Voynich word of the day: pareidolia

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One thing I’ve noticed about people with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript is that they often have logophilia (a love of words), particularly manifesting itself as a passion for etymology (the histories [both real and imagined] coiled up inside words), for the consonance and dissonance of word and letter patterns, and for the child-like joy of finding the perfect word – a key to fit the lock of the world. Perhaps Voynich research somehow manages to tick all these boxes?

Anyway, here’s your perfect Voynich word for today: pareidolia, which I would describe as being the delusional antipattern the human mind is tempted to succumb to when it sees something astonishing in basically the wrong place – such as Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun, Jesus Christ in a tortilla (1978), or the 2007 “monkey tree phenomenon” in Singapore.

People flock to see these (particularly religious pareidolia), and collectors even buy & sell them on eBay. The Internet has some fantastic collections of pareidolia photographs (and bizarre stories), such as on the Skeptic’s Dictionary site, The Folklorist site, and this Pope Tart site (yes, really).

In the context of this blog, I think it is quite clear that most visual interpretations of the Voynich Manuscript (and I’m particularly thinking about its curiously-structured herbal pages here) are “pareidolic”, manifesting the basic human need to find meaning in whatever it looks at.

And so if you look long enough (hours? weeks? years?) at anything, the danger is that you’ll start to mis-see meaning in it. The paradox here is that long-term researchers (such as myself) surely become unable to tell whether they are extremely expert or extremely deluded, if not indeed both at the same time. Are they deluded as to their expertise, or experts in their delusion?

This whole thing can also be viewed as one of “semantically irregular verbs”:-

  • I am an expert
  • You (singular) are a bit confused
  • He/she is deluded
  • We agree to differ
  • You (plural) have somewhat lost the plot
  • They are completely bonkers

On the bright side, there’s an even more unnerving mental phenomenon called apophenia, which is where you see patterns in palpably random data (at which point I normally insert a reference to Mark Romanek’s 1978 film “Static”, which of course I wish I had made). Contemporary writers (like Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, Alan Moore, etc bleedin’ etc) enjoy apophenia as a motif, perhaps because it is based on a peculiarly kind of desperate desire to find meaning anywhere in the world, where even pareidolic places aren’t quite implausible enough.

In this sense, then, I think Newbold’s quest to find meaning within the random craquelure of the Voynichese quillstrokes is something closer to apophenia than to pareidolia. Other Voynich theories based at the level of stroke decomposition (like the gloriously over-detailed one from Ursula Papke that used to be at ms408.com, and where the “meaning” is read off from each stroke of the letter) may well also be apophenic.

Review of "The Philosopher’s Stone"

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If “The Philosopher’s Stone” (1969) was a car, it would have a great big weld down the middle where author Colin Wilson had attached the (frankly rather turgid) H.G.Wells-style front end to the (actually reasonably OK) H.P.Lovecraft-style back end. It makes me wants to shout in his face: Oi, Wilson, No – the beginning is usually the wrong place to start your story.

Really, he should have dropped all his faux logical positivism guff (drearily moving the main character forward one atom at a time) and instead started from about page 190. Then, just three pages from the end, when the main character’s mind is temporarily merged [a bit Mr Spock-y, but what the hey] with the mad God-like uber-priest K’tholo, Wilson could easily have punted the story off into an even higher state of Lovecraft emulation (but moved forward to the present day)… now that would have been a nice slice of occult horror to read. But he didn’t. 🙁

Including the Voynich Manuscript is a nice piece of intellectual decoupage on Wilson’s part, but feels a bit like collateral damage from his high-speed drive-by scattershot blasts at culture, philosophy and history – Bruckner, Merleau-Ponty, George Bernard Shaw, Plato, de Maupassant, the Popol Vuh, etc – which fill most of the book.

Still, if you fancy reading a Lovecraftian short story disguised as a novel, you shouldn’t be too disappointed. *sigh*

"The Montefeltro Conspiracy" arrives…

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A copy of Marcello Simonetta’s new book “The Montefeltro Conspiracy” (2008) has just arrived in the post (I first mentioned it here). I must admit to being a bit excited, as he covers a lot of ground I’d had to wade slowly through in the Italian sources when writing my own book – Cicco Simonetta, Francesco Sforza, the death of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Italian cryptography – as well as the fascinating web of intrigue and treachery threaded through so many of the condottieri and(mainly Florentine) princes which forms the book’s focus.

Really, it’s the kind of book I aspired to in “The Curse“: a historical account of the politics of cryptography (though the cryptography aspect here is fairly light by comparison). And, quite unexpectedly, Marcello cites my book (though admittedly only in the endnote to p.24 – but hey, it’s in the bibliography too, every little citation helps).

Even at a glance, it’s obvious that his book is well illustrated, with even some nice pictures of the Urbino intarsia I mentioned here only a few days ago. But I’m getting way ahead of myself now: I have to go away and read it ASAP so that I can post a proper review here…

The Open Directory Project…

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I’ve just been accepted as an editor of the Open Directory Project: for several years, its Voynich Manuscript category has been fairly moribund (if not actually dead), and I thought it would be a positive thing to try to update and restructure it, so that it could provide a set of links to Voynich-related things that was actually useful – image galleries, research, theories, etc.

I made a good start at doing this: but then I ran into a heap of problems…

Firstly, it turns out that nearly every interesting Voynich-related site I’ve looked at over the past six years has stopped working: Voynich dead links significantly outnumber the live links. Furthermore, many dead links (even recent ones such as ms408.com) don’t appear to have made it into the Wayback Machine. And “deeplinking” (linking to sites inside a website) into the Wayback Machine is a no-no in the ODP.

Secondly, while the intention of the Open Directory Project is that it should provide a categorized directory of useful resources on a subject, Voynich Manuscript research only rarely works like that. For example, some ODP editors wouldn’t even link to the Wikipedia page on their subject because it is a deeplink within another resource (i.e. within Wikipedia itself), as opposed to a user’s subsite. So only a tiny handful of sites (such as Rene Zandbergen’s exemplary pages on the subject, my Voynich News blog, etc) would satisfy a hardcore ODP editor’s criteria for inclusion.

In other words, though I hoped that the ODP section might be the right place to bring some kind of order to the disjointed heap of fragments we call Voynich knowledge, many inside the ODP actively argue that that’s not what it’s for.

But if the ODP is the wrong answer, what is the right answer?

Having just spent a few days tracking down a long succession of dead links, I think there are two main types of webpage that should somehow be actively preserved: research pages (analyses of features, mainly of Voynichese) and theory/hypothesis pages (“my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine“).

And so I’ve just started up Voynich Research and Voynich Theories pages, each of which I plan to maintain as a single index page giving links to (and brief summaries of) all the research papers and webpages placed there. Though the ODP won’t allow links to the Wayback Machine, I can put them in here: though my plan (longer term) is to contact the people involved asking for their permission to put an actual copy on the site, which would be a somewhat better answer.

OK, it’s not a perfect answer… but it’s a start.

How many Voynichologists does it take to change a light bulb?

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It’s a sad (but true) observation that most webpages (and particularly blog posts) on the VMs are serious, dull, dry, high-minded, conceptual guff, at best offering up a semi-quirky restatement of either the Wikipedia page, Rene Zandbergen’s page, or of Gordon Rugg’s hypothesis-of-possibility. You would scarce believe, dear reader, what oceans of cack I have to swim through to reach the occasional archipelago of Voynich-related interest… *sigh*

And so it is with great pleasure that I landed upon the shore of this gently satirical review of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Read it and enjoy!

As for the rest of the Voynichian web, it is (sadly) pretty much uniformly humourless, with the joyous exception of the excellent Uncyclopedia Voynich Manuscript entry, which has been heavily updated since I mentioned it last year (though I’m pleased to see the “medieval VCR manual” gag is still there). Recommended!

PS: the answer to the question is (of course) “None, they like being in the dark.“

Mysterious intarsia panels from Urbino…

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Here’s another historical mystery from my favourite neck of the woods (the Quattrocento), and involving the amazing trompe-l’oeuil wooden intarsia (decorative inlays) in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, something I’ve wanted to visit for years.

Basically, when Federico da Montefeltro was decorating his new palace, he commissioned a wonderful set of intarsia, mainly destined for his studiolo (study room). When not furiously waging war, he loved Greek literature and the liberal arts, and the designs chosen reflect this: scenes with 3D platonic solids, an astrolabe, an armillary sphere, musical instruments, animals (such as squirrels), etc. You can see some of these in this “Procrastinating in Pittsburgh” blog post (and in this one too): the amount of technique that was required to execute these small marvels is frankly incredible.

Other Quattrocento palaces commissioned similar intarsia works, such as this perspective view of a cittern (lute-like instrument) and sand-timer from the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio (from 1479-1482).

But what I didn’t know was that there was also a set of three cityscapes done in this same intarsia style: one is in Urbino, one in Baltimore, one in Berlin. These have been attributed to Luciano Laurana, but this is hard to be sure about.

What do they depict? Jockusch concluded (in a 1993 dissertation) that while some intarsia panels depicting real scenery did exist (one of Monte Oliveto near Siena, the other of the Colosseum in Rome), the rest – including these three – were all very probably imaginary.

OK, so what were they for? According to a 2007 study by Macerata University geography professor Giorgio Mangani, these were probably memory aids (the “architectural mnemonic” in the Ars Memoria, as discussed by Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, etc).

I haven’t yet seen Mangani’s study, but his conclusion seems a bit of a stretch to me. This article (part of Kim Veltman’s 2004 work here) notes plenty of other views: Krautheimer (1948) thought the Baltimore and Urbino panels represented tragedy and comedy, though Sanpaolesi (1949) disagreed; while Battisti (1960) speculated that they might instead be visualizations of ancient cities.

It’s a mystery – or is it? Do these three idealized cityscapes actually need to be for anything, any more than the squirrel or the astrolabe or the sand-timer? Perhaps Mangani is right and that someone used or appropriated them for their own personal mnemotechnical odyssey, but that seems a little after-the-event.

My personal preference in this instance is, in broadly the same vein as Charles Hope’s skepticism about claims of Neoplatonism in art, that these are just perspectival grandstanding, 3d technique for its own sake. If there is an art history link to these cityscapes, it might well turn out to be to Antonio Averlino’s ideal city Sforzinda: but even this I’m not really holding my breath for.

Codex Seraphinianus on Flickr…

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If you haven’t seen Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out.

It’s now reasonably well-known that the book’s strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it’s a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski has posted some observations here, but I think it’s fair to say nobody yet has the foggiest idea how to go about trying to read it. Oh well!

Incidentally, there’s even a ballet based on it!

Another Voynich paper…

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I’ve just found a German summary of the 2006 “Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries” conference in Sheffield, at which Volkhard Huth of the University of Freiburg apparently presented a paper on the Voynich Manuscript. According to the description, Huth (whose expertise is in handwriting) broadly localizes the manuscript to Germany, provisionally dates it to 1480-1500, and places its encoded contents within a broadly philosophical tradition. According to this, he presented it in session three, just before the ubiquitous Charles Burnett. 🙂

This page describes his paper (well, its title) and where it will be published:-

“The Critic on Magical Mystery Tour. Towards a serious location of the enigmatic ›Voynich Cipher Manuscript‹ in the history of knowledge, in: Knowledge, Discipline and Power, 12th-17th Centuries. An international conference organised by the University of Sheffield with the support of the British Academy in honour of Professor David E. Luscombe, FBA (University of Sheffield / Humanities Research Institute, 15.9. – 17.9. 2006). Papers, ed. by MARTIAL STAUB (erscheint bei Cambridge University Press; in Vorbereitung) “

That’s two academics known to be actively looking at the VMs: hardly a tidal wave, but hopefully the start of something good. I’ll try to get hold of a copy of the paper to review here…

More Voynich music crossover stuff…

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Many people reading this probably will already have vageuly heard of contemporary Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz (b.1960) and his orchestral work “The Voynich Cipher Manuscript“, which was inspired by the VMs. Not a lot of people know (or care) that Kyburz also inserted in the work three short poems by maverick Futurist genius Velimir Khlebnikov, I’d guess because of Chlebnikov’s “super-tale” Zangezi, which was partly written in an invented language of the birds: but now you know as well.

But now other musicians (though admittedly of the rock ilk) are starting to wake up to the smell of Voynich coffee. I mentioned one Californian band here not so long ago, but here are a few more to add to your Top Trumps collection of crossover Voynichiana.

So first off, a big hello to the FaceBook page of Mechatohm, a Californian band in the Alternative Rock Metal genre to add to your overworked networked music drive. Band member Zyclobonzaron (so Enochian!) is apparently influenced by “The Voynich Manuscript and shit like that…“, which is pretty much on the mark, can’t really complain. Just so you know, it’s VMs page f68v (the “sun-face” solar calendar page) that graces the band’s album cover (albeit Photoshopped halfway into next Tuesday).

And a grand welcome to a YouTube clip courtesy of The Phaser [Update: sorry! They’ve just removed it! Bah!]. I’m not entirely sure what the world has done to deserve a piece of music apparently played out on the Commodore 64’s VIC chip played into a reverb unit, but it must have been something good because I quite like it. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure I could listen to it more than a couple of times, but it might be a good thing to put into your iPod if you’re going for a 10-minute run. “Maybe you don’t appreciate my interpretation [..]. but I really don’t give a sheet“. Bless.

Finally, a great big ¡hola! goes out to “The Voynich“, a Spanish foursome mainly from Granada who formed at the end of 2007, playing rock/pop that is presumably as uncategorisable as the VMs itself. Here’s a link to their “Voynich Dossier” blog: I’m sure they’re lovely people.