Edith Sherwood’s anagram cipher…

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A new day brings a new Google Adwords campaign from Edith Sherwood (Edith, please just email me instead, it’ll get the word out far quicker), though this time not promoting another angle on her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-Manuscript hypothesis… but rather a transposition cipher Voynichese hypothesis. Specifically, she proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may well be Italian written in a simple (i.e. ‘monoalphabetic’) substitution cipher, but also anagrammed to make it difficult to read.

Anagram ciphers have a long (though usually fairly marginal) history: Roger Bacon is widely believed to have used one to hide the recipe for gunpowder (here’s a 2002 post I made on it), though it’s not quite as clear an example as is sometimes claimed. And if you scale that up by a factor of 100, you get the arbitrary horrors of William Romaine Newbold’s anagrammed Voynich ‘decipherment’ *shudder*.

More recently, Philip Neal has wondered whether there might be some kind of letter-sorting anagram cipher at play in the VMs: but acknowledges that this suggestion does suffer from various practical problems. I also pointed out in my book that Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino (‘Filarete’) both used syllable transposition ciphers, and that in 1467 Alberti mentioned other (now lost) kinds of transposition ciphers: a recent post here discussed the history of transposition ciphers in a little more detail.

So: let’s now look at what Edith Sherwood proposes (which is, at least, a type of cryptography consistent with the VMs’ mid-Quattrocento art history dating, unlike many of the more exotic ciphering systems that have been put forward in the past), and see how far we get…

Though her starting point was the EVA letter assignments (with a few Currier glyphs thrown in), she then finessed the letter-choices slightly to fit in with the pharma plant label examples she picked: and there you have it (apart from H, J, K, Q, X, Y, Z and possibly F, which are all missing). All you’d have to do, then, is to anagram the rest of the text for yourself, sell the book rights, and retire to a sea-breezy Caribbean island.

edith-sherwood-alphabet2

Might Edith Sherwood be onto something with all this? No, not a hope: for example, the letter instance distribution is just plain wrong for Italian, never mind the eight or so missing letters. As with Brumbaugh’s wobbly label-driven decipherment attempts, I somehow doubt you would ever find two plausible adjacent words in the main body of the text. Also: what would a sensible Italian anagram of “qoteedy” (“volteebg”) be?

Her plants are also a little wobbly: soy beans, for example, were only introduced into Europe in the eighteenth century… “galioss” is a bit of a loose fit for galiopsi (not “galiospi”, according to “The Botanical Garden of Padua” on my bookshelf), etc.

As an aside, I rather doubt that she has managed to crack the top line of f116v: “povere leter rimon mist(e) ispero”, “Plain letter reassemble mixed inspire” (in rather crinkly Italian).

All the same, it is a positive step forward, insofar as it indicates that people are now starting to think in terms of Quattrocento dating and the likely presence of non-substitution-cipher mechanisms, both of which are key first steps without which you’ll very probably get nowhere.

History or mystery…?

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What do I research, “history” or “mystery”? The latter, saith my uncle Eric Alexander: his own eight-year-long history research project has involved his diving deep into the murky pool that is British archives, and revolves around Henry Cort (1740-1800), whom Wikipedia calls (somewhat tartly, I think) “an ironmaster”.

Granted, I’m definitely not doing Eric’s kind of archival history, trawling through documentary evidence to verify, clarify, and patiently illuminate. Rather, my interest in “cipher mysteries” is focused more on the nature of the knots that constrict the flow of knowledge around such odd objects – a kind of epistemological meta-take on history, using these (apparently) mysterious objects as lodestones to guide the way into the locked historical psyche.

Hmmm: I am at least self-aware enough to see that I suffer from a bad case of eighteenth-century French philosophy, insofar as I see “history” and “science” merely as two views onto the same unified field (in the Renaissance, they weren’t even separated yet), and “mysteries” merely as handed-down lumps of knowledge whose particular misconnection differs from other knowledge only in a matter of degree, not of kind.

To us fully-paid-up Enlightenment rationalists, the point of history lies not in knowing what happened, but in the process of finding out what happened. Ultimately, I’d like us all to be historians, not to memorize (or even to fake) stuff like royal lineages (the kind of spurious historical apologetics John Dee excelled in, unfortunately), but to use its palette of research skills in our daily lives – to actively bring to light that which has been occulted, in whatever area, for whatever reason.

That’s not too much to ask for, is it? 🙂

Nostradamus quatrain cipher…?

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In retrospect, it all seems bleakly inevitable: that enigmatologists would move on from the lardy Bacon-stuffed margins of Shakespeariana to find new hunting grounds. Personally, I thought Nostradamus scrabbled pretty hard to find rhymes for his verses, but a new book claims these were all just a cover story, and that it was no more than an enciphered journal.

“Rise to Consciousness” (2008) by Michal Deschausses claims to decipher the truth hidden in Nostradamus’ work, allegedly revealing a story about “one strong woman” in the far future who seems to resemble… Michal Deschausses?

I-1
Some publishers will assist with offering the knowledge in this Century. In pure reason they will rush her through it. The bout the year of her death secures vast knowledge through the age and the verses will release facts which people will hardly believe.

Could it really be that Nostradamus’ quatrains (strictly speaking, “vers commun”) enciphered a “multi-lingual” secret message? Or is it simply the case that you can, just as Leo Levitov famously did for the Voynich Manuscript, “decipher” just about any given text-like thing into an entirely parallel “polyglot oral tongue”, a stream of Romance language fragments from which you can read basically any message you like?

For reference, Nostradamus’ Century 1 Quatrain 1 is probably an “evocation of the Delphic Oracle, after Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum“: and goes like this:-

Estant assis de nuict secret estude,
Seul reposé sus la selle d’aerain:
Flambe exigue sortant de solitude,
Faict prosperer qui n’est à croire vain.

The two are connected, errrm, how? Anyhoo, because Michal Deschausses has been good enough to include her deciphering methodology as an appendix, I’ll probably end up buying a copy and having a look. But having seen Levitov’s book, I won’t be holding my breath.

Now… we’ve had hundreds of years of people claiming that Nostradamus’ verses predict every d&mn thing in the news, from the end of the world, to war(s) in Iraq, and even (most recently) to Barack Obama and his running mate:-

Born of obscure and dark family,
Of white and black of the two intermixed.
The dark one biding his time,
Before the Empire changes.

But… hold on a minute: “Born of obscure and dark family” is a line from Century V Quatrain 84, “Of white and black of the two intermixed” is a line from Century VI Quatrain 10, “The dark one biding his time” appears just to have been made up, while “Before the Empire changes” is a line from Century I Quatrain 43.

So, Nostradamus bloggers have supposedly got themselves excited about three lines moved waaaaay out of context with a filler line added in to form a supposed verse about Obama. Oh, really?

OK… let me try for myself, restricting the search to a high-speed sleective scan through Century I:-

Lost, found, hidden for so long an age,
In the future by headless idiots
That which shall live without having any sense
submerged, killed, dead through brainless idiocy

Profoundly predictive, don’t you think? 😮

What is a ciphertext?

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Essentially, a ciphertext is a piece of text where the individual letters have been transformed according to a rule system – substitution cipher rules replace the shape of the letters (as if you had just changed the font), while transposition cipher rules manipulate the order of the letters.

THIS IS A CIPHER —> UIKT KT B DKQIFS  (substitute each letter with the one after it in the alphabet)

THIS IS A CIPHER —> SIHT SI A REHPIC (transpose the letters, writing each word back-to-front)

So, as long as (a) you know [or can crack!] the rules by which the “plaintext” (the original unenciphered text) was transformed, and (b) those rules can be played out in reverse, then you can decipher the ciphertext.

OK so far… but if you’re looking at historical ciphers, there’s a problem.

Prior to 1400, transposition ciphers were extremely rare, partly because words themselves were rare. Many documents were written without spaces – and without spaces, where do words begin and end? Effectively, this meant that in-word transposition ciphers (such as reversing syllables, as the Florentines Antonio Averlino and Leonardo da Vinci both used) would only happen in those few places (such as Florence) where people had a modern concept of what words were. A well-known modern example is “Pig Latin“, a (20th century) humorous in-word transposition cipher: and there’s the 19th century “loucherbem” in French, too.

Round about 1465, these flowered into some kind of complex system (by an unknown practitioner, and now apparently lost forever): Alberti, writing in Rome during 1465-1467, mentioned a number of ideas for a complex transposition system, though he recommended his own cipher wheel in preference to them.

Yet after 1500, these basically disappeared into the historical footnotes of cryptographic works. What replaced them (circa 1550) was the “rail-fence” Renaissance notion of transposition cipher: this was instead grounded in the print-centric culture of movable type. This saw messages as sequences of characters tick-tocking away to a metronomic beat (i.e. one per tick), and transposition ciphers not as a way of disrupting word contents, but instead as a way of disrupting (& subverting) the metronomic pulse of letters – a very different beast indeed.

THIS IS A CIPHER --> ISTHAY ISYAY AYAY IPHERCAY   (Pig Latin cipher)

THIS IS A CIPHER ---> T I I A I H R    (Railfence cipher)
                      H S S C P E X

It is this latter (16th century) two-dimensional transposition cipher that is widely used in modern cipher-systems, not the late medieval ‘anagrammatical’ transposition cipher.

cipher-timeline

Older histories of cryptography tended to situate all these cipher techniques within what I call a  “progressivist mythology” – the mistaken notion that every new idea not only flows out of all previous ideas, but also improves and refines them. In practice, of course, that’s not how things work : many brief local flowerings of ideas (basically, all the cipher varieties marked in italic above) made almost no impression on contemporary cryptographic practice. Even Vigenère’s autokey cipher (taught on every modern cipher course) did not get picked up by cryptography practitioners for more than two hundred years!

And now for the punchline of this post: if you discard the progressivist mythology, the range of possible local enciphering strategies for a given ciphertext is sharply constrained by the date and position of a document.

I argue that the Voynich Manuscript ciphertext is likely a prime example of this: its internal evidence dates it no earlier than 1450 and no later than 1470 – right at the time of the brief flowering of the kind of syllabic and interline transposition ciphers mentioned by Alberti in his De Componendis Cyfris (1467).

And so, if we seek to apply “pure” modern substitution cipher analytical techniques to something built around an unknown transposition cipher system, we would surely fail to make any sense of it – and this is, I believe, what has happened in the case of the VMs… why it has remained a “cipher mystery” for so long.

“Historian” the 7th best job?

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Here’s an odd little thing: a site ranking 200 different jobs. What I found interesting there was the complete lack of overlap between the top ten “best” jobs (based on a combination of “Stress, Work Environment, Physical Demands, Income and Outlook”)…

(1) Mathematician, (2) Actuary, (3) Statistician, (4) Biologist, (5) Software Engineer, (6) Computer Systems Analyst, (7) Historian, (8) Sociologist, (9) Industrial Designer, (10) Accountant.

…and the ten most “satisfying” jobs…

(1) Clergy, (2) Physical Therapist, (3) Firefighter, (4) School Principal, (5) Artist (Fine Art), (6) Teacher, (7) Author, (8) Psychologist, (9) Special Education Teacher, (10) Construction Machinery Operator.

I’ve marked in bold those hats which I wear most days (although I’m sometimes accused of being too “preachy” about the VMs, I don’t think I could claim to be a member of a Voynich “clergy”) – 6/10 from the first list, and 1/10 from the second. Curiously, though, I found “Author” to be just about the least satisfying job of all: far too obsessive and antisocial while writing, and more brickbats than bouquets afterwards. 😮

Also, I really wouldn’t have predicted “Historian” would be one of the top 10 highest-rated jobs: but perhaps part of the reason for the enduring level of interest in the VMs is that it appeals to affluent, clever people in good jobs who have leisure time to waste how they please. 🙂

Sarah Goslee’s reconstructed codex…

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A few years ago, Sarah Goslee (who I believe has her own blog here) gradually become more and more interested in medieval / Renaissance history, specifically (in accordance with her science background) with cosmology, astrology, botany, and cryptography. I doubt any Cipher Mysteries regular would be hugely surprised to find out that, somewhere along in the way, she ended up “hooked” on the Voynich Manuscript. 🙂

Her VMs research has mainly concentrated on PCA (Principle Coordinate Analysis) of the VMs’ text: which I think is a bit of a shame, given that the text was apparently constructed in an anti-analytical way to render that kind of approach largely useless. Oh well!

However, infinitii recently emailed me (thanks!) with a link to Sarah’s fascinating description of the late medieval manuscript simulacrum she constructed. Inspired by a fifteenth century Italian herbal and a fifteenth century Austrian alchemy notebook (MS LJS419 and MS LJS382), she set out to create her own SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism)-style astronomical notebook. Structurally, this has limp vellum binding, rag paper, oak gall ink, quill pens, and writing patterned after a fifteenth century herbal: contents-wise, it has a calendar, the metonic cycle, Domenical letters, location of the sun, etc.

It’s a nice, brief description of a well-contained project: recommended! 🙂

Review of “The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus”…

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Every once in a while, a history book comes along that really humbles me, that leaves me speechless not from its erudition, brilliance or sophistry, but from a certain hard-to-pin-down historical “X Factor”: a kind of connectedness in the thinking that yields rounded arguments but with a human dimension.

Some brief examples? Though critics may say he overreached his evidence, I found Carlo Ginzburg’s “Ecstasies” an amazing piece of work: Evelyn Welch’s “Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan” I found inspirational too. The first half of Rolf Willach’s “The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope” was electrifying: and so forth.

And now to add to this list, here’s “The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus” by Florian Ebeling (translated from the German by David Lorton), a book whose very subtitle flashes up a subject that you might well think obscure in extremis: “Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times“.

The book delivers everything you’d expect of it: it is patient, academic, marginal, cross-referencing, liminal, with a broad intertextuality to its reading, yet still managing to cover everything from Herodotus all the way through to Umberto Eco. In fact, the list of interesting / influential people somehow ensnared by the Hermetic ‘project’ seems to go on forever: Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Sebastian Franck, Pico della Mirandola & Marsilio Ficino (of course), Paracelsus, Casaubon, Kircher, Newton…

Was there ever a “golden book” hidden in a monastery wall by Antiochus I, that told what Aristotle secretly taught Alexander the Great? No, not a hope: and, much as Casaubon pointed out, the whole Hermes Trismegistus thing doesn’t really stand up to close philological scrutiny – basically, it’s a crock (and I don’t mean a crock of gold).

However, I do think that the strange Hermetic-alchemical-mystical-revelatory dance helps to capture a lot of the edges of our cultural knowledge over the centuries – that its mixture of high claims and dodgy details is rather like a shiny (but non-shewing) shewstone, reflecting back people’s preoccupations and obsessions far more strongly than anything it reveals. And Ebeling’s book captures these brilliantly!

Apollo vs Dionysus, the eternal grudge-match…

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Here’s another post inspired by the book I’m currently reading, Joscelyn Godwin’s “The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance”.

Whereas 15th century Renaissance art was largely orderly, linear, a lot of Mannerist late 16th-century art is disorganized, curvilinear, riotous – this has led to the label of antirinascimento, the “Anti-Renaissance”. But to someone like Godwin with both feet in the iconological trenches, this speaks of a deeper dichotomy – between the ordered Apollonian meme and the disordered Dionysian meme. Godwin pitches the austere, Roman-loving Quattrocento humanists’ dry perspective against the carnal obsessions and pagan thematics of corrupted Cinquecento cardinals – an extended Apollo vs Dionysus grudge-match in an art historical arena.

All of which is quite cool, in an iconological sort of way. 🙂

But once you start looking at things in this way, you begin to see echoes everywhere: in my own research area of Quattrocento ciphers, you could view Alberti’s über-ordered cipher wheel as a quintessentially Apollonian solar device, and then compare it with the apparently disordered, fragmented Voynich manuscript cipher statistics (that I link with Antonio Averlino, AKA Filarete) – Roman austerity against Greek cunning.

Yet does this kind of dichotomistic model really give us a real insight into the kind of secret history that iconologists believe lurks just beneath? Or is it just a modern quasi-thermodynamic meta-narrative (historicizing the universe’s eternal battle of order vs disorder) being stamped over the top of something that is no more significant than a difference in personality?

Reading anything to do with iconography makes me feel like I’m watching a renegade episode of the X-Files, where Mulder and Scully are arguing the toss over something foolishly marginal. Though occasionally I have brief moments where I think “Yes, that does make sense”, you simply cannot infer from the existence of a debate that any of the mad theories being proposed has to be correct. Oh well!

Update: Dennis Stallings points out off-list that the Apollo vs Dionysus grudge-match as an art-historical thema only really kicked off with Nietzsche’s (1872) “The Birth of Tragedy”, which is entirely true – here’s a nice 1996 paper showing (basically) how you can use the A. vs D. dichotomy as a way of blagging your way through literature studies. 🙂

Cryptography vs Cryptanalysis vs Cryptology…

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There are many different ways of, well, reading the unreadable: what isn’t so well-known is that the technical terminology we use tends to highlight those particular aspects that we think are worthy of study (as well as to occult those aspects we are not so interested in). The big three buzzwords are:-

  • Cryptography: writing hidden messages – a historical / forensic approach
  • Cryptanalysis: analysing hidden messages – a statistical / analytical approach
  • Cryptology: reading hidden messages – a linguistic / code-breaking approach

Generally, you’ll see these terms used extremely loosely (if not interchangeably): but that’s something of a tragedy, as each strand is concerned with a different type of discourse, a different type of truth to help us get to the end-line, that of finding out what happened.

(1) If you study the cryptography of the Voynich Manuscript, you would primarily focus on issues such as: the intellectual history behind (and embedded within) the glyphs, the forensic layering of the writing itself, the physical strokes that make up the letters, what corrections there are to be found, how Voynichese practice evolved during the construction of the document, how the writing interrelates with the drawings, etc. This is reconstructive forensic history, that seeks to establish the truth of the writing system – to establish the mental structures that were given systematic shape (and yet were hidden) in the writing. In many ways, the end-product would be an accurate transcription of the text – but I strongly believe that this strand has not yet been pursued to its logical conclusion.

(2) If you study the cryptanalysis of the Voynich manuscript, you would instead take the study of the cryptography completely as a given, and use the resulting transcription as a starting point for your analytical research, however (in)accurate it may be. The argument has typically been that even if, say, 10% of the transcription is wrong, statistical analysis of the remaining 90% should still yield informative results that are (to a certain degree) illustrative of the underlying mechanisms. Yet the specific reliance upon the transcription cannot be ignored, particularly when you go hunting for larger-scale patterns (such as words, or lines).  And there is a very strong case to be made that the absence of convincing statistical results to date arises not from inadequate statistical testing, but instead from some basic division within the text being misunderstood.

(3) If you study the cryptology of the Voynich Manuscript, then you would take as a given a carefully-selected set of statistical properties previously derived from cryptanalysis, and look for some kind of linguistic fit between those properties and the properties of known languages and/or transformations of known languages (such as shorthand, patois, abbreviation, contraction, etc). Many Voynich theories are based on a very naive cryptological reading, often filling the vast gaps between the two models by expanding the range of possible languages that are present all at the same time, and hence resulting in a claimed plaintext that is a hugely interpretative soup of Romance language fragments – though Leo Levitov’s “polyglot oral tongue” is a prime example, it is very far from being the only one of its kind.

In terms of this framework, I’ve invested most of my time on the VMs’ cryptography, to the point where I believe I can give an account of each of the glyphs and of the evolution of the writing system: but I’m now at the point where I have to move on to the cryptanalysis in a more focused way to make progress.

The overall point I’m trying to make is that we need to get the history (cryptography), the statistics (cryptanalysis) and the linguistics (cryptology) sorted out in order to get over the high walls of the Voynich Manuscript’s defences: its singular beauty arises from how it manages to confound all three of these approaches simultaneously. This is, I suspect, merely a byproduct of the ‘undivided’ Quattrocento thinking that gave it life – that it comes from the time-period just before we (as a culture) imposed artificial divisions on the way we think about the world… just before intellectual specialization took hold. The historian part of me wants to shout: look, it’s the product of a Renaissance Man, in every useful sense of that much-abused phrase.

LibraryThing as a research tool…

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Last summer, I mentioned here that I had listed a few of my VMs-related books on LibraryThing: it’s a nice little social web gizmo for bibliophiles like me who don’t otherwise get out much. But given that the number of people who have listed their books there has since increased to a quite staggering 500,000, it has become (as its founders probably hoped) a resource in its own right.

Perhaps most directly useful is its ability to tell you who has books in common with you: by thumbing through their (often well-stocked) virtual bookshelves, you can find many other related titles you might never have otherwise heard of.

For example, the person there with the most books in common with me is Brian Ogilvie, an “intellectual and cultural historian, specializing in early modern Europe, the history of science, and the history of scholarship” – precisely the kind of person whose library I’d love to mooch around. The beautiful thing, of course, is that now I can! Here (post-mooch) are some of his 1323 books I’d like to see:-

  • “Alchemy and authority in the Holy Roman Empire”, Tara Nummedal (2007)
  • “The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400-1850” (Studies in the History of Art Series), Therese O’Malley (2008)
  • “Books of secrets: Natural philosophy in England, 1550-1600”, Allison Kavey (2007)
  • “Botany in medieval and Renaissance universities”, Karen Reeds (1991) [How on earth did I miss Karen Reeds’ book?]
  • “Carolus Clusius in a New Context: Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist”, Florike Egmond (2008)
  • “The Clock and the Mirror”, Nancy G. Siraisi (1997)   [I’ve been meaning to read this for a decade!]
  • “Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century”, Arthur MacGregor (2008)
  • “The eye of the Lynx : Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history”, David Freedberg (2002)
  • “Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance” (Variorum Collected Studies Series, Cs 650), Jerry Stannard (1999)
  • “History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning” (Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World), Nancy G. Siraisi (2007)
  • “Leonhard Rauwolf; sixteenth-century physician, botanist, and traveler”, Karl H. Dannenfeldt
    (1968)
  • “The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery”, Edward G. Ruestow (2004)
  • “Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century”, Peter N. Miller (2000)
  • “Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany” (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 646), Jerry Stannard (1999)
  • “Renaissance and revolution : humanists, scholars, craftsmen, and natural philosophers in early modern Europe”, Judith Veronica Field (1997)
  • “Secrets of nature : astrology and alchemy in early modern Europe”, William R. Newman (2001)
  • “Technology, society, and culture in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300-1600”, Pamela O. Long (2000)
  • “Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe”, Stuart Clark (1999 )
  • “Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe” (Oxford-Warburg Studies), Sachiko Kusukawa (2006)

There – you now have an ideal reason for listing your own books on LibraryThing. 🙂