). Of course, linguist Jacques Guy ferociously responded to this Ruggish in sci.lang firing off real-life counter-examples such as “di mana-mana ada barang-barang. Barang-barang itu…” As always, there’s a fair degree of truth in what both are saying: but the fact (as Elias points out) that only some parts of the Voynichese corpus read like “qokedy qokedy” is a pretty good indication that we can’t reduce this debate to an either-or between these two opposing poles. Essentially, it can’t be just a simple repetitive language if it’s not consistent throughout (and it isn’t): and beneath all the cryptographic window-dressing, there probably is some kind of meaningful language thing going on.

I’d say that Mark Perakh’s (1999) tentative conclusion on the language differences probably yields the most useful key to Elias’ paradoxical door. Mark wondered about the internal structural differences (i.e. within words) between Voynich Manuscript A and B language pages (and all the text that shades between A & B) and so carried out some tests: ultimately, his favoured explanation is that the A language is a more abbreviated & contracted version of the B language, but that beneath it all, they are still both expressions of the same thing. (Though Mark points to contraction probably being the main mechanism used).

So, the text in Q13 – as a B language object – therefore exhibits redundant probably because it is more verbose. This suggests that we should be looking to decipher the B text, simply because we stand less chance of being distracted by the A text’s arbitrary contractions.

My own take is a little more nuanced (though still hypothetical, lest I raise the hackles of the hypothesis police once more). Firstly, I suspect that the A pages were written first, and that these were trying to duplicate an existing document using a verbose cipher – meaning that a ciphertext line wouldn’t map to the same physical space as a plaintext line. The only way to fit it in was to aggressively abbreviate & contract… but this helped make the ciphertext more opaque.

Then, I suspect that the B pages were added, using smaller quills (say, eagle’s feather?) – because the smaller letter sizes took the pressure off the overall line lengths, the need for contraction and abbreviation was reduced. However, I think some aspects of the coding system changed (specifically the steganographic numbering scheme, but that’s another story!), making the B pages harder to break in a different way.

That is, I suspect that we have two types of ciphertext present in the VMs: a simpler cipher system A (but with a significant amount of contraction and abbreviation) or a more complex cipher system B (but with less contraction and abbreviation to distract us). And just to make things really difficult, there are probably system B pages that are also heavily contracted (i.e. the worst of both worlds).

And some people still wonder why computers can’t break the VMs! *sigh*

450-year-old challenge cipher cracked!

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In the 1564 printed edition of his cryptography manual, Giovan Battista Bellaso included seven challenge ciphers for his readers to break, along with a set of clues: these all remained unbroken and in obscurity until Augusto Buonafalce wrote about them in 1997, 1999, and 2006 in the journal Cryptologia.

But that’s all changed now!

Tony Gaffney – who Cipher Mysteries regulars should remember from his book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” (under the nom-de-plume ‘Jean Palmer’), his reading of the Dorabella cipher, and his corrections to the Bellaso cipher transcriptions – has managed to crack Bellaso Challenge Cipher #6, despite the handicap of not actually being able to read Italian. 🙂

Here’s the ciphertext in question (with Tony’s starting point highlighted), followed by a description (based closely on the document he posted to the Ancient Cryptography forum) of how he used that to begin solving the entire cryptogram. (Incidentally, if this all comes across a bit like a kind of linguistic Sudoku, it’s because that’s essentially how most non-machine code-breaking is done)…

DP QBGTA ITP LBIEE DFIIHO LI AQILIFF SO NILEECHL OMGTTIE=
CZXRC CGEDFLLIILBGGP PLBBIUNO UL QURNXSRRNB OR ACFEDFLL=
ILBFI PLACFODACU AP UHEEOI PLSGGAOLRIBLNGIBLNPE SO ROCDBCG
BU PCLICB MR RBERPUGSTSLB PLACFOEXBUBLB BPSPDXG QU BDUU
DCCAGE FCFXSFP HP MBHI LH EOMGU FSDDHEIJMG FPDHQMPDD.

Having a repeated block of four letters five letters apart implied that the cipher system involves cycling through five different cipher alphabets: and so Tony trawled through Bellaso’s clues looking “for any word that had a period 5 repetition in it ie. lontano; riteovata; lequale; etc.” When he hit the very promising-looking word consequentemente, he lined that up with the ciphertext letters with the cycle numbers beneath:-

??consequentemente??
PLSGGAOLRIBLNGIBLNPE
12345123451234512345

There’s a problem here, in that in alphabet #4 ‘G’ appears to encipher both ‘o’ and ‘m’: yet because most printed ciphers suffer from typesetter errors, Tony ignored this and marched bravely onwards. 🙂

His next two steps forward were to notice (a) that the second letter in the group shown must be ‘t’ (it occurs in cycle #2 in the same word) and (b) the final letter must be ‘i’ (because ‘e’ is its reciprocal in cycle #5 – Bellaso was fond of reciprocal ciphers, i.e. ones that perform both the ciphering and the deciphering) – so, guessing that the first letter is ‘e’, the above section of ciphertext resolves to ‘et consequentement ?i‘

Observing that plaintext ‘e’ appears to get enciphered as P in #1; O in #2; N in #3; and I in #5, Tony’s next angle was to rely on the five cycling alphabets’ probably having some kind of symmetry – in particular, because P O N are all a single alphabetical step away from each other, he thought it likely that the bottom half of the alphabet was shifting along by one place in each cycle. This guess let him start to fill out the 5 cycles in more detail:-

????b?e?g??? 1
????nop?????
????b?e?g??? 2
?????nop????
????b?e?g??? 3
??????nop???
????b?e?g??? 4
???????nop??
????b?e?g??? 5
????????nop?

Where next? Well, Tony now turned his gaze on a second repeated feature in the cryptogram, which appeared to be two words formed from the same linguistic root, but with a different prefix and suffix each. Did he now have enough letters to solve this? He decided to give it a go regardless:-

ACFEDFLLILBFI &
 CGEDFLLIILBGGP
??o???????????   ???o???t?????
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
51234512345123   5123451234512
??o???t???n???   s?????tq??n??
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
12345123451234   1234512345123
?????tq?????o?   ?s????q??????
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
23451234512345   2345123451234
so???q???t?one   ???p?????t???
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
34512345123451   3451234512345
?np??????q????   ???o?????q???
CGEDFLLIILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
45123451234512   4512345123451

Looking at the fourth set, he wondered if ‘t?one‘ might well be ‘tione‘, and so tried them both “as if they were the same word”. Removing the extra I from the first word yields:-

?np?????tione   ???p?????ti??
CGEDFLLILBGGP & ACFEDFLLILBFI
4512345123451   3451234512345

His original table for #3 maps ‘e?g‘ to ‘nop‘ so it seemed entirely possible that ‘F’ might encipher ‘o’: and so guessed that this word was something along the lines of the word ‘proportion‘:-

?n proportione   ??? proporti??
CG EDFLLILBGGP & ACF EDFLLILBFI
45 12345123451   345 1234512345

Working with the code-breakers’ two secret weapons (controlled mistakenness, allied with bloodyminded persistence), Tony moved forwards, safe in the knowledge that if his guesses were significantly wrong his errors would soon present themselves. How much of the five alphabets did he now have?

??r?b?efgl?? #1
??i?nopqt???
??r?b?efgl?? #2
??di?nopqt??
??r?b?efgl?? #3
????i?nopqt?
??r?b?efgl?? #4
??u??i?nopqt
??r?b?efgl?? #5
??t???i?nopq

He now moved on to the next weakest link in the ciphertext, a long group of letters (‘RBERPUGSTSLB‘) that he thought might well now be solvable with the letters he had:-

i?nu??qc????  di??e?p??ati  ??iif?o?g?q?  u?pdgrnalcp?  ?no?l?t???on
RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB  RBERPUGSTSLB
123451234512  234512345123  345123451234  451234512345  512345123451

Pleasingly, ‘distemperati‘ seemed to fit the second version (‘di??e?p??ati’): and so he proceeded with all the remaining words in the challenge cipher.

Tony’s final plaintext (parallel with the ciphertext, and the matching cycle numbers) looks like:-

della giors cre ticip rocede qualche ilcorpo nostro ecoposto
DP    QBGTA ITP LBIEE DFIIHO LI      AQILIFF SO     NILEECHL
      23451 451 23451 234512         2345123        34512345
etorganizato inpropor tione musicabe poi maicretici sono
OMGTTIECZXRC CGEDFLLIILBGGP PLBBIUNO UL  QURNXSRRNB OR
23451234-451 45123451*23451 51234512     4512345123
disproportine etdiscrdia nella musica etconsequenteoenteli nostro
ACFEDFLLILBFI PLACFODACU AP    UHEEOI PLSGGAOLRIBLNGIBLNPE SO
3451234512345 1234512345       234512 12345123451234512345
uloriin quella giorni sono distemperati etdiscordanti ilferro inogni
ROCDBCG BU     PCLICB MR   RBERPUGSTSLB PLACFOEXBUBLB BPSPDXG QU
4512345        345123      234512345123 1234512345123 3451234
sara condoi soprese della vite per petoa saratirato serumpera
BDUU DCCAGE FCFXSFP HP    MBHI LH  EOMGU FSDDHEIJMG FPDHQMPDD.
2345 512345 5123451       2345     12345 5123451234 512345123

Bellaso appears (as per his book) to be using two letter groups to stand in for common words:

  • DP — della
  • LI — mille/qualche
  • SO — no macati e sequir/quanto/ve habiamo/scritto/nostro
  • UL — vostra/poi
  • OR — perilche/sono
  • AP — della/nella
  • BU — ditto/quella
  • MR — il vostro/sono
  • QU — quella/inogni
  • HP — della/imperoche
  • LH — intutto/per

Finally, Tony notes – “I am greatly indebted to Augusto Buonafalce for his help in translating some of the words and supplying me with copies of his English translations of the books.”

The plaintext refers to Bellaso’s clue #8, and discusses the well being of the body at different times, which could well refer to the theories of the Renaissance astrologer Andrea Argoli.

All I can really say is that I think this is a splendid achievement, and I wish Tony the very best of luck with the other challenge ciphers! Excellent, well done! 🙂

Secrets of Herbiculture or of Herbal Medicine?

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As should be apparent from recent posts, for the last few weeks I’ve had Glen Claston bouncing a number of his Voynich ideas, observations and hypotheses off me. In many ways, he and I are like conjoined research twins – though truth be told, if I happen to say “poe-tay-toe”, he’ll go out of his way to say “tuh-may-duh“. 🙂

But now something a bit, well, unnerving has begun to happen.

I hate to say it, but… we’re actually starting to agree on lots of things. In fact, the formerly vast ocean between what we each see in the Voynich Manuscript is gradually narrowing, if not to a trickle (don’t be ridiculous, tcha!) then certainly to only a small sea. On the one hand, Glen is bringing his characteristically intense eye for detail to bear on the kind of codicology I’ve been harping on about for years: while on the other hand, I’m growing increasingly comfortable with his take on the probable content of various sections of the manuscript.

In many cases, it turns out that we’re seeing basically the same thing but from wildly different angles, and using quite different kinds of evidence and chains of reasoning. And if we perpetually feuding twins can form a broad consensus, it’s hard not to conclude that the beginning of a new period of Voynich research might well be at hand… exciting times, indeed.

One fascinating example of this is the question of what the Herbal drawings encode. In “The Curse”, I put forward a lengthy, textual argument about why I thought the Herbal-A pages were actually Antonio Averlino’s (lost) secret book of agriculture: but without any useful idea how the two were connected, it was somewhat hard to take forward. Glen, however, has been reading an entirely different literature: and sees the Herbal drawings as encoding secrets of herbiculture – that is, he believes that particular details of the drawings show where best to prune the plants in question, along with (presumably in the text) various other tricks to grow them most effectively.

Are these two readings so very far apart? Personally, I think not: and believe they will turn out to be two very different sides of the same thing – as always, individual details may well turn out to be wrong (history is like that, basically), but the overall sense of ineluctable convergence I get from all this is hugely powerful.

For further reading, I’ve added a page to the site which discusses secret books of agriculture in the fifteenth century (mainly culled from fleeting references in Lynn Thorndike’s many books). Averlino’s book is perhaps the most notorious, but there are a few others too… Enjoy! 🙂

Rushkoff: Capitalism vs The Middle Ages…?

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First things first: I loved Douglas Rushkoff’s book “Coercion” (2000), and so have been looking forward to his upcoming take on corporatism “Life Inc” (due June 2009). But when I read his recent blog entry on the economy, I have to admit that my heart sank somewhat.

Rushkoff’s starting point there is that we working peons been playing a lose-lose game for the last five hundred years – that from the Renaissance onwards, capitalism was a Ponzi scheme expressly designed to make the rich richer while keeping the poor in their place.

Well, duh. This should only really be revelatory to those who have spent no time at all thinking about what money does, or who have perhaps spent too much time in the toxic companionship of economists (who studiously ignore the whole socio-political aspect of capital, preferring instead to look at flows of numbers). It’s why debasing the coinage has always been such a heinous crime – only kings and queens (oh, and central banks now) are allowed to do anything as foolish as that. And all of this is an issue that has been going on not just since 1500 or so, but for millennia.

OK, so control over money is perhaps the most raw expression of power going: but why try to pin the blame for all that on the Renaissance? Well… perhaps I ought to let you into a secret. To every modern historian’s ears, there are certain keywords and keyphrases that are a dead giveaway that someone has no real idea what they are talking about. My own list:-

  • Dark Ages (this was when, exactly? It depends who you ask, basically)
  • Middle Ages (a fiction humanists concocted to make themselves seem cool)
  • Renaissance (a fiction Jacob Burckhardt concocted to justify his research programme)
  • Leonardo da Vinci (a few good pictures but basically zero influence for centuries)
  • Rise and fall of civilizations (Spengler’s historical cycles that don’t really exist)
  • La longue duree (Braudel’s neat macrohistorical notion that doesn’t really exist)
  • Nazi (comparisons with the Nazis normally show that someone has lost an argument)

These are all historiographical cargo cults, too frequently venerated by historians simply by dint of the amount of historical graft that has been applied to them – and all too frequently appropriated by cultural writers in the way gullible Victorian historians all too often did to rig their own moral evidential votes, to falsely justify their pre-formed conclusions.

So when I hear Rushkoff talk of “a centralized economic plan [that] ravaged the real world over the past 500 years“, and that exclusive royal charters distorted the marketplace leading directly to modern hypercapitalism, please excuse me if I just don’t buy into it. Yes, such charters very probably fanned the flames of the War of Independence: but did they lead to Bear Stearns? No, I don’t think so.

And can it be true (as Rushkoff claims) that the cathedrals of the Middle Ages form some kind of glaring ‘elephant-in-the-room’ counter-example to modern global capitalism, in that many such cathedrals were financed by local merchants rather than by proto-robber-barons?

Actually, no again. These constructions are relics of what some might argue is the greatest Ponzi scheme ever confected: Purgatory. Many of these (literally) awe-ful monstrosities, then, were financed by the sale of indulgences to redeem yourself or your recently-deceased (but sinful) relatives: many were also built with tithed labour (as I recall). Basically, it was not some unspecified Renaissance financial model that killed them off, it was the Reformation, which saw selling indulgences in this way as morally depraved.

[As an aside, Pope John Paul II declared in 1999 that Purgatory was not actually a physical place, but rather a “condition of existence” – nice to see the Church moving with the times. Would Saatchi & Saatchi have instead suggested rebranding it as “Hell Lite”?]

Rushkoff also goes on about local currencies, the kind of thing anti-capitalists and collectives have been using for decades. What… like the pound, then? The US Dollar only has its place as a world trading currency because Far East countries have collectively made it so – and the day when that particular monetary ‘hegemony’ ceases can surely not be that far away. The view from outside New York is quite different, I’d say.

Just because I disagree with Rushkoff and I’ve got an MBA doesn’t make me an apologist for the system. In my opinion, the fundamental distortion in the system is the investment banks – how can you get sound advice from someone who benefits from any upsides to your trades but which has no exposure to any downsides? Future returns on investment get valued in the present relative to each other in terms of risk and reward (and investor appetite): but the investment banks gamed that system to the point that all that was important was volume. And let’s not even talk about the chillingly mad economics of IPOs either, or venture capitalists’ über-bubble economics.

Rushkoff loves the hacker counter-culture ethic, and plainly wants to catalyse other people into applying it to ever more mainstream parts of society: he wants us all to be culture hackers, which is not a bad thing. Yet I think the big question here is how corporates (our pension funds, basically) can get by without investment banks’ ever-morphing range of financial products – not hacking the markets, but hacking the marketplace. Get that right, and we all stand a bit more of a chance.