Other Euro Voynich books…

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Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here’s a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels…

Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia magazine), I’m very much looking forward to the forthcoming English translation of his novel… even if I do still have to wait until June 2009. *sigh*

Elderly professor, Voynich manuscript, high-level Vatican/Jesuit conspiracy, corrupt cardinal, people learn of the VMs and then they get killed, how will it all end?, la-di-da.

Yes, once again it’s those pesky Templars and their accursed book (what, the VMs? Quelle surprise!) *sigh*

The VMs, the Philosophers’ Stone and quantum physics all get woven together here: though any Voynich book without evil Jesuit priests and lost Templar treasure will always move swiftly to the top of my list, who’s to say what this will be like? All the same, first-time novelists probably have more than enough things to worry about without lumping the weighty baggage of the VMs onto their camel’s back.

According to Dennis Stallings, Maugenest’s story describes how Roger Bacon wrote the VMs during his 13-year confinement – and how Bacon’s ideas are so powerful that anyone who now tries to read them falls into an irreversible coma. Hmmm… though I must confess that Jacques Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” did give me a headache for a week afterwards, Maugenest might just be stretching believability past its breaking point here. Oh well!

German Voynich books…

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While adding categories to some old blog posts just now, up popped a mention of the Karlsruhe Virtual Katalog (KVK). I normally use KVK to find specific non-fiction holdings: but today I wondered what otherwise-unknown Voynich masterpieces it might be able to tell me about. At Dennis Stallings’ prompting, I’ve just started to add non-English Voynich novels to my Big Fat List, so this was a good opportunity to expand its scope in a rather more , errrm, “Teutonophile” direction…

What can 32.60 euroes buy you these days? Not a lot of explanation about the VMs, if the Amazon blurb for Roitzsch’s book is anything to go by. Somewhat unbelievably, its Unique Selling Point is that mainstream Voynich researchers will be eternally grateful for any insight readers might have into this mystery. Sadly, “condescending and hostile” might be a better prediction. Oh well. 🙁

Again, 19.90 euroes for a “Mystikthriller” might seem a little steep (particularly for those in the UK looking at the pound’s current 1:1 parity to the euro), but what the hey.  As with The Voynich Enigma, a Templar seal on the cover flags what you’re getting – a Euro-zone admixture of Church, Templar secrets, and (I’d predict fairly thin) cryptography. Ah, bless.

Alexander the Great, Persia, Voynich Manuscript, terrible secret, sexy archaeologist, Yale, bla bla bla. Sorry to be so immediately negative, but when will these people learn?

A bit of an oddity: 34 pages long, 8 euroes, a German-language magazine devoted to cryptozoology puts out an issue focusing on cryptobotany – and no prizes for guessing which bizarre manuscript is invited to the party. Might possibly be an interesting read – but I’ll admit to being somewhat skeptical.

The real curiosity of the day: a book describing the life and (odd) works a German mystic called Frederika Hauffe (1801-1829) whose convulsions and visions led to bizarre trance-like writing in both a “spirit language” and a “unique coded alphabet”. DeSalvo’s putative link between Hauffe and the VMs is anyone’s guess – but perhaps it would be worth having a look at his 224-page, pleasantly-affordable book. 🙂

Vinland Map latest…

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Two up-to-the-minute papers on the Vinland Map (the Beinecke’s other “VM”) for your delectation and delight.

Firstly, a 2008 paper by Garman Harbottle called “The Vinland Map: a critical review of archaeometric research on its authenticity” in Archaeometry, 50, pp.177-89 – this tries to discredit / undermine the analytical & spectroscopic chemical analyses of the Vinland Map by McCrone (1974) and Clark (2004).

And secondly, a late-2008 paper by Kenneth Towe, Robin Clark and Kirsten Seaver that seeks to vigorously rebut Harbottle’s rebuttal (and, indeed, appears to succeed).

Much as I would like the tricky fragments of cipher on the Vinland Map (as best described by James Enterline) to be a genuine piece of late medieval cryptography (after all, this is a cipher history blog), and even though I suspect Towe, Clark and Seaver might have overreacted somewhat to Harbottle’s paper, the science currently does seem to be more on their side than on his. Hmmm… I really ought to review Kirsten Seaver’s (2004) book “Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vínland Map” (where she names her suspect as Joseph Fischer, though her argument has been criticized for lack of evidence) here soon… so much to read, so little time. Oh well! 🙁

For a recently updated (and generally very comprehensive) online discussion of the Vinland Map, I heartily recommend J. Huston McCulloch’s Vinland Map webpage.

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! 🙂