Knights Templar & the Turin Shroud!

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OK, I’ll admit that the following has no ‘cipher mystery’ angle whatsoever: all the same, it’s a truly remarkable story that trumps 90% of Templar fiction.

According to a piece in The Times, in 2003 a historian at the Vatican called Barbara Frale uncovered a misplaced document (dating to after 1287) which seems to prove beyond much doubt that it was the Knights Templar who brought the Turin Shroud back from Byzantium and venerated its “bearded figure” for a century. Historians had long known of its indisputable 14th century history in Italy and its (often-questioned) 12th century history in the town-formerly-known-as-Constantinople – Frale’s discovery thus sensationally answers the long-standing question of where the shroud was in the 13th century. Additionally, it answers many open questions Templar conspiracy theorists have long riffed on about the nature of their alleged heresy and the secret religious things they brought back from the East.

But… hold on, I hear you cry, wasn’t the Turin Shroud scientifically proven to be a medieval hoax? Well, another news story from the last few days (which I also picked up from the Daily Grail newsfeed, but this time from the Daily Mail) relays some unreported comments from a member of the 1978 testing team, the late Dr Raymond Rogers (he died in 2005). Rogers came to believe that the piece of cloth they had taken for testing was from a medieval section that had been added to mend a fire-damaged part of the shroud – by 1998, he realised that what they had examined was a piece of cotton that had been heavily dyed in order to colour-match the rest of the (far older) linen.

Of course, the really big question is whether this sounds the death-knell for trashy Templar historical fiction. Without some bizarre demonomantic kruft to riff off, that whole historical episode must surely cease to hold the seditious / heretical pungency romantic authors seem to relish so much. All the same… I do suspect that novelists for years to come will carry on telling us that the location of the Templars’ accursed treasure is encrypted in the Voynich Manuscript. Oh well!

Update: more details in this follow-up post on the Turin Shroud…

The cipher mystery of “Esio Trot”!

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Poor old Roald Dahl, remembered more or less entirely for his plucky parentless pawpers propelled into beastly circumstances (but who somehow come good in the end). Apart from bookish Dahl completists patiently working their way through the library shelf to find hidden gems to read to their son/daughter (errrm… like me), whoever would end up reading Dahl’s “Esio Trot“?

It’s a nice (if slightly mawkish, compared with Dahl’s normal writing) little story: it concerns a plot contrived by a lonely retired gentleman (Mr Hoppy) to gain the attention of the attractive widow (Mrs Silver) living in the flat immediately below him, despite her obsession with a puny tortoise called Alfie. I’d like to point you to the Wikipedia article here, but as it does nothing but summarize an already short story, that would be a mean-spirited waste of link ink. 🙂

But does this book contain a cipher mystery? Why… yes! Mr Hoppy pretends to Mrs Silver that he had been told a tortoise-enlarging secret by a Bedouin tribesman – and writes down a special chant for her to whisper to Alfie each day, which begins…

ESIO TROT, ESIO TROT,
TEG REGGIB REGGIB!

Speaking as a collector of Quattrocento letter transposition ciphers (such as Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino used, and which Alberti also described), I have to say that it came as quite a surprise to me to find a modern example with illustrations by Quentin Blake. (Though given that Dahl was employed by MI6 for some years, his interest in cryptography is perhaps not totally unexpected?)

So… can you read “Esio Trot” yet? Or are you not as backwards as a tortoise? 😉

Vellum reasoning chain…

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Rene Zandbergen recently commented that much of the codicological reasoning presented on my Voynich codicology page fails to satisfactorily differentiate between observation, hypothesis, reasoning, and fact. At the same time, Glen Claston has also set about trying to pin down key facts about the Voynich Manuscript’s codicology (though taking his own angle on the evidence): while I have also been thinking about alternative (and hopefully better!) ways to present this mass of information.

From my perspective, doing significantly better is a far harder challenge than it might first appear. Generally speaking, I’ve been working to ‘art history‘ standards of proof – but I think that what Rene is asking me to do is to raise my presentation to the level of scientific proof.

Here’s a first pass attempt, that examines merely part of the chain of codicological reasoning I put forward in 2006 (Curse, pp.54-56) to do with the stitched-up vellum flaws in the herbal section. I’ve marked observations in yellow, and inferences in green, with the arrows mapping out the chain of reasoning:-

vellum-flaw-evidence-chain

However, even this tiny fragment of codicological reasoning needs to be accompanied by extensive visual evidence to back it up. I did what I could in The Curse to present all my visual evidence in as clear a manner as I reasonably could, but without a great deal of parallel forensic evidence, this will always amount merely to probabilistic arguments, not scientific arguments.

In retrospect, given that science can only (except in certain remarkable situations) ever disprove, not prove, I think I did tolerably well to present my evidence so openly. But who (apart from Glen Claston) is out there actively trying to disprove my hypotheses? For all Rene’s desire to see a scientific presentation, where are all the Voynich scientists?

A guide to Leonardo da Vinci’s handwriting…

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Edith Sherwood recently posted up a webpage comparing one of Leonardo da Vinci’s abbreviations with the third character on the Voynich Manuscript’s back page. She says that this is an ‘x’ – a letter which doesn’t appear in Italian, but which Leonardo often uses to denote “ver“. Might she be right?

pox-labor-large

Just to be sure, let’s zoom right in on that first word: is this ‘pox‘, ‘pof‘, or ‘por‘ (etc)?

pox-large

Does that first letter seems oddly familiar? Let’s look at the letters in the bottom-left margin of f66r:-

y-en-muc-mal

So, the stakes are high insofar as these pieces of added writing (on f116v and f66r) both appear to be by the same hand – and so understanding one better might well also help us decrypt the other.

Anyway… for her ‘x’ claim, Edith refers us to the “Clavis sigillorum” (key to the ‘seals’ i.e. to the special symbols) on pages 1-4 of Jean Paul Richter’s (1883) “The Literary Works of Leonardo Da Vinci” (later reprinted as “The Diaries of Leonardo da Vinci”), which we can now see online here, courtesy of Cornerstone Book Publishers (who publish a zesty mix of Masonic, Esoteric & Pulp Fiction books, just so you know). In common with many other Quattrocento Florentines, Leonardo often placed a (nasalizing) bar above a, e, i, o, and u to indicate an, en, in, on, and un (or sometimes am, em, etc). But the special abbreviating symbols he used were:-

leonardo-abbreviations-v2

So, as you can see, Leonardo did indeed use an ‘x’-like abbreviation for ver: but is this what we see on f116v? To my eye, there’s something that doesn’t quite ring true: partly because the distinctive shape used by Leonardo is not really present – but mainly because the ‘x’-like character that is there has so clearly been emended by someone using a different colour ink.

It therefore seems very likely to me that a later owner guessed that this should read ‘pox‘ (for whatever reason) and emended it accordingly: but was this (as Edith Sherwood claims) what was originally written here? I think very probably not. So… what does it say, then?

Back in 2006, I hazarded a guess (Curse, p.27) that this line was written in Occitan and originally read “por labor a mon aut…” followed by EVA ‘och‘ (Voynichese): now, though I still suspect Occitan, my current reading (somewhat to my surprise) is that it starts with “por le bon simon s…”

Lest you think this is some kind of slightly delayed April Fool’s joke (and that I’m trying to sneak in a reference to Duran Duran singer/lyricist Simon Le Bon), please be assured that it’s honestly not – “le bon simon” is simply what it seems to say in this (admittedly much-disputed) margin. Unless you know better? Look at it for yourself and feel free to post your own reading!

And finally… here’s a link to a nice little web application that transforms a message you type in into Leonardo’s handwriting. Now that you are an expert on Leonardo’s abbreviations, you should quickly realise that this fails to handle both “per“, “ver“, “di“, “br“, “ser“, “uno“, and “una” and “an“, “en” (etc) properly. Incidentally, Leonardo also replaced “j” for “i” if it was next to an “n” (so that the resulting letter-pair wouldn’t get confused with an “m“), which this (otherwise very cool) app also doesn’t handle correctly… but perhaps I’ve covered enough arcane palaeographic ground for one day, and should stop there! 🙂

The Fake Factory

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“Geezer”, sighed the bald little man, “this is London, rip-off centre of the world. As they say, ‘Walloons devise, Londoners revise’.”

The long-haired man shifted awkwardly, twiddling his cheap codpiece. “It’s not just a matter of copying – my master has certain… unusual requirements.”

“Heh, this part of town’s full of pretty girls who for the price of…”

“No, you lecherous fool, his requirements are about the manuscript. He says it has to look old – really old, as though God’s own angels had written it.”

“Must… have… angelic… script…”, muttered the mordant midget as he scribbled notes on a scrap of paper. “Hold on a mo’, your master must have that spooky German abbot’s book in his library – padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas an’ all that, eh?”

“As yet he has not – but if you hear of a copy…”

“…yeah, I’ll whistle, don’t you worry, geezer”, soothed the midget, mysteriously noting down ‘humpty bonus real russet’ in his notes. “Anything else about this ancient fake he wants us to make?”

Kelley’s eyes raised and narrowed, as if he was looking at a far-off object. “My master wants hundreds of pictures threaded through the book – plants, star diagrams, and small naked women to please the reader’s eye.”

“Phwoah, your man does have ‘unusual requirements’ after all!”, snickered the faker. “Well, I can’t promise you no works of art, seeing as it’ll be the boy what does the drawings, he’s only eight, and he’ll be using his pregnant muvva as a drawing guide.”

“Well… OK… but be sure to tell your boy not to use any fashionable hairstyles or clothes, as it has to look really old…”

“Ah, clever stuff, matey-boy! You’ve really been workin’ this out, ain’tcha?”

Kelley ignored his uncouth patter, and continued counting an imaginary feature list on his fingers. “Use whatever size sheets of vellum you can get your hands on: oh, and use Cardano’s clever grilles to generate text that resembles the patterns of language. It’s simple once you get going, I’m told.”

“Now I’m beginnin’ to see where you’re headin'”, chortled the little old guy, a shy grin smirking its way across his toothless face. “Howsabout we also make it look like loads of people have owned it? You know, shuffle the pages around, rebind it several times, flip the leaves around, add little comments in the margins, add fake wear-marks along various folds, overpaint it in twenty different paints and styles. If we leave all kinds of different fake clues for your buyer’s so-called experts, it’ll take them centuries to figure out how we turned ’em over, the suckers!”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous!“, snorted Kelley as he pushed the fake factory manager aside and marched off into the crowd. “What kind of a fool would go to that much trouble?”

“Hmmm… what kind, indeed?” mumbled the old man to himself. “Get me my quill, boy – I’m feeling inspired…”

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…