"The Coso Artifact"…

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A few days ago, Voynich News started getting web visitors from the Hall of Maat, an alternative science website I’d heard of (but had never got round to looking at properly). And so I decided to drop by; and was very pleasantly surprised at its range of well-written articles, most of them skeptical takes on the kind of alt.history nonsense that typically bedecks the Internet.

Here’s a link to the article on “The Coso Artifact”, simply because the story (of how a modern object worth no more than “a couple of bucks” led to such an outpouring of tosh about ancient civilizations and even creationist takes on technology) amused me so much. But the rest of the site is good too – enjoy!

PS: just so you know, there isn’t much about the VMs on the site, with the brief exception of an interesting 2004 article by Mark Newbrook on linguistic revisionist histories.

Review of "The Montefeltro Conspiracy"…

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Once upon a time, when I was trying to research the cryptographic history of Sforza Milan 1450-1500, it became painfully obvious that I had to build up a proper understanding of Francesco Sforza’s chancellor Cicco Simonetta: more than just a ‘gatekeeper’ or even a ‘lynchpin’, Simonetta was the very lintel above the door, the central architectural feature silently and powerfully holding the whole enterprise together.

However, for the most part histories have tended to treat Simonetta as a marginal figure, as if he was simply some gouty old henchman beavering away in the Sforza family’s shadows. Only when contemporary historians (Evelyn Welch perhaps most famously, but there are now quite a few others) began relentlessly chiselling away at the Sforza propaganda facade did Cicco become foregrounded as a useful object of study.

Despite my efforts to collate what fleeting references to Cicco I could find, he remained an elusive figure. But then I found a relatively unknown book in Italian called “Rinascimento Segreto: Il mondo del Segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli” (2004) by Marcello Simonetta: chapters III and V covered the key people & period I was particularly interested in. The author’s surname is no coincidence: when Marcello went to Yale in 1995, his professor from the palaeography class (the very excellent Vincent Ilardi) “immediately suggested that [he] write a biography of [his] ancestor Cicco Simonetta“. Poignantly, Marcello had been born in a hospital in Pavia “only a few yards from where Cicco Simonetta was imprisoned at the end of his long life.”

I should have been delighted: but my Italian comprehension has only ever been tourist-plus, and “Rinascimento Segreto” was written in (to me) full-on academese. Yet even though reading it was a hard, hard slog, it really did have everything I needed to build up a fuller picture, as well as plenty on other related stuff (such as the Visconti, the Pazzi conspiracy, Roberto da Sanseverino, Filfelfo, and so forth). In many ways, Simonetta’s book was one of the ten or so key texts that substantially contributed to my research back then.

Since then, Marcello has been busy digging further trenches within the same Quattrocento patchwork of fields. Most notably, in 2001 he uncovered (in the Ubaldini family archive in Urbino) an enciphered letter from Federico da Montefeltro to his envoys in Rome, dating from 14th February 1478 – a mere ten weeks before the Pazzi conspiracy attack on Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. Marcello had already accumulated plenty of material implicating Federico in the whole plot: and so wondered whether this letter might be connected…

During 2002 or 2003, he therefore decided to see if he could break the letter’s cipher using only the set of “Regule” (rules) famously written down by Cicco Simonetta in his diary: these described how to break unknown ciphertexts. “After a few weeks of hard work“, Marcello was finally able to decipher it: and it revealed, just as he had inferred from other documents, that Federico da Montefeltro had indeed been utterly involved with the whole plot against the Medicis. Marcello published his results in the well-respected Archivio Storico Italiano: but it was not historians who responded in 2004, but the world’s media, bringing him a small measure of international fame: in 2005, a documentary even came out on the History Channel describing Marcello’s story.

Fast forward to 2008, and here’s Marcello’s brand new popular history book “The Montefeltro Conspiracy“, which does everything you’d expect: it tells the interlinked stories of Cicco Simonetta, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Federico da Montefeltro, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pope Sixtus IV, and the whole Pazzi conspiracy (and the subsequent Pazzi war), particularly focusing on the political machinations from 1476 to 1482, together with the story of the ciphered letter.

Well, that’s the making-of-the-book covered, the kind of human-interest story PR people love to feed to tame journalists (not that I’ve received a single PR release to date, let alone a review copy of anything): but what is the book actually like?

For the first 50 pages, I have to say that I really didn’t enjoy the book. To me they read like 19th century jut-jawed Italian popular histories, such as Count Pier Desiderio Pasolini’s “Catherine Sforza“. Even though I happened to love that book, it’s really not something that could be sensibly released nowadays, because sensibilities and presentation styles have moved on so far: modern history is so much better than that.

All the same, beyond that point, Marcello progressively got into the swing of it: and by about page 150, he had really got the measure of the material and the pacing, and his story was really flying. Yet the very final section appended to the structure (where he proposes a link between Botticelli’s uber-famous “La Primavera“, his “Punishment of Korah” (the fifth fresco on the walls of the Sistine chapel), and the whole Medici-Pazzi thing) just doesn’t work at all (sorry); and so the whole book ends on a bit of an historical down note, which is a shame.

Having tried my own hand at writing an accessible historical account of the mid-Quattrocento (and it is a far harder challenge than it looks), I’d put the lull of the first 50 pages down to popular writing inexperience on Simonetta’s part (trust me, he can do full-on academese just fine): so in the end, I’d still recommend his book overall as a good piece of historical writing on a fascinating era.

As an aside, an article last week by Juliet Gardiner in the Sunday Times eulogizing contemporary British historians (almost to the point of hagiography, it should be said) also criticized European historians’ writing for being too polarized between high and low culture:-

“[Richard] Evans makes the point that, on the Continent, the divide between academic and popular history is far deeper. Elsewhere in Europe, history is seen as a social science (Wissenschaft), so it tends to be written in ‘high academese’, a theoretical, technical style that is all but impenetrable to all but the committed specialist. In Britain, history is seenas a branch of literature, rather than science, and the tradition of writing narratic, empirical history, often with an emphasis on biography, provides a vivid ‘story’ that can be appreciated by the educated reader.”

I would say that “The Montefeltro Code” amply demonstrates of all these historiographical trends: yet I do look forward to further historical books by Simonetta, particularly as his popular writing style continues to improve (as it undoubtedly will).

However, when considering his book as a piece of cryptographic writing, I have a whole heap of issues. Despite the huge influence of the Da Vinci Code on the publishing trade, there are very few recent books that could genuinely qualify as both historical and cryptographic non-fiction (Simonetta’s “The Montefeltro Code” and my book “The Curse of the Voynich” are pretty much the only two I can think of right now), as long as you put the torrent of titles on the whole Enigma / Bletchley Park thing to one side.

In this context, Simonetta would have been aware that cryptography historians would take a keen interest in his book, and should therefore have checked his work accordingly. Unfortunately, this seems not to have happened.

I’ll give some immediate examples from p.26. Though his mention of “the insecure roads of Europe” is true for most cipher dispatches, my understanding is that Sforza cipher dispatches were (according to Francesco Senatore) folded up inside a littera clausa, powerfully deterring anyone from even trying to peek inside. In each cipher, Marcello says “there were about 250 random symbols, which stood for single, double, and triple characters“: actually, they stood for single letters, doubled letters, and nulls, as well as some common short words, and occasionally common consonant-vowel or vowel-consonent pairs. In fact, Cicco Simonetta’s Regule pointed out that the only Latin word with a tripled letter is “uvula” (egg), making this an even more obvious mistake (even though Cicco himself seems to have miscopied this as “mula“). “Some fifty other[ symbol]s designated people or powers“: actually, this number varied widely. “Every few months, the sets were completely changed“: I don’t think this is true at all – Tristano Sforza’s cipher was changed only after about 15 years in use, and only because of Tristano’s petulance (his old cipher wasn’t ornate enough for his position) rather than any cryptographic need. In fact, as far as I know, the only Milanese cipher of the period that was updated much was the one to Tranchedino in Florence… and so on.

All very minor and (frankly) unnecessary: but it is Marcello’s claims relating to Federico da Montefeltro’s ciphered letter that require the most careful scrutiny. In a recent email, Augusto Buonafalce flagged to me that Marcello had not made it transparently clear how he had decoded the nomenclator (the list of people/place/etc, each represented by a single symbol): and that this was central to whether his deciphering claim was cryptologically valid or not.

Certainly, when Simonetta first published his findings in 2003, he had (though this is not made clear anywhere) only guessed at the “persons and powers” code-table section of the nomenclator: many of these symbols appear in the two pages he reproduced (for example, you can see instances of c24, j6, p1, p2, p12, r1 dotted around the page). In January 2004, I suggested to him that he should examine the Urbinate Lat. 998 cipher ledger (held in the Vatican), which contains various Urbino ciphers, and pointed out that, from what I had seen, it seemed to be common practice in Urbino to reuse & extend codebooks rather than to create entirely new ones. When Marcello had a look at Urb. Lat. 998 in the summer of 2004, he was pleasantly surprised to find two symbols reused from a (then ten-year-old) cipher codebook: yet the remainder were still educated guesses on his part. Though he included two small images of the “Montefeltro Codebook” on p.91 (but with no folio reference), these are not at the level of cryptographic proof that would satisfy a Cryptologia readership: his code-table cracks were based more far on historical inferences than on cryptography.

Though Marcello took several weeks to break the cipher, it should also be pointed out that this was because Cicco’s rules were simplistic (and, I suspect, hardly ever used in practice): had Marcello passed his transcription to a cryptologer, it would probably have yielded up its secrets in mere minutes – code-table aside, it was a very simple cipher.

Ultimately, the irony of the situation is that the Sforza camp (and specifically Cicco Simonetta, I argued in my book) had provided the Montefeltro camp with far better ciphers than this since the 1440s: yet because Federico was now moving his loyalty away from Milan, the new cipher his administrators created for him was far simpler – but one unknown to his former allies.

All this points towards what I found so maddeningly annoying about “The Montefeltro Code”: that neither the cryptological methodology nor the cryptographical history were treated fairly and in context. In the end, the book presents a good historical rendering of a fascinating period with only a light dusting of crypto confetti on the surface – much as I liked its historical side (and would indeed have walked across broken glass to get a copy of it when writing my book), anyone hoping for a brilliant synthesis of that with cryptography may well come away disappointed.

Wilfrid Voynich’s papers…

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Here’s a quick research note: a list of Wilfrid Voynich’s archives…

There may well be more, but that should be enough to keep any researcher going for a bit… 🙂

A little more on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku…

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A nice little thing just arrived in the post: I had contacted the Prague-based Society for the History of Sciences (“DVT” = dějiny věd a techniky) to ask how to get hold of a copy of its 2000 monograph on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku. To my surprise, the DVT’s Igor Janovský said – don’t worry about paying, we’ll just send you a copy (which they did).

It’s a rather pleasant little blue-covered volume: though all in Czech, there is a contents page at the back in English. As this doesn’t appear anywhere on the Internet, I thought I’d copy it here:-

5 … Introduction
7 … Zdenĕk Beneš: Lifetime of Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek – his personality, time and milieu
15 … Jaroslav Soumar: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek and his time
25 … Michal Svatoš: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek and Prague University
35 … Martin Šolc: Astronomy in activity of Tadeáš Hájek
41 … Alena Hadravová & Petr Hadrava: Observation devices in the time of Tadeáš Hájek
49 … Petr Hadrava: Tradition in Czech stellar astronomy (Conclusion to the astronomy of Tadeáš Hájek and foreward to S. Štefl’s article)
51 … Stanislav Štefl: Stelar studies of Be-stars with spectrograph Heros
55 … Voytĕch Hladký & Martin Šolc: Tadeáš Hájek and the calendary reform of Pope Gregorius
61 … Karel Krška: Tadeáš Hájek as meteorologist
67 … Zdenĕk Tempír: Cultivation of hop-plants up to 16th century and Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek
79 … Gabriela Basařová: Contribution of Tadeáš Hájek to Czech and world brewing
93 … Pavel Drábek: Aspects of medicine in Hájek’s treatise on beer
95 … Václav Vĕtvička: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek as botanist
103 … Jaroslav Slípka: Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek and his “Methoposcopy”
109 … Milada Říhová: Treatise on methoposcopy of Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek
115 … Pavel Drábek: Antonius Mizaldus an interpreteur of Hájek’s Methoposcopy into French
117 … Bohdana Buršiková: “Actio medica”, or the professional dispute of Tadeáš Hájek
125 … Josef Smolka: Andreas Dudith (1533-1589) – penfriend of Tadeáš Hájek
169 … Josef Petráň: Tadeáš Hájek’s relation to practice
175 … On bibliography Hageciana
189 … Obsah [i.e. “Contents” in Czech]
190 … Contents

By far the biggest (44-page long) piece is Josef Smolka’s article (pp.125-168) on Hájek’s correspendence from Andreas Dudith: the table on p.137 lists 47 extant letters dating from 1572 to 1589. Dudith’s correspondence is currently being edited by L. Szczucki a T. Szepessy: parts I to IV were published in 1992, 1995, 2000, and 1998, with the last two corresponding just to 1574 and 1575 (which must have been busy years). Note that Smolka has examined the letters to Hájek past 1575, not just the ones that have been edited & published.

I must admit that all this changes what I thought about the 16th century. I had previously got the impression that there was a huge explosion in scientific letter writing only in the mid-17th century, triggered by the Royal Society and Kircher’s encyclopedic output. My impression of the preceding century had been that its letters had been more literary and political. But here we can see a 16th century group corresponding intensely: this pushes the boundary right back in time.

Was this an “invisible college”? Owen Gingerich received light flak for using the phrase (“The Book Nobody Read“, p.82), which he defines (pp.178-179) as “tutorial and mentor relationships that transcended institutional boundaries“: though in modern sociological usage, it is usually a rather more hand-waving way of expressing undocumented (but implicitly present) loose connections between members of an extended community through which ideas flow. For once, the Wikipedia entry is mostly helpful (well, up until its final summary, anyway).

I’d point out that ‘mentoring’ is a somewhat inexact term (as well as being a modern back-projection onto history, with “mentor” dating only from 1699, and becoming trendy in the 1990s): and that the whole “invisible college” notion comes with extensive occult, Rosicrucian, and secret society baggage which perhaps we would be better off not carrying on our journey forwards. Basically, I fail to see how using “invisible” to denote “non-academic” is helpful to anyone: I’ve met plenty of essentially invisible academics, haven’t you?

For the most part, I think that what is meant by “invisible college” is no more than a geographically- extended community of letter-writers, trading ideas rather than goods. Others might prefer to call this a “community of letters” (though I’m not sure if this is helpful either).

And so we come to Rene Zandbergen’s comment on my earlier post on Tadeáš Hájek. He writes that “According to Dr.Smolka, if Hajek had had access to the MS now known as the Voynich MS, it should be expected that he would have mentioned it to Duditius, but this is not the case.” [Smolka’s article on Duditius and Hájek is the one discussed above].

Actually, I do buy into this: if the VMs did get bought by Rudolph II (who, let’s say, then gave it to Horcicky), we may be able to rule out the pre-1590 (and indeed the pre-1600) period. In fact, I’d say the best place to look would probably be in the community of scientific letter-writers around Europe circa 1600-1612, and particularly before 1606-1609 when Rudolph II’s grip on the court started to yield to his brother Matthias. So rather than Duditius and Hájek themselves, we ought to be hunting down their successors’ letters. But who would that be?

It would need someone with a better grasp of ‘unpublished Bohemian scientific correspondence 1600-1610’ than me to know where best to look next. All the same, I have some ideas… 😉

John Dee’s "Tuba Veneris"…

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Was the “Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus” really written by John Dee? I first saw this several years back, when I stumbled upon Joseph Peterson’s transcription of it on the Esoteric Archives website.

The link with Dee seemed (and still seems) to me to be spurious: even though he is mentioned right at the start of the text, for me the language, the drawings, the style, the thinking, in fact all of it fails to please as a match. But then again, the earliest copy (held by our old friend the Warburg Institute, MS FBH 51) is apparently 16th century, so would have been written while Dee was still alive. It’s a nice little mystery, I thought, though one which at the time I assumed few had any interest in.

However, I recently found a paper online by occasional Voynich mailing list member Teresa Burns published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (No. 12, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2007), called “The Little Book of Black Venus and the Three-Fold Transformationof Hermetic Astrology“. This fascinating little piece takes the reader on a journey around Dee’s conceptual world and how it might link in with the Tuba Veneris, all the way to a suggested link with the “Familists”, the Family of Love, and from there to an underground Dark Goddess movement.

There’s also an Appendix by Phil Legard, which provides a different (but resonantly similar) angle. Nicely, he discusses whether the invocations might be Trithemian-style steganography (Legard thinks not, but it’s good that this has been explored).

In the same issue, Terri and Nancy Burns also put forward a parallel translation of the Tuba Veneris – this is probably the place most people coming to it for the first time should start.

The next issue’s follow-up piece (by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns) is also online, called “The Little Book of Black Venus – Part Two Olympic Spirits, the Cult of the Dark Goddess, and the Seal of Ameth“. This tries to link the Tuba Veneris with Dee’s early book-buying expedition in Italy, and (though not so successfully, I have to say) with the benendanti of Northern Italy, which you may possibly have heard of in connection with Carlo Ginzburg’s fascinating book “The Night Battles”.

Finally, there’s a beautiful hand-crafted modern edition of the Tuba Veneris mentioned here (apparently based on the same set of articles) though its price of $189 may possibly be just a tad more than many people would spend on books in a year.

My opinion? Having absorbed all these articles, I’m now far more comfortable than I was before with the notion that the Tuba Veneris might well actually be by John Dee – it is dated 1580, which was before the whole Edward Kelley / angelic conversation farrago started kicking off, and placed in London. Yet I’m not taken by the Dark Goddess connection: though I appreciate the possibility, that’s a whole step further than I can take (for the moment, at least). Ultimately, I suspect that the Tuba Veneris will turn out to be in a very loose Trithemian-style steganographic cipher, perhaps for carrying a Familist message around Europe.

Hmmm… perhaps (pace Koestler & Owen Gingerich) someone will end up writing a book on it called “The Spell Nobody Cast”? Just a thought…

"The Voynich Chronicle"…

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No, it’s not another Voynich Manuscript novel for the Big Fat List, but instead the working title (according to a blog entry here) for a track by 1980s German Synthpop funsters Alphaville in an upcoming album.

And no, much as I enjoyed “Big In Japan” I don’t quite think that really counts as a huge lurch into the mainstream. Until you start to see Barbie Voynich-decoder love rings (“olal” = “I fancy him“, “qoky” = “after school“, etc), or perhaps “The Voynich Manuscript According To Clarkson” in hardback in Asda, it’s going to stay a pretty much marginal thing. But could that ever happen? Well…

Having just driven a Murcialago through the sides of three caravans on fire, the producers of Top Gear set me my toughest challenge yet – deciphering the Voynich Manuscript. With my judgment still clouded by that incredible adrenaline high, I rather foolishly accepted…

 

 

 

"The Alchemy Guild"…

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Alchemy arguably dates back to Alexandria, and there are many alchemical manuscripts dating through to the 13th and 14th century (though Lynn Thorndike noted that the 15th century was something of a fallow period). However, the modern organization The International Alchemy Guild traces its practical roots back to what was going in 16th century Bohemia, specifically with the work of Wilhelm von Rosenberg (their spelling) in Cesky Krumlov.

The Guild has put together a nice little historical piece on their website linking a lot of the famous alchemical names of the time to this specific milieu (though doubtless Voynich historian Rafal Prinke would view it as a somewhat simplistic rendering): so you’ll see Rudolph II, Hajek, Dee, Kelley, Horcicky, etc all passing by in quick succession… Enjoy!

Semicolonoscopy…

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Much as I hate to admit it, semicolons are terribly old-fashioned; look, now that I’ve consciously used one, I feel like saying “Harrumph!“, “2nd inst.“, “Yrs etc.” In fact, these days it would be a pretty safe bet that more semicolons are used for winking smileys than for punctuation. 😉

Yet here’s a lovely little 2008 article from the New York Times about the public recognition received by a semicolon put in a City Transit sign by the transit agency employee Neil Neches.

Apropos of nothing, of course; I just thought you’d like it! 😉

Review of "Inventing The Flat Earth"…

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It’s a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from?

In his fascinating (if all too brief) “Inventing The Flat Earth” (1991), medieval historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces the faulty arguments and ideologies across the centuries that contributed to this nonsense. As an immediate cause, he points to a small coterie of 19th century writers (specifically William Whewell (1794-1866) and John W. Draper (1811-1882)) who decided to start an agitprop war between “religion” and “science”, essentially by building opposing false idols of both “sides” and getting people angry enough about it to join in the fight.

For “religion”, the caricature they constructed was one of superstition and medieval backwardness: and what (thanks to multiple careful misreadings of the sources) could be more retrogressive than the notion of the flat earth? Disregarding the fact that just about everyone at that time believed in a spherical earth, Church or not. *sigh*

Yet for retrogressivity to be of interest as something to avoid, someone had (logically) to be promoting progressivity: Russell traces this back to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and to Jules Michelet, the last of which dubbed medieval scholastics “valiant athletes of stupidity” (hugely unfairly, of course).

But Jeffrey Burton Russell goes back further still: calling the Middle Ages “the Middle Ages” is a way of implicitly saying that it sat inbetween the (glorious) Classical Era and the (glorious) Renaissance – that it was a Tweenie era, that was more than just a bit disappointing and dull. And similarly with the Dark Ages, which would appear to have been so hugely disappointing that some extreme revisionist historians are trying to excise it completely!

Ultimately, Russell points the finger at Renaissance myth-makers: it was they who essentially invented the whole “medieval = rubbish” mythology which used to annoy Lynn Thorndike so much (though perhaps he should have been angrier with Alberti & his chums than with Jacob Burckhardt), in order to justify their own glory, as if fama was a zero-sum game. What did those Renaissance brainiacs ever do for us, eh?

Rewind to 1492, and the basic history is that Columbus never had to argue against a flat earth. His main point of disagreement was with those scientifically-minded people of the time who argued (completely correctly!) that his estimate of the distance East West to the Orient was far too low, and that he and his crew would die of starvation before they reached there. And they would have done, had another continent not happened to be in the way… but that’s another story.

Some may have heard of this book via the recent short article by Mano Singham (Phi Delta Kappan, 1st April 2007, available online) that was built almost entirely around a high-speed precis of Russell’s book: on HASTRO-L (2nd December 2007), Michael Meo criticized Singham’s presentation, but I think the inaccuracies there were in the summarizing, not in the original.

As far as the intellectual history goes, the seed of the myth/error seems to have been specifically sown by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus preface (not the one Osiander added!). There, he says:-

For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth’s shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.

Copernicus was trying to play to the Church audience here, as the spherical earth was so well-believed as to be a point of faith. Yet because Lactantius’ opposing view (of a flat earth) had been deemed heretical, the papacy ordered in 1616 that this passage be censored from Copernicus’ book – but this order came too late for the 3rd edition of 1617, and the subsequent edition came along only in 1854.

And so the final irony here is that if De Revolutionibus had indeed (as Koestler asserted) been “The Book Nobody Read”, the flat-earth myth/error might never have flowered.

Wilkins, Lib II, Cap X "Of subterranean lamps"…

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Having just bought a print-on-demand copy of John Wilkins’ book “Mathematical Magick: Or The Wonders That may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry“, I found that it was (mostly) placed online in 2006 as part of “The Mathematical and Philosophical Works of the Right Rev. John Wilkins“, (re-)published in 1802 – there’s a free version on Google Books, available for free download here. If you go to page 247, you can also see his 1668 essay on a philosophical language which D’Imperio mentions in her section 9.3 “Pasigraphy: Universal and Synthetic Languages”.
All the same, because I was interested in the “perpetual lamp” section of Wilkins’ “Mathematical Magick”, and the online text version was somewhat flawed, I thought I’d post a more usable/readable version here of Book 2 Chapter 10 (page numbers as per “Mathematical Magick”). PS: I like the animated statue story on p.237: it has a proper Indiana Jones feel to it! 🙂
[p.232]
C A P. X.
Of subterraneous lamps : divers historical relations concerning their duration for many hundred years together.

Unto this kind of Chymical experiments, we may most probably reduce those perpetual lamps, which for many hundred years together have continued burning without any new supply in the sepulchres of the Ancients, and might (for ought we know) have remained so for ever. All fire, and especially flame, being of an active and stirring nature, it cannot therefore subsist without motion; whence it may seem, that this great enquiry hath been this way accomplished: And therefore it will be worth our examination to search further into the particulars that concern this experiment. Though it be not so proper to the chief purpose of this discourse, which concerns Mechanical Geometry; yet the subtility

[p.233]
and curiosity of it, may abundantly requite the impertinency.
There are sundry Authors who treat of this Subjection by the by, and in some particular passages, but none that I know of (except Fortunius Licetus) [margin: Lib. de reconaitis antiquarum Lucernis] that hath writ purposely any set and large discourse concerning it: out of whom I shall borrow many of those relations and opinions, which may most naturally conduce to the present enquiry.
For our fuller understanding of this, there are these particulars to be explained:
1. οτι, or quod sit.
2. δίοτι, / cur sit. / quomodo sit.
1. First then, for the οτι, or that there have been such lamps, it may be evident from sundry plain and undeniable testimonies: Saint Austin [margin: De Civit. Dei. l. 21 cap.6] mentions one of them in a Temple dedicated to Venus, which was always exposed to the open weather, and could never be consumed or extinguished. To him assents the judicious
[p.234]
Zanchy. Pancyrollus mentions a Lamp found in his time [margin: De deperd. Tit. 35. De operibus Dei, part 1. l. 4. c. 12.], in the sepulcher of Tullia, Cicero’s daughter, which had continued there for about 1550 years, but was presently extinguished upon the admission of new air. And it is commonly related of Cedrenus, that in Justinian‘s time there was another burning lamp found in an old wall at Edessa [margin: Or Antioch. Licetus de Lucernis, l. 1. c. 7.], which had remained so for above 500 years, there being a crucifix placed by it, whence it should seem, that they were in use also amongst some Christians.
But more especially remarkable is that relation celebrated by so many Authors, concerning Olybius his lamp, which had continued burning for 1500 years. The story is thus: as a rustic was digging the ground by Padua, he found an Urn or earthen pot, in which there was another Urn, and in this lesser, a lamp clearly burning; on each side of it there were two other vessels, each of them full of a pure liquor; the one of gold, the other of silver. Ego chymice artis,

[p.235]

(simodo vera potest esse ars Chymia) jurare ausim elementa & materiam omnium, (saith Maturantius, who had the possession of these things after they were taken up.) On the bigger of these Urns there was this inscription:

[p.236]

Plutoni sacrum munus ne attingite fures.
Ignotum est vobis hoc quod in orbe latet,
Namque elementa gravi clausit digesta labore.
Vase sub hoc modico, Maximus Olybius.
Adsit faecundo custos sibi copia cornu,
Ne tanti pretium depereat laticis.

The lesser urn was thus inscribed:

 

Abite hinc pessimi fures,
Vos quid vultis, vestris cum oculis emissitiis?
Abite hinc vestro cum Mercurio
Petaesato Caduceatoque,
Donum hoc maximum, Maximus Olybius
Plutoni sacrum facit.

Whence we may probably conjecture that it was some Chymical secret,

 

by which this was contrived.
Baptista Porta [margin: Mag. Natural. l.12. c.ult.] tells us of another lamp burning in an old marble sepulcher, belonging to some of the ancient Romans, inclosed in a glass vial, found in his time, about the year 1550, in the Isle Nesis, which had been buried there before our Saviour’s coming.
In the tomb of Pallas, the Arcadian who was slain by Turnus in the Trojan war, there was found another burning lamp, in the year of our Lord 1401. [margin: Chron. Martin Fort. licet. de lucern. l.1 c.11] Whence it should seem, that it had continued there for above two thousand and six hundred years: and being taken out, it did remain burning, notwithstanding either wind or water, with which some did strive to quench it ; nor could it be extinguished till they had spilt the liquor that was in it.
Ludovicus Vives tells us of another lamp, that did continue burning for 1050 years, which was found a little before his time. [margin: Not. ad August. de.Civit.Dei, l.21.c.6]
Such a lamp is likewise related to

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be seen in the sepulchre of Francis Rosicross, as is more largely expressed in the confession of that fraternity.
There is another relation of a certain man, who upon occasion digging somewhat deep in the ground did meet with something like a door, having a wall on each hand of it; from which having cleared the earth, he forced opon this door, upon this there was discovered a fair Vault, and towards the farther side of it, the statue of a man in Armour, sitting by a table, leaning upon his left arm, and holding a scepter in his right hand, with a lamp burning before him; the floor of this Vault being so contrived, that upon the first step into it, the statue would erect itself from its leaning posture ; upon the second step it did lift up the scepter to strike, and before a man could approach near enough to take hold of the lamp, the statue did strike and break it to pieces. Such care was there taken that it might not be stolen away, or discovered.
Our learned Cambden in his description [margin: pag. 572]

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of Yorkshire, speaking of the tomb of Constantius Chlorus, broken up in these later years, mentions such a lamp to be found within it.
There are sundry other relations to this purpose. Quod ad lucernas attinet, illae in omnibus fere monumentis inveniuntur, (saith Jutherius). In most of the ancient Monuments there is some kind of lamp, (though of the ordinary sort): But those persons who were of greatest note and wisdom, did procure such as might last without supply, for so many ages together. Pancirollus tells us, [margin: De perdit. Ti o2] that it was usual for the nobles amongst the Romans, to take special care in their last wills, that they might have a lamp in their Monuments. And to this purpose they did usually give liberty unto some of their slaves on this condition, that they should be watchful in maintaining and preserving it. From all which relations, the first particular of this enquiry, concerning the being or existence of such lamps, may sufficiently appear.