The Somerton Man: the search for John Joseph Keane continues…

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For some time, I have been looking at the Somerton Man case from the point of view of tangible evidence. For a start, the much-repeated belief that he was unidentified simply doesn’t hold true: the suitcase that he (without any real doubt) left at the railway station contained three items with the name “KEANE” on them. And any reconstruction of his life (or indeed death) that starts with some kind of spy thriller-inspired ‘clean-up crew’ sanitising his effects to cover up his real name is just of zero interest to me.

So, whether you happen to like it or not, he has a surname: KEANE.

Us and Them

Of course, the South Australian Police searched high and low (and even interstate) for anybody with that particular surname who had recently gone missing. But no such person ever turned up. Even when Gerry Feltus managed to track down the mysterious nurse (whose phone number had been written on the back of the Rubaiyat connected to the dead man by a slip of paper in his trouser fob pocket), he encountered nothing apart from evasions and stonewalling from her.

Gerry knew he was being shut out of the truth, but didn’t know why. I think it should have been obvious because, as I’ve blogged before, this specific behaviour has a name: omertà, the Mafia / gangster code of silence. The nurse’s husband – Prosper (“George”) Thomson – had been tangled up with some Melbourne gangster second-hand car dealers, the name of one of whom he specifically refused to reveal in his court case against Daphne Page. So any suggestion that the nurse knew nothing of gangsters or the gangland code of silence would be completely untenable, in my opinion.

What I think Gerry perhaps didn’t grasp was the degree of antipathy that Australians felt towards the police (and even the law itself) in the period after the Second World War. In particular, the Price Commission’s arbitrary price-pegging (carried over from the war years) meant that many people’s economic activities were suddenly only viable on the black market. Trove is full of stories of butchers and greengrocers being prosecuted because they charged at the wrong price: this was a sustained failure of the social contract between a government and its people.

Really, the Price Commission made criminals of just about everyone: buying or selling a car almost inevitably became an exercise in white-collar crime. The main beneficiary of all this was organized crime groups, which clawed their way into dockside unions, off-track gambling, baccarat schools, betting on two-up, and dodgy car sales (particularly interstate, and particularly with imported American cars). Even with meat and vegetable sales!

Put all this together, and you see that the post-Second World War years in Australia were a time of Us and Them, with ‘Them’ being the government and the police. The police were really not loved: but neither were the gangsters who enabled and controlled lots of the activity on the other side of the same line. So the widespread dislike of the police was mirrored by a dislike of the gangsters, along with a fear of violent gangland reprisals.

To my eyes, this is the historical context that’s missing from people’s reconstructions of the Somerton Man’s world.

The Sound of Silence

We hear the sound of silence in the Daphne Page court case, and we hear it in Jo Thomson’s long decades of stonewalling: but I think we hear it loudest of all in the sustained lack of response to the Somerton Man. Remember:

  • Nobody saw him.
  • Nobody said a word.
  • No trace was found.

Bless Gerry Feltus’ heart, but he only allowed himself to draw inferences from what people did say: where they remained silent, he was blocked.

For me, though, this sound of silence tells us one thing above all else: that the Somerton Man moved in gangster circles. I have no doubt at all that there were plenty of people in Adelaide and elsewhere who knew exactly who he was, but chose to say nothing. He was, as per my post on this some years ago, not so much the “Unknown Man” as the “Known Man”: despite clearly having a surname, he was an Unnameable Man.

This may not superficially appear like much, but anything that can winnow down the (apparently still rising) mountain of historical chaff to even moderately manageable proportions is a huge step in the right direction.

But how does being sure he was connected to gangsters help us, exactly?

The Baccarat School Nitkeeper

In January 1949, “two prominent Melbourne baccarat players” came forward to say that they thought the man had worked as a nitkeeper in a Lonsdale Street baccarat school “about four years previously” (i.e. ~1945). They thought he had worked there for ten weeks before disappearing, never to be seen again (until his face was in the paper, that is).

Of all the mountains of Somerton Man-related speculation and punditry, this alone stood out for me as something that could be worked with, as a research lead that had some kind of archival promise. And so I have assiduously read hundreds of articles and new reports in Trove, to try to make sense of how this part of the post-war economy worked.

It’s true that a fair few policeman back then took bribes from the gambling bosses to turn a blind eye (this was remarked upon in numerous news stories of the day). But even so, one striking fact is that the laws in Victoria relating to nitkeeping were much harsher than elsewhere in Australia:

  • First offence: £20
  • Second offence: £250
  • Third offence: six months in prison

Because principals paid nitkeepers’ fines, it simply wasn’t in their interest to hire anyone with a prior conviction for nitkeeping, not when the fine for a second conviction leapt up to a staggering £250.

From this, my suspicion is that the man the two baccarat players were talking about had been caught in a raid after working in Melbourne for ten weeks and fined £20. And with a fine under his belt, none of the schools would then re-hire him as a nitkeeper: that would have been the end of the line.

Moreover, Byron Deveson uncovered SAPOL records for a John Joseph Keane (apparently born in 1898) who had been convicted of hindering / nitkeeping in Adelaide, and whom I then pursued through Trove.

If only I could see the Victoria court records for 1944 / 1945…

Victoria Petty Sessions Court

The records for the Victoria Petty Sessions Court are behind a findmypast paywall. So here’s what it threw up for John Keane (some or none of which may be our man John Joseph Keane):

  1. The Geelong ledger is dated 23rd September 1924. “Defendant at Geelong on the 7th September 1924 did behave in an offensive manner in a public place, to wit Eastern Beach”. Pleaded guilty, but case was dismissed.
  2. [John Francis Keane]: “Defendant between 10th and 11th December 1929 at [Geelong?] did break and enter the warehouse of the Geelong [???] Water Company Pty and steal therein 13 cases of Dewars whisky seven cases of Johnny Walker whisky five cases of Gilbeys gin and two cases of Hennesys brandy valued at £190”. Result: “Committed for trial at the first sittings of the Supreme Court to be held in Geelong 1930. Bail allowed accused in the sum of £200/-/-.”
  3. [J Keane] Colac Courts, Victoria. 17th March 1930, Conviction: “Drunk”.
  4. The Geelong ledger is dated 19th March 1940, but the stamp on the page is marked 10th Feb 1940. The Sergeant of Police was Arthur De La Rue. Keane (and indeed 49 others) were accused of: “Defendant at Geelong did commit a breach of Act 3749 Section 148 – Found in common gaming house”. The case was “Dismissed”.
  5. The Geelong ledger is dated 24th November 1944, but the stamp on the page related to Keane’s being found (along with 25 others) in a common gaming house on 25th September 1944, with a summons dated 11th October 1944. The case was adjourned until 8th December 1944. The Senior Constable of Police was Colin Egerton.
  6. On 8th December 1944, Keane returned to Geelong court and admitted that he had been present on that occasion, but pleaded not guilty. There seems to be no records of the court’s response (most of the other defendants on that occasion were represented by a Mr Sullivan, and pled that they had not been present), but the other defendants who also admitted being present while pleading not guilty were discharged with a caution.

So, no definitive results here. Bah!

John Joseph Keane – BDM

Finally: are there any fragments of Birth / Death / Marriages that we might stitch together to eliminate some or all of the possible John Joseph Keanes out there? Here’s what I found:

Findmypast lists:

  • John Joseph Keane born 1898, died 1950 in Shepp (registration 21625).
  • John Joseph Keane marrying Florence Mary Clancy in Victoria in 1930 (registration 6892)
  • John Joseph Keane marrying Alma Maude McKay in Victoria in 1939 (registration 346)

FamilySearch.org lists:

  • John Joseph Keane died 20th January 1941, buried West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide (billiongraves image). Also with the same headstone: Delia McKague (died 15th January 1939, findmypast says she was born in 1863 and died in Glen Osmond), Kevin Newland Keane (died 29th June 1967, findmypast says KNK was born in 1902, married Alleyne Maud(e) Dinnis (born 1905) 19th December 1927, lived at 6 Smith St Southwark), and Marguerite Ellen Wilson (died 12th April 1984 aged 85 years).
  • John Joseph Keane (retired) died 7th August 1967, in Brunswick, Victoria
  • John Joseph Keane (grocer) died 17th June 1972, in Castlemaine, Victoria

If there’s a way of stitching all, some or even a few of these strands together, I for one certainly can’t see it yet. But perhaps you will?

Veronica Mary Keane of 63 Jetty Road, Glenelg…

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While (yet again) raking through Trove a while back for anything to do with the missing bookmaker’s clerk (and gambling nitkeeper) John Joseph Kean(e), I found two mentions (here and here) of a May 1948 divorce in a Sydney court between J. J. Kean and V. M. Kean in front of Mr. Justice Clancy in No. 2 Court.

Even though this trail had previously gone cold, I returned to it today to see if I could find anything more about “V. M. Kean”: and this time around, it turned out that the Gods of Trove were a little more on my side.

63 Jetty Road, really?

I first found a November 1945 open letter from “V. M. Keane” published in the Adelaide Advertiser on the 16th, 17th and 19th:

PERSONS who have left goods to be sold on commission make enquiries re same by December 1st, 1945, otherwise the undersigned will not be responsible (Signed) V. M. KEANE. 63 Jetty road. Glenelg

This then led me to find an article in the 30th October 1945 Adelaide News:

At Glenelg yesterday, while Mrs. Veronica Mary Kean was serving in her secondhand shop in Jetty road about 3 p.m., she left two rings on the counter. An hour later they were missing. […] One of them, an eternity ring, was valued at £4 and the other, a gold ring, at £3.

A similar article appeared here in the Adelaide ‘Tiser:

Two rings, together valued at £7, were stolen from the secondhand shop of Mrs Veronica Mary Kean, home duties, of Jetty road, Glenelg, on Monday. PCC Rawson is enquiring.

There’s a reference to “Kean, Veronica Mary” in the 1945 SA Police Gazette (category H: “Stealing In Dwellings etc”), the index to which is visible online.

In 1951, we see a business at the same address: “Miss Muffet 63 JETTY ROAD, GLENELG The Children’s Wear Specialists Large range of Over coats and Frocks in all shades and sizes.”

The shop was already called “Miss Muffet” in January 1946, as per this article:

In aid of the RSL Building fund, a variety show and mannequin parade will be held in the Glenelg Town Hall at 8 p.m on Wednesday February 13. Organiser is Mrs. S. Eitzen and compere Malcolm Ellenby. Mannequins—Mary Rennie (bathing beauty candidate), Zita Minagall, Beth Habib, Patricia Rennie, Mary Abbley, Gipsy Rowe, Lorraine Hart, Barbara Jacob. Cynthia Marshall. Mona Allison Stella Minney and June Lord. Clothes displayed by courtesy of leading Glenelg stores. Bookings at “Miss Muffet,” Jetty road, Glenelg.

Was Veronica Mary Kean also the owner of the Miss Muffet shop? I suspect not, because the letter in the Advertiser seems to imply that she had had the lease of her second hand shop’s premises withdrawn as of 1st December 1945. But a branch of The National Bank of Australasia opened at 63 Jetty Road on 2nd January 1952, giving any Miss Muffet searchers an end date to work with.

Marriage or Death?

So, can we find details of her marriage? The only SA marriage I found for a Veronica Mary Keane was from 1946:

KEANE — SMITH.— The marriage of Veronica Mary, only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Smith, of St. Peters, to Hillary Ignatius, fifth son of the late Mr. and Mrs. B. J. Keane, of Goodwood, was solemnised at St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral on July 20, at 6 p.m.

However, NSW’s BDM website found me a 1926 marriage between James J Kean and Veronica M O’Brien in Glebe (refs: 11392/1926 and 11392/1926). Sadly, images for these aren’t available online.

As for her death, the LDS FamilySearch website yields only a death on 20th December 1968 of a widow called “Keena, Veronica Mary” in Warrnambool: but I somewhat doubt that that was her. Similarly, GenealogySA only suggests a Veronica Mary Keane (whose deceased husband was William Joseph Keane) who died in 1971.

What do I think?

OK, I admit I got a little bit excited when I found Veronica Mary Kean(e) running a second hand shop on 63 Jetty Road, Glenelg in 1945. But it does seem as though she was not the same V. M. Kean who divorced J. J. Kean in Sydney in May 1948 – realistically, that was almost certainly James J. Kean and Veronica Mary Kean (nee O’Brien) terminating their 1926 Glebe marriage.

My best guess is therefore that the Veronica Mary Keane of 63 Jetty Road was in fact the Veronica Mary Smith who married Hillary Ignatius Keane on 20th July 1946, and whose engagement was announced in the Adelaide Advertiser on 3rd November 1945:

SMITH—KEANE. —Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Smith, of St. Peters, wish to announce the engagement of their only daughter, Veronica M., to Hillary I. (RAAF. Pacific), fifth son of the late Mr. and Mrs. B. P. Keane, of Goodwood.

Like another Adelaidean with whom Somerton Man researchers are thoroughly familiar, it seems that Veronica Mary was using her married surname after getting engaged but prior to getting married.

So, it would appear to be no more than normal frustrating chance that put Veronica Mary Keane and her 63 Jetty Road second hand shop in the path of my research steamroller. Well worth a look, undoubtedly close, but… no Tamam Shud cigar this time, sorry! 🙁

Ethel Voynich talk in Dublin…

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Anyone in Dublin this week with even a passing interest in Ethel Voynich could surely do no better than drop by Dr Angela Byrne’s talk: Ethel Voynich, Transnational Revolutionary at 5.30pm to 6.30pm on Thursday 10th October 2019, at EPIC (The Irish Emigration Museum), Custom House Quay, D01 T6K4 Dublin 1. And did I mention it’s completely free?

The talk’s synopsis:

Cork-born Ethel Voynich was raised in London, where she became involved in anarchist circles and translated the writings of exiled Ukrainian revolutionary, Stepniak. She travelled around Russia in 1887–9, teaching music and associating with radicals. Her novel, The Gadfly (1897) inspired communists worldwide for decades – but by 1917, she had moved away from radical politics. This talk details her transnational radical networks and asks, what was the extent of her involvement in the Russian revolutionary movement?

Ah, yes: and I can confirm that it’s a pleasure and a delight to finally have some Ethel Voynich-related news that isn’t related to lingerie.

Jack Gordon Keane of Broken Hill…?

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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.

The Trove links I found are:

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.

Finally, some proper (Ethel) Voynich fashion…

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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):

Tytler also has a multicolour Voynich kurta with patiala pants combo, which is a bit more in the right kind of direction, I think:

Ajour Lingerie

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.

And now you know.

François Parmentier’s Plougastel-Daoulas dossier…

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I was recently sent a fascinating (and, at 88 pages, substantial) dossier by François Parmentier on the Plougastel-Daoulas inscriptions. It’s a very pleasant read (François is much to be applauded), and has pretty much everything you might need to bring you up to speed on the mystery surrounding these strange inscriptions. He also examines many of the assumptions and ‘Internet wisdom’ on the inscriptions, and finds them not to be true.

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:

  • Geography:
    • Coordinates: 48 ° 34 ’50 “20 ‴ N, 4 ° 44′ 41” 06 ‴ W;
    • 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.

Revealed! The Voynich Manuscript and The Secret Order of the Seagull…

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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!

Idea: publishing Voynich research via preprint servers…

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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?

But what do you think?

Two pages wanted from a Frank Fürbeth book… :-/

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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!

Voynich Aries and Greedy Goats…

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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:

  1. tail direction (goats’ tails go up, while sheep’s tails go down)
  2. what they’re doing (sheep usually graze grass, while goats tend to prefer munching everything else)
  3. 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.

The Voynich Aries

As Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot wrote to Rafal Prinke in 2001, having examined the Voynich Manuscript: “The genre scenes, eg. Aries eating a bush, suggest that the signs were redrawn from a calendar”. And just as with the McKell calendar’s Aries, it has long been argued that the animal depicted is less like a ram or sheep than, as Albert Howard Carter seems to have first pointed out back in 1946, a goat.

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)
  • WU – 67r Wurzburg, UB M ch f 265

As an example, here’s Strasbourg BNU Cod. 2264’s goat, which I’d say scores a comfortable 2-0 win:

The small point I’m making here is that 15th century artists were clearly more than capable of drawing goats in a semi-realistic way if they so chose.