Cipher Mysteries

09Feb 2019

Abraham Colorni’s Cryptography…

Diane O’Donovan recently stumbled across a reference to a relatively little-known Italian-Jewish engineer / cryptographer / magician called Abraham Colorni (Abramo Colorni) who was for a short while at Rudolf II’s court: and wondered aloud (in some comments to Cipher Mysteries) what we might learn from his 1593 book on cryptography.

“Scotographia etc etc”

As you might expect, Colorni’s book title is badly afflicted by the prolixity so typical of the age: “Scotographia, ouero, Scienza di scriuere oscuro, facilissima, & sicurissima, per qual si voglia lingua : le cui diuerse inuentioni diuisi in tre libri, seruiranno in più modi, & per cifra, & per contra cifra : le quali, se ben saranno communi a tutti, potranno nondimeno usarsi da ogn’uno, senza pericolo d’essere inteso da altri, che dal proprio corrispondente”. That is, “Scotography, or the science of concealed writing, most easily and most securely, etc etc etc“.

Various physical copies exist: MIT Library, in the Cryptology Collection of UPenn’s Van Pelt Library (I always wondered what happened to Lucy), Harvard Library, BnF, the British Library, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Library, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Klau Library at Hebrew Union College in Cincinatti to name but eight. There are also microfilm copies at Herzog August Bibliothek and the British Library, if squinting into dusty old back-lit magnifying boxes floats your boat.

Obviously, what you’d actually like to know is what online versions exist. The BNCF website includes only a ragged copy of the first couple of folios of MAGL.3.8.24, which is not that impressive:

The Museo Galileo’s website has a complete set of scans of the BNCF MS, though (perhaps because the whole book has an unusual aspect ratio, i.e. it’s much wider than it is tall), all the Museo’s scans have come out vertically stretched by a factor of three in their reader (the “Reader” icon at the top of the page). This is also true of the PDF download option, e.g. how it is (left) and how it ought to be (right):

Alternatively, you can read the same pages from the index webpage, though only one at a time, and the (unstretched) image goes off the right hand edge of the web page unless you really widen the size of the browser window, which is annoying in a quite different way.

Having said that, none of this is fin du monde etc.

The Book’s Contents

As normal, the book starts with a seven-page laudatory preamble praising Colorni’s most magnificent patron, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and explaining the symbolic meaning behind the four specific zodiac signs chosen for the frontispiece (Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo):

The book continues with three main chapters (though the middle chapter is tiny), and then finishes up with an enormous enciphering table (more than half the remainder of the book). It also includes some interesting cryptographic figures which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere.

From what I have read, it seems to me (and feel free to correct this impression) that Colorni was not a theoretical codemaker or codebreaker. Though his cipher history account starts with the normal SCYTALE (long thin message wrapped around a stick) cipher yarn, his writing doesn’t seem informed by the work of contemporary crypto theoreticians such as Bellaso.

Rather, I suspect what happened was that Colorni collected together a series of cryptographic tricks (such as nulls, verbose cipher, etc) and then adapted and extended them into something cunning and ingenious which he believed to be practically impregnable. So I think his book (to answer one of Diane’s questions) documents various cunning “peasant ciphers” rather than being part of a theoretical crypto mainstream.

Incidentally, just about the only ciphertext given in Colorni’s book (there are no challenge ciphers) is:

GWGHPCXKGBEDMMYWOPWQPWO
HMAAHXNAYLPKOOBPXKFFLTGWYIXG

Feel free to try to crack it if you wish. 🙂

Colorni and the Voynich Manuscript?

But, Diane continues, might it have been Abraham Colorni who brought the Voynich Manuscript to Rudolf II’s Golden Court in Prague? Superficially, Colorni would certainly seem to tick many of the boxes, and there’s unlikely to be evidence out there that explicitly proves that he didn’t bring it. (After all, what are the chances a letter now turns up saying “It wasn’t me, Abraham Colorni, who sold that scandalous naked women cipher book to the Emperor, it was that blasted John Dee“?)

All the same, I don’t believe that Colorni’s book’s introductory dedication to Rudolf II (written in 1593) mentions anything sounding at all like the Voynich Manuscript (as always, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). It does namecheck Oedipus, but presumably for broadly the same reasons that Georg Baresch also (independently) namechecked Oedipus several decades later.

Perhaps a more productive route to take would be to look at Colorni’s correspondence, and see if that casts any light on the subject. And, very helpfully, there are (at least) two freely downloadable 19th century articles by Professor Giuseppe Jarè that might assist us in this regard:

Both articles include transcriptions of a number of letters (in both Latin and Italian) culled from numerous archives. In fact, the second article contains so many that I suspect that Jarè must have had Colorni as an ongoing research interest for some twenty years or more.

Though some of these definitely mention Colorni’s Scotographia, I didn’t notice anything related to the Voynich Manuscript in there. However, others more observant and diligent than me may have more luck: and wouldn’t that be nice? 😉

Secondary Literature on Abraham Colorni

Though I’ve tried to limit my discussion here of Abraham Colorni to primary evidence, there is also a pretty good modern literature on him if you’re interested:

The age of secrecy : Jews, Christians, and the economy of secrets, 1400-1800 – Daniel Jütte
Or, in German: Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses : Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen, (1400-1800) – Daniel Jütte
Trading in secrets : Jews and early modern quest for clandestine knowledge (Isis, Vol. 103 (2012), p. 668-68)
Il prestigiatore di Dio : avventure e miracoli di un alchimista ebreo nelle corti del Rinascimento – Ari’el To’af – Milano : Rizzoli, 2010
Rene Zandbergen also points out there is a chapter on Colorni by Vladimir Karpenko in:Alchemy and Rudolf II, Exploring the Secrets of Nature in Central Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, edited by Ivo Purš and Vladimír Karpenko, Artefactum, Prague (2016), though probably building on Daniel Jütte’s book.

A Needle In A Haystack?

For twenty-plus years, Rene Zandbergen and a whole host of others have invested a lot of time into trying to dig up references / historical evidence relating to the Voynich Manuscript’s (probable) time at Rudolf II’s court: but have so far found nothing.

From what I know, I don’t currently believe that Abraham Colorni will turn out to be the missing link, the “Herald” (in Joseph Campbell / Hero’s Journey terms): rather I think that if it did make its way to Rudolf II’s court, it was very much towards the end of his rule (notionally at Rudolf II’s death in 1612, but he was under a kind of house arrest by his brother Matthias for the last few years – families, eh, who’d have ’em?). And with Colorni dying in 1599, the two therefore probably didn’t overlap in Prague.

All the same, I find Professor Giuseppe Jarè’s articles hugely heartening, because he was able to collect together from a whole list of archives all manner of correspondence relating to Colorni: and that gives us access to a evidential slice cutting through Colorni’s life.

So perhaps the right thing to do, Voynich-wise, is to stop looking for a needle in a haystack – i.e. a single perfect piece of evidence – and to instead start looking for a sewing box in a haystack. By this I mean collections of diligently-collected letters and documents not unlike Jarè’s collection of Colorni’s correspondence, but for technical-minded court insiders who were at Rudolf II’s court nearer the end.

The best attempt at doing this so far has been by looking at the correspondence between Duditius and Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who was Rudolf II’s Imperial Astronomer, as studied by Josef Smolka (with help from Rene Zandbergen). I previously discussed their lack of (Voynich-related) success here, and concluded that the 1600-1612 period might be more fruitful.

But do we have a list of people who we might even consider as candidates for this kind of search? One would have thought that the 15 volumes of Tyco Brahe’s correspondence (in Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera omnia) to 1601 would have been thoroughly mined by Voynich researchers by now. Christoph Rothmann (of Kassel) similarly died in 1600, while Caspar Peucer died in 1602. Even so, I suspect we are likely to have no luck with any of them.

Has anyone trawled through Kepler’s correspondence looking for partial or indirect references to the Voynich Manuscript? I’m thinking that perhaps the best way forward would be to look at the network of correspondents linked to Kepler in the 1600-1615 period. The letters between Kepler and Galileo are well-known, but they surely can’t make up even 25% of Kepler’s correspondence, right?

Perhaps one of these letter writers will have heard mention of the Voynich Manuscript: and perhaps this is how the first big piece in the Voynich jigsaw will be found, who can say? 🙂

02Feb 2019

The Palermo Cipher

by nickpelling ⋅ 51 Comments

A nice message from “Milite Ignoto” (‘Unknown Soldier’, if your Italian is a little rusty) at a French email address points us all to an interesting postcard cipher sent from Palermo that is currently on display at the Vittoriano Museum in Rome.

The twist here is that, rather than the normal enciphered-note-to-a-lover so typical of the turn of the 20th century, this one was sent by an Italian soldier, and where the (as-yet-undecrypted) cipher itself was further concealed beneath the stamp. Yes, it is indeed a proper cipher mystery. 🙂

Our Unknown Soldier informant kindly sent us through two images, one of a larger section of postcard showing where the cipher sits beneath the (removed) stamp, and the other a slightly blurred image of the cipher:

When I put this page up earlier today, commenter Peter Moesli immediately pointed out that it looked to be the wrong way up (straight right edge, ragged left edge, etc). Which meant my initial transcription was completely back to front. *sigh*

Rotating the image around by 180 degrees gives a more sensible-looking block of ciphertext, where the first set of shapes appears to be “10:01”, whatever that means (the date on the postcard is quite different):

The start of this now looks as though it reads “10:01”, so I have transcribed that on a separate line. Hence my (revised) transcription is as follows:

10:01\
T.-.-
GTIT+G.VVI
/WIGXGP.AJJ.
/A+..A//LTA
MIPI/GJL+.
GTQPGTT.GL
VG-I.X.JGJA
SARGRA//.MA-
XA+A.

I (of course) tried putting this into CryptoCrack:
unsurprisingly, it yielded an Italian plaintext. Tweaked slightly (CryptoCrack swapped L and V, and I’ve added spaces to make it clearer):
10:01\ sono n
esiste oggi
chiedero avvo
cato accusa
mi ricevuto
espresso eu
genio doveva
farer accom
andatao

It turns out that the reason for concealment and secrecy was almost certainly legal (“avvocato” means lawyer). Can any Cipher Mysteries reader with good Italian (or, at least, better Italian than me) fix this up and translate it properly?

Incidentally, Joe Nickell (famous for his writing on the Beale Ciphers) once wrote about finding a series of postcards with tiny (though unenciphered) writing concealed in much the same way. Yet…

The hidden-under-the-stamp messages were simply miniscule love notes. One consisted of rows of little X’s (a popular shorthand for kisses), while another asked, “Do you you still love this bad boy?” The cards, postmarked between 1911 and 1913 were addressed to a young lady at a Virginia girls’ school (Nickell 1990, 177). Charming!

I’ve also read that Agatha Christie wrote a story where a cipher key was microwritten beneath a postage stamp (though I don’t know which one that was). The set of six postage stamps released in 2016 to commemorate Christie include numerous steganographic tricks, which is a lot of fun.

Having said that, there is also a long history of false stories (helpfully debunked here by snopes.com) dating back at least to the American Civil War where tales of atrocities carried out on prisoners of war are supposedly carried home in microwriting under stamps. So anyone looking for historical messages hidden beneath stamps should be more than wary of what they read and believe. 😮

Postscript:

Here’s a (small) picture of the postcard on display in the museum:

The text below says:

Nel quadratino dove era incollato il francobollo è ancora chiaramente leggibile un messaggio criptato scritto con lettere piccolissime, a matita. La cartolina è indirizzata al Maggiore Polizzi della 2a Divisione Ragioneria al Ministero della Guerra – Roma Spedita il 25-3-1918

“In the square where the stamp was stuck (and still clearly readable) is an encrypted message written in tiny letters in pencil. The postcard is addressed to Major Polizzi c/o the 2th Accounting Division at the Ministry of War in Rome, and was sent on 25-3-1918.”

01Jan 2019

Nick’s non-fiction(-ish) films of 2018

by nickpelling ⋅ 1 Comment

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many good films I’ve seen in the last year that have been based on true stories. (And yes, I am quite aware that “true” and “Hollywood” are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.) So I thought I’d list them here (along with where I saw them), though in no particular order.

#1 Untouchable (in the UK, “Intouchables” in French) – Google Play

IMDB link This is basically a buddy film between a French quadriplegic and a Senegalese crim, that manages not only to tell an essentially true (though slightly altered) story, but also be challenging and entertaining from start to finish. Definitely the most surprising film of my year.

As an aside, it seems that this is now being remade by Hollywood as “The Upside”. But given that the performances in the (subtitled) French original are all fantastic, I’m not entirely sure what this remake will achieve. Put that little cucumber away!

#2 Torvill and Dean – ITV

IMDB link This was a lot of fun, and built up to their Ravel’s-Bolero-powered 1984 Olympic ice skating triumph. I followed this by immediately watching the BBC2 documentary on the twinkle-toed pair (this may still be on BBC iPlayer), which showed (I think) that the film-makers had basically done a pretty good job of telling the story.

OK, it’s not “I, Tonya”, criticisms of schmaltz aren’t entirely unjustified, and it’s definitely a TV-movie rather than a movie-movie: but I actually enjoyed it from start to finish. So ner. I just wish I had a YouTube trailer I could embed here. :-/

#3 Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down The White House (Netflix)

IMDB link Liam Neeson (sans stunts) is cast oddly well as “The G-Man’s G-Man”, who was also the famous “Deep Throat” whistleblower who pulled the walls down around President Nixon.

Everyone (surely) knows a little bit about this slice of relatively recent history, but the film (based on the books by Felt himself) gives a much broader (and dare I even say timely?) feel of the kind of interference with the FBI that the White House tried to carry out. Ultimately that failed, but only because of a single man – Mark Felt.

#4 Bohemian Rhapsody – (Odeon Cinema)

IMDB link I must admit that I wasn’t looking forward to watching this: the movie trailer made it seem a lot like “Queen – The Panto”, and that it was going to whitewash Freddie Mercury out of the picture.

But I was delighted (and, yes, pleasantly surprised) that the film-makers didn’t hold back on any of Mercury’s complicated sides. Much like the Torvill and Dean film, this built up to Queen’s 1985 Live Aid set: again, even though everyone knows a little about this story, seeing the broader picture was a proper blast. And it was cool eating pizza in a slouchy chair at the Odeon in Kingston. 🙂

31Dec 2018

The Voynich Manuscript’s problematic pipes…

by nickpelling ⋅ 36 Comments

In my opinion, the Voynich Manuscript’s nine rosette page has a bit of a problem with its pipes. However, to show you why I think so, I first need to take you on a journey through the rest of the Voynich Manuscript…

Q19A containers

Because of their visual similarity to the pipe tops, let’s start by working our way through all the container tops in Quire 19 (‘Q19’). Q19 is made up of two wide bifolios: every single container depicted in Q19 has what appears to be an open top (i.e. no lid or covering), giving them an initial feeling of having been meant to be bound together.

However, if you look carefully at the containers on the inner bifolio (f100+f101), you’ll see that these are all substantially simpler than the containers on the outer bifolio (f99+f102). This makes me strongly suspect that the containers on the inner bifolio were drawn first.

Hence I’ll start by going through the containers in the inner (simpler) bifolio, which I’ll call Q19A (f100+f101). These container tops all appear to have been filled in with faded light yellow paint, that I think is typical of the earliest stages of construction; there is no sign of vertical parallel hatching; some have rows of dots around them; all are very simple.

Q19B containers

Contrast the preceding Q19A containers (f100+f101) with the Q19B containers (f99+f102) bound around them. These containers start simple (in fact, almost exactly as simple as all the Q19A containers), but quickly grow in complexity. Rows of dots ‘inside’ the container neck on f99 morph into vertical parallel hatching by f102r1: while the parallel hatching starts by yielding to the surface of a liquid in the container (f102r1), before finally going all the way down the neck of the container on f102v2:

Q15 containers

More than a decade ago, I argued that Q15 was almost certainly intended to have been read after Q19. This was because there is an ever-increasing complexity to the depictions of containers in both quires, growing from simple open-topped containers at the start of Q19 (as above) to Byzantine (and almost impossible to actually construct) containers by the end of Q15.

You can see the direct visual continuity between the last page of Q19 (f102v) and the first page of Q15 (f88r) here (clearly these two were overpainted by different people, using different quality inks and indeed paint strokes):

Voynich Manuscript, f102v jars placed next to f88r jars

Q15 has only one open-topped container (top left of f88r, right at the start of the quire), while all Q15’s other containers appear to have lids, again supporting the idea that this top left container marks a kind of hand-over point between Q19 and Q15:

Here we can see full-height vertical parallel hatching inside the container neck (as per the hatching on f102v2), yet another indication that Q15 should probably be read as following Q19B.

Pipe evolution

I believe the way that these pipes are drawn may well be telling us a story about how the manuscript was constructed, e.g. the order of construction (Q19A, then Q19B, then Q15). We’ll use this basic model shortly as a lens to take a fresh look at the nine rosette page’s pipe drawings.

Furthermore, I think it would be interesting to look again at the text patterns on the (Currier A) pharma pages to see if they too follow some kind of evolutionary path mirroring the pipe evolution sequence. The pipes would seem to predict that Herbal A -> Q19A -> Q19B -> Q15.

Marginalia container

We can use our new micro-model to take another look at the container that is part of the f66r marginalia:

Here we can see the hint of sketchy dots or vertical hatching going down to a painted liquid surface, which would seem to date the marginalia to around the time of the Q19A / Q19B writing phases.

Oddly, f66r is a Currier B page: which would seem to imply that the Currier B on f66r may well have been written before the Currier A on the Q19B bifolio. Something to think about, then.

The NW rosette pipes

OK, so now we’re ready to move onto the nine rosette page (I’ll leave the odd pipes in Q13A and the Pisces/Aries tubs for another day, this is already too long a post).

Let’s start with the single set of pipes in the NW rosette:

It shouldn’t be hard to see that these pipes have a fair few drawing issues. For a start, the pipe ends are circles, not perspective-style ovals. Also, you can see traces of faint yellow paint inside the circles (none of the other pipes have this). It also looks to me as though the dark areas in the middle have been added over the top of the blue paint. And yet the blue paint on the top left circle seems to have been painted on top of the inner circle.

Further, there are no parallel markings or rows of dots on the inside of the pipes. I’m also not at all clear about the codicological relationship between the blue and yellow paint: I suspect the faint yellow paint was put down first, and then the blue on top at a different time.

Compare these with a typical cluster of pipes from the central rosette:

Here, there’s no colour in the pipes at all: there’s (faint) evidence of parallel hatching down the inner back wall of the pipe. The rear pipes of the group are occluded by the dominant central pipe: there are rows of dots along the outside of most of the pipes, just below the front edge of the top rim. The side edges of the pipes are also lined up well with the side edges of the top rims.

It may not be a comfortable starting point, but I can’t easily equate the pipes attached to the NW rosette with the pipes attched to the central rosette. My belief is therefore that the five circles in the NW rosette were originally drawn as free-standing circles (and please don’t ask me what this pattern means, because I don’t know), and that the pipe bodies (and the five central dark areas inside the circular ends, to make them resemble pipe tops) connecting them to the rosette were added afterwards.

Moreover, I suspect that the bodging to the NW rosette’s circles to turn them into pipes was done around the time of the Q19A (simple container layer), while the sophisticated ‘fantasia’ pipes added to the central rosette were probably added after the Q19B/Q15 container layer.

I think this also implies that the pipes all around the central rosette don’t have any actual meaning, but were rather added to try to draw attention away from the five fake pipes in the NW rosette. So, of all the pipework drawings on the nine rosette page, only the five circles (at most) had some kind of actual meaning, while the rest of the pipework there would seem to be decoration and/or distraction.

The other story this seems to be telling is that there was not a simple do-a-single-section-and-then-move-on approach to the construction of the Voynich Manuscript: rather, that multiple layers were added and updated at different times, i.e. with a somewhat more reflective and adaptive mindset.

That is, it would seem that the VMs was not a simple fire-and-forget project, but instead something that involved a lot of thought and practical finessing over a period of time. Quite why it needed so much refinement and empirical subtlety I have no idea: but it is what it is.

Wolkenband Layering

If we look at the bridge between the N rosette and the central rosette, I think we can see at least one type of layering quite clearly:

And no, I don’t think that these are simply an artifact of the scribe sharpening his or her quill, or starting a fresh batch of iron gall ink. I’ll specifically highlight the two layers here:

That is, I think that the original outside edge of the central rosette was the wolkenband ‘cloud’ motif (which is, after all, what wolkenbanden signified, i.e. a kind of liminal edge between levels or worlds): and that the pipes around the central rosette were added as part of a separate phase.

This would mean that the central rosette started out as essentially just the exploding onion domes and the wolkenband outer ring: everything else there would seem to be surplus decoration. The north-west rosette too would seem to have originally contained be little more than a series of 37 crescent moons, plus a mysterious set of five circles outside it. (Note that the blue contact transfers near the centre of the NW rosette appear to me to have come from the SW rosette, rather than from a facing herbal or pharma page etc.)

Please understand that I don’t know why any of this should be, I’m merely documenting what I find.

26Dec 2018

Magnus Pharao Hansen vs the Nahuatl Hydra…

by nickpelling ⋅ 72 Comments

In a recent blog post, anthropologist and linguist Magnus Pharao Hansen takes on the Voynich Nahuatl monster constructed by Tucker, Talbert and Janick. Having written a dissertation “Nahuatl Nation” on “the political roles of the Nahuatl language in Mexico and beyond” in 2016, Hansen sounds like someone well equipped for this particular battle. So what does he think?

Hansen helpfully lists the main problems as he sees them, starting with the quality of the actual scholarship supporting the venture:

The most nefarious problem is that it is pseudo-rigorous – that is it, it works hard to give the appearance of being rigorous scholarship while in fact it is not at all. They cite lots of serious scholarship, and mostly they cite it correctly, but nevertheless all the citations are used only for circumstantial evidence. As soon as we look at the concrete examples and the readings they are unsupported by this evidence and rests on pure speculation – often uninformed speculation.

But this is just peanuts to space, as Douglas Adams once wrote. For Hansen, the hugest problem is simply that T/T/J’s supposed Nahuatl readings make no sense to him whatsoever:

For me the best problem, best because it is so solid that it clearly invalidates the entire endeavor, is the fact that none of the proposed readings are valid – hardly a single one of the proposed words actually read like a bona fide Nahuatl word.
Many of them are completely alien to Nahua phonological structure. And to be honest I am surprised that the scholars haven’t found it to be odd that a few of the letters are so frequent that they appear in almost all words – for example more than half of the proposed plant names (and names of the nude ladies they call “nymphs”) start with the letter that they read as /a/ – that would be very odd in a natural language, unless the a was a very frequent grammatical prefix (which it isn’t in Nahuatl).

Even so, Hansen pursues the logical thread through to the end by trying to use the supposed ‘key’ supplied in T/T/J’s 2018 book to turn Voynich text into proper Nahuatl, to see where this led. And he ended up no less disappointed by what he found there:

Finally, as I read the example it bothered me that there is a certain repetitiveness in the deciphered text, the same letters seem to occur very frequently in combinations with specific other letters. This is not usually the case for natural languages – but very frequent in something like glossolalia of the baby-speech “lalala balala malalaba”- type.

So, there you have it. There isn’t anything in Tucker, Talbert and Janick’s oeuvre that actually links Voynichese to Nahuatl in any workable way. Next!

22Dec 2018

The Improbable World of Beale Cipher B1…

by nickpelling ⋅ 2 Comments

In many ways, Beale Cipher B1 is a lot like the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher, insofar as they both have what seem to be direct predecessor homophonic ciphertexts (B2 and Z408) that are very publicly solved: yet we seem unable to exploit both ciphertexts’ apparent similarities in both system and presentation to their respective parent.

At the same time, it’s easy to list plenty of good reasons why Beale Cipher B1 has proved hard to crack (even relative to B2), e.g. its very large proportion of homophones, the high likelihood of transcription errors, etc. Combining just these two would seem to be enough to push B1 out of the reach of current automatic homophone crackers, even (sorry Jarlve) the very capable AZdecrypt.

But in many ways, that’s the easy side of the whole challenge: arguably the difficult side is working out why B1’s ciphertext is so darned improbable. This is what I’ve been scratching my head about for the last few months.

Incremental Series

I posted a few days ago about the incremental sequences in B1 and B3 pointed out by Jarlve, i.e. where the index values increased (or indeed decrease) in runs. Jarlve calculated the (im)probability of this in B1 as 4.61 sigma (pretty unlikely), B2 = 2.72 sigma (unlikely, but not crazily so) and B3 = 9.86 sigma (hugely unlikely).

Why should this be the case? On the one hand, I can broadly imagine the scenario loosely described by Jim Gillogly where an encipherer is pulling random index values from the same table of homophones used to construct B2, but where the randomness sometimes degenerates into sweeping across or down the table (depending on which way round it was written out), and that this might (somehow) translate into a broadly positive incrementality (in the case of B1).

But this kind of asks more questions than it asks, unfortunately.

Gillogly / Hammer Sequences

Surely anyone who has read more than just the mere surface details of the Beale Ciphers will know of the mysterious Gillogly strings in Beale Cipher B1 (that were in fact discussed at length by both him and Carl Hammer).

On the one hand, finding strings in broadly alphabetic sequence within the resulting plaintext (if you apply B2’s codebook to B1’s index numbers) would seem to be a very improbable occurrence.

And yet the direct corollary of this is that the amount of information stored in those alphabetic sequences is very small indeed: indeed, it’s close to zero.

One possible explanation is that those alphabet sequences are nothing more than nulls: and in fact this essentially the starting point for Gillogly’s dissenting opinion, i.e. that the whole B1 ciphertext is a great big null / hoax.

Alternatively, I’ve previously speculated that we might be looking here at some kind of keyword ‘peeking’ through the layers of crypto, i.e. where “abcdefghiijklmmnohp” would effectively be flagging us the keyword used to reorder the base alphabet. For all that, B1 would still be no more than a “pure” homophonic cipher, DoI notwithstanding. As a sidenote, I’ve tried a number of experiments to use parts (e.g. reliable parts, and only some letters) of the B2 codebook to ‘reduce’ the number of homophones used by the B1 ciphertext to try to finesse it to within reach of AZdecrypt-style automatic cracking, but with no luck so far. Just so you know!

I’ve also wondered recently whether the abcd part might simply be a distraction, while the homophone index of each letter (e.g. 1st A -> 1, 2nd A -> 2, 3rd A -> 3, etc) might instead be where the actual cipher information is. This led me to today’s last piece of improbability…

The Problem With jklm…

Here’a final thing about the famous alphabetic Gillogly string that’s more than a bit odd. If you take…

the B1 index (first column)
map it to the slightly adjusted DOI numbering used in the B2 ciphertext (second column, hence 195 -> 194)
read off the adjusted letter from the DoI (third column, i.e. “abcdefghiijklmmnohp”)
print out the 0-based index of that homophone (fourth column, i.e. “0” means “the first word beginning with this specific letter in the DoI”)
and print out how many times that letter appears in the DoI

…you get the following table:

  147 ->  147 -> a -> 16 /166
  436 ->  436 -> b -> 12 / 48
  195 ->  194 -> c ->  7 / 53
  320 ->  320 -> d -> 10 / 36
   37 ->   37 -> e ->  2 / 37
  122 ->  122 -> f ->  1 / 64
  113 ->  113 -> g ->  1 / 19
    6 ->    6 -> h ->  0 / 78
  140 ->  140 -> i ->  5 / 68
    8 ->    8 -> i ->  1 / 68
  120 ->  120 -> j ->  0 / 10
  305 ->  305 -> k ->  0 /  4
   42 ->   42 -> l ->  0 / 34
   58 ->   58 -> m ->  0 / 28
  461 ->  461 -> m ->  7 / 28
   44 ->   44 -> n ->  1 / 19
  106 ->  106 -> o ->  7 /144
  301 ->  301 -> h ->  7 / 78  [everyone thinks this one is wrong!]
   13 ->   13 -> p ->  0 / 60

What I find strange about this is not only that the “jklm” sequence is in perfect alphabetic order, but also that its letters are all the 0th instance of “jklm” in the DoI. To me, this seems improbable in quite a different way. (Perhaps Dave Oranchak and Jarlve will now both jump in to tell me there’s actually a 1 in 12 chance of this happening, and I shouldn’t get so excited.)

The reason I find this extremely interesting is that it specifically means that the jklm sequence contains essentially zero information: the B2-codebook-derived letters themselves are in a pure alphabetic sequence (and so can be perfectly predicted from letter to adjacent letter), while each letter is referred to the index of the very first word-initial occurrence in the DoI.

This means (I think) that there isn’t enough information encoded inside the jklm sequence to encipher anything at all: which I suspect may actually prove to be a very important cryptologic lemma, in terms of helping us eliminate certain classes of (or attempts at) solutions.

18Dec 2018

“Voynich Botanica 1-66”, mysterious beauty products…

by nickpelling ⋅ 11 Comments

Logistically, it might be just too late for Santa to swoosh these under your Christmas tree, but I found out yesterday that Italian perfume house Pinalli has just started selling a range of perfumes and related products under the brand “Voynich Botanica 1-66“.

If you hadn’t already guessed (and I must admit it wasn’t immediately obvious to me), the “1-66” in the name actually refers to the folios of the Voynich Manuscript containing the first large herbal section (well… Herbal A and Herbal B, to be precise). Here’s what their fragrant PR flacks have to say about it (translated from the Italian):

Voynich is an advanced cosmetic brand that combines naturalness with high performance to bring to life formulations strictly free of Silicones, Parabens, Peg, Sles, Mineral Oils, Artificial Colors, with over 98% of natural ingredients. Voynich uses a scientific laboratory that for over 30 years has been studying, developing and producing cutting-edge formulas using the most advanced technologies and the highest quality standards.

The Voynich manuscript is an ancient illustrated code from the fifteenth century. Section I (folios 1-66) called “Botanica” contains countless illustrations of plants and flowers. Voynich products are inspired by the charm that surrounds this book, the passion for botanical research and respect for what Nature gives us.

So what do these look like? There are currently three to choose from:

You can even buy them all in a nice Christmas gift box:

Obviously they’re leaving the plants in the Pharma section for next year’s wave of products, and maybe the bathing nymphs of Q13 for a future spa range of shower and bath products. 😉

Well, they are what they are, I guess. But regardless, may Father Christmas fill your stockings with fine mysteries this year!

16Dec 2018

More notes on the Beale Ciphers…

by nickpelling ⋅ 2 Comments

I’ve recently been trawling through lots of sources of information on the Beale Ciphers, and thought it might be nice to dump a whole load of thoughts in a single place, rather than sprawl these out over 4-5 posts. So here goes…

Clayton Hart

The suggestion that the Beale Ciphers might be three genuine ciphertexts but that the Beale Papers could simultaneously just be fantastical meanderings woven around those ciphertexts is not original to me (and I never claimed it was). However, what I didn’t realise until the last few days was that Clayton Hart also wondered that this might have been true, possibly as far back as 1903:

Clayton Hart actually met with James Ward and his son, who both, in 1903, confirmed the content of his pamphlet. In particular he states: “I have wondered if Ward might have written his manuscript based upon some figures he found, or made up; and yet, we have the word of Ward, his son, and friends to the contrary. Inquiry among some aged neighbors of Ward showed the high respect they had for him, and brought forth the statement that Ward would never practice deception.”

Interesting, hmmm?

C3 and high numbers

Another Beale page on the same angelfire.com site (though watch out for those pesky pop-unders there, *sigh*) demonstrates that the high numbers in B3 are concentrated very strongly in the second half of the ciphertext:

The image is credited to researcher Simon Ayrinhac, who has a picture from 2006 or earlier here:

Ayrinhac’s French discussion on the Beale Ciphers is also online, though as it doesn’t include the above diagram, there may well be further Beale analyses of his elsewhere online (which I haven’t yet found).

Declaration of Independence

One of Stephen M. Matyas Jr.’s major contributions to Beale Cipher research is his extensive collection of printed versions of the Declaration of Independence from 1776-1825, which is available both in printed form and online on his website, e.g. his checklist and addenda PDFs (both highly recommended).

This has led him to build up what I think is a really solid reasoning chain about the Declaration of Independence used in the (solved) Beale Cipher B2. For example, as far as the word “unalienable” goes, Matyas writes:

Many, in fact, most Declarations printed before 1823 contain the word “unalienable.” Thus, it may be surmised that Beale’s Declaration contained the word “unalienable,” not “inalienable,” and therefore that the two Declarations are different and taken from two different source works (probably books).

In Chapter 6 of his book “Beale Treasure Story: The Hoax Theory Deflated” (according to this page, but more about Matyas’ books another day), Matyas further writes about the word “meantime”:

Beale’s DOI contains the variant wording “institute a new government” at word location 154 and the more common wording “mean time” at word location 520. (The pamphlet’s DOI uses the word “meantime” (one word), and this should be changed to “mean time” (two words) so that ten words occur between numbered words 500 and 510 instead of the present nine words. The printer of Ward’s pamphlet may have unwittingly combined the two words.)

So, the first big takeaway from Matyas’ careful analysis of all the pre-1826 printed copies of the Declaration of Independence is that the DoI that was used to create B2 was, he asserts, not an obscure and wonky variatn, but instead a genuine mainstream copy of the DoI. Matyas says that of the 327 printed versions he was aware of, 26 were entirely consistent with the cipher: and he believes that the one used to encipher B2 was from a book (rather than, say, from a newspaper).

His second big point is that some of the errors that affected the DoI numbering in the pamphlet seem to have arisen because the author of the pamphlet included a version of the DoI that he had adapted / reconstructed to better fit the one used to turn B2’s decrypted plaintext into its ciphertext. As Matyas puts it, “The misnumbered DOI in Ward’s pamphlet is the result of the anonymous author’s best attempt to simulate Beale’s key. He did a pretty good job of it, although some might disagree.”

From all this, I think it is clear that anyone genuinely trying to decrypt B1 and B3 should very probably be working forward from one of Matyas’ 26 remaining compatible DoI texts rather than backwards from the DoI version given in the pamphlet. This is a tricky point with code-breaking ramifications I’ll return to in a follow-up post.

Matyas’s Reconstruction

With the above in mind, Matyas moves on to show the sequence of steps that he believes was taken to construct Beale Cipher B2, which I reduce to bullet-point format here:

1. “[I]t is supposed that [the encipherer] copied the words in the DOI to work sheets.”
2. “He then carefully counted off groups of ten words, placing a vertical mark at the end of each group of 10 words.”
3. “Finally, he constructed a key by extracting the initial letters from the words on his work sheets, and arranged them in a table with 10 letters per line and 101 lines.”
4. The encipherer “made three clerical errors”:
(a) “a word was accidentally omitted after word 241 and before word 246,”
(b) “a word was accidentally omitted after word 630 and before word 654, and”
(c) “a word was accidentally omitted after word 677 and before word 819.”
5. The encipherer “made one additional clerical error; he accidently skipped over 10 words in the work sheets immediately following word 480, thus omitting an entire line of 10 letters in the key.”

Matyas believes that because of these errors, when the anonymous author of the Beale Papers pamphlet came to reconstruct and number his own Declaration of Independence, he adapted the numbering and wording to better fit the plaintext he had worked out.

02Dec 2018

Seventy years of the Somerton Man mystery…

by nickpelling ⋅ 96 Comments

Seventy years ago this weekend, a man’s body was found on Somerton Beach just south-west of Adelaide: our inability to identify this “Somerton Man” or even to reconstruct any significant part of his life has turned him into one of South Australia’s favourite cold cases. His unexplained death has inspired books, novels, TV documentaries and countless web pages and blog posts: behind this mini-industry is a panoply of breathless conspiracy theories, ranging from spurned suicidal lover to Russian rocket spy to inter-state car criminal (as if anyone would even consider such a thing, hrrmmmh).

On this day, though, I think it’s time to take a rest from that whole treadmill, and to look at the Somerton Man from a quite different angle.

History, Evidence, Disappointment

Cold cases are, almost definition, historical: so to “do history” on them, we need to select both historical evidence and a historical methodology / mindset.

But even though social historians love nothing more than diaries, journals, or even tax records of ordinary people, for the Somerton Man we only have what one might call tertiary social history evidence – incidental objects of low social signification such as cigarettes, laundry tags, chewing gum, combs, and (what I would categorise as) a fairly random assortment of men’s clothes. Can we read social history clues and cues to locate the Somerton Man in a social milieu? People have tried this trick, for sure: but I think it is fair to say that this has yielded very little of use.

Similarly, even though political historians tend to work from a more high-end (yet slim) frame of reference (from Chifley to Churchill), it hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to read the mysterious unreadable note attributed to the Somerton Man as implying some kind of espionage-centric back-story for him: a Russian spy scouting out South Australia’s uranium secrets, or defecting from some international conference. Yet the supposed ‘tradecraft’ evidence holding this aloft is something that I’ve never found any genuine substance to.

Finally, despite the South Australian police’s loss of almost all its evidence (Gerry Feltus had only a small folder of fragments to work with), hundreds of newspaper articles on Trove plus the detailed text of inquest reports have yielded a fine factual slurry for researchers to sieve and then rake over in search of That Single Golden Nugget Of Information That Turns Everything Upside Down. Yet even the massed eyeballs of the Internet’s army of DIY forensic historians – sometimes derided as armchair detectives, but who have actually managed to uncover all manner of interesting evidence – have struggled to gain any significant kind of purchase on the Somerton Man’s slippy upwards slopes. What was his profession? What was his nationality? Satisfactory answers remain out of reach for even such (apparently basic) questions as “if the Somerton Man wasn’t “T. Keane”, why did his suitcase have T. Keane’s tie and underwear?”

In short, none of the historical hats we have worn when we try to understand the Somerton Man seems to have had the (mythical) power of a Holmesian deerstalker: and is the game even afoot in the way many (most?) people think it really ought to be? The answer would seem to be that it is not.

As of December 2018, I don’t believe that we have any genuine idea who the Somerton Man was, or precisely why he died (i.e. mishap, murder, or suicide), or where he had come from, or even what he was doing in Adelaide at all. For all of these, we have well-stocked warehouses of might-possibly-have-beens, for sure: but this is a situation only someone wanting to weave and embellish a story around the scanty facts could be truly satisfied with. Anyone who wants to know what happened to lead up to the Somerton Man’s death is, for now, likely to be in a state of disappointment.

Random Clothes

Putting all that accumulated historical disappointment to one side, I actually think we are very close to being able to reconstruct a little about the Somerton Man’s life and times in a useful way: and even if the precise details remain murky (and may remain so for some time), I suspect that there’s still a lot we can now say.

For a start, his clothes were not from a single shop or town or even country (some were American, some were Australian): even his shoes and slippers were different sizes. Others may disagree, but I don’t think this sartorial randomness can be read as a sign of affluence or of taste, or even of implying he was on some kind of undercover operation. Rather, to my eyes it strongly indicates that he was just plain poor – his clothing has all the hallmarks of charity donations, of Seaman’s Missions, of gifts by charity’s hospital visitors.

From all this, I strongly suspect that he, like so many others in the years immediately following WW2, was a recent immigrant to the country (he had air mail stickers in his suitcase), and quite probably not a legal one (no official record of him could be found). Exactly where he originally came from I can’t say: I suspect that the faded tan on his legs may imply that he had earlier that year been working outdoors, perhaps riding horses on a farm. Remember that Paul Lawson stated:

On looking at the deceased legs I am of the opinion that he was used to wearing high heel riding boots. I form that opinion because the muscles of his legs were formed high up behind the knees, similar to the muscles of a woman who wears high heeled shoes. [Gerry Feltus, “The Unknown Man”, p.85.]

I should also note what John Burton Cleland wrote about the air mail stickers:

Air-mail stickers in suitcase – corresponded with some one at a distance – other State more likely than Britain (special air-mail letter forms usually used for latter).

All the same, my current suspicion is that he arrived by surreptitious means (e.g. using fake papers) in Australia around October 1948, perhaps from the United States, perhaps staying in New Zealand for a period of time (where the Rubaiyat seems to have come from) en route, and – like Charles Mikkelsen – was corresponding with one or more people there. But all of that remains just a guess.

The Known Man

Who was the Somerton Man? Apart from the nurse Jessica Harkness / Jo Thomson (who told her daughter that she knew who the Somerton Man was, but wouldn’t tell the police at the time or even Gerry Feltus decades after the event), not a single person has admitted to knowing who he was. Nobody at all! As for me, I don’t believe for a New York second that the Somerton Man somehow entered Australia and made his way to Somerton Beach to die without encountering en route a whole load of people – fifty to a hundred at a minimum – who would subsequently recognize him if they wanted to. And so I think that the title of Gerry Feltus’s book – “The Unknown Man” – belies what I think will prove to be a difficult truth to swallow about the Somerton Man: that a whole set of people knew who he was, but for broadly the same reason chose to say nothing.

The Italian word for this is omertà – a code of silence surrounding Mafia criminal activities, along with a shared, mutual refusal to give any evidence to the police. (Even former police.) Everyone knows what happens to squealers, even the KGB: even though the CIA says the story about captured double agent Pyotr Popov being thrown alive into a furnace isn’t actually true, it is very likely still presented as if it were true to GRU new recruits, to persuade them of the value of “omertà-ski”. And let’s not pretend that the Novichok attack never happened, right?

Anyway, when Gerry Feltus had worked out the name of the (unnamed) nurse whose phone number was written on the specific Rubaiyat connected to the slip of paper in the dead man’s pocket, he interviewed her several times. Yet even though, as a retired police officer, he knew full well that she told him nothing of the truth surrounding the dead man that she was clearly aware of, he never really twigged why that was the case. For me, though, the reason for her prolonged silence seems all too obvious: that she was aware of the omertà surrounding the dead man, and wasn’t prepared to be the first one to say That Which Must Not Be Spoken out loud.

The presence of an Italian organized crime syndicate in Melbourne is something that became all too apparent in the 1960s, with the spate of Victoria Market murders being triggered (literally) by the accession wars following the deaths (by natural causes) of crime godfather Domenico “The Pope” Italiano and his enforcer Antonio “The Toad” Barbara in 1962. This crime group was described at the time in a secret report by John T. Cusack as follows:

It is frequently referred to by its adherents as the Society. Some, particularly outsiders, call it mafia. Actually it is not mafia. The latter is exclusively Sicilian in origin and membership. Since the Society in Australia is exclusively Calabrian, it is obviously a derivation of the ancient Calabrian Secret Criminal Society known as the L’Onorata Societa (The Honoured Society), ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian dialect for The Honoured Society), also referred to by some as Fibia.

From my perspective, the most powerful explanation for the silence surrounding the Somerton Man would be not that nobody knew who he was, but instead that he was some kind of footsoldier in a criminal society (I would predict Melbourne, given that the Melbourne train arrived in Adelaide early). I suspect this was (in 1948) not the ‘Ndrangheta, but rather home-grown gangsters The Combine (more on that in a moment). More broadly, my inference is that lots of people knew exactly who he was, but deliberately chose to say nothing. Gerry Feltus certainly knew he was being spun a line by Jo Thomson, but perhaps he will live to be surprised by how many people knew who exactly “The (Un)known Man” was.

I hope that some day soon someone will come forward – even anonymously, seventy years on – to defy the code of silence and finally tell even a small part of the Somerton Man’s story.

Daphne Page

What was it like to deal with omertà in Australia in the late 1940s? Fortunately, we have a pretty good idea. Jo Thomson’s (soon-to-be) husband Prosper (George) Thomson got involved in a court case where he was wedged between a lady called Daphne Page and a dangerous Melbourne individual who he would not name in court. The judge seems to have taken a hearty dislike to everyone involved, somewhat reluctantly judging the case in George’s favour but ordering him to pay the costs.

From this, we know that “Early in December [1947] he [Thomson] went to Melbourne to sell a car for another man.” When a cheque from the “other man” bounced, Thomson was unable to do anything about it: and so refused to pass on the “black market balance” (that he hadn’t received) of the failed transaction to Daphne Page back in Adelaide. Page then told him she’d get her whole family to pretend that she’d instead loaned him £400 and would take him to court. In the end, the judge thought that Thomson’s (who had welched on a black market deal with Page when the Melbourne crim he’d sold to had welched on his half of a deal, and then told her to forget all about it) poor behaviour was more legally justifiable than Page’s poor behaviour: but it’s hard to feel grotesquely sympathetic towards either.

But even so, that’s what can easily happen when things as simple as buying or selling a car for its actual value are, thanks to the Price Commission, effectively pushed out onto the black market and criminalized. According to the Barrier Miner 15th June 1948, p.8:

Men in the trade said honest secondhand car dealers had almost been forced out of business during the war. Records showed that 90 per cent of all used car sales were on a friend-to-friend basis and they never passed through the trade.

So: the man the nurse Jo Thomson was living with was directly connected to dangerous Melbourne criminals who operated under a code of silence (George Thomson wouldn’t name the man in court). This is not a conjecture, this is just a consequence of being a garage proprietor and car dealer in 1948, a time when 90% of car buying and selling was done on the black market. Thomson expressed no shame or sorrow for having tried to broker a black market car deal between Daphne Page and Melbourne criminals (even if it went wrong), because that is what he had to do to stay in the car business: you might as well have asked a dog not to bark as ask him to change his ways.

The Lonsdale Street Baccarat School

There’s a nice 1947 introduction to Melbourne’s gambling scene here.

Interestingly, the baccarat school on Lonsdale Street (a part of Melbourne long associated with brothels) was raided and shut down two weeks after the Somerton Man’s death. An article in the Melbourne Argus dated 16th December 1948 runs:

BACCARAT DENS BROKEN, POLICE CLAIM

Big city school closed

WITH the closing of a notorious school in Lonsdale street, city, on Tuesday night, gaming police claim they have at last broken the baccarat racket.
The school was the second last of the big games which yielded promoters thousands of pounds in the last five years.
Police say that the only other school of any consequence is operating at Elwood. They are confident this will be closed in the near future.
On Tuesday night the gaming squad served a man in Lonsdale st with papers informing him that his premises have been declared a common gaming house.
Previously, other premises in Lonsdale st and also in Swanston st, city, were also “declared.”

ENRICHED CRIMINALS

Sergeant A. Biddington, gaming police chief, said yesterday that the fight to beat the racket had been long and hard.
There were 14 schools in Melbourne two and a half years ago, all run by desperate characters. Huge sums changed hands nightly, enriching many well-known criminals.
In the last 12 months, he said, baccarat schools were raided nightly at two-hourly intervals.
Not only were the “bosses” upset but players, many of them respectable citizens and inveterate gamblers, became frightened.
The result was that attendances dwindled and some schools closed down for lack of patrons.

“COCKATOOS” BUSY

Sgt Biddington explained that it was difficult to obtain evidence against the schools. Usually they were on the top floors of buildings, and ‘cockatoos’ were able to give a warning before police ascended stairs and made a raid.
Sgt Biddington added that by closing the baccarat dens, police will break up some of the city’s worst consorting spots for criminals.

Incidentally, the (brief, and probably not 100% truthful) memoirs of Melbourne baccarat school owner Robert Walker that ran in the Melbourne Argus in 1954 is on Trove, e.g. here. In another installment, Walker describes entering the Lonsdale Street baccalat school, on his way to see The Gambler:

To get to the club in Lonsdale st., you walk up three flights of stone steps and knock on a big fireproof steel door.

I did that, and a small trapdoor was opened.

A few minutes after doing this that day, Walker got shot in the leg by the doorman (though he lived to tell the tale). But that’s another story.

Where To From Here?

If the Somerton Man was (as was claimed) associated with the Lonsdale Street baccarat school around 1945 or so, it should be possible to piece together a list of names associated with it from the Police Gazettes and newspaper articles of the day, and then rule out all those who lived past 1st December 1948, or died before then. It might well be that if we can follow this through to its logical conclusion, we would find ourselves with a very short list of names indeed – maybe three or four. What will we then find?

As always, there’s a good chance that this will be yet another Somerton Man-style dead end, a “big fireproof steel door” at the top of the stairs that we cannot get through. But whatever the Somerton Man’s reason for being in Adelaide on the day he died, perhaps this thread offers us a glimpse not of what he was doing, but of the life he was living.

For he was a real person, living his own life in his own way, even if that isn’t how we choose to live our own lives, and that’s something that tends to get marginalized: while people who treat him purely as a historical puzzle to be solved or to give them ‘closure’ in some sense aren’t looking to remember him for what he was, but for what resolving the questions around him can do for them now. Today, though, I simply want to remember the Somerton Man, and to try to imagine (however imperfectly) the life he lived and lost.

29Nov 2018

A Voynich Manuscript pincer attack on Cancer…

by nickpelling ⋅ 46 Comments

Every couple of years, I wake up in the middle of the night with an all-new version of The Big Idea – you know, the one that’s finally going to unlock the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. These unstoppable small-hours plans are normally formed from the soup of things slooshing around in my head, but arranged in a pincer movement attacking the problem on two fronts (i.e. with the idea of trapping it in the middle).

As an aside, it would be a bit of a shock to me if the Voynich Manuscript’s contents turn out to be something wildly unexpected, like a 200-page Swahili ant-summoning ritual, or a book about various weird vegetables that magically cure diabetes (as if anyone would randomly send emails about that, ho hum). :-/ Similarly, I would find it a big surprise if the writing / enciphering system were to turn out to be something we hadn’t collectively considered at length and in detail already, though in some cunning combination that we hadn’t quite grasped.

More generally, I would summarize my overall position as being that, without much doubt, there is a high probability that we are much closer than we think to the Voynichian chequered flag. Even though there are many nuttier-than-a-fruitcake researchers out there (no, I’m not referring to you, dear reader, that would be quite absurd), a huge amount of excellent research has been done, a very large part of which will almost certainly be correct.

And so, swimming against the pessimistic epistemological tide that seems to prevail these days, my overall judgement is that we shouldn’t – very probably – need to know much more than we already do in order to crack through the Voynich’s walls: just a little more may well do the trick. In fact, it may even be that a single solid fact might be enough to open the floodgates. 🙂

This Week’s Big Idea

And so it was that I woke up at 2am a few nights ago with (inevitably) a new Big Idea for cracking the Voynich. And given that my last post was about the diffusion of vernacular Cisiojanus mnemonics, I guess few readers here will be surprised that the main part of the idea was that the 30-odd labels per zodiac sign might well be the syllables of a vernacular Cisiojanus.

Why vernacular? Well, even though Latin Cisiojani had been known since the 12th century or so, vernacular Cisiojani were novel and unknown even in the mid-fifteenth century, and so one might well be a good candidate for something someone compiling a book of secrets might well want to conceal / hide / obfuscate / encrypt (delete as appropriate).

At the same time, I don’t believe that Voynichese can be enciphered or obfuscated Latin, because the way Voynichese seems abbreviated / truncated seems incompatible with Latin (where endings contain so much of the meaning). But if we are instead looking at a linguistically diffused Cisiojanus (such as Italian or French), it’s perhaps a different kettle of (cray)fish.

In parallel, the Voynich zodiac section offers us numerous more interesting clues to work with: for instance, the three crowned nymphs, of which the red-crowned nymph on the Leo page is arguably the earliest.

I’ve previously proposed that one or more of these crowns might be flagging a feast day with personal significance to the author. (For example, for a Florentine such as Antonio Averlino, the most important day in the calendar was the Festa di San Giovanni, the Feast of St John the Baptist.) As such, we might also look at the Voynich zodiac page for Cancer, which also has a crowned nymph, but where the crown looks to have been added later:

I previously mused whether this Cancer crown might have been a fake, designed to draw attention away from the real crown in Leo, but in retrospect this was a bit too harsh and reductive, even if the codicology is sound. Rather, these two crowns (and indeed the crowned nymph in Libra) may well have had different types of significance, added in separate codicological layers for separate reasons. Even if the idea of Antonio Averlino’s connection to Firenze is too strong for some of you, the connection between Italian Cisiojani and St John the Baptist may still be worth pursuing, as we’ll see next.

Nicola De Nisco’s Cisiojanus

In the same way that Jesus’ birthday is celebrated near the Winter Solstice (the shortest day of the year), St John the Baptist’s birthday is celebrated near the Summer Solstice (the longest day). And so it has been widely suggested that both attributed birthdays offered Christian hooks to hang pagan festivals from (and there seems to be no obvious reason in the Bible why John’s birthday should be celebrated then). Hence in many places in Europe (not just Firenze), the Feast of St John the Baptist was a three- or four-day long affair, arguably more akin to a pagan summer festival.

Hence if we suspect that the labelese text in the Voynich’s zodiac section is some kind of vernacular Cisiojanus, there should be plenty of good reasons why we should look for the Feast of St John the Baptist.

For June (which German calendars typically link with Cancer), De Nisco transcribes one 15th century Italian Cisiojanus as follows:

Nic.mar.cel.qui.bo.ni.dat.me.pri.mi.bar.na.an.ton.
Vi.ti.que.mar.pro.ta.si.san.ctus.io.bap.io.do.le.pe.pau

If we add in De Nisco’s corrections in square brackets, plus additional saints’ names courtesy of that most indispensable of publications, The American Ecclsiastical Review (1901), Vol. 24, plus an 1886 French book which gave me St Dorothy of Prussia), we get:

1. Nic — Nicomedes [original document has “Vic”]
2/3. mar.cel — Marcellus / Marcellinus
4. qui — St Quirino, Bishop of Sisak
5/6. bo.ni — Bonifacius
7. dat — ???
8. me — Medardus
9/10. pri.mi — Primus
11/12. bar.na — Barnabas
13/14. an.ton — Sant’Antonio da Padova
15/16. Vi.ti — Vitus
17. que —
18. mar — Marcus et Marcellianus [original document has “Nar”]
19/20/21. pro.ta.si — Protasius (et Gervasius)
22/23/24/25. san.ctus.io.bap — St John the Baptist
26. io — Johannes (et Paulus)
27. do — (if this isn’t St Dorothy of Montau (Prussia), patron saint of the Teutonic Knights (from 1390) whose actual feast day should be 25th June, who was it? Thanks Helmut Winkler for pointing this out.)
28. le — Leo
29. pe — Petrus et Paulus
30. pau — Commemoratio Pauli

The presence of the much-contested St Dorothy of Prussia (a chronically-self-harming widow from near Gdansk, who was adopted in the 20th century by Catholics for Hitler, if you really want to know) gives us a hint not only to the German origins of this particular Cisiojanus, but also an earliest date (1390). Yet the presence of St Quirino perhaps hints at an itinerary via Hungary (the St Quirino with a 4th June feast died in Szombathely, whereas the St Quirino of Rome had an entirely different feast day): while, as De Nisco points out, the presence of the Feast of Sant’Antonio da Padova points very strongly to a Paduan Ciosiojanus adapter.

More importantly, you can see “san.ctus.io.bap” taking up four consecutive syllables in the Cisiojanus, a fragment of (almost-)plain text peeking through the jumble of syllable fragments that make up the rest. Moreover, the next syllable along is also “io” (for the feast of St John and St Paul), which might also be there for the finding.

All of which could offer an excellent crib for the plaintext lurking somewhere beneath Voynich’s labelese: so might we be able to find some echo of this in the Cancer labelese? Even more remarkably, might we be able to line up this phrase’s syllables with the labelese close to the crowned nymph in Cancer?

(As an aside, I hope you can see that this is the kind of connection that not only wakes Voynich researchers up in the night but also stops them from getting back to sleep.)

The “san.ctus.io.bap” Crib

Firstly, I offer up my own EVA transcription of the Voynich Cancer labels:

Outer ring (from 10:00 clockwise, just around from a gap at the left)

ykalairol
olkylaiin
olalsy
or.aiin.am
os.as.sheeen
otosaiin
opoiinoin.al.ain
ypaiin.aloly
oteey.daiin
oeeodaiin
ofsholdy
opoeey.okaiin

Central ring (from 10:00 clockwise)

olfsheoral
or.alkam
ytairal
oeeesaiin
ory
ochey.fydy
ofais.oeeesaly
ykairaiin.airal
okalar
orary
olaiin.olackhy

Inner ring (from 09:00 clockwise)

oletal
opalal
yfary
osaiisal
ytoar.shar
actho
aral

And then I offer up my thoughts: much as this whole idea got between me and my comfortable bed, I just can’t construct a sensible mapping (even with verbose cipher) between these labels and any of the Cisiojani I’ve seen, whether Latin, Italian, French or whatever.

But then again, I can’t sensibly map these labels to just about anything, language-wise: there’s no structure, or grammar, or variational consistency that offers a way of systematically parsing these labels into a system, let alone reading them. Even the characteristically labelese-like “oletal” / “opalal” / “okalar” / “olalsy” words (I’d perhaps also include “osaiisal”, “otosaiin”, “oeeesaiin” and “ytairal” in this group, and maybe even “ykalairol” and “olkylaiin” too) are only a minority of the thirty labels.

All of which isn’t to imply (as Richard SantaColoma is wont to say) that ‘this can only be a hoax’ (*sigh*), but rather that I think we’re missing something really big here, a rational connecting principle that would give these kind of labels a mutual structure and explanatory context that our theoretical crossbow bolts are flying a mile both over and past. For example, what is the way that we see “es” (411) much more than “er” (28), or “ir” (724) much more than “is” (62) really telling us? Why is almost every single instance of “ssh” not only at the start of a word, but also either at the start of a line or immediately to the right of an illustration in the text?

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