The Voynich Manuscript – Who Cares?

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I’ve been debating giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript at Treadwell’s, but I keep coming back to the same problem – what angle should I take?

For me, while its content is occulted (“hidden”), it’s not really an occult object per se. (Well, apart from the magic circles, and they were pretty mainstream natural magic circa 1450). And it’s neither religious, nor sacrilegious, nor nonsensical, nor a conspiracy, nor a hoax.

In short, if some well-meaning rationalist has stripped away the terror, the fantasies, the heresies, the necromancy, the madness and the delusion, would anyone want to hear about that which remains – an object that is just ordinary (albeit extraordinarily well disguised)?

And similarly: in the whole process of re-writing my book, the hardest chapter to tackle has been (and continues to be) the very first chapter: yet in the first edition, this was the easiest (probably because it was mainly a high-speed roll-call of the VMs’ post-1600 history).

These days, I’m reluctant to waste any of my readers’ time on any of the could-be might-be nonsense that most VMs writers (such as Kennedy and Churchill, D’Imperio to a large degree, and the Wikipedia entry almost entirely) tend to fill their entire works with. Rather, my interest lies in the dogged hunt for the-thing-that-the-VMs-is, whatever it turns out to be – and that’s the quest I want to take my readers on, too.

And so in the revised first edition, Chapter 1 will have almost no pussyfooting provenance, but will instead launch straight into the very specific art history evidence that places the VMs at a certain place and time – Northern Italy circa 1450.

And so in many ways, I’d like to run my talk just about the art history of the VMs (like a try-out of Chapter One) – but in other ways, perhaps I should talk about the VMs’ curious cultural channelers (such as Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna, Colin Wilson, David Icke, and so on) whose streams/dreams sometimes tend to hog this blog.

I can’t do both at the same time – but which should I do? What do you think?

Did any Voynich pages go missing?

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When the Voynich Manuscript misdecipherer William Romaine Newbold died, his friend & colleague Roland Grubb Kent decided to bring all his late friend’s notes together into a book: this was published in 1928 by the University of Philadelphia Press under the title “The Cipher of Roger Bacon”. If you’d like your own copy, Kessinger sell a modern print-on-demand reproduction of it, with quite reasonable quality pictures (apart from the awful picture of Newbold right at the start).

And it was from Newbold’s and Kent’s book that the story of the modern missing pages sprang.

You see, there’s an innocuous-looking table in page 45’s footnote 2 that describes the physical make-up of the manuscript: in particular, it lists the first (what we would now call the “Herbal”) section (“Part I. Botanical, ff. 1-11, 13-66″) as having 65 folios (“leaves”), with 125 drawings and 5 text-only pages.

However, the manuscript as now owned by the Beinecke only has 59 leaves: Rene Zandbergen’s page on this lists folios 12, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, and 64 as missing. Might folios 59 to 64 (at the centre of a quire) have gone missing in the 20th century, sometime between Newbold examining them and being given to the Beinecke by Hans Kraus? If so, might Newbold have had any reproductions of them?

While researching my book, en route to New Haven I stayed with some old friends near Philadelphia: and so used the opportunity to drop by the University of Pennsylvania’s archives, which I happened to know held several boxes of Newbold’s records. At last, I thought, I would be able to see if these missing pages might be there.

The good news was that the set of photostats Wilfrid Voynich had given Newbold were still there: yet the reproduction of the Herbal section contained precisely the same pages as we see nowadays – the same pages that are missing now were missing then.

So what actually happened? Simply, I’m reasonably sure that the table on page 45 was miscopied from an intermediate handwritten count, and that Newbold or Kent (whichever of the two) just got it wrong. The missing folios were long gone, decades (probably centuries) before Wilfrid Voynich bought it in 1912.

I suspect that the folio numbers were added between 1580 and 1600, around the time that the manuscript was rebound into its current order and repainted (probably to gain a higher price): and that many (if not all) of the missing pages-as-numbered were sent by George Baresch to Athanasius Kircher, as per the correspondence.

Perhaps Kircher’s collection of cipher notes will turn up one day (which would be very nice), and will turn out to contain many/all of these missing pages: but perhaps it is safer to assume that somewhere along the way, some well-meaning Jesuit administrator destroyed them – after all, something you can’t read surely has no value?

Leonardo gets a face…?

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It’s not the greatest of art history mysteries, but if you haven’t seen this 4-minute YouTube clip from www.ted.com (an interesting boundary-crossing conference phenomenon you may not have come across) about how Siegfried Woldhek went looking for Leonardo’s face in his notebooks, I think you’ve missed out.

Most modern stories about Leonardo I’d advise taking with a pinch of salt (occasionally more), but this one’s perhaps just a touch more substantial. A simple idea, but one nicely followed through!

[Big restecp goes out to my artist sister Liz Jose for passing this link my way.]

Voynich f36r plant = geranium?

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A few days ago, my wife suggested that the plant depicted on f36r might be a variety of geranium: on a hunch, I thought I’d compare it with the plants in Fuchs’ famous herbal – and Google quite unexpectedly directed me to a museum in Tuscany.

You see, in 2002 the Aboca Museum in Sansepolcro embarked upon an ambitious programme to bring together, to document, and even to publish its own books on the history of herbal medicine in Tuscany. It even has an online virtual tour (in both English and Italian) of its various collections of herbal-/apothecary-related artefacts (such as maiolica, pestles and mortars, books), though I’d recommend broadband. (I can’t stand their background saxophone music, though, sorry!)

For history lovers, they have also put scans of a number of herbals. Here I’m interested in their online browsable copy of Leonhard Fuchs’ Great Herbal (“De historia stirpium”), though only in 72dpi resolution (boo!). Handily, though, this is searchable by keyword: and for “geranium”, you find that Fuchs included drawings of six varieties of geranium (“geranion” in Greek) on plates 204-209. I pasted the images side by side so that I could compare them properly: this is what it looks like (be warned if you click on it, it’s a 3000-pixel-wide image!)


I think that the best match by far is the third plate (plate 206, “Geranium Tertium”, or “Ruprechtskraut”), as this has a similar curious rootball and a hairy lump” (the crane’s bill, I believe!) just beneath each flower. I put this side-by-side along with a picture of the plant on my neighbour’s front step (thanks Alex!) and the Beinecke’s scan of f36r: and now I’m pretty sold on the idea that this is indeed a geranium (thanks Julie!)

There’s another version from the Biblioteca Riccardiana here, and also an uncoloured version of Fuchs’ plate in Yale’s medical library here (on the left).

It is thought that Fuchs’ “Geranium Tertium” corresponds to the “Geranion Eteron” in Book Three (Roots) of Dioscorides. There, Section 3-131 says:-

“Geranium has a jagged leaf similar to anemone but longer; a root somewhat round, sweet when eaten. A teaspoonful of a decoction (taken as a drink in wine) dissolves swellings of the vulva. It has slender little downy stalks two feet long; leaves like mallow; and on the tops of the wings certain abnormal growths looking upward (like the heads of cranes with the beaks, or the teeth of dogs), but there is no use for it in medicine. It is also called pelonitis, trica, or geranogeron, the Romans call it echinaster, the Africans iesce; it is also called alterum geranium by some, but others call it oxyphyllon, mertryx, myrrhis cardamomum, or origanum. The Magi call it hierobryncas, the Romans, pulmonia, some, cicotria, some, herba gruina, and the Africans, ienk.”

What do you think?

Google PageRank for bloggers…

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Over the past few months, I’ve been tracking where this Voynich News blog appears in Google’s search results for “Voynich”: it has been as high as #1 and as low as #13, which is quite a variation. It seems to lurch up to #5 (behind Wikipedia and voynich.nu, with two links each), before slowly sinking down to about #12 over the following fortnight, before cycling back up to #5 (or occasionally #1) again.

The other sites in the top 12 typically date from 2004 or before (equivalent to about 30 Internet years) and refer to each other a fair bit: and their age, interconnectedness, and accumulated inward links all work together to give them a Google PageRank of 5 or more when viewed as a network.

By way of comparison, Voynich News is part of a small new network of Voynich-related sites with few inbound links, and so has a PageRank of only 3. Furthermore, because the older sites are rarely (if ever) updated, their PageRank won’t “flow” to Voynich News, whereas whenever Voynich News links to one of them, part of its PageRank flows out to supports theirs.

So why does Voynich News cycle around the first 12 places? I strongly suspect that to keep the PageRank values “fresh”, every once in a while Google completely discards its PageRank cache and incrementally rebuilds it as it crawls around the Net. And so, without the impact of PageRank on its position, Voynich News would consistently be at #1-#5 (i.e. based solely on its content relevance). But as the PageRank cache gets progressively rebuilt, down it slides. 🙁

To get a higher PageRank, I’d need people to mention it on their blogs and sites: but this rarely happens (Google also tries to filter out backlinks in comments, for example, as this was how an earlier generation of trolls tried to artificially inflate their PageRank). However, there’s a big wave of Voynich interest coming later this year and forwards, so my only real crime is to be ahead of the game. Shame on me for being too early! 😉

I’ve been updating this blog with (I hope) relevant and interesting Voynich-related stuff pretty much every day for ages now: but I’ve pretty much hit the limit of what I can do with Google and Blogger alone. For example, Blogger sites get penalised by Google because Blogger does not place different keywords or descriptions in the META tags in the header: but Google owns Blogger, for goodness’ sake!

If Blogger simply added a set of META “keywords” based on the tags in a post, and had a configurable META “description” that only got put on the root page of the blog, I think that would be a huge improvement as far as SEO (“Search Engine Optimisation”) goes. But Blogger seems more interesting in adding in useless sidebar Gadgets that nobody really benefits from, which is a shame.

I’d love to go in and turn Blogger round, as I think right now it’s a wasted opportunity for Google: but it seems easier from where I’m sitting just to start my blog all over with a different blogging host, one which gets the SEO basics right. Which would be a shame, but there you go.

There’s one little-known curiosity about META tags: if you don’t have them on a web page (like most of the older sites in the Voynich network I mentioned above), then Google may well use the description given for the site in the Open Directory Project (though you can disable this with “NOODP” in a META tag). Seeing all the descriptions from the ODP I had recently edited suddenly popping up in the search listings for Voynich was quite a surreal experience for me (even though they have since disappeared again!)

My top blogger tips for high Google search results are therefore:-

  • Find out the PageRank of sites that rank highly on searches for your keyword – this is the value your blog will have to match in order to appear near the top most of the time (for comparable content, that is). You can find this out with the PageRank searcher from SEO Chat, or the SEOQuake plugin (for IE and Firefox).
  • PageRank is based on unique contentful inbound links to your blog (a repeated link in a site template, such as someone’s sidebar list of blogs, makes little or no difference). How do you get these? Be nice to other bloggers lots of times, and hope some link back to you!
  • Getting from PR3 to PR4 (and then to PR5) will take time and effort. Even high quality inbound links from directories (such as the Open Directory Project, which people always used to think was helpful) may also not help because these often get duplicated around the Web – and when Google notices duplicates, it can reject all of them (pretty much).
  • Don’t use Blogger, find a blog host who gives you proper control over META tags (sorry, Google/Blogger, but that’s the way it is right now).

Edward Kelley and the Blair Witch Project…?

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For those of you who like the whole John Dee / Edward Kelley mythology schtick, I thought I’d mention that the Wikipedia entry on Edward Kelley points to a silly link with the Blair Witch Project. There, the witch is named “Elly Kedward”, a spoonerism of his name: there’s even a fake site for her (all part of the guerilla marketing, I guess).

Not very substantial, but it amused me, nonetheless. 🙂

"Wilfrid Voynich & The Grand Multiplier"

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Having spent many years in that industry, I always find it quite nice to see computer games people appropriating the Voynich Manuscript. But as games get more visually “realistic” (or, rather, foolishly detailed), their reliance on conceptual props ever diminishes: so I wondered whether Charles Cecil‘s Broken Sword III – which comes over a bit like a traditional text adventure that just happens to be rendered in 3d – would be the last such game.

Yet some are still thinking about Voynich-themed games. Here’s some concept art from Swedish (but Australia-based) games artist Micael Nyberg called “Wilfrid Voynich & The Grand Multiplier” – click on the image to see a decent resolution scan.

In these days of commercial mega-games corporations and marketing-driven games, will this ever see the light of day? Probably not. But do I like it? Yes! 🙂

David Icke and the Voynich…

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I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world’s favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in “The Biggest Secret” (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice.

Much as you’d expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For example, “John Dee was the Queen’s astrologer, a Rosicrucian Grand Master, a black magician, and a secret agent for the new intelligence network”: he and Edward Kelley were talking not with angels but “reptilians“. Oh, and Rudolph II was “of the reptilian Habsburg dynasty, another occultist.”

Hmmm: I feel another semantically irregular verb coming on:-

  • I am a visionary, a singularity within a vortex of eternal chaos
  • You (singular) are badly compromised, but might be redeemed if you buy my book
  • He/she is reptilian. Oh, and did I mention he/she is reptilian?
  • We are freedom fighters against the infinite evil of The Brotherhood
  • You (plural) are corrupted by prolonged exposure to reptilian media lies and hype
  • They are part of a reptilian dynasty/network/conspiracy that spans the ages

Once you get the hang of how it works, Icke’s stuff almost writes itself. What is he going to say about the Voynich Manuscript? Easy: just take the most superficial reading you can (Newbold’s snail, etc), reptilify it, and summarize it thus:-

“This manuscript is just one example of the level of knowledge the
Brotherhood were working with hundreds of years ago while their other wing, the
religions, were keeping the masses in the most basic ignorance.”

And now someone has posted on David Icke’s online forum, claiming to be a senior member of the Illuminati (though to me it reads more like a publisher PR hack having a bit of fun at Icke-fandom’s expense):-

“Let me just say to you that we tried twice in the past to show a coded glimpse of the nature of our great secret. You have probably heard of the most mysterious manuscript in the world – the Voynich manuscript. No one has ever been able to decode it. The men who wrote it were members of the Illuminati and they were captured and killed before they could release the key to decoding it. The Arthurian legends were our other main attempt to enter popular consciousness and reveal our true purpose. They succeeded to an extent, but our enemies were able to confuse our message by releasing alternative versions of the legends. So, now we are trying again.”

Yeah, rrrright.

Bizarrely, the title of the (probably as-yet-unfinished) book being puffed (“The Soul Camera”) is the same name as an odd camera that has just been released in Japan by Sonaco, that apparently photographs your “aura” in some way. As always, the world is far stranger than conspiracy theorists think – but in a completely different way.

"Mappamundi" Voynich novel…

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Fans of historical novelist Christopher Harris have a new Voynich Manuscript-themed book of his heading their way in early 2009: to be published by Dedalus Books, “Mappamundi” is a non-Byzantine sequel to the final book in Harris’ Byzantine trilogy, “False Ambassador” (if that’s not too confusing). I asked him how he came to find the Voynich Manuscript:-

“As far as I can remember, I first came across the Voynich MS in an article in New Scientist (17 November 2001). As you would expect, the focus of the article is on cryptography, linguistics, statistical analysis, etc. I was intrigued by the strangeness of the MS, and thought I might be able to use it in a novel. (I have an interest in lost or mysterious manuscripts, e.g Plethon’s ‘Book of Laws’, which features in my ‘False Ambassador’.) I read what I could about the MS, and later got hold of the Gawsewitch facsimile edition (I don’t know if it’s available in the UK. I bought mine from Amazon.fr).”

Aside from the role the VMs takes on Mappamundi, what are his thoughts on what the VMs is or contains?

“Personally, I am inclined to believe the Art Brut theory, which suggests that the MS may be the production of a psychotic outsider who had seen herbal/ alchemical/ esoteric manuscripts, and attempted to replicate them obsessively, but without any understanding of the originals. There are examples of this in the 19th & 20th centuries, and it is quite possible that some 15th century monk, or amateur scholar, was similarly afflicted.

However, it would be a lot more interesting if it turned out to be a coherent document, capable of being translated.”

All of which is fair enough: more on this as it happens…

More Voynich jokes…

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After my Voynich light bulb joke, I thought you might like this one (Andy did):-

  • “Doctor, Doctor, I think I can read the Voynich Manuscript?!”
    “Fantastic! If you can do audio typing as well, you can start on Monday!”

I also found a Voynich gag on Mediadesk’s Voynich page:

  • Who [made the VMs], when and why?
    […]
    It’s from The Central Library of Atlantis, and you can’t imagine how much the overdue charge is going to be when it’s returned.

Voynich completists might prefer this:-

  • What’s black and white and red all over?
    Oh yes: that would be     f1r, f67r1, f67r2… my website lists them all…

Or this:-

  • A Voynich researcher is at the Pearly Gates.
    “Sorry”, says Saint Peter, “but because of your sins, you’ll have to spend a century in Purgatory before you can enter Heaven.”
    “That’s terrible!”, wails the man, “Ten years on the Voynich Manuscript and now this!”
    “Oh dear”, says St Peter, “nobody told me     that. You’d better come straight in!”

Or finally (and perhaps inevitably):

  • Knock, knock!
    Who’s there?
    The author of the Voynich Manuscript!
    Errrrm… could you narrow it down a bit?

🙂