Voynich magic circles (Part 1)…

by ⋅ 3 Comments
I’m just collecting my thoughts after an exhilarating lecture by William Kiesel (the publisher and editor of Ouroboros Press) on magic circles at Treadwell’s in Covent Garden (Christina’s post-lecture blog entry is here). William presented a long series of images of magic circles (manuscripts diagrams, woodcuts, paintings, etc) from the Middle Ages right through to the 19th century, including many of John Dee’s strange diagrams.

Voynich Manuscript, page f57v (the ‘magic circle’ page)

The reason I’ve been trying to find out about magic circles for years is because, as you can see above, page f57v in the Voynich Manuscript apparently contains one. Or (more precisely), whatever f57v actually contains, it seems on the surface to follow the constructional rules and layout of genuine magic circles. However, this is hard to research because the topic of magic circles has attracted relatively little academic interest over the years, Richard Kieckhefer’s (1997) Forbidden Rites (an in-depth study of a 15th century necromancer’s manual) being one of the few honourable exceptions. Which is why I was so excited about the lecture.

Having said that, there are many things about f57v that cast doubts on its ‘magic circle-itude’. For example, I could find no other magic circle with the directional spirits given faces rather than simply named: depictions in every other magic circle I had seen were instead abstract diagrammatic renderings (swords, pentacles, rings, sigils, etc), and names of the directions (to help orient the circle, the first thing any proper necromancer would want to do). But even more brutally: when magic circles are all about the power of names, why ever would someone want to replace them with images?

And so… after the lecture, I asked William for his thoughts on f57v (which, delightfully, he had looked at before). As far as the directional faces go, he agreed that this was pretty much a unique feature: though a tiny number of magic circles he had seen do have sigils shaped to broadly resemble faces, that would seem to be a completely different strand of development to that which we see in the VMs. Overall, even though he did note that it was intriguing that the postures of the four “people” on f57v were all different, the main impression the page left him with was that each of the four faces faced in a different direction (though he didn’t know what that meant).

On the train home, I sat there wondering what this might have caused this, letting all the various aspects swirl around me (though, no, I didn’t have any of Treadwell’s wine that night). And then all the bits clunked into place, with that sound very familiar to any Simpsons fan: “d’oh!”

I should explain. Perhaps the biggest trap Voynichologists fall into is that of overthinking issues: when many complex explanations for a given phenomenon exist, sometimes simple ones gets overlooked, or (worse) rejected for appearing too simple. And the simplest explanation here is that, because almost every magic circle has the directions of the compass written on it, that would be both the first thing you would want to keep and the first thing you would want to hide. And so it seems highly likely to me that the four faces on f57v code for N/E/S/W. In short, I think that (like the VMs’ “Naked Lady Code” I described in my book) the four faces employ a misleadingly elaborate way of enciphering something very simple – the compass directions. But which is which – and how – and why?

  • The left figure is facing forward-left
  • The top figure is facing backward-right
  • The right figure is facing forward-right (and holding a ring / egg)
  • The bottom figure is facing backward-left

But how do these four map onto N/S/E/W? The first thing to notice is that magic circles are very often written in Latin, with the four points written Oriens [E], Meridies [S], Occidens [W], Septentrio [N]: and so an encipherer would only need to hide one in order to hide them all.

While I don’t know for sure… I do predict that the nose and eyebrow of the left figure’s face was elaborated around an “S” to denote “Septentrio” [i.e. North]: and that the only useful information is that a ring (as rings are far more common than eggs in magic circles, The Black Pullet notwithstanding) should be placed opposite it [i.e. South]. The flower-like shape at the centre is probably an elaborated shape around the central o-shapes, which probably denote locus magistri, the place where the exorcist / conjuror / master of the magic circle should stand. Finally: might the heavily-drawn straight line on the shoulder of the ring-carrying person denote a sword? Very possibly.

 

Voynich Manuscript, page f57v – four central figures

This doesn’t answer every question about f57v (how could it?): but it does give a good snapshot of my current thoughts on how (beneath all the deception) it is actually a magic circle (though perhaps not as complex a magic circle as you might initially think).

Part 2 will move on to the VMs’ other magic circles…

Review of "PopCo"…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

I’m a lousy fiction reviewer, probably for two main reasons: (1) creative writing classes taught me how to spot when writers are cheating (in order to make me a more honest writer myself); and (2) years of Voynich Manuscript-related research has made me constantly alert for infinitesimal details upon which the answer might just hinge.

Put these two together (a lie-detector and an adrenaline-fuelled eye for detail), and you have a completely unfair toolkit for reading novels, simply because novels are very rarely actually “novel” – they’re more often an assembly of ideas.

Take Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo” (FourthEstate, 2004), for example. Superficially, it’s like a 500-page anagram of my life (BBC Micro / chess / maths / philosophy / Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem / videogames / business / marketing / cryptography / cryptology / secret history / Voynich Manuscript / etc), together with a load of other untaken doors (Bletchley Park / SOE / crosswords / vegetarianism / vegan / Go / low-level drug-use / homeopathy / etc), and it’s written quite well: so I really should be engaged by it, right?

Problem #1 is one of construction: the first tranche is basically Douglas Coupland (specifically Microserfs), the second tranche Iain Banks (his fiction rather than his science fiction), then a bit of Martin Gardner’s puzzle columns and Simon Singh’s The Code Book: there’s a kind of teenage girls’ magazine section along the way, and a rather clunky historical pirate romance, before it all flips out into Thomas’ fictional take on Naomi Klein’s No Logo… Yet to me, a book needs to be more than merely a collage of influences, a narrated scrapbook: but perhaps that makes me too old-fashioned for contemporary fiction. If you wanted to be kind, you might compare it with Kurt Schwitters‘ Merz, carefully arranged collections of found objects (forged Merz pieces get placed on eBay all the time): but sorry, Thomas is no Schwitters.

Problem #2 is the lack of parents. The other day, while watching (the original TV series of) Batman on BBC4, my four-year-old son asked me where Batman came from. Well, I said, a man called the Joker killed both Bruce Wayne’s parents, and when a bat bit him in the caves beneath his mansion, he somehow gained a super crime-fighting ability. OK… so where did Spiderman come from? Well, I said, after both Peter Parker’s parents died, he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and gained amazing spider-like powers. My son paused, looking back at the screen. But what about Robin, he asked. No, don’t tell me, I know: both his parents were killed… Before he had a chance to say “(and he was bitten by a radioactive robin)”, I suggested we look Robin up on Wikipedia (though sadly he was basically correct). In PopCo, the main character Alice Butler is basically Crypto Girl, a sort of Elonka-lite: her mother dies and her dad runs away, and she gains her m4d cryptological and prime factorisation sk1llz from her grandad. Put it that way, and it all looks a bit comic-book thin, doesn’t it?

Problem #3 is that I’m wise to novelistic conceits. I know that in a cryptological novel, someone called A[lice] is going to communicate with someone called B[en], who will pass on what she says to someone called C[hloe]: and this kind of spoils it. Incidentally, Ron Rivest denies that he used “Alice” and “Bob” (in his 1978 paper introducing RSA public-key cryptography) in any kind of homage to the film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (which is actually a bit of a shame). It would also have been cool if PopCo’s Alice had been born in 1978 and openly named in crypto homage to Ron Rivest’s paper, but I think she’s too old (is she 29? I can’t find the page, rats!).

Problem #4: cringeworthy logic/maths puzzles. To give texture to her story, Thomas brings together loads of lateral puzzles and mathematical ain’t-that-amazin’ fragments, the kind of thing that you sometimes hear being trotted out at student parties. For example:-Two men go into a restaurant and order the same dish from the menu. After tasting his food, one of the men goes outside and immediately shoots himself. Why? (p.109) The explanation given for this in PopCo is ludicrous (it involves an albatross and a dead child, don’t get me started): but why is one not simply a food-taster for the other? Fugu: mmm, delicious… hey, what’s that trainee doing in the kitchen… aaaarrgggh!

Problem #5 (probably the biggest of all for a Voynichologist) is that PopCo uses the Voynich Manuscript as a MacGuffin (or do I mean a “Philosopher’s Egg MacGuffin”?). Alice’s grandfather spends years on the VMs, and even gets her to count the words and letters on each page (and later to factorise large numbers): perhaps washing his car would have been a better way to earn pocket money. Alice says that she’s learnt so much from the journey, from the search for the heart of the VMs: but really the manuscript is no more than occasional wallpaper for the narrative. The Beale Papers also make a brief appearance: my guess is that Scarlett Thomas would have used them as the central hook, had there been more than a paltry $20million dollars’ worth of treasure linked to them: the alternative “Stevenson/Heath” pirate cipher mystery Thomas constructs is a bit thin when held up against real ones, regardless of the size of its haul.

…and so on. I feel in a bad place: I really wanted to like PopCo, but all I can do is whinge (and I haven’t even moaned about her merging Alberti’s and Vigenere’s cryptography, etc). Other reviewers (such as here and here) seem basically to like the book: and compared to Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress (where I wanted to kill all the main characters by the end of Chapter One, all the minor characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publishers by the end of Chapter Three) it’s Shakespeare.

Cryp-lit like this requires a certain kind of technical devotion from the reader, and if you are a diehard crypto-geek PopCo is something you really ought to read. But only if you’ve read the good stuff (like Neal Stephenson’s excellent Cryptonomicon) first.

"The Invention of the Telescope" update…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

OK, so it’s not exactly Wikileaks: but following on from my very recent review of Albert van Helden’s monograph, a (how shall I put it?) well-placed insider has dropped me a line…

Apparently, the American Philosophical Society is planning to republish “The Invention of the Telescope” in an “augmented edition” next year (2009, the International Year of the Telescope), for which van Helden has been asked to put together a new introduction. My guess is that this will come out at about the same time as the book on Galileo’s sunspots which Eileen Reeves and van Helden have been working on (which itself was delayed by Reeves’ “Galileo’s Glassworks“, according to her acknowledgments section).

However, I should flag that a big problem with long publishing pipelines like this is that it only takes one really interesting piece of work to come out to make everything in it seem instantly outdated: and with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic breakthroughs imminently upon us, right now there are doubtless several (2? 5? 10?) historians out there finishing up their shocking alt.history revisionist accounts of the telescope’s genesis.

For me, the most surprising aspect of this whole story is that van Helden’s work has lasted 31 years without being significantly overturned (as far as I can see): but in the field of ideas, things can change (and they often do, rapidly). We shall see what happens next…

Incidentally, I wish I knew of a book like the first half of “Galileo’s Glassworks” that covered the literary prehistory of the microscope, and/or an equivalent of van Helden’s monograph covering the microscope’s birth. Was the romantic lure of seeing tiny things ever as great as that of seeing afar?

All of a sudden, I’m transported Proust-like to the Trigan Empire comic strip in the “Look & Learn”s of my childhood, where one storyline revealed whole subatomic galaxies to explore (might Oli Frey have drawn that?)…

Review of "The Invention of the Telescope"…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

It may seem a little odd to be reviewing a 31-year-old monograph, but stick with it, you’ll see where I’m going soon enough…

The whole sequence starts with the review I posted here of Eileen Reeves’ brand new “Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror” (2008, Harvard University Press). Though overall very fascinating, one aspect of this book confused me: why it should be structured in two so radically different (dare I say almost schizophrenic?) halves. You see, while the first 50% covers the amorphous literary pre-history of the telescope, the second 50% deals with the textual minutiae of who told Galileo what and when, and what Galileo probably believed in 1608-9: so the book swings sharply from a super-broad cultural reading to an ultra-close textual reading. An uncomfortable mixture.

Now, the first half particularly intrigued me, so it made sense for me to move on to Reeves’ major source for it: Albert van Helden’s (1977) brief (but magisterial) “The Invention of the Telescope”. If you want your own copy, there are still a couple under £25 available on BookFinder.com (though be quick, the rest are over £50).

Van Helden (for whom Dutch is his first language) had started out by translating Cornelis de Waard’s relatively little-known book “De uitvinding der verrekijkers” (The Hague, 1906), which laid out a lot of new evidence on the genesis of the telescope as we know it in the Netherlands: much of the story revolved around the town of Middelburg (which held one of the largest glassworks in Europe), with nearly all key documents written in Dutch.

But de Waard’s conclusions – that the telescope had probably been invented in Italy circa 1590, that Raffael Gualterrotti had built such a device in 1598, and that one of which had surfaced in Holland circa 1604, before being replicated by various spectacle-makers and inventors in 1608, leading to an unseemly patent rush – seemed to van Helden not quite to be supported by the evidence. And so he decided to take a fresh look at the documents: and his 1977 monograph was the result.

Having said that, van Helden’s final conclusions are practically the same as de Waard’s, though not quite as specific: that Giovanbaptista della Porta’s claim to have built a telescope (to which his “Magia naturalis libri XX” (Naples, 1589), Book XVII, Chapter 10, p.269 circumspectly alludes) probably does hold up, as does Gualterrotti’s claim (perhaps more weakly), though given that the best magnification possible pre-1600 would (argues van Helden) have been only around 2x, the resulting device would have been unspectacular – a telescopic amuse-bouche, rather than the Galilean feast that was to come. And so van Helden concludes that Italians (specifically della Porta) probably did invent the telescope, though they didn’t realise it at the time.

Thirty years on, and I think van Helden’s monograph stands as a great piece of writing: clear, lean, thoughtful, honest. Best of all, the majority of it (pp.28-64) consists of transcriptions (and English translations) of the important sections of all the relevant documents; so if you don’t like his conclusions, feel free to go right to the primary sources (they’re pretty much all there), knock yourself out. Perfect.

It should now be clear what I think happened with “Galileo’s Glassworks”. The elephant in the room (who was not mentioend, but around whom all the furniture was carefully arranged) was van Helden’s monograph: this forms a bridge between Reeves’ two distinct sections. And so if you add the two books together, you get what amounts to a single coherent work, going from medieval and early modern notions and claims of vision-at-a-distance and burning mirrors (Reeves), through to the myriad claims and counterclaims of the Dutch “inventors” (van Helden), through to Galileo’s reception of the new device (Reeves again). At only 231 pages (with endnotes starting on p.167), Reeves’ book originally felt to me to be about 60-70 pages short: how curious to find that van Helden’s monograph exactly fits the dimensions of that lacuna.

In her acknowledgments, Reeves says that she “benefited most of all… from the intellectual guidance and constant friendship of Albert van Helden, whose own work… is the basis of and inspiration for my own” (p.220). I’d say that while Reeves’ book gives context and consequence to van Helden’s monograph, reading the former without the latter doesn’t really make sense. In fact, I would strongly recommend to Harvard University Press (who publish “Galileo’s Glassworks”) that they negotiate with the American Philosophical Society to reprint Reeves’ book with van Helden’s excellent (but scarce) work as an appendix. Now that would be a book truly worthy of the International Year Of The Telescope.

When hoaxes go bad…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Years ago, I was told that in Greece, gamblers who pull off a big coup are feted: there, making money for nothing is apparently seen as a kind of heroic alchemy, something to which everyone should aspire. And because hoaxes – stunts carried out not for art’s sake, but to swindle – surely fall into this category just as much as many of the historical alchemists’ “projections”, it should be obvious why some Voynich researchers should link the swindler/alchemist Edward Kelley with the manuscript.

However, one good reason to be wary of Voynich hoax hypotheses is that, in the real world, the people (and the stories) behind hoaxes do tend to surface: as Shakespeare wrote, “but at the length truth will out“. Tricky things tend to be collaborative, even if in only a loose way: I can say from my experience in the games industry that being a “lone gunman” on a high complexity project is a hard gig, like being an uomo universale with a spaceship to build. Anyway, where’s the fun in conspiring on your own?

Regardless, all of this hoax-based free association was triggered by the article this month by Philip Mantle on the people behind the famous “Alien Autopsy” hoax. As you’d expect, all kinds of collaborative technical trickery was required to make it seem even remotely feasible: and the main technician behind the story (Cypriot-born video wizard Spyros Melaris) is now emerging to tell his story.

There’s a longer transcript of the interview here: but if you simply have to know more, you’ll probably be more interested in Spyros Melaris’ book “ALIEN AUTOPSY: The True Story“. It’s a bit pricy (£37.50), comes with a DVD, though doesn’t yet seem to be available: email [email protected] for more details (allegedly). Confusingly, there’s a (different) 2006 DVD out there with exactly the same name, presented by Eamonn Holmes: and you already know about the Ant & Dec “Alien Autopsy” film, so I’ll skip past that too. Just so you know.

The punchline here is that, in the fullness of time, the only certain way to get participants in a big hoax to keep quiet is to kill them all, Hollywood stylee… and I don’t really think that happened with the VMs. It also seems to me that Kelley gives the impression of having an enormous ego and a big mouth, particularly near the end of his life (he was a golden knight, after all), and if there was one iota of self-aggrandisement to be had out of his association with a strange manuscript, he would have done his best to extract it. But the record is silent.

The "visual poetry" of the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

It must seem like I’m fixating on everything apart from the VMs itself, but sometimes that’s how blogging works: and, indeed, how life itself works. This June 2005 entry from visual poet Geof Huth’s “dbqp: visualizing poetry” blog takes a confidently sideways angle on the manuscript from most people.

Geof talks of the Voynich’s “hypnotic beauty” and wonders whether “the draw of this book is that we must treat it as a child treats a picture book: We read the images and look at the text.” Yet I happen to believe that there is more visual poetry to be found in the VMs than even he thinks, many miles beyond the limited horizons of “The Friar and the Cipher” (which he had just read).

Geof also suggests that the VMs might have influenced the DIY cultural anarchist mIEKAL aND. Certainly, there’s some visual overlap with the fonts here (one grabbed from the Rohonczi Codex), but as for the VMs’ influence on the “crossmedia beliefware” here, his Zaum Gadget and other hypertoys at Qazingulaza, and according to this page, “THE DRIFTLESS GROTTO OF WEST LIMA, a permanent public grotto/park/installation which when finished will feature a bird-operated time machine in a 25 ft blue glass tower“, I really couldn’t say.

I’d never really thought of it before just now, but to me the Voynich does have the same kind of deep structure as poetry: that ineffable feeling of polished granite blocks effortlessly grinding past each other in an unseen topology, far below the surface. And a kind of coruscating anti-etymology too, that elegantly hunts down and destroys the patterns our magpie eyes feverishly search out.

Burning flames, dead stars humming:
Rhythm of a dance? Each thing
Is lost inside this packed-in future –
The one you tried to grasp so much.
We throw our words, our empty hopes,
And foolish dreams upon this pyre,
To keep you living in your fire.

Make of it all what you will.

"Codex", by Lev Grossman…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

“Codex” (2005) , another Voynich-ish thriller to add to the Big Fat List, is by New-York-based writer Lev Grossman who you might know as the author of the “When Words Fail” article (a nice introduction to the Voynich Manuscript) in April 1999’s Lingua Franca I have favourably cited here several times.

In his novel, an investment banker gets roped in by a wealthy couple to track down a medieval travel narrative, which may or may not be a fraud. Lev’s website says (of his own book) that “It’s also an unusual love story, as well as a love letter to the mysteries and wonders of the Book, the death of which has been wildly exaggerated“: sounds plausible to me. 🙂

Oh, and it genuinely does appear to be an international bestseller, as evidenced by the 25 copies of it in my local libraries (where most interesting books don’t even merit a single copy, sadly).

"Codice Voynich", by Claudio Foti…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

There’s a new book just out, self-published through lulu.com, called “Codice Voynich” by Claudio Foti. It’s 143 pages long, 6″ x 9″, and in Italian – though fewer pages, it has the same dimensions as the VMs and, who knows, perhaps even the same language. 😉

But printing is basically easy now: and so the big issue for publishers and self-publishers is sales and marketing – getting people to buy your wares. Yet for print-on-demand business wrappers like Lulu, the economics are somewhat suspect: unless you’ve got absolutely killer content that large numbers of people need right now and can be compressed into a tiny number of pages (like, say, “Getting Laid with Facebook“), who is going to pay £13.15 for a softback? Yeah, Voynich completists like me, sure: but are there really more than 20-30 of those in the world?

For my own Voynich book, I worked out that for digital printing to make good economic sense, it could sensibly have no more than 240 pages, and I could charge no more than £9.95 per copy, no matter what I actually put inside it. And so I’ll be very interested to see what makes Claudio’s book worth more for 90+ less pages.

Incidentally, typical keywords Claudio has flagged are: magic alchemy Prague Rome medieval Middle Ages manuscript codex Atlantis Bacon Kelley mysterious rune Lovecraft Necronomicon Nostradamus Dee Voynich. No huge surprises there: which itself is a bit of a shame. If it had been “Voynich Facebook Smurf Cheeseboard Helicopter“, well…

Current reading list…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Here’s my current reading list: make of it what you will.

“Shopping in the Renaissance“, Evelyn Welch [just finished, will review here soon]

“Of Grammatology“, Jacques Derrida [100 pages in, which is about 98 pages more than most people… but it’s a desperately slow read]

“The Occult Sciences in Byzantium“, Paul Magdalino and Maria Mavroudi [about halfway through: a fascinating (if piecemeal) collection of essays]

“Secrets of the Code“, Dan Burstein [150 pages in: an interesting compilation of snippets, but all a bit off-topic for a Voynichologist – I was more interested in figuring out how to to compile a Voynich reader, like a more text-based version of D’Imperio]

“PopCo“, Scarlett Thomas [50 pages in: will review this shortly]

“Lucrezia Borgia“, Sarah Bradford [I’ve not yet started this: but it seems to have lots of interesting Quattrocento texture to look forward to]

“Elizabeth’s Spy Master“, Robert Hutchinson [Not yet started]

“The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader”, Keith Whitlock [Not yet started]

“History of Astrology“, Peter Whitfield [Not yet started: I liked his “The Mapping of the Heavens” and “Mapping The World”, so I have high hopes for this]

Yet more Voynich "solutions"…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

I recently found a German Voynich Lexicon wiki-page, with lots of nice things that appear almost nowhere else (such as a link to my Compelling Press Voynich book page, *sigh*).

It has quite a light touch, reminiscent of my old Voynich friend Elmar Vogt: for example, it has a short “Newbold of the month” section pointing to two latter-day Voynich “solutions”, neither of which I’d heard: Erhard Landmann’s book, and Dirk Schroeder’s kabbalistic numerology.

Perhaps more usefully, the site also has a list of Voynich media mentions, going from 2001 all the way up to 2008. OK, it’s in German: but even so, you can get a good idea of what’s being said about the VMs (and where). There’s a link there to a 2007 Suddeutsche article I was interviewed for (and which I’d forgotten about until I saw it there just now).

But here’s the punchline: the more Voynich coverage from around the world I see, the more it seems to me that the English-speaking world doesn’t currently give a monkey’s about the whole issue. With all due respect to the army of novelists out there slaving away on their Voynich-themed soon-to-be-masterpieces, you might consider avoiding making them too parochial: the translations may well make you more money…

Incidentally, I’m now 50 pages into Scarlett Thomas’ novel “PopCo”: I’ll post a review here as soon as I’ve finished it…