Jesuit libraries and archives…

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Following on from Philip Neal’s translations, I wondered to myself: what might be lurking in Jesuit archives (specifically to do with Jacobus de Tepenecz / Sinapius)? And so I thought I’d have a quick snoop…

For Jesuitica in general, sjweb.info has a useful list of Jesuit archives, of which the big three are (1) Georgetown University’s numerous Special Collections [Maryland District of Columbia]; (2) Loyola University Archives [Chicago]; and (3) the Maurits Sabbe Library at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Belgium]. Incidentally, Georgetown has a very cool favicon, hats off to their web designer. 🙂

A slightly wider web-trawl yields more resources: an EBIB article on a giant Jesuit library in Poland (with an online catalogue), and the Library Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main. Doubtless there are many more to be found, but that is at least a starting point.

As an aside, the Society of Jesus was born at the height of the Republic of Letters, with its missionary empire spanning the globe supported by extensive letters (I saw Matteo Ricci’s Lettere [1580-1609] flash past during my unproductive Jesuit catalogue searching), so in some ways one might expect that Sinapius might be plugged in to that whole network. Yet he emerged from the [presumably unlettered] kitchen staff at Krumlov, and may have not been primarily inclined to write as much as others. It may well be that there simply are no Sinapius letters out there to be found (probably a bit of Melnik-related decree signing, but not a great deal else).

Yet on the other (Paracelsian) side of Yates’ Rosicrucian divide, we see Georg Baresch’s 1637 letter to Athanasius Kircher which praised the latter’s “unprecedented efforts for the republic of letters”. Plainly the idea of the Republic of Letters was still very much alive in the pre-Kircher years: but the question inevitably remains, hanging awkwardly in the air – where have all those letters gone? Were they lost or destroyed, or are many simply lying uncatalogued in private archives?

Incidentally, Christopher Clavius is a famous letter-writing Jesuit mathematician: while François De Aguilon first used the word “stereographic” (for astrolabe-style projections), and his book on optics (Opticorum libri sex philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles ) had illustrations by Peter Paul Rubens.

For the voluminous scientific correspondence of Peiresc (1580-1637) who left about 3200 letters and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) who left around 1100, you might try trawling through the “Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne”, 16 vols. (1932-1986) or Ismaël Boulliau’s (1605-1694) 5000 unpublished letters. Even though these may well all fall just past our particular time-frame of interest, you’ll never know if you don’t look. [For Boulliau, see Robert Hatch’s chapter 4 in The formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe].

I don’t know: basically, I experience alternating waves of optimism and pessimism about the Voynich Manuscript’s post-1600 history – there’s too little and too late. I get the feeling that Sinapius is a bit of a cul-de-sac, and that we should be looking earlier and towards Southern France for a brief flash of our mysterious herbal manuscript inside the correspondence of the day. But what letters are out there? How would we ever find them?

Bellaso’s challenge ciphers (updated)…

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After I recently mentioned Bellaso’s set of seven challenge ciphers from 1564 on this blog, Augusto Buonafalce very kindly emailed me with scans of Bellaso’s three challenge ciphers from 1555. I’ve now transcribed these (as best I can) and have added them to the existing Bellaso cipher transcriptions page.

I do acknowledge that the font that my theme currently uses for “preformatted” text is too small (thanks Dennis!), but the ciphertexts are only really there to be cut-and-pasted into whatever hacky cryptanalysis package you choose. Incidentally, one neat little online crypto cipher package is John’s Javascript Secret-Code Systems webpage, which has a number of unsolved ciphertexts, such as the three “Richard Feynman” challenge ciphertexts (copied onto a Cipher Mysteries page).

New translations…

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Back in May this year, I suggested to my friend Philip Neal that a really useful Voynich research thing he could do would be to translate the passages relating to Jacobus Tepenecz (Sinapius) that Jorge Stolfi once copied from Schmidl’s (1754) Historiæ Societatis Jesu Provinciæ Bohemiæ (though Stolfi omitted to the section III 75 concerning Melnik) from Latin. The documentation around Sinapius is sketchy (to say the the least), yet he is arguably the earliest physically-confirmed owner of the Voynich Manuscript (even if Jan Hurych does suspect his signature might be a fake): and Schmidl’s “historical” account of the Jesuits in Prague is the main source of information we have on this Imperial Distiller.

So today, it was a delightful surprise to receive an email from Philip, pointing me at his spiffy new translations of all the primary 17th & 18th century Latin sources relating to the Voynich Manuscript – not just the passages from Schmidl, but also the Baresch, Marci and Kinner letters to Athanasius Kircher (the ones which Rene Zandbergen famously helped to uncover).

Just as I hoped, I learned plenty of new stuff from Philip’s translation of Schmidl: for example, that Sinapius was such a devout Catholic and supporter of the Jesuits in Prague that he even published his own Catholic Confession book in 1609 – though no copy has yet surfaced of this, it may well be that nobody has thought to look for it in religious libraries (it’s apparently not in WorldCat, for example). (Of course, the odds are that it will say nothing useful, but it would be interesting to see it nonetheless.) Sinapius was also buried in a marble tomb “next to the altar of the Annunciation” in Prague, which I presume is in the magnificent Church of Our Lady before Tyn where Tycho Brahe was buried in that same decade.

Interestingly, rather than try to produce the most technically accurate translation, Philip has tried to render both the text and the tone of each letter / passage within modern English usage, while removing all his technical translation notes to separate webpages. I think this was both a bold and a good decision, and found his notes just as fascinating as the translations themselves – but I suppose I would, wouldn’t I?

One thing Philip wasn’t aware of (which deserves mentioning independently) is Kircher’s “heliotrope”, mentioned in Marci’s 1640 letter to Kircher. The marvellous “heliotropic plant” which Kircher claimed to have swapped with an Arabic merchant in Marseille “for a watch so small that it was contained within a ring” (“Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything”, Paula Findlen (2004), p.13) was the talk of the day: this was a nightshade whose seeds allegedly “followed the motions of the sun when affixed to a cork bobbing in water”, in a kind of magnet-like way. This seems to have occupied the letters of natural philosophers even more than Galileo’s trial (from the same period). Yet to this day, nobody knows if Kircher was conning everyone with this heliotrope, or if he had been conned by someone else (but was perhaps unable to admit it to himself).

Then again, Kircher’s inclusion of the “cat piano” in his Musurgia Universalis might be a bit of a giveaway that he was a sucker for a tall tail tale. 🙂

Review of “The Shakespeare Secret”…

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In many ways, I have to concede that “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell is a fun little novelistic riff on all things Shakespearean: a series of people die in recreations of famous First Folio fatalities, while the main character (who is chasing after a lost play called “Cardenio”) recoils from each gory death while girding herself for the next clue in the scavenger hunt.

Structurally, it’s built around a vaguely Oxfordian-Stratfordian axis (i.e. whether Shakespeare really was himself or not), with a bit of Delia Bacon thrown in for fun. There are all the obligatory twists and turns at the end (where various players reverse their roles): and it wouldn’t be a proper Shakespearean pastiche-y thing without a bit of cross-dressing along the way, so that happens too. Basically, all the right boxes get ticked in a broadly trashy-secrets-novel-that-you-can-pretend-is-a-bit-posh kind of way.

But there’s a problem.

For me, there’s just something about it which brings so many other novels I’ve reviewed here immediately to mind. For example, its underground finale echoes both Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” and Michael Cordy’s “The Source” (with a bit of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum thrown in for good measure), while the book’s whole scavenger hunt motif has a parochial American angle to it (not unlike Lev Grossman’s “Codex”, which I’ll be reviewing soon).

Really, to me it’s as if these books are all reprising a single High Victorian cipher Ur-romp: but not even in a syncretic “Hero of a Thousand Faces” / Joseph Campbell way. Put them all together, and it feels as though you can perhaps begin to redraw the vague outlines of ye olde booke from whence they all flowed: and it goes something like this…

The main character begins the book in a kind of liminal state, floating between academe and pragmatism (but committed to neither). Yet he/she is quickly presented with a challenge arising from his/her personal life, which compels him/her to use apply both his/her mad research skillz and practical nous to a mysterious enciphered / obscured object. After an almost-interminable scavenger hunt across a number of locations (snooty rare book and manuscript libraries, draughty museums, improbably fantastic or rich archives, and odd church basements), chased by unconvincing (and frankly two-dimensional) protagonists who seem to have escaped from a penny dreadful, the main character realises the awful truth about both the codex / book and the agenda(s) of the people who have steered / guided / manipulated him/her to find it. However, despite being finally found in some underground location (with an unconvincing fight sequence whereby the truly evil character dies), for some mysterious reason the codex ultimately slips through the main character’s grasp, and (to nobody’s great surprise) a new optimistic chapter of his/her life finally opens up, with all that murky nonsense placed safely behind.

I’m not a historian of the novel, so I really wouldn’t know where to begin digging to find a (early Victorian? or slightly older?) prototypical cipher romp, where this basic template first appeared. It’s superficially tempting to see things like the liminality of the main character as a modern conceit: but actually, it all feels far older to me. Perhaps someone will recognize it and add a comment…

Pseudo-science and The Curse of the Voynich…

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A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.

The wisdom of a crowded forum…

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On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple – hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse seems to have gone dramatically downhill over that same period.

I used to believe that everyone’s contribution was potentially worthwhile, because anyone might see a connection that helps to unlock a door: but this inclusive liberal viewpoint isn’t tenable any more, basically because you have to be able to read the VMs’ pictures in a pretty sophisticated way to get even close.

The curious rubbed-through hole on f34r/f34v of the Voynich Manuscript

Even for the very brightest, there are numerous traps to fall in: such as Sergio Toresella’s belief that the hole rubbed through the tree-trunk-like thing on f34r signals the mad scribe’s sexual frustration (it would require a great deal of work to rub such a neatly arranged hole through vellum). Perhaps Sergio is right (he’s extremely close in almost every other way): but this presumes a very specific kind of irrationality – and so the observation relies very heavily on the hypothesis to validate it, which is a kind of circular argument.

All of which colours my reaction to Zachary1392’s post on the Facepunch Studios forums: when looking at the same hole rubbed through on f34r/f34v, he sees it as a representation of female genitalia. Which (having then thought about it some more) he then concludes we should perhaps worship, as part of a Voynich religion.

In some ways, it’s an optimistic moment: a very sophisticated opinion informed by Sergio Toresella’s lifetime of studying medieval herbals, being duplicated by some amusing forum troll. But it’s also a pessimistic moment, because it gets us nowhere: “Greeman” on the same forum similarly points out:

Haha it was probably some shmuck from 600 years ago who thought;

“I bet if I write some crazy letters and draw some real fucked up stuff on a book someone will find it years later and totally freak out.”

It worked, you all got trolled from an Ancient Pothead.

Good Game.

While “Trogdon” helpfully suggested that, because one word looks like “crop” (EVA chol), the VMs might instead be a Photoshop tutorial. And Draicia thinks the whole thing might be a viral advertisement (but for what? Another Dan Brown novel? Have book publishers suddenly evolved?)

I think that all this forum chatter demonstrates something quite basic: that Linus’ Law sucks for things you can’t easily decompose. Reductionism is such a fundamental tenet of scientific thought that nobody even thinks to mention it these days – but the awkward dizzying truth is that to get started on difficult problems, scientists actually have to actively exercise their scientific imagination to generate novel decompositions (which may or may not be right), within which the hard slog of execution can be split up amongst a virtual cloud of volunteers / academics /  workers. Hence string theory, etc.

Linus’ Law fails for the VMs because nobody wants to sign up to any apparently mad theory before committing any serious amount of effort to testing it. But the truth underlying such an odd object will most likely appear somewhat alien (if not outright demented) to our present day minds – and so any person proposing the hypothesis is naturally expected to do all the hard work of proving it.

The sad thing about the VMs is that we do now have a collection of basic art historical facts and observations which tell us broadly where and when the VMs came from: but these point to so prosaic a subset of answers that almost nobody wants them to be true. Far more interesting to put your trust in David Icke’s, Dan Burisch’s, or Gordon Rugg’s brand of alternate history: they’re scientists, aren’t they? (Errrrrrrm…)

Put it all together, and I think the wisdom of the crowded forums perhaps points to the antithesis of Linus’ Law: that if enough people help to trample on every suggestion, nothing is simple. Or perhaps even simpler: given enough troll eyeballs, everything becomes worthless junk. Oh well. 🙁

Dead links, Google oddness, etc…

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I decided to do a bit of site admin over the last few days, by at least trying to tidy up any outstanding issues lurking in the Cipher Mysteries site, mostly from the changeover from Blogger to WordPress. While doing this, I noticed that the site had suddenly dropped about 300 places in Google’s rating for basic search terms, such as “Voynich” and “cipher” (though it has since recovered to about 180): at one stage, it wasn’t even #1 for “cipher mysteries” (Bah!) Even though I’m still getting lots of new visitors (mainly from mailing list recommendations, I think), not a lot of “love” (as SEO people like to describe PageRank, usually to sex up their dull presentations) is flowing my way from Google. Perhaps that will change soon…

Anyway, I found an excellent free tool that revealed a whole load of site problems I wasn’t previously aware of: http://www.dead-links.com/ Much as you’d expect, this is a free robot crawler that trundles happily through your website finding all your dead links, both internal and external. Links to commercial sites (such as Amazon / IMDB etc) often get reported as “405” (which basically means, “no robots allowed in here, so go away“): you’ll also get the occasional “403” (“Forbidden“, where you’ve accidentally linked to a page you had to log in to access), and perhaps a “500” (“Internal Server Error“), where Bad Stuff Is Going On But You Don’t Actually Know What It Is.

In the main, though, the bulk of the errors are likely to be “404” pages: this can encompass just about anything from miscopied or dead URLs, to “the-page-was-loading-too-slowly-so-the-robot-decided-to-give-up” (normally a false positive). Helpfully, dead-links.com lists all the errors a second time at the end of the output page, so you don’t need to cut and paste them from the huge list yourself (errrm… like I happened to do the first time).

And so, I’m going to try to sort out all my dead and malformed links over the next few days: if only 50% of the Voynich sites on the web would do the same…

Dorabella: one step forward, two steps back…

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According to a nice little 2004 New Scientist article by Kevin Jones (Professor of Music at Kingston University, my most recent alma mater), even though Elgar composed his cipher note to Dora Penny in 1897, he appears to have reused the same 24-token cipher alphabet in an exercise book 30 years later. (Kevin Jones doesn’t mention in which collection the exercise book is to be found: there’s a nice listing of Elgar’s notes and immense collection of letters here.)

As with the majority of self-conceived ciphers, it was born of a simple idea:-

[Elgar] listed the symbols used in the Dorabella cipher matched against the letters of the alphabet. The cipher follows a simple pattern, with single, double and triple E-like characters, each in eight possible orientations – upright, rotated 45 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees clockwise and so on. This gives a total of 24 potential characters, and as with many ciphers, I and J share a single character, as do U and V.

Elgar then tries it out on some samples, which when deciphered read:-

M-A-R-C-O E-L-G-A-R (Marco was his pet spaniel) and A V-E-R-Y O-L-D C-Y-P-H-E-R. But when applied to the Dorabella cipher this key does not generate anything that makes obvious sense.

It certainly was “a very old cypher” (probably 30+ years old at that stage). But there’s something a bit back-to-front about this whole thing. If he was reusing an old cipher, why would he be going through the palaver of trying it out again? He would surely have gone through his experimenting phase decades before? But according to Kevin Jones’ subsequent notes to the 2007 BBC Proms:-

Elgar scribbled an 18 character code using the same cipher symbols in the column of printed programme notes for a concert he attended at Crystal Palace in April 1886 – opposite a musical example from Liszt’s “Les Preludes”. (Copy at the Elgar Birthplace Museum.) Annotations on other pages are not ciphered – so it’s possible that this may have been added at a later date.

And so even though this was used as a cipher circa 1886 (probably), and post 1927 (probably), was it also one circa 1897? All these scraps muddy the water once again – which is perhaps what Elgar was hoping to achieve. I just wish we knew what Dora Penny’s favourite song was…

Interestingly, one of the comments to this page was by Peter Brooks, who said he was “increasingly confident that the message consists of two parts separated by an evident period on the last line”, with a first apart in Latin and the second in some kind of vertically arranged English. Personally, I’m not sure how that would be any less obscure than the solution proposed by Eric Sams discussed here recently: but I’m sure Peter Brooks has plenty of sensible reasons to back his notion up.

Following on from the Proms post, “The Elgar Apostle” (“the Elgar on-line newspaper”) held a Dorabella cipher competition, which “seven individuals were brave enough to submit entries”.

The final Dorabella bombshell of the day comes from Peter Brooks, who noted (in his comment) that “there is a moderated Yahoo group Elgar-Cipher“. If you want to find out more about the Dorabella Cipher, this is surely the first place you’d want to head towards.

Incidentally, the “enigma” of the 1899 “Enigma Variations” was Elgar’s claim that they all played in counterpoint to a well-known melody (which he never disclosed, and which has never been worked out) – might the Dorabella Cipher be enciphering this tune, too? (The timing would be basically right.)

PPS: the German WWII Enigma machine was (apparently) specifically named after the Enigma Variations: yet another non-obvious connection between music and cryptography…

The mystery of Bellaso’s ciphers…

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A little while back, I asked Augusto Buonafalce about Renaissance cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso’s challenge ciphers, completely unaware that he seems to have published more articles on them than anyone else on the planet. (Shame on me for not subscribing to Cryptologia, I really ought to.)

In fact, Bellaso published two sets of challenge ciphers in his cryptography manuals: a set of three long ones in 1553 (which I don’t have copies of), and a set of seven short ones in 1564 (which I do). For me, the mystery is why nobody has cracked any of these in 450 years… compared to the Voynich Manuscript’s multilayered (and horrendously tangled) cryptography, they can’t be that hard, surely?

Here’s a link to the short page I’ve just put up on Bellaso’s challenge ciphers. Don’t forget that the “=” signs at the line-ends are almost certainly hyphens, and not part of the cipher. Good luck! 😉

Two Renaissance cold cases, solved…?

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Italian scientists claim to have solved two mysterious deaths from the Quattrocento: those of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Agnolo Ambrogini, two big-brained Florentines at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court who suddenly passed away within only a few weeks of each other in 1494.

Though some historians had conjectured the pair might have died of syphilis, the contemporary rumours of poisoning have apparently now been supported by the high levels of arsenic, mercury and lead found (very, very post mortem) “in Pico’s tissues and nails”, the report goes on. All fascinating forensic stuff, I’m sure. (With slightly more in the Telegraph’s coverage).

But… permission to speak, please, Mr Italian Scientists? The 15th century in Italy was full of hazards, no less from your friends than from your enemies. For example, the culinary fashion was for really undercooked meat (and lots of it), which can (quite literally) be a recipe for disaster – and whenever anyone died suddenly, the jabbing finger of retribution usually pointed at anywhere but the kitchen.

For the rich (i.e. those who could afford apothecaries), another major source of death-by-(mis)fortune was the arsenic-, lead- and quicksilver- (i.e. mercury-)based medicines that were sometimes in favour. I would say that the best thing about the medieval cure “theriac” was that its large number (often 70+) of ingredients usually meant that none of them came in a strong enough dose to kill you.

Put bluntly, I would be thoroughly unsurprised if other bones from similar Medici courtiers happened to exhibit precisely the same tox profile: but without actually killing them. And there are many reports of poisoning plots that failed – different groups used different poisons (the Borgias favoured inorganic ones, as I recall), often ineffectively. Did the two men’s similar deaths mean they shared the same enemy, or just the same apothecary and cook?

Merely pointing to the arsenic etc isn’t enough to tell the whole story: and this is why I sometimes despair at the sight of scientists’ trying to do history. Different types of evidence (and inquiry) yield different and complementary types of story, and it is usually only by linking all these together that the whole narrative emerges. These days, history is multimedia, or it is nothing.

Here, “historical documents that have only recently come to light” (suggesting that Piero de’ Medici was angered by Pico’s connection with mad preacher Savonarola) ought to give the inevitable documentary a spin in the right direction. However, only in Hollywood’s cheesier fringes might someone think that writing “kiiiiiill hiiiim” in a letter would be a good idea. Will the archives really have enough to hold it all together?

All the same, if someone could point to some coded letters written in 1493-1494 by Pico della Mirandola’s enemies, well, then we might just be in business… 😉