While yet again raking through Trove for bookmakers’ clerk John Joseph Keane, I found another Keane: Jack Gordon Keane of Broken Hill. Back in 1916, this J. G. Keane was prosecuted by Mr B. J. Kearney, who (more than a decade later) represented John Joseph Keane in court (which may be a coincidence).
Jack Gordon Kean was ordered two months’ imprisonment, the warrant not to issue for 10 days, for non-compliance with an order for the payment of 5/ a week towards the maintenance of his child.
In Broken Hill’s Barrier Miner, I also found a report of a 1917 case relating to a saddle (stolen from the Southern Cross Hotel), where a John Gordon Kean (“barman employed at the Commercial Hotel”) gave evidence (he advised the recipient of the purloined saddle to go to the police).
Similarly, a “J. G. Keane” was selected for relief work on “Crystal and Kaolin Streets, near Miners Arm Hotel” in Broken Hill in July 1919.
Now, please understand that I don’t for a moment think that this is the same person as the (name-changing) John Joseph Keane I was looking for. What I’m actually wondering is whether, given that the child maintenance orders were issued in an Adelaide court, this might in fact be John Joseph Keane’s father.
Can anyone please do better than I did and track down John Gordon Keane (his surname appears with and without the final ‘e’ in different reports), plus the name of his unsupported child?
Possibly (but, as always, not necessarily) connected is that there was a Mrs J. Keane and Dorothy Keane of “78 Piper-street”, Broken Hill on a broken-down train in March 1919. Similarly, a “J Keane” of “78 Piper-street” objected to a mining concession in February 1926, and to other proposals here and here. But that might be no more than a (different) coincidence.
The normal scenario for Voynich fashion is for some short-run digital-print textile house (whether making T-shirts, hoodies or whatever) to put some nice evocative Voynich image on the stuff they sell. You know, on sites such as RedBubble and the like.
Teito T-shirts
And this is basically the deal with classy Japanese T-shirt company Teito T-shirts, which I saw a few days ago. They sell one T-shirt with a nice balneo picture, one with a nice astro picture, and one with a nice Herbal B image (in fact, the concealed ‘car’ page I proposed back in 2006, Curse fans).
Siddhartha Tytler
If you want some Indian designer Voynich gear, controversial creator Siddhartha Tytler (son of Jagdish Tytler) has some rather livelier print-on-demand designs for your delectation and delight. For children, he offers a Voynich printed skirt with choli/shirt kurta (though the design isn’t that Voynichy to my eyes, I have to say):
So far so (reasonably) predictable. But… then I stumbled upon a Voynich range of lingerie, courtesy of Anna-Bella Lingerie of Alpharetta, GA. From there, Pam McKinzie kindly redirected me to Tetyana Kravchuk of Ajour Lingerie in Ukraine, the company who designed and made the range, some of which is below:
Now: having looked very closely (in the name of primary evidence, of course, why else would anyone do such a thing?) at these, I honestly couldn’t see any design elements linking these with the Voynich Manuscript at all. And so I asked Tetyana Kravchuk why they chose the name. She replied:
“The line name [is] Voynich because the general theme of the collection was names of the writers and novelists. Especially this line named Voynich, because it’s so much different from others. Seductive and modest, revolutiona[ry] & calm.“
So there you have it. It’s actually Ethel Voynich lingerie.
Because the dossier is in French, I’ve appended my translation of the first few pages below: I’ve omitted discussions of the entropy, index of coincidence and discussions of ciphers. What remains in the dossier largely consists of tables and annexes, which anyone interested should be able to easily follow.
The downside – which you may already have guessed – is that none of the lines of enquiry he follows leads anywhere particularly solid. But in many ways that also (I think) means that François should be commended on his transparency – this openness means his research loss becomes everyone’s gain. 🙂
Incidentally, one idea for future work suggested right at the end of the dossier is to look at gallo (the Vendée patois). This is because even if the Sacred Heart turns out (as is possible) to be linked to the Chouannerie, François found no “use of the Sacred Heart on the part of Breton Chouans: to my knowledge, only the Vendeans adopted it“.
Anyway, one final round of thanks to François Parmentier: and now on with my normal free-wheeling translation. All mistranslations are mine, etc. Enjoy!
Nick’s Translation of the First Few Pages…
This document does not pretend to precisely decrypt the inscription left on the rocks at Anse du Caro. Rather, its purpose is to attack the problem as rationally as possible, and in a logical sequence. Hence Part I contains information concerning the inscription; Part II the result of an automated analysis of the inscription; and Part III a theory / attempted decoding leading (…or not) to a meaningful plaintext. However, given that things become more uncertain as the pages proceed, Part IV consists not of answers but of perspectives and provisional conclusions.
Maybe one of the attempts made here will prove to be a way in to the mystery of this inscription; or maybe not. Or perhaps the data presented here will help other researchers determine the inscription’s meaning. Anyway, I present this file to the (virtual) jury, hoping that it brings it much to reflect upon.
Part I. Givens of the problem
I.1. Historical-geographical context
In order to avoid overburdening this (already substantial) file, here is a brief summary:
The rock is near the Anse du Caro, a few hundred
meters from Ilien-en-Traoñ, on the Plougastel-Daoulas peninsula in Brittany.
History:
Unknown date of creation: all the same, it has
become conventional to ‘read’ three dates on the rock: 1787, 1786, 1771 (with the
implication that one should select the last of the three as the most probable
candidate date of creation);
1920: apparently inscribed by a Russian soldier;
1979:
Bernard Tanguy mentioned the inscription to the Société Archéologique du
Finistère ;
1984: Article by Yves-Pascal Castel in the Bulletin
de la Société Archéologique. Presentation
of a first transcription;
May 2019: Launch of a decryption contest, after
several approaches to specialists yielded nothing.
I.2.Transcription of the text
As mentioned above, the first transcription of the inscription was made by Yves-Pascal Castel in 1984; a second attempt was provided by the Mairie in the recent competition documentation: they both appear, commented, in Appendix 3. Using the photographs provided by the town hall and those on Internet, and with the overlaps made with these two previous transcriptions, what follows below is a new transcription: this is what we will primarily work with throughout this document.
The transcription is presented as
follows: on the left is a text identifier of the text, consisting of a letter
designating the rock and a line number. More information on the numbering
system is in Annex 2. Underscores indicate one or more indecipherable letters;
the paragraph shows that the inscription does not begin to the very left of the
rock, but is (more or less) right justified.
A1
GROCAR
A2
dREAR DIOƧEEVbIO
A3
ARVREOИEƧLAΘhVEC
A4
PEИ AbEИEИEƧΘI8ƧE +
A5
ИbICEИG
A6
_OAИI EKGE
A7
AƧOMGAROPA ɣCDO’FET
A8
dAR OA
A9
O I E EM __ GEM E JAIEJ
A10
IVEL AChEODCET DA-AOMA
A11
CVLES ELdA RE IdIMEVƧMEƧ
A12
I __R ER
A13 AR PRIGIL O d11(Coeur orne d’une croix)81
A14 ObIIE bRIƧbVILN EROIAL
A15 ALVO4 ARbORSIV_T
A16 CARCLO IVE PRE Ƨ T
A17
VƧOИ REƧ E_____ I
A18
VA_Ƨ 1920
A19
ƧdARANdOC
A20
AdREIRIO
A21
I186 ИEIƧ
B1
Ƨh_
B2
AND PIN
B3
_A_AИ
B4
_A_VET
B5
_AM__
C1
____A
C2
_ PRET
C3
OR
C4
ONE_AИ_ __
D1
__E_
D2
O
D3
VET
D4
I__T
E1
__OИR
E2
__RIC
E3
__R_
E4 __CE_
There are, of course, many obstacles to a ‘perfect’ transcription of this inscription.
All things considered, some spaces and even some lines are highly debatable (see A. A8). Similarly, various signs that are interpreted here as falling in the same category could well be distinct: I do not differentiate between the small raised o (1. A10) and the full-size O (A13); nor between a sans-serif vertical line (1. A2) and a similar vertical line with serifs at the ends (1. A13); or between a very clear and straight V (A1) and another more curved specimen (beginning of 1. A11). Some decisions had to be taken during this transcription, particularly with the difference between “IV” and “N”: here, three criteria were used – the junction between the I and the V, the inclination of the two characters, and their (relative) size.
I also find the question of the dates (allegedly) observed very difficult, because I do not see the elements mentioned in the previous transcriptions. The date around the heart in A13 (if it is indeed a date), seems to me to be “1181”, because all 1-shapes have a serif at the top turned to the left, and have no middle bar. I see the same-shaped character in the second l on A21, while the first has no serif at all: hence I transcribed that as I.
Thus, if the analyses carried out on this transcription fail, it could well be because specific transcription choices I made were faulty. In this case, it would therefore be necessary to provide a finer-grained transcription, which should take into account the size and orientation of the characters, the presence (or absence) of serifs, etc. To do this, a trip to the rocks themselves would probably be necessary, to touch (like Saint Thomas) the signs and thereby better understand them. In particular, one might use such an opportunity to examine some particularly intriguing characters:
The final C of line A3, which is very angular but lacks a middle bar (i.e. to make an E);
The beginning of the A4 line;
The possible presence of characters before the inscription of line A5;
The apostrophe in A7 (hapax) might simply be an I belonging to the line A6
I.3.Typical elements of the inscription
Apart from numbers, the text contains three non-alphabetic elements:
A discreet, non-stylized cross (A4);
What is commonly characterized as a left-facing crescent moon (1. A6);
A heart surmounted by a cross (L. A13).
Unfortunately, we can deduce little about the first two of these, given that they are so generic. The cross might simply be an addition sign, or might follow a religious text (as, from time to time, crosses appear inserted in the text in breviaries). The crescent – if it is really a crescent – could be an astrological / astronomical symbol, and thus would give us no further help.
The most intriguing of these symbols is therefore the heart surmounted by a cross, commonly associated with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Devotion to the heart of Christ is an old tradition, but one that grew considerably in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, thanks to saints such as Jean Eudes and Marie Alacoque. In 1670, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, nineteen days after Pentecost, was instituted in the diocese of Rennes: this was extended throughout France and then to the entire Church. In the Plougastel inscription, the representation of the Sacred Heart would therefore seem to fit well with the traditional reading of the dates 1787 (1. A13) and 1786 (1. A21).
Later on, the Sacred Heart becomes the emblem of the Chouan royalist uprising, which took place in Brittany; this symbol remains the current emblem of the Vendée. Personally, I consider this link quite likely, because it is so strongly iconic, even if it does pose a question for those who believe the traditional reading of dates on the inscription, because 1786/1787 were 7/8 years before the whole Chouannerie episode began. Note that the reading of the above-mentioned dates raises questions for another reason: if we assume that the last line (1. A21) gives the date of writing of the text, the dates on line A13 designate years which had not yet happened. This would hence have to be a prediction or some vision of the future: unless, of course, they are simply nothing more than just dates.
Finally, there is also the engraving on rock E (if I’m not mistaken), commonly referred to as the “sailboat”. In truth, though, the engraving is not very legible, and shows mostly straight lines converging towards the same point. To make interpretation even more difficult, the rock seems broken close to the base of the engraving. As a result, this detail, although possibly critical, remains largely unusable.
Part II – Analyses of the Inscription
II.1. Frequency analysis
32 characters: 25 alphabetical, 4 digits and 3 typographic symbols;
Most of the alphabet is Latin and capitalized, but has some non-Latin characters: Ƨ, И, d, b, h, Θ and ɣ;
The 10 most frequent characters: E, A, R, I, O, Ƨ, V, C, I, L (73.03% cumulative frequency).
II.2. Algorithm for Determining the Vowels
Several algorithms exist to determine which characters in a text are vowels or consonants: but none is infallible. The best known is probably that of Sukhotin: here, I use Mans Hulden’s OCPb algorithm (Obligatory Contour Principle based), posted online by its author. This algorithm is very effective – it yields only 7 errors when analyzing a corpus of 503 languages.
Overall, it seems that vowel letters do indeed refer to vowels and consonants letters to consonants;
Among the special characters, the OCPb
algorithm classifies h and ɣ as vowels, and Θ, Ƨ, И, b and d as consonants;
The characters 1, 8, 6, K, F, h, + and ‘ are
very unstable according to the algorithm, the variant and the corpus used;
On the contrary, the stable letters are:
A, E, I, O, ɣ (vowels); Θ, S, N (coronal consonants); J and L (non-coronal
consonants).
II.3. Phonotactic analysis
Phonotactic analysis describes the probabilities that one letter is followed by another for each of the characters used in the alphabet.
The analysis has been conducted here on two different corpuses: one with the transcription spaces proposed above, the other only interpreting the line-ends as spaces. In all cases, unknown characters have been replaced by spaces. The results obtained appear in Appendix 5; the salient points are:
3 repetitions of letters: 11, EE and II;
Vowel groups (identified in II.3) are: EE,
EO, EA,
EI, EK, OA, OI, AO, (AA), Al, (Aɣ), IE, IO, IA,
II, hE;
The bigram “AR” is strangely
frequent;
The letter T always appears at the end of the word.
If asked who the greatest historical codebreaker was, would I point to Jim Reeds, Jim Gillogly, or even William Friedman? No! That accolade would surely have to go to Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon.
Like, why? Well, despite the twin handicaps of (a) being accompanied by much younger, sexy sidekicks, for whom his awkwardly lustful old-guy feelings constantly get in the way, and (b) being a thinly drawn fictional character being played by a thinly drawn actor who was much better in ‘Big’, Langdon does solve some kick-ass cipher mysteries. Which is cool.
And so I recently set out to solve the kick-ass cipher mystery that is the Voynich Manuscript using Robert Langdon’s historical cipher playbook as my only guide. And boy oh boy, you’ll never guess where that led…
Birds of a Feather / Flock Together
So how would Langdon begin? Duh!Obviously, he’d turn to the very first page of the manuscript, where an obscure detail (that everybody had looked at before but glossed over) would, in his cavernous brain, trigger some insanely erudite / off-the-wall connection that nobody else could ever make, ever. And he would then have the intellectual courage to follow its trail of breadcrumbs through to its logical end, no matter what awful truth (usually guarded by some millennia-spanning conspiracy) it revealed.
So let’s channel our inner Langdon, and look in the upper left side margin of the first page of the Voynich Manuscript (folio 1r). This is what we see:
“Why, that couldn’t be…”, Langdon would muse, “or… could it?” Yes, it can!
I think you (and Robert Langdon) would surely agree that what is on the first page of the fifteenth century Voynich Manuscript is, without any doubt, essentially the same logo used by Californian children’s faux surf-wear company Hollister. But how? Wasn’t Hollister founded in 1922?
Now, Langdon would immediately know (as sure as if he had Wikipedia open on his leather-bound tablet) that Hollister was a fake brand concocted by Abercrombie & Fitch in July 2000 to help them target a younger market, and that all the talk of it having been created in the 1920s was just made up.
But at this point, Langdon’s eyes would narrow and his forehead would furrow slightly, and he would say something enigmatic in Italian: eppur si muove – “…and yet it moves clothes“. Or something like that.
Despite the logical difficulties, he would be immediately convinced that the two seagulls shared a subtle connection, one that he would have to travel to a long stream of good-looking locations to pursue. After all, what does Langdon ever have to lose, apart from his stellar reputation, his cushty academic job, and the lives of his ex-lovers and oldest friends as they accidentally get caught in the (literal) cross-fire?
And once he had reviewed all the available evidence (say, ten minutes later), he would conclude that there was only one possible way that the propositional variables of the Voynich Manuscript and the Hollister logo could be connected. How? You guessed it – a centuries-old conspiracy one of his nutty old mentors (who probably originally worked with Edgar Wind, but let’s not hold that against him) had once mentioned to him in hushed breath after an exhilarating iconographical lecture at the Warburg Institute… a conspiracy with a terrible, awful, powerful name he could never forget, no matter how hard he tried…
“The Secret Order of the Seagull”
Langdon would also instantly recall that Abercrombie and Fitch had been founded in 1892 by Establishment favourite David Abercrombie, initially selling outdoorsy apparel and related stuff from his Manhattan shop. Yes, Langdon would muse (thinking out loud over a Bellini to an old girlfriend who he had just randomly met on a traghetto in Venice, and who would be sadly heading to her doom in a couple of reels’ time) David Abercrombie was clearly the inheritor of a terrible age-old secret. Look, it’s obvious – you can tell by his moustache and sad mouth, for sure.
But who had been the Grandmaster of The Secret Order of the Seagull before Abercrombie? Well, only Anton Chekhov (not the Star Trek navigator, but the Russian playwright, *sigh*) could fit that bill. And after the disastrous 1896 debut of his play “The Seagull”, Chekhov must surely have sold the dreadful secret he had been looking after to Abercrombie on a outdoors goods buying trip to Moscow.
And yet… might some aspect of the secret also be embedded in The Seagull? In its Act II, which Langdon inevitably has memorized in the original Russian, we find the following:
Nina lingers behind after the group leaves, and Konstantin shows up to give her a seagull that he has shot. Nina is confused and horrified at the gift. […] Trigorin sees the seagull that Konstantin has shot and muses on how he could use it as a subject for a short story: “A young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a seagull, and she’s happy and free, like a seagull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom. Like this seagull.“
“Now, wait a minute”, notes Langdon to a mysterious young lady who has easily sidled into his stuffy, egocentric life, “I’m sure that’s something I’ve seen in the Voynich Manuscript”.
“I think you could be right”, replies the sexy lady whose paper-thin backstory didn’t really make much sense, now you come to mention it. But given that she arrived at a point when Langdon had his mystery-solving head wedged several miles up his mystery-solving ass, he wouldn’t even have noticed if she had seven heads and ten horns. “It certainly looks like a woman by a lake. Even if she is apparently being eaten by a giant fish.”
Homer, But Not Simpson
But Langdon is wracking his colossal brain yet further, like a Greek fisherman beating squid on a rock to tenderize it. “Why is it”, he asks plaintively, “that Homer compared Hermes to a seagull?”
“[he] sped on over the waves like the seagull that hunts for fishes in the frightening troughs of the barren sea and wets his thick plumage in the brine; like such a bird was Hermes carried over the multitudinous waves. But when he had reached that far-off island he left the violet ocean and took to the land until he came to a great cavern; in this [Kalypso] the Nymphe of the braided tresses had made her home, and inside this he found her now…”
“That’s very strange”, says the young girl, whose curious accent really should have flagged her to Langdon as a strange mix of German rifle champion, Sorbonne arts student and Estonian prostitute, had he not been so distracted by her pert body. “I believe”, she continues, passing him a Beinecke printout from her oddly capacious handbag, “that scene is also depicted in the Voynich Manuscript.”
“Clearly the second nymph from the left is Kalypso”, notes Langdon, flexing his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Classics. “Because, as the daughter of the Titan Atlas, she’s bound to be the fittest.”
“So you have reconstructed The Secret History of The Secret Order of the Seagull, all the way from Homer to Hollister”, sneers the girl, suddenly pointing her diamante-encrusted Mauser HSc at Langdon. “This arcane and dangerous knowledge will do you no good when you are (dramatic pause) dead. As a dead dodo who has died. And is dead.“
But just as the conspiracy gun girl is about to shoot, Langdon’s old girlfriend, returning from the bar with their next round of Bellinis, trips on the conspiracy girl’s handbag and falls between Langdon and the gun. She dies, Langdon lives (he is merely grazed by the bullet, of course), the gun girl escapes, and the Secret Conspiracy goes ever on.
You know it makes sense. You’ve read the book, right?
Yes, It’s All As Plain As Day, Fer Sher
So, will the Voynich Manuscript turn out to be linked to some ancient shady symbol-obsessed cabal, of the kind whose dusty evil doors Robert Langdon is doomed to forever find himself accidentally knocking on? Clearly only a fool (maybe even a fool with a History degree) would think otherwise.
Here, I’ve tried to stand shoulder to shoulder with Robert Langdon, letting his indomitable spirit and continent-spanning leaps of faith guide me as we trace the roots of the Voynich Manuscript together. For to one like him (and I can confirm that there are indeed very many like him, because they keep sending me their Voynich Theories, and then snarling that I’m an idiot for not being able to grasp their ineffable brilliance), these things are Easy Peasy.
Perhaps you can learn some important lessons from him too!
As I’ve said on Cipher Mysteries numerous times, I’ve been finding that my Voynich research is getting harder and harder to publish as blog posts. There’s a long stream of reasons: for example, research into the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels drawings…
…often overlaps existing research literature
…often relies on a literature fragmented across different languages
…often needs to include a literature review
…often refers to a cluster of related previous posts
…tends to be long form rather than short form
…is rarely complete in and of itself
Despite all these, I’ve continued trying to publish my research in blog form: but it’s not getting easier. Yet I very often find myself held to account over details in posts as if I had published a lead article in Nature. Really, it sometimes feels as though I’ve managed to get the worst of both worlds.
And so, going forward, my plan is to trial a quite different approach. Please bear with me, as I’m still trying to work out how to make this work in practice. This post is to try to describe my basic plan, and to provide a forum for your thoughts, comments and suggestions (if you’ll be so kind).
The World of Preprint Servers
There is a large number of preprint servers out there: the most famous one by far is the arXiv.org e-Print archive, which since 1991 has specialised in making preprints of scientific papers easily available on the web. (It now has more than 1.5 million papers, just so you know.)
What is not so well known is that there is also a small (but growing) set of humanities-focused preprint servers out there. These offer a route for preprint (and, increasingly, nonprint) articles to see the light of day.
If you have at all tracked the Voynich-themed brouhaha kicked up by Gerard Cheshire and his somewhat overoptimistic polywhatever linguistic papers, then you’ll probably have noticed that he published them on LingBuzz. Unsurprisingly, this is a linguistics-focused preprint server offering linguistics researchers the opportunity to post up pretty much whatever they like.
For historical code-breaking, the Cryptology ePrint Archive (courtesy of the IACR) seems to be a splendidly super preprint server (though I don’t know much about it). And for general research preprints that perhaps don’t fit big categories comfortably, CERN’s Zenodo seems full of promise (though, again, I know very little about it).
All in all, there now seems to be a preprint server suitable for whatever research you have in mind. So, as a general thing, this route seems to be becoming an effective way of getting articles-in-progress out there.
Openly Published Staged Preprints
You might ask “…but isn’t this just the whole Cheshire thing all over again?” Actually, what I’m doing here is advocating a completely different way of using preprint servers to publish research.
What I’m suggesting here is not to pretend that an article is complete (or even destined for full print publication in a non-existent journal, because that would be just plain stupid), but rather to openly embrace and accentuate the article’s ongoing lack of completion by publishing it via preprint servers in a staged manner, and flagging it as such.
Think of this as a way of serializing publication: or even of celebrating reaching research milestones within a research microproject by publishing a state of play update that anyone can read and comment on, or even possibly collaborate with and help develop further.
For example, a reasonable initial draft on a specific Voynich zodiac roundel topic might include a lightly annotated list of handschriften (including links to those few that are available online), an outline of a literature review, together with a first draft of a research hypothesis.
Similarly, a second pre-draft might include an attempt at extracting the relevant aspects of the literature, summarizing it, including some key images, and then trying to put it all into the outlines of an argument lined to an updated (and finessed) version of the research hypothesis. And so forth.
As for me, I don’t – as long as the stages are described honestly, and the process is made transparent (e.g. by including links to earlier drafts inside the draft) – see any downside to this for the research I do. In many ways, it would be a blessed relief to be able to publish along the way, rather than – tada! – with an ornate flourish at the end, like Arnold Rimmer saluting.
At the same time, I fully understand that some researchers (particularly historical cipher researchers, it has to be said) feel very protective and closed about the research they do, as if they expect to uncover a Pearl of Great Price any day now, and that this will inevitably trigger the start of an Immense Redemption Arc for them. But I can’t speak for those people.
My own position is simply that I’d rather publish stuff as I go (which is basically why I blog). However, I don’t like updating posts endlessly: even though some bloggers do this (some even edit comments to try to make every discussion seem to favour them after the fact), I find this practice both shoddy and indicative of a disgraceful lack of online netiquette. Still, each to their own, eh?
Stuck In The Middle (With You)…
As a researcher, it’s easy to flag how different aspects of blogs, journals, social media, print media, preprint servers etc don’t quite suit your purposes, or your style of research. But at the same time, it can be devilishly difficult to steer a path between them that does gives you what you want.
Perhaps I like the idea of openly publishing staged preprints because I’m at the stage in my personal research journey where I don’t feel concerned or threatened by the notion that someone may possibly waltz in and somehow ‘steal’ my entire research from under my nose. Alternatively, perhaps it’s because I like living life in the open. I don’t know: they’re all true.
An entirely parallel benefit is that someone might well look at a staged preprint and want to pick up the baton in some way: perhaps they already have expertise in or experience of a particular aspect of the field being covered, and would be happy to help hone the argument or whatever.
It may even be that some researchers prove better (Problematique-style) at constructing effective research hypotheses than in answering or resolving them. Further, it might be that openly published staged preprints open up ways of collaborating entirely different from the ones we are used to.
For example, if you were to approach an academic with a specific question about a particular literature they know about, surely it would be a huge assistance if your email to them included a link to a staged online preprint of where your research has managed to reach without their help. Surely this level of transparency and openness would be an entirely good thing?
I’ve recently been researching 15th century copies of Johannes Hartlieb’s German translation of Andrea Capellanus’ “De Amore“. My plan is to try to work out if any includes a predecessor of the hand-crossing drawing that appeared in the three 1482/1484 incunabula…
…which, if you recall, is the drawing that Koen Gheuens cleverly suggested might well be linked with a Diebold Lauber workshop drawing and the Voynich Manuscript’s Gemini zodiac roundel…
This is all going OK so far (I now have Alfred Karnein’s magisterial book on the subject, and a copy of his 1985 book should land on my doorstep soon), and as always I’ll post more on this in due course.
However, there’s one other German “De Amore” described by Frank Fürbeth in his more recent book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” that I can’t find anything about. This manuscript, which doesn’t appear in either of Karnein’s books, was (says Fürbeth) Number 3 in American antiquarian bookseller Philip J. Pirages’ 1985 catalogue. But when I emailed the bookseller, Phil Pirages himself kindly replied, saying that he had no record of any such book.
It would seem that something a little odd is going on here. 🙁
Can I therefore please ask any Cipher Mysteries reader who just happens to have easy access to a stupendously good academic library with a copy of Frank Fürbeth’s book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” (currently £80+ on bookfinder.com, somewhat out of my range, sadly) to photograph or scan pages 62 and 63 for me? (This is, according to Google, where Fürbeth discusses the Pirages manuscript.) Thanks very much!
Note: I believe that the 2011 edition of the book is simply a reprint of the 1992 original, but please check to see if these two pages do mention Philip J. Pirages, thanks!
There are now, courtesy of Koen Gheuens and others, numerous web pages exploring possible / probable connections between the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels and 15th century scribal workshops in German Alsace (most notably that of Diebold Lauber).
In one of my own contributions to this (small) canon, I discussed the McKell calendar, an astrological / medical calendar made in Hagenau between 1430 and 1450 by Lauber’s workshop (it has more recently been dated as c. 1445). Though I only knew of black and white scans online, commenter Helmut Winkler very kindly posted up a link to a webpage from BNU Strasbourg, the institution that recently bought it.
This included colour scans of the pages, including the gold-leaf sun/moon framing device at the top of the medical pages, which surely makes it clear what a top-end manuscript this must have been:
The colours too turn out to be remarkably vibrant, notably the red and blue clothes and gold wings on the calendar’s page for August (Virgo):
The McKell Aries
Though the McKell Aries page scan is now (apparently) missing from the website, I found a copy of it online that Darren Worley had posted in a comment to Stephen Bax’s website. Note that the Aries page’s tree is drawn and coloured very similarly to the Virgo page’s tree (above):
Can you spot anything wrong with this image? Having once lived next door to a goat for a few months (who would happily eat your washing given half a chance), I have to say that this looks to me less like a sheep or a ram than a greedy goat with a goatee doing what goats do best (i.e. climbing up to eat anything it can sink its teeth into).
But to be clear, the three simplest ways to tell a sheep from a goat are:
tail direction (goats’ tails go up, while sheep’s tails go down)
what they’re doing (sheep usually graze grass, while goats tend to prefer munching everything else)
goats stereotypically have goatees (the clue’s in the name)
So even though the McKell Aries illustrator got the tail direction right for sheep, I’m still happily scoring this 2-1 in favour of the goats.
Moreover, there are two of the same animals on consecutive pages, firstly a dark Aries…
…followed by a light Aries…
Incidentally, on the VMS list in 2004 Pamela Richards argued that this must be a goat because “[s]heep don’t have dew claws, those tiny hard horns above the hooves; goats do. And those dew claws are very clearly depicted on each foot.”. However, as Rene Zandbergen pointed out much later, sheep actually have dew claws too (though horses and giraffes don’t, so please be reassured that we can at least rule them out), so this isn’t a great argument.
So… is this actually a goat? By my (albeit simplified) scoring system in the preceding section (tail down, no goatee, but grazing), I ought really to instead score this 2-1 to Sheep United. But it’s a game of two halves, I’m sick as a parrot, the seagulls follow the trawler, etc etc.
Model Books and Calendars
In many ways, though, I think it doesn’t greatly matter if either/both is/are a sheep or a goat, because I think we can tell broadly what happened here.
The McKell Aries was (I believe) most likely copied from a previously made goat drawing exemplar, probably from a model book. And perhaps the artist straightened the tail to make it better resemble a sheep, who knows? I also think that the McKell Virgo tree was copied from the same goat picture (the tree was surely integral to the goat design).
Similarly, I think the Voynich Aries was almost certainly copied from an Aries roundel in an existing calendar. Perhaps the score in that original illustration would have been scored 2-1 to the goats or 1-2 to the sheep after extra time, it’s almost futile to try to say.
Incidentally, I have a recollection of Rene Zandbergen once pointing to an Aries calendar roundel where there was a tree in the background that was almost like an optical illusion of something being eaten by the animal in the foreground. But I am unable to dig that up from anywhere, sorry. 🙁
Goats in the Buch der Natur
Finally, Ulrike Spyra’s book might once again be an interesting resource here, because her Synoptic Table of Illustrations lists (on p.384) a number of drawings of goats (“Gaiz / Capra“):
M590 – 61rb (Munchen, BSB, Cgm 590)
A497 – 115va (Augsburg, SuStB, 2o Cod. 497)
GW – 66ra (Gottweig, Stiftsbibl., Cod. 389 rot)
SG – 69rb (Strasbourg BNU Cod. 2264)
HD311 – 79v (Heidelberg UB Cpg 311)
M684 – 84r (Michelstadt, Nic.-Matz-Bibl. Cod D 684)
For one, the location of the cavern (‘grotto’) is now widely reported as being in the Vallée St François in the East of Rodrigues (though given that there are often queues of visitors driving up to have a look now, it’s hardly a secret). This is a valley dipping eastwards towards the sea between two radiating arms of the mountain that makes up the central part of the island. It runs down to the Auberge St Francois B&B on the plage de St François, which one website droolingly describes as having “Miles of fine sand, warm and transparent water, filao trees as far as the eye can see [… and] three of the top ten Rodrigues restaurants on Trip Advisor“.
So, when we read (in the Mauritian press) about the two hikers walking down a dried-up river bed (strong echoes of Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang there, you might say, hohum), I think this is basically the foot of the valley you can see running down the centre of the picture above (facing East).
Incidentally, one nearby cove beach is called “Trou d’Argent”, about which Lonely Planet helpfully notes: “Local legend has it that a pirate once hid his treasure here“. And there’s an identically named “Trou d’Argent” on Mauritius’ east coast. So perhaps nobody should have been shocked if pirate gold turns up in, errrm, a hole here. Or indeed there. No, wait… 🙂
A Private Notice Question (PNQ) to the local administration (which I saw reported here) also revealed some things I didn’t know:
The two hikers reported their find to the (Mauritian) authorities on 15th and 22nd March 2019
Their names are Roger de Spéville and Georges Désiré Némorin
The find was reported to the Rodrigues authorities on 11th June 2019
Anyway, in other news reported in the last few days, the roof of the cavern had supposedly collapsed due to heavy flooding since last year (though I’m not sure that’s true). Another news report suggested that the ‘treasure’ may well have just been a mirage, a trick of the light.
And – in a strange update in the last day or so in l’Express – a photo taken in the last few days seems to imply that the cave may have been robbed out. Even former chief commissioner Johnson Roussety is one of those who now believe the treasure has been moved.
Moreover, Roussety is one of those who believe that the “hikers” were (contrary to their affidavit) actually treasure hunters, and has posted (undated) pictures on his Facebook feed showing a bearded person on the beach (presumably de Saint Francois) using a metal detector (though whether this is one of the two hikers he doesn’t say).
(Having said that, I should point out that almost all people who use metal detectors on beaches primarily use them to find jewellery and coins dropped in the sand by modern tourists, not to find pirate treasure. Just so y’know!)
So… while all the politicos have been shouting at each other, might the Lady have quietly vanished in the night? Or might the Lady never have been on the train in the first place? We now seem to have entered a properly Hitchcockian zone, where you would be unwise to trust that anything anyone tells you will leave you any wiser. (Apart from me, of course. 😉 )
PS: given that Rodrigues has beautiful beaches but a desperately struggling economy, why has nobody yet pointed out that the appearance of pirate treasure here is almost too good to be true? (Or indeed ‘to be Trou‘?) Any conspiracy theorist worth their salt should surely now be suggesting that the goat skull and treasure were only ever touristic stage props designed to bring footfall to the island’s beaches. Just a thought! 😉
Back in the 18th century when Île de France was owned by France, the French gave the island their laws. And when the British took it over (and renamed it ‘Mauritius’) at the start of the 19th century, they left (as I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong) almost all existing laws intact.
Further: because of all the destructive treasure hunting activity that went on in Mauritius in the early 20th century (imagine large groups of overexcited treasure hunters with hundreds of sticks of dynamite, and you’re basically there), additional modern legislation has been passed forbidding treasure hunting: or, rather, making it almost impossible for anyone to benefit from deliberately going treasure hunting.
All which has the side effect of making the Republic of Mauritius – arguably one of the best places in the world to go treasure hunting, in terms of artifacts that are probably buried there (e.g. pirate treasure) – one of the worst places to benefit from being a treasure hunter. Because if you do find something that you went looking for, you then automatically lose the right to benefit from finding it. And so Mauritian treasure hunting lore is full of stories of people not just finding treasure, but also stealing that treasure away to sell via the black market.
In a very significant way, this has had (I think) the effect of criminalizing treasure hunting. Hence the only clear way you can honestly benefit from finding lost treasure in Mauritius is if you literally stumble upon it while doing something else. (Article 716 of the Mauritian Civil Code says that, in this case, 50% should go to the accidental discoverers, and 50% to the Mauritian state.)
What The Two Hikers Found
Back in August 2018, the ‘something else’ that two ecologists were busy doing (while definitely not looking for pirate treasure) was hiking around the island of Rodrigues. (Just so you know, this is according to the affidavit the two filed with Juristconsult Chambers, which L’Express had seen.)
The first thing they did was stumble upon three nearby rock faces with curious signs and marks, and took some photographs. However, when they (later on) enlarged those photos, it became quickly clear to them that the marks were not natural marks, but were instead man-made ones (made using a chisel). Hence they decided to return to take a closer look.
On their next hike to the same place, one of the two squeezed into the narrow gap between the three rock faces and took photographs of the cavity behind them. This time when enlarged, their new photographs revealed (drum roll, please) a rusty chest, decayed rope from a pulley setup, a metal rod that had fallen from the chest, and finally (leaving the best until last) a goat’s skull mounted on a shiny metal body, that might possibly even be gold.
As far as I can tell, this was as far as our two intrepid (and as-yet-not-named-in-public) Mauritian eco-hikers went: that is, they didn’t try to excavate the find (no, not even with dynamite, even if that has become something of a ridiculous Mauritian tradition).
For a bit of local colour, I found this 1:38-long video (that doesn’t, to be honest, show a great deal of interest, apart from blurry shots of the cavity, queues of people driving to visit the site, plus excited locals being interviewed) on MBC here:
What has become clear this week is that the site (in the East of Rodrigues) is very much as the two hikers described it, and that what they found there is indeed almost certainly pirate treasure, all of which the local administration now has soldiers guarding 24/7. Which is nice.
Treasure Finding (Not Treasure Hunting)
Because the two ecologists found their (probable) pirate treasure while hiking (i.e. they weren’t looking for it), this almost certainly counts, under Mauritian law, as a genuine treasure-finding scenario (as opposed to a treasure-hunting scenario).
But here’s where the whole story gets more than a tad political.
By way of background: though Rodrigues was taken over by the British at around the same time as Mauritius, it was made a district of the Republic of Mauritius in 1968 (when Mauritius gained independence); and was then made an ‘autonomously administered region’ within the Republic of Mauritius (though under Mauritian law) in 2002. So even though it’s still part of Mauritius, its politicians like to think of themselves as largely independent of Mauritius.
Hence you can probably guess how the three-way battle is now unfolding. On the one hand, you have the two ecologist hikers, for whom Lady Luck (and indeed Mauritian law) currently seems to be on their side. On the other hand you have the Mauritian central government who is (by way of its own law) the find’s other 50% beneficiary. And on the third hand (just to muck up the whole hand-based thing), you have pretty much everyone in Rodrigues’ autonomous administration, who feel that Mauritian law is clearly an ass, because Rodrigues should obviously benefit from this whole affair, even if the Mauritian treasure-finding legal computer says no.
And so many Rodrigues politicians are now desperately spinning round in circles trying to concoct quasi-legal ways by which ‘their’ pirate treasure can become less of a Mauritian cash cow and more of a Rodriguan regional asset. The word on everyone’s lips seems to be “patrimoine” (patrimony), though the specific details of how that can be mobilized remain rather more than a little challenging. For example, there is talk of applying to make the cave a UNESCO site of special historical significance, even if this perhaps seems a tad optimistic for what seems to be little more than an unexcavated rocky hole in the ground.
How will this whole affair now play out? Even though SAJ (better known as Rodrigues’ Ministre Mentor Sir Anerood Jugnauth) is keen to stress that the Law is King of this particular jungle, it would seem that there are plenty of legal eagles hovering above this piratical carcass, eager to pick the bones clean for themselves. Anyone who would happily bet on the ultimate outcome at this stage would, in my opinion, be fairly unwise.
Pirate Treasures of the Indian Ocean?
It should be no surprise that virtually every news report so far has name-checked Olivier Levasseur (AKA “La Buse“) and the mysterious cryptogram speculatively linked to him by Charles de la Roncière (and since then by several generations of gullible treasure hunters), all of which I’ve covered numerous times on Cipher Mysteries. (e.g. here, here, here, here, etc).
Some reports have further tried linking the story to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, with many claiming (about as incorrectly as can be) that Bernardin was some kind of royal pirate treasure collector (not even close, sorry, and where does that misinformation even come from?) *sigh* (Again, all of which I’ve covered too many times to even link here.)
But in fact, arguably the most genuinely interesting (and apparently unasked) question here is whether any of the curious marks that the two hikers found link up in any way with other stories of curious marks that the Indian Ocean pirate treasure literature abounds with. Most notably, Le Clézio’s “Voyage à Rodrigues” (why do I seem to be the only person commenting on this that mentions Le Clézio? How bizarre is that?) has plenty of specific interest here, but once La Buse gets mentioned, everyone’s minds seem to turn to mush, which is a shame and a half.
For me, there’s a huge amount of historical and research interest to be had here, but the reportage surrounding the story so far just isn’t cutting it yet. I normally like L’Express, but their plucky journalists only seem to have got their teeth into 10% of the (much bigger) story so far. Let’s hope things starts to pick up soon.
Of course, if anyone out there wants to fly me to Rodrigues (purely in the interests of historical research, you understand), I’m sure I could be reasonably accommodating. It really wouldn’t take me that long to pack my factor 50 and special pack of piña colada straws research laptop, I swear. 😉
I keep on looking for John Joseph Keane, our hard-to-pin-down Adelaide bookmaker / bookmaker’s clerk / nitkeeper. However, my search keeps getting tangled up by the 1933 gangland murder of Sydney bookmaker John (‘Jack’ / ‘Jackie’ / ‘Mustard’) Stanislaus Keane. The 01 Oct 1933 Brisbane Truth hauled the story out into the light in its normal breathless style:
Jack Keane, third-rate bookmaker, inveterate gambler and friend of gangsters, threatened to commit the unpardonable sin of the underworld and it was decided that he should die. He had threatened to tell police the full story of the shooting of Jack Finnie and Micky McDonald, so a gunman sealed his lips for ever in death. It was a merciless, cowardly and brutal crime carried out in the deliberate modern manner of Sydney’s underworld human wolves.
And despite having a “pretty young wife” in Waddell Road, Undercliffe, Keane was (if you believe the Truth) seduced by “a gangster’s girl”, who possibly – the Truth insinuated as hard as it could – led him to his execution but had since disappeared. He lived his life, claimed the Truth, as part of the Sydney ‘talent’:
Gathered on the fringe of the underworld and its habitual and professional criminals, gangsters, gunmen, blackmailers and women of the town is a community of men, mostly young men, known as the ‘talent.’ To this social order belonged Keane. Racehorses, poker, billiards and women of their own circle are the main interests of those who comprise the ‘talent.’ They lead a precarious existence, sometimes penniless, and sometimes enriched by their constant gambling. They will do anything except work. Work is an abomination. It is regarded as a form of disease which infects.
The Sydney Truth ran a more bulked-out version of the story, with the femme fatale now described as “married and extremely attractive. She lives in a different locality to where Keane’s body was found.”
There’s a picture of Keane’s tragic death-scene, which I found here:
(According to the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 02 Oct 1933, Keane seems to have met his death after refusing to hand over his winnings to gangsters, a story which seems likely to be closer to the truth than The Truth.)
Mrs Alice Keane was so outraged by the Truth’s coverage that she then wrote them a letter (which they sneeringly called an ‘epistle’) most of which appeared in the 08 Oct 1933 Truth:
You stated that my husband was one of the class of people known as ‘talent,’ by this meaning that he was an associate of criminals and was not following in an honest manner the occupation of a bookmaker. May I inform you that my husband was rarely in Sydney during the last 12 months, and before that time he had an A.R.C. Ledger license as a bookmaker. I know and have been informed by all his friends that his honesty and integrity in his calling could not be questioned, and if he had the misfortune to lose his money and was forced to have a No. 9 license, surely his poverty should not be a reason why he should be designated as a friend of criminals, none of whom I know he was friendly with, but some of whom he might have been known to. You stated that my husband was leading a double life, and may I be permitted to say, for your guidance, that whilst in Sydney my husband rarely ever missed coming home of a night. He was a most upright and loving husband, and one of whom it could never be said that he had led a double life. Your paper stated that he had threatened to give details of the McDonald and Finnie shooting to the police, and that he was known to be a stool pigeon. It will prove how wrong the whole of your story is respecting my husband’s conduct, when you learn that at the time of the shooting my husband was in the country and, I am sure, knew or cared nothing about this gun play. He has always been regarded by his friends as a man to be respected, who keeps his opinions to himself, and one in whom any confidence reposed would be carefully guarded. As my husband had worked in the mines out west until 1920, and had since then been carrying on the calling of a bookmaker in the country, and as be was respected by all who knew him, I am sure that you will help to clear the falsely besmirched name of my dead husband.
By the 15 Oct 1933 Truth, Alice Keane was (apparently) in a terrible state: and, I’m sorry to say, the police investigation into her husband’s murder was never satisfactorily concluded. Looking back (in 1936), Keane’s murder had become merely one of a long series of unsolved Sydney gangland murders:
After seven months of investigation the inquiry before the City Coroner was closed when Detective-sergeant McRae declared, “The police do not desire to give any further evidence on this matter at this juncture. There is a certain amount of silence among those we have spoken to and we are not prepared to say anything further until we break this down. We can only say we have no evidence to offer.” It was a shocking admission of futility.
So why write all this up here? To a large degree, I think the story highlights why relying so heavily on newspapers can sometimes be problematic for historians. Clearly, the Truth’s Aussie brand of yellow journalism (one of Frank Luther Mott’s defining aspects for which is “dramatic sympathy with the ‘underdog’ against the system”) shows that the desire to sensationalize stories at (almost) all costs is far from a recent phenomenon.
And yet I also don’t quite believe that the Truth completely fabricated its stories of Sydney’s ‘talent‘ (even if John Stanislaus Keane himself wasn’t one), who we moderns would perhaps see as ‘hustlers’, ‘players’, or maybe even ‘gangstas’ (as opposed to actual gangsters). So perhaps there is a glimmer of historical gold to be found in the bottom of even this mine-dark media coverage.
