Things are on the up…

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2009 begins, and – at long last – Cipher Mysteries has lurched back up to PageRank 3 (“PR3”), which is the height it had reached back when it was still with Blogger.

But because of all the super-duper WordPress plugins (like Tim Trott’s Folding Categories plugin, etc), visitors are now finding more of what they’re interested in here, and then staying on the blog for nearly twice as long as they used to – and all the major browsers are able to index the site far more comprehensively than they used to. Twice as many visitors per day reading twice as many pages is good news all round, I’d say. 🙂

One intriguing thing is that nearly 50% of recent Cipher Mysteries visitors use Firefox 1.x as their browser: so, what’s so wrong with FireFox 2.x or FireFox 3.x, then?

All the same, even though WordPress is such a better platform than Blogger, there are still many, many things I’d like/plan/hope to fix: for example…

  • Even though I’ve installed a WordPress plugin (“CSS-Compress”) to serve up compressed CSS files (this would help to reduce the initial load-time), this apparently isn’t working. 🙁 [Fixed: bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’) needed to be in header.php for the plugin to work, oops]
  • The SEO Pager plugin isn’t producing any CSS (don’t know why, though I’d guess it’s probably a PHP 4 issue), so the page-numbers at the bottom don’t have nice little boxes around them. 🙁
  • I’d love to make small icons inline in the CSS, but Internet Explorers before version 8 don’t handle these (boo, hiss), so I’d have to do browser-conditional stuff when generating the CSS
  • I ought to get the hosting company to upgrade the server to PHP 5
  • I ought to ask the hosting company to install eAccelerator to speed up PHP bytecode generation
  • I ought to ask the hosting company to turn on MySQL caching
  • Is there a WordPress performance profiling plugin out there? Is there an easy way of working out which plugins are slowing the page-loading down (apart from just turning them off)?

…and so forth. These kinds of things could halve the loading time for the blog: but maybe I’m just kidding myself that they would make a difference, perhaps it’s fast enough already.

Anyway… a Happy New Year to you all! 🙂

Arthur Wallis Exell…

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Sometimes a passing comment can open up a brief window onto an otherwise lost world. A 2002 email I made to the VMs mailing list I stumbled upon earlier today brought to mind one such instance, and six years on I found myself wondering just what had been said, what had been going on in a very particular context. Let’s start with the email, which quoted Mary D’Imperio’s book “An Elegant Enigma” (as copied by Luis Velez):-

A.W. Exell, in his letter to Tiltman, August 1957, refers to a theory (not further specified) that early Arabic numerals were built on from one, two, three, four or more
strokes in a similar Oriental manner; he suggests a sketchy and incomplete correspondence between Voynich symbols and conventional numerals along these lines. No one has, to my knowledge, worked out a “stroke” theory of this kind in sufficient detail to test it out as a hypothesis (p.24)

Of course, D’Imperio’s work was built squarely on Tiltman’s foundations, so it’s entirely unsurprising that a letter to Tiltman should end up in it. Yet Exell was a botanist working at the Natural History Museum: so what was he doing talking about possible Arabic numerals in the VMs?

I followed up the post with a short post about ladybirds (the subject of Exell’s final book in 1991), somewhat amused by the fact they are known to Italians as “The Devil’s Chicken”, concluding that Exell died some time after 1991. But far more information is quickly available now than was the case in 2002 (though no English-language Wikipedia page): for example, the Natural History Museum archives have this to say about him:-

  • Exell; Arthur Wallis (1901-1993); Botanist in the Department of Botany;
    2nd class assistant 11 Aug 1924
    1st class assistant keeper 1934
    Deputy keeper 1950
    Retired 1962

So at the time of the 1957 letter, Exell was the NHM’s Deputy Keeper in the Department of Botany, having worked there for 33 years (more than half his life).

What fascinates me about all this is the notion that a whole group of people probably linked to the Natural History Museum (of which Exell was merely one) must surely have been looking at the VMs circa 1955-1957. Perhaps if someone looked at Exell’s correspondence from around that date (at least some of which is held in the NHM’s archives), a whole “invisible college” of Voynicheros might well present itself.

This isn’t just an academic exercise on my part: I genuinely believe that the kind of broad (yet classical) education you would need to understand the VMs has become a rare thing in modern education, to the point that there may be plenty we can learn from what Exell and his friends thought about the VMs. In fact, I would argue that probably the most useful writer on the subject is Lynn Thorndike (and he died in 1965). Is it coz we are too modern to unnerstand it?

Book meeting in London…

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A few weeks back, I posted about perhaps meeting up in London to dole out a few of my towering pile of Voynich- and cipher-related books over a pint or two. Well, here’s a date, time and place for it: 6.30pm, 5th January 2009, at the Cittie of York pub on Chancery Lane.

Anybody who wants to turn up, let me know beforehand what you’d like to borrow from my library, or any other book I’ve reviewed or mentioned here along the way, and I’ll bring it along for you. Philip Neal is after my copy of Mary D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma”, while Marke Fincher is after my copy of James Morrison’s “The Astrolabe”:  but there’s plenty of others on the shelves.

See you there! 😉

Baptized magnets & unspeakable imprecations…

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And so up pops a delightful article by Eileen Reeves, who Cipher Mysteries regulars may remember as the author of “Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror”. Her paper, called “Of Language and the Lodestone”, covers a peculiarly Renaissance phenomenon: baptizing magnets with holy water and unholy words (nomina barbara, which Reeves summarizes as “foreign utterances whose force lay in sound rather than in semantic sense”) in order to induce a very human kind of magnetism – love.

To most people back then, magnets were occult objects imbued with an unknown power: and looking at perpetual energy machines/scams half a millennium later, nothing much seems to have changed since. By comparison, the Renaissance fringe notion that a quasi-religiously treated magnet could perform some kind of low-key sympathetic magic (conceptually not so very different from the rationalizations of astrologers throughout the ages) seems, dare I say it, almost reasonable.

Curiously, Jesuit mathematicians/astronomers circa 1610 believed that they could somehow use “the hidden force of the magnet” to communicate at a great distance, via the great magnet that is the earth – some would no doubt hear pre-echoes of Tesla there. These pairs of communicating magnets, too, were to be anointed and “baptized with cabalistic names”, just as love-magnets were. However, by 1640 our friend Athanasius Kircher was happy to denounce this “stupid little machine” as “stupid and absurd”, even though he claimed that an unknown kind of solar magnetism apparently powered his own heliotropic plant. Oh well!

Enjoy! 🙂

“Voynich Volume 1” in BookLand…

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Something new just pinged on Cipher Mysteries’ bank of cultural radar screens: “Voynich Volume 1” by Hiromi Taihei (a manga artist who has previously published works in the young adult / science fiction genres) is due for release on 20 January 2009 – let me know if you see a copy.

Back in 2005, Elmar Vogt mentioned some German manga in Blotch magazine which used Voynichese for the monsters’ language: though the picture he uploaded has long since disappeared, the speech bubbles said “dar shes shokey” (from f68v1), “ykeey ykeey” (from f89v1), and “ees aiir olcho” (probably made up).  We’ll have to wait and see what line Hiromi Taihei’s manga takes…

As an aside, I looked up the 13-digit EAN number (ISBN-13) for Voynich Volume 1 on a UPC database: to my surprise, it came up as being registered to the country of “BookLand” – this turns out to be a fictional country invented in the 1980s to hold article numbers for books (EAN codes have a country prefix, e.g. Indonesian barcodes start with “899” etc). Having recently spent so much time reading about the sixteenth century Republic of Letters, I found this wonderfully ironic – a 20th century Republic of Books, right under our book-reading noses, but disguised as numbers and hence invisible to our eyes. The secret life of numbers, eh?

Hbppz Chrkstmbs Tp Ypx Bll!

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Just so you know, replacing vowels by their next letter in the alphabet is known as “the magical cipher”: though Caterina Sforza used it in a few of her recipes in the 15th century, it was centuries old even then. This kind of cipher is used not so much for secrecy, but instead for ritual and wonder. All of which is simply a thin cryptographic pretext for me to say: K hppf ypx hbve b mbgkcbl Chrkstmbs! 🙂

The secret of “aiin” and “aiir” revealed…

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Here’s a novel explanation for the curious “aiin” and “aiir” pattern found throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text (AKA Voynichese) that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

In my 2006 book, I pointed out that the Voynichese stroke conventionally transcribed as “n” (in EVA) is actually far closer to a “v” with an embellished right stroke: I then went on to suggest that these lettergroups might well be pretending to be page numbers: “iiiv” for “2v” (i.e. folio 3 verso), “iir” for “2r” (i.e. folio 2 recto), etc. Yet however appealing an idea this might be, it fails to explain the preceding “a” sign (“i”-groups are almost always preceded by “a”). And so the follow-on question is this: why do “iiv” and “iir” appear as “aiiv” and “aiir” in the text?

The answer I now propose is brutally simple, and (dare I say it) possibly even obvious to anyone who has seen my recently posted page on the Voynich Manuscript’s own unusual quire numbers. Though quires were usually “signed” (i.e. they had signs added to them to allow a binder to be able to bind them together in the correct order) with quire numbers in the late Middle Ages, these quire signatures normally used quire letters in the early Middle Ages – a, b, c, etc. And so what “aiiv” would have most strongly resembled to a would-be reader circa 1450 is simply a rather old-fashioned reference to “quire a, folio ii verso“.

Having said that, not for a minute do I think that this kind of page reference is what the lettergroup actually represents – instead, I strongly believe that this is all part of the slightly convoluted rationale for the VMs’ cover cipher (i.e. what the cipher is pretending to be, rather than what it actually is), a deceptive surface arrangement of faux-historical letter shapes that attempts to tell/sell a misleading story to the casual observer.

All the same, I should mention that I did briefly wonder whether lettergroups such as “aiiv” apparently highlighting a page might simply be standing in for a letter hidden in plain sight on that very page, encoded (for example) as the shape of the plant or root there. In this manner, f1v could just about be read as “t” or “f” or “v”; f2r might conceivably be “m” or “e” (in the roots); f2v  “p” or “o” or “q”; f3r “v”; and so on. What is so intellectually appealing about this is that it would make the first quire nothing more than a huge one-page-per-letter steganographic cipher dictionary. Though this isn’t something I could myself accept, I thought I ought to flag it as a novel idea: errrm… neat, but rubbish. 🙂

New page on Voynich Quire Numbers…

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I’ve just added a new page to the Cipher Mysteries site that looks at the (historical) mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s quire numbers. This is an aspect of the VMs that has had relatively little coverage (apart from pp.15-18 of my book, *sigh*), yet which should form one of the key dating data.

Should be plenty there both (a) to pique the interest of any passing mainstream historians and (b) to annoy late Renaissance hoax theorists. Enjoy! 🙂

Books for Christmas 2008…

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Here’s a quicky list of books I’m looking forward to reading in the near future, some of which will doubtless already have been gift-wrapped by oddly-familiar elves. Of course, those with book tokens or pockets wadded full of spare cash may prefer to wait until January/February 2009 to read my reviews first, but where’s the fun in that? 🙂

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale. Though it was pricy in hardback (I first mentioned it here), it looks to be a must-read in softback. A fascinating historical take on the birth of modern forensics under the mass-media gaze in Victorian England (with awards aplenty for the writing).

The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution by Deborah Harkness. I just saw this briefly mentioned in the Guardian Review section last Saturday: it deals with the proto-scientific community in Elizabethan London. Plenty of old friends of ours (L’Obel and co) pop up, so should be a fascinating slice of historical pie.

John Dee’s Conversations with Angels by Deborah Harkness. Another fascinating slice of broadly the same historical pie by the same author. I have long said that the full story of Dee’s angelic discussions has yet to be written (though Renaissance Curiosa had a good attempt): perhaps this will take us a step closer? I hope so…

Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood. This is something I’ve covered in the blog before (I reviewed Russell’s “Inventing The Flat Earth” a while back, for example) and thought nobody apart from me had much interest in it, but (to my surprise) here’s a brand new book on the subject.

The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 by Stephen Gaukroger looks interesting too. Publishers now think that the word “magisterial” in any review is supposed to be some kind of kiss of death, but when the subject matter presses so many of my buttons, I don’t really care. 🙂

At the end of the year in which John North died, I’m also thinking about doing a completist thing in 2009 and working my way through his works: specifically, rereading The Ambasssador’s Secret and God’s Clockmaker (of course), but also going through some of his articles I haven’t seen.

Review of “The Voynich Enslavement”…

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This is a weird one: The Voynich Enslavement by Hank Snow is a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-themed experimental novel, in an alternative society built around whipping, slaves, S&M and all that jazz. I’m hardly giving away my personal orientation to say that, ummm, this isn’t really my bag: but there you go, it is what it is.

The story stops after seven chapters (which was when Hank Snow died), though most readers will likely give up after a page or two: despite the full-on mix of bravado, bravura and braggadoccio, the majority of the pleasure was probably more for the writer than for the reader.

So far, so nothing: but what struck me is how this casts a raking light across the age-old advice to “write about what you know”. Given that hardly anybody in the big scheme of things actually knows anything about the VMs, under what circumstances could an author ever sensibly weave the VMs into their novel? “Write about what you don’t know” doesn’t seem so much postmodern as deliberately obtuse, if not actually foolish. As I have said many times, trawling through the sustained paralysis of the Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page yields nothing of great substance: yet this is surely what most novelists seem to rely on when constructing their great works.

My own advice to the legion (well, certainly cohorts) of would-be Voynich novelists is that, whatever your postmodern / ironic / amused take on this  “unreadable book”, the VMs is actually a very poor hook to hang a fine coat upon, let alone to catch a fine fish with. Find yourself a big theme (or two) for the actual story, and work hard to keep a very light touch on both the history and the mystery – the point at which these stop being secondary to the plot is the point at which you will lose your readers.