David Icke and the Voynich…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

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…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

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…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

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?

🙂

Egyptian / Arabic link to the VMs…?

by ⋅ 15 Comments

If (like me) you are a bit of a bibliophile, you may quite enjoy a little social web site called LibraryThing, which is based around a community of bibliophiles listing all the books they own (or rather, the ones they’re happy to admit owning). Thanks to a low-tech web interface, adding your own books is a surprisingly quick process (marred only by its apparent inability to handle apostrophes in book titles effectively, *sigh*), and you can add up to 200 for free. So far, I ‘ve added most of my VMs research titles, which you can see on my LibraryThing catalogue.

But it’s then that LibraryThing starts to get interesting, because you can start to see who else there has similar bookshelves, and what they’re reading – and what you haven’t read. There are also user reviews, and various other tricksy book-related things you can do (like adding tags to books).

Which is where I wanted to start: one LibraryThing user called “morgan42” (Morgan Roussel) has a (frankly huge) book collection of all the right kind of stuff, and blogs about it etc. While searching for LibraryThing books tagged with “Voynich”, I noticed that he had applied this tag to a most unusual book..

Morgan had been reading “Egyptology: The Missing Millennium” by Okasha el Daly: this concerns the transmission of Egyptian ideas through Arabic texts over a thousand year period that most accounts simply omit. In the book’s Figure 24, there is a colour reproduction of folio 50a of British Library MS Add 25724 by the 13th-14th century Arab alchemist Abu Al-Qasim Al-‘Iraqi, which itself reproduces (with various alchemical embellishments) “A stela of King Amenemhat II (ca 1928-1895 BCE) of the Twelfth Dynasty”.

A quick web search reveals that Okasha el Daly is a professor at UCL, who revealed to a surprised world in 2004 that various Arabic alchemists were able to read hieroglyphics an entire millennium before Champollion. There’s a decent-sized UCL press release about this over on the ArcheoBlog.

All fascinating stuff: but presumably nothing to do with the Voynich Manuscript, right? Well… Morgan noticed that Al-Qasim’s drawing appears to contain the common Voynichese letter pair “ot”, clear as day. And here it is:-


Note also that the letter one to the right of the “ot” looks not unlike like a “ch” struckthrough gallows, while the letter two to its right looks not like a “4” (EVA “q”). Of course, any Voynich researcher would tell you that these letters would never appear in that order in the actual VMs: but it’s interesting, nonetheless.

So, I thought, let’s have a look at the BL catalogue entry for this ms: rather unhelpfully, it says “For description of No. 25,724, see the Catalogue, of Oriental MSS“. So I emailed the BL, and was told that “descriptions of [the BL’s Oriental MSS] are at present only available in handwritten and printed catalogues kept for consultation on the open access shelves in our Reading Room“. *sigh*

But the BL person also typed in the entry for MS 25,724 to save me the trouble of going on, which was very kind: it is “a volume containing several treatises on alchemy by Abu-l-Ka’sim al-Iraki, Balamaghus [?] al-Maghribi and others, with coloured symbolical drawings and cabbalistic writings. Arabic, 18th century“. Which then raises the question… “18th century”?

In summary: though I don’t honestly think this mysterious lettering is Voynichese, I must admit to being a little intrigued. Might the lettering in a similar 14th century Arabic document (of which this is apparently a copy) have been the specific inspiration for the Voynich’s cipher alphabet?

I asked Okasha el Daly about this phrase: he said that he had “…no clue but they may be corrupted Greek or some other deformed Egyptian scripts. They may well be some of the many alchemical symbols used in these manuscripts.”

A reasonable prediction would therefore be that this is a (possibly 18th century?) scribal corruption of stylized Ancient Greek or deformed Egyptian text – I’d guess Greek, in that the “o” is probably an omicron. But can we possibly reconstruct what that six-letter word originally was? It was located between a curious face and an alchemist at his furnace, with large ravens to the right (not shown below):-

More Dan Burisch Voynichification…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.

Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone trying to understand Burisch’s claim, by asserting things such as “The Voynich Manuscript may provide clues to the shape and function of items found in the YSC cells, spooled material“. No, you’re absolutely right: it means nothing to me either.

Other discussion boards have whole bunches of people saying Dan Burisch is a fraud, though with occasional rambling posters popping up to defend him:-

From the website ‘world mysteries’ concerning the Voynich document we read in an except from Dr. Levitov: “There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; the innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis’ mantle.” The fate of the the Cathars resembles that of the Knights Templar, does not the dualism of the former also receive a modicum of redemption in the restoration of the latter?With Dr. Burisch’s background in microbiology, the Voynich ‘botanical illustrations’ were child’s play, and the astrological designations had already been previously noted as corresponding to the Milky Way Galaxy, and by conversion of linear transformations into ‘diagrammatic notation,’ the determinant of the matrix was solved. ‘As above so below’ was not, in this case, a spiritual derivative, it was simply and starkly a ‘spacial’ one.

Ohhhh dear: if a novelist tried to get away with froth like this, he/she would get taken apart. There is no Milky Way link, there is no microbiology, there is no Cathar link, there is no Templar link, there is no matrix (spatial or otherwise), there is no religion, no gnosis, no dualism. The Voynich Manuscript being summoned up here is an imaginary one, a heretical MacGuffin for a potboiler that never quite got written.
In many ways, I get a sense from all this of a deeply tragic situation, of a bright (but disturbed) person grasping at anything they can find on the glittering, shallow surface of Net knowledge that might just explain (however temporarily) their personal pain, the loss they feel: but it never does, and their pain never goes away.
I have no idea if that person is Dan Burisch or someone else: and in most of the important ways, it really doesn’t matter. John Manly was right in detail but not in scope: more than simply a blank cryptographic screen to project ideas and emptions upon, the VMs is actually like a magnet for unhappy PhDs, a sandpit for them to play out their make-believe stories of intellectual redemption. By doing this, they can “rescue” someone from historical oblivion whose frustrated life-experience somehow chimes with theirs: all of which amounts to a kind of intellectual displacement activity directed at the past when they should be putting the effort into their own lives in the present to save themselves – but perhaps that’s too emotionally hard for them to do.
Perhaps I’m no less guilty (with my reconstructed story of Antonio Averlino “Filarete”) as Levitov, or Rugg, or any of the other 20+ Voynich theories out there. I don’t feel unhappy: but I can at least see that maybe I was hoping for redemption in some other way. In my defence, all I can say is that I at least tried my best to let the manuscript do the talking… and hope that this will in the end prove to be enough to move the history forward. Isn’t that as good as it gets?
As a (frankly slightly spooky) postnote on the whole Dan Burisch affair, there’s an online novel (with a bit of a Voynich thing going on) posted to a blog that you might well find fascinating. It’s called “Josef6” by Benjamin Kerstein, and deals with a claimed time-traveller from the future posting messages to an online community, and all the cultish madness that follows on.

The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics
— those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. The
frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating
talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century.

 

Sounds familiar, Burisch fans? Though it’s not strictly a Voynich novel per se, I really quite enjoyed it (and even donated $5 to the author via PayPal for posting it up). Recommended! 🙂

"The Alchemyst"…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Nosing around in Borders the other day, I noticed a popular teen alchemist-themed book called “The Alchemyst” (2007) by Michael Scott: it had a nice cover, good in-store marketing (early-teen-eye-high positioning, right next to some Philip Pullman books), and featured John Dee and Nicholas Flamel, doing a whole bunch of the-world-is-in-danger demonological things with two children (Josh and Sophie) who begin the story working in Flamel’s bookshop. Of course, the star of the show is arguably The Codex (containing the recipe for the Elixir of Life) that gets stolen and endlessly pursued: but you probably guessed that already. 🙂

And now I read (courtesy of Wikipedia) that there’s a “The Alchemyst” film in pre-production, and the sequel’s already in the shops. Alchemy: there’s a lot of it about, isn’t there, hmmm? 😮

Voynich Manuscript as storyboard…?

by ⋅ 1 Comment

A couple of VMs-related links for you today, one old and one new (but nothing blue, sorry): I thought I’d run them together for a bit of fun…

Back in January 2005, the Independent on Sunday ran a piece called “Nudes, triffids and the mother of all riddles“, a review of Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill’s book “The Voynich Manuscript: the unsolved riddle of an extraordinary book which has defied interpretation for centuries“. The writer – Scarlett Thomas, who Voynich News regulars will doubtless recognise as being the author of crypto-geeky NoLogo-esque Voynich-themed novel “PopCo” – colourfully described the VMs as like “a storyboard for an other-dimensional remake of Day of the Triffids“, and thought that the basic story of the VMs’ history “(which makes The Da Vinci Code seem like a slightly lame round of Hangman) would work in the hands of any authors.” The conclusion of her review was that Kennedy & Churchill’s book should be sufficient to bring the “beautiful, frustrating and compelling” VMs to the attention of the world.

Fast forward to last weekend (June 2008), and the Guardian’s book review section ran a short review by Steven Poole on “The Enigmas of History” (third piece down on the page) by Alan Baker. Though this covers a number of non-enigmas, the Voynich Manuscript does get a reasonable mention (I should hope so too!), with Poole describing the VMs as being “like a storyboard for The Matrix with annotations in an indecipherable language.”

Hmmm… two book reviews, both with Voynich storyboard metaphors… Perhaps, back in 2005, Scarlett Thomas was secretly hoping for her book to be optioned by a moneybags film studio (these things do happen, though not as often as novelists would like) and this guided her choice of words; and then Steven Poole (or indeed Alan Baker) happened to read her review.

Or is there a Voynich film lurking in the collective unconscious? Even though the story of the VMs may well be something that a “proper” historian could never sign off on, it may well be a set of bones that Hollywood screenwriters could happily boil up into a tasty filmic soup. Do you think?

As long as they don’t cast Tom bl**dy Hanks as a Warburgian-style secret historian again and they leave Jesuit priests right out of it (the VMs very probably predates the Society of Jesus by 50+ years!), I wish them luck! 🙂

Voynich word of the day: pareidolia

by ⋅ 1 Comment

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"

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

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…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

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…