The Improbable World of Beale Cipher B1…

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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.

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

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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!

More notes on the Beale Ciphers…

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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.

Seventy years of the Somerton Man mystery…

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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.

Suggested Links to Melbourne

One story that appeared in the Adelaide News (26th January 1949) (and in the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Geraldton Guardian) suggested a connection between the Somerton Man and a Melbourne baccarat school:

Gamblers believe dead man was “nitkeeper”

Melbourne.- Two promininent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

Nitkeepers / cockatoos were basically lookout men, hired to stop police and undercover officers from getting inside the door: they were equally part of the street bookie’s world.

Gerry Feltus’s “The Unknown Man” (p.118) also included a cutting from the Mirror (no date given, but much later):

One Mirror “investigator” had more than just an idea to go on.

The Tamam Shud, he said, was more than just a page torn from a book.

It was the usual signature of a man who had twice stood trial for murder.

Every big baccarat player in post-war Melbourne knew who “Tamam Shud” was.

He was the enforcer!

In the hey day of a man called “Twist” he said and “Freddie The Frog” Harrison – himself executed – “Tamam Shud” was known and in [the] nether world of sly grog and illegal baccarat, feared.

Obviously the dead man had fallen afoul of the underworld and had been executed.

In fact, Melbourne detectives had investigated the same theory years before.

But this apparently promising lead had been a dead end.

Note that “Twist” (Jack Eric Twist) and Freddie “The Frog” Harrison (who was killed in 1959) were two of the five people who made up “The Combine”, controlling much of the organized crime in Melbourne in the years following WW2, via the Federated Ship Painters’ and Dockers’ Union. The others were Harold Nugent, Norman Bradshaw (AKA “Cornelius”), and Joseph Patrick “Joey” Turner (AKA “Monash”).

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.

A Voynich Manuscript pincer attack on Cancer…

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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?

The linguistic diffusion of Cisiojanus mnemonics…

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Even though (academic opinion has it that) the idea of a Cisiojanus feast-name mnemonic first appeared in Germany in the 12th Century and largely diffused there, there is no such thing as a single universal Cisiojanus. That is, most examples of Cisiojanus have local tweaks – local saints, local memorials, local feasts.

Bear in mind that Christianity in the Middle Ages was a much less centralized affair than it became in the sixteenth Century and beyond: medieval Rome was a dump (the Vatican’s fabulous Renaissance buildings had yet to be erected), and papal behaviour was often more political than pontifical.

And so it was that Christian practice was more of a patchwork, where feasts (major ones excepted) were determined locally by bishops, towns, councils, and even guilds. The various examples I posted here before meshed syllables from local saints’ names into the Cisiojanus meta-framework: there is a lot more work for historians to do in terms of mapping the “adaptation trees”.

Interestingly, though, the basic Cisiojanus template was sufficiently flexible that it was able to be adapted not just to different German-speaking regions, but also to completely different languages.

Given that I haven’t found any review article on this “linguistic diffusion” of Cisiojanus, all I can do us offer up a brief set of research notes on all the different language Cisiojanus variants I’ve run across, in the hope that these might offer a starting point in that direction.

German Cisiojanus literature

Just as an aside, the root of the modern Cisiojanus literature is, without doubt:

“Cisiojanus : Studien zur mnemonischen Literatur anhand des spätmittelalterlichen Kalendergedichts” (1974) by Rolf Max Kully, which appeared in “Zeitschrift: Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde”, Band (Jahr): 70 (1974), Heft 3-4.

Before Kully, one of the most influential papers was by P. Diels (1937), Der älteste polnische Cisiojanus.

This year, there was a paper “All Days Are Equal, but Some Days Are More Equal than Others: Late Medieval German Cisiojani and Their Structure of Time” by Silvan Wagner at IMC 2018, as part of the “Memorising Time: The Cisiojanus as a Complex Storage of Pre-Modern Memory” session.

English Cisiojanus literature

“A Unique English Cisioianus” (2005), by William H. Smith, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 18:2, pp.10-16. This covers Chapel Hill MS 522.

Scottish Cisiojanus literature

A Scoto-Irish Cisiojanus (1980), by Alexander Boyle, in Analecta Bollandiana, Volume 98, Issue 1-2, pp. 39-47. Boyle is discussing MS Laing III 21, folios 1-9: and refers back to a 1959 paper “Cisiojani Latini” by Oloph Edenius, which divides Cisiojanus manuscripts into two types – syllable-based (usually Latin) and word-based (usually vernacular).

Boyle has another article (with David McRoberts) called “A Hebridean Cisiojanus“, The Innes Review, Volume 21 Issue 2, Page 108-123.

Irish Cisiojanus literature

An Irish cisiojanus by William O’Sullivan, in Collectanea Hibernica No. 29 (1988), pp.7-13. I haven’t seen this fully, but fragments on Google make it seem as though O’Sullivan thinks Boyle and McRoberts got their Hebridean Cisiojanus wrong.

Italian Cisiojanus literature

Nicola De Nisco, a PhD student at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, uploaded Un inedito esemplare italiano di Cisioianus to academia.edu. This paper describes an Italian Cisiojanus that appears on the final page of “manoscritto ambrosiano + 93 sup.”, from the second half of the fifteenth century: it has a good bibliography.

De Nisco transcribes January as:

Sci.si.da.ia.nus.e.pi.si.bi.uen.pau.lim.fe.li.mar.an
Pri.sca.fab.ag.vim.cen.ti.pau.lus.cri.so.sto.mi.que.

For July (which has long been an interest of mine), the transcription runs:

Oc.pro.ces.no.dor.oc.ui.chi.li.fra.be.er.ma.co.di.post.al.
Ar.ga.mar.prax.mag.ab.crist.ia.an.na.pan.ta.le.on

Interestingly, De Nisco gave a presentation on “The Memory of Saints and His Stratifications: A Philological Approach to the Study of Italian Cisiojani” in IMC 2018, in the same session described above.

Hungarian Cisiojanus literature

There’s a Hungarian Cisiojanus described here, which goes far beyond the paltry limits of my tourist Hungarian.

Westjiddischer Cisiojanus literature

A fairly slim literature here, it has to be said, but Simon Neuberg (1999) “Aschkenasisches Latein. Ein westjiddischer Cisiojanus“, in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm, pp. 111–132.

French Cisiojanus literature

Here’s a webpage discussing a French Cisiojanus from circa 1500, courtesy of prolific Cisiojanus commentator Erik Drigsdahl. January looks like this:

En ian vier que les Roys ve nus sont
Glau me dit fre min mor font
An thoin boit le iour vin cent fois
Pol us en sont tous ses dois

A version of the same French rhyme was found in a 1514 pastedown (courtesy of a crowdsearch project!), according to this 2014 page.

Dutch Cisiojanus literature

There’s a mention (I believe) of a Dutch Cisiojanus in KB Brussel 15.659-61 by Theo Meder’s “Sprookspreker in Holland“.

Icelandic Cisiojanus literature

A 16th century Icelandic Cisiojanus is mentioned on footnote 18 of page 35 of the Saga book here: it says that the syllable ‘bla’ for St Blaise got inserted into the Cisiojanus in Guðbrandur Þorláksson’s (1576) “Bænabok med morgum godvm og nytsamligum bænum”. As a side note, I’ve been to plenty of presentations that would seem to celebrate St Blaise three times over. 😉

Diebold Lauber’s workshop and the knotty problem of necklines…

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The recent surge of Voynich research interest in Diebold Lauber’s workshop has come about thanks to Koen Gheuen’s research. Koen’s focus was on the series of drawings in the centre of Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels: and he began by tracing the unusual hand-clasping going on in the Voynich Gemini roundel (which I discussed here previously):

The similarity Koen highlighted between the Voynich Gemini roundel figures and the two frontmost figures in the following drawing from Diebold Lauber’s workshop is striking:

The parallels between the Voynich zodiac roundels and elements in Diebold Lauber’s workshop’s output are both qualitatively and quantitatively striking, not least of which is the crayfish (also highlighted by Koen) which – to the best of our collective knowledge – only appears misdrawn in a particular way (with the crayfish’s legs incorrectly attached to its tail rather than to its body) (a) in a Lauber-illustrated Buch der Natur, and (b) in the Voynich Manuscript’s Cancer zodiac roundel.

Knotty Problems

But there are problems of historical logic to untangle here. The first problem concerns the arms: the two hand-clasping Voynich Gemini figures have their arms crossed over (which is a correct depiction of the medieval ceremony), whereas the figures in Lauber’s drawing (dated 1448-1450) do not have their arms crossed over (which is incorrect). Koen dug up an image from the Werkstatt von 1418 (a different manuscript workshop, but from the same general area) that he suggests might well have been a predecessor to one or both of the other two:

Here, we can see the arms crossed over (which is correct) and a simple neckline (which is the same as we see in the Voynich Gemini roundel). Yet the arms are uncrossed, which is what we see in the Lauber drawing.

Koen proposes that this would make it difficult for the Voynich Gemini figures to have been derived from the Werkstatt von 1418 image, because the arms there were uncrossed, and it would be a little bit odd for the arms to have been recrossed.

Yet at the same time, given that the image depicts a man and a monk, this too is problematic for anyone trying to trace out a line of direct transmission.

It seems likely to me that the plain necklines depicted in all the Voynich roundel drawings that include a clothed human neck are systematic copies of a series of zodiac roundels from a single predecessor German manuscript (which was most likely a calendar). So we can tentatively date the predecessor document as being, say, closer to 1420-1430 (the date of the Werkstatt von 1418 drawing) than to 1448-1450 (the date of the Diebold Lauber drawing).

This gives us, I suspect, a sequence tree something broadly like this:

However, is this lineage compatible with the strangely misdrawn crayfish, which seems to suggest that Lauber’s workshop was somehow involved?

All I can say is that it is possible that the unknown document on the right (that I suspect was the predecessor for both the Voynich Gemini and the 1448-1450 Diebold Lauber drawing) was also from the Diebold Lauber workshop. The earliest known Lauber document is dated 1427 (Köln, Hist. Archiv der Stadt, Best. 7010 (W) 251, signed “Diebold de Dachstein”), and a number of Lauber’s early illustrations may have been by Hans Ott (whose work, the Heidelberg site says, can be found in Strasbourg documents between 1427 and 1449).

I (eventually) managed to track down some drawings from this 1427 Lauber document:

And yes, there are certainly a fair few simple necklines there. So the proposed sequence is still entirely possible, I think. Unless you know better? 🙂

Usage patterns in the Beale Ciphers…

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Even though Beale Ciphers B1, B2, and B3 each consist of similar-looking strings of numbers, it’s far from obvious that they have been generated in the same way (i.e. that they all result from using the same cipher system).

Usage Patterns

We can quickly map the usage of the first 1000 index values (I remain a bit suspicious of higher numbers), with the following bitwise key:
* ‘.’ => unused
* ‘1’ => used in B1
* ‘2’ => used in B2
* ‘3’ => used in B1 + B2
* ‘4’ => used in B3
* ‘5’ => used in B1 + B3
* ‘6’ => used in B2 + B3
* ‘7’ => used in B1 + B2 + B3

77773777777757777776775777777376777777777777676777
7766576377737777755577754577317777755555.75777575.
77516774525774757757774525554135276747531.6.143147
42.3..4227.5.4..4..1454.4564.45.4124..1.7.171624.7
515.65574175554565525..51454.7111745.42421.44752.2
52...4...414154...46..247....1..132522.34..1.46.4.
73457..3.444474644475.11.5.5........4..11.46.1.4..
4.2..1...31..55.1..32..44....444.....2.....2..4..2
1.1.22.12.144..541.2..1..1....1..4.1..43......1...
.........55.11.2....1..1..........33........4....1
1...2.....2..................1.......1.3..1....3..
...2..2..........1......2.....33.................2
1131..3...41.1..54.2..11......4...........24..2...
...1.........1.21.......41...1.1.4................
...............14..........1.......1..............
.......1.....................1....................
......2...21.14.41554.11....1..........1....4.....
.....4.1..11.4.......1..1..............5....141...
...........1....411.14.4......1..4.5..............
44.......111..1.........5.........1..............1

From this, we can see that even though the numbers that are used in all three ciphers are biased towards low numbers (e.g. look at all the ‘7’ values at the top), B1 numbers (and to a slightly lesser extent B3 numbers) appear throughout the number range. Furthermore, apart from the numbers near the top, there seems to be no systematic relationship between the usage map of any two pair of ciphers (not even B1 and B3).

And yet we have quite strong evidence that the same enciphering tables derived from the DoI were used for both B2 (which has been solved) and B1 (which remains unsolved). I think this alone is strong evidence that for all their underlying “causal similarities” (for want of a better phrase), B1 and B2 were not generated by the same ciphering system.

Note also that the map shows runs of adjacent indices that appear in only one of the three ciphertexts (e.g. “4444” in B3) or that appear in both B1 and B3 but not in B2 (e.g. “55555”). However, these look broadly within the range of normal randomness, so I doubt these are highlighting anything unusual.

Jarlve’s Incremental Series

In a comment here a few days ago, Jarlve observed that all three Beale ciphers have stretches of numbers that were numerically ordered to a degree that was somewhat unusual. And furthermore:

Testing the significance of these incremental series versus randomizations, then B1 = 4.61 sigma, B2 = 2.72 sigma and B3 = 9.86 sigma.

If we map B1’s “incrementality” (i.e. where ‘.’ => decrement, and ‘*’ => increment), we can indeed see a six-long increment sequence about 60% of the way through, plus a couple of five-long increment sequences. What is just as striking is that the long decrement sequence in B1 is four-long (twice), which points to some kind of subtle asymmetry.

B1:

*.*...**.*.*.*..**.**.***.**.*.**.**.*.**..***..**
.*..**.*.***...*.**..**..**.*..*.*.*.***.*..*..***
..*.*.*.***...***.*.**.***.*..*..**.****.*.**.*.**
..*.*..*..*.**.*.***....***.**..***.**.*.*..*.**.*
*.**.**..**.*.*.*..***..***.*.*.*****.**.*.**.*...
***.*..****.*.**.***..*..****..****.*.*.***..***..
*.******.*..**.***.*..*..**...**.*..**.*.*.*.*.**.
*..*.*..*.**.****..*.*..**..*.*.*.*..****..*..**..
**.*..**..***.*.***..**.*..**.**.****.****.*..*.*.
.***....*.***..*..*****.*..*.**..*.*.**...***.*.*.
**.***...*.****..**

Compare this with B2, which has a six-long decrement sequence (about 30% of the way through), and a pair of five-long increment sequences.

B2:

..*.*..***..**..*.*.*.**.**..*..*..***....*.*.**..
*.*..**.**.*.*.**..***.**.*..***.**.*.*.*.**.*.*.*
*.*.**...*...**..**.**.***.*.**..**..***.*..*.**.*
.***.*.*.*.*..*..**..*.***.*.***..**..***.*..**..*
.*.**......*.**.*....*..*.*.***.***..**.*..***..**
.*.*.*..**..*.*.*...*.***.*.**.*.*.**.*.*.**.*.*.*
.***.***.*..**..*.****...*..*.*.**..***.**.*.**.**
.*.*.**.*.*.*..*.*....***.*..*..*..**..**...**.*..
*.*.**.****..**.*..*.**.***...*.*...**.*..*..*.*.*
*.***.**..**.**.*.**.*...*.**..*.*.****.*****..**.
***..*.*..**.*.**.*.*.**..***..**...***.*....*.*..
*.**...***.*.****..*.*.*.*.*..**..**.**..*.*.*.*..
**.**...*..*.*.*.*..***.*.****..*.**..*.*.*..*.*.*
*.**.*..***..*..**...**.*.*..**....*.**.*..*****.*
***.*.*..**.**.*.***.**.*..**.*...**..*..*.****.*.
***..***.***

But all of this in B1 and B2 is almost as nothing to B3’s extremely unbalanced set of increment series, firstly in a patch in the middle (two seven-long increments and two six-long increments) and then in a long patch at the end (where the positive increment sequences are 9, 9, 7, 6, 7, 9, and 6 long). By way of contrast, the longest decrement sequences in B3 are a single 6-long set, and a single 5-long set).

B3:

.*.*..*.**.*.**..***..*.*..*.***..*.*.*..*.*.**.*.
**.*.*.*.*..*..**.***..*.**.****.***.**.*.*.**.***
*.*.*.*...*...**.*.*.**.**..*.**..*.***.*.***..*..
*.***.**.**..*****...*.*.*..****..*....***..*.****
.*****..***...*.*.****.*******..**.*.*.*..**..**.*
***.**...**..*..**.*.*.***.**.**.****.****.******.
***..****.**...*.*.**..*.***.*******..*...**.*****
*.**..*.*.**.*.***.*.**..*.*.**..*****..***.**..*.
***.**.****.****.*.***.*...**...**.*......*.*..**.
**..*.*****.****.*****.*.*.*.*.**.*.*....*.*.*****
****.*********..**.**.*******..**.*..******.*.****
..*.**.****.*****.....*.**..*******.****..*.*.***.
.*********.******

Putting All This Together

I think Jarlve’s incrementing series perhaps offer a quite different dimension to what Jim Gillogly (perhaps better known for breaking parts of the Kryptos ciphers) mused in his “Dissenting Opinion” on the Beale Ciphers, where he opined:

I visualize the encryptor selecting numbers more or less at random, but occasionally growing bored and picking entries from the numbered Declaration of Independence in front of him, in several cases choosing numbers with an alphabetic sequence.

Whereas this loosely seems to fit B1 (where mysterious alphabet-like strings do indeed appear, but which require the cipher table used in B2 to have been used in a different manner), the immediate problem is that it doesn’t really capture what happens in B3 (where no mysterious alphabet-like strings appear if you apply B3’s index values to the DoI) at all. There, (thanks to Jarlve) we can say that the same encryptor seems to have instead chosen numbers with a strong bias towards incrementing numeric series.

But why would that be?

Is it time for the Secret History of the First World War to emerge?

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I recently went to a very enjoyable evening of history lectures at Kingston Grammar School’s swanky Performing Arts Centre / Theatre, a local celebration of this year’s (2018) centenary of the end (or, at least, one of the ends) of the First World War. Inevitably, the urge to write a blog post in response was almost impossible to contain…

WW1 War Poetry

The first talk, given by Dr Jane Potter (Reader in Arts at Oxford Brookes University) was on war poetry: though very interesting, it became quickly apparent to me that even though war poetry as a phenomenon emerged in the military heat of WW1, it was forged as an academic study target in the ideological heat of 1960s anti-war protest.

Many aspects of war poetry that strongly engage its academic audience – its inclusivity, its naivety, and its perceived ‘genuineness’ – reflect the kind of ‘bottom-up’ social history that was emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. From that point of view, it is (I think) hard not to see that these were precisely the things that 1960s anti-war academics seized upon as giving it ideological value to them. Hence it is a field that seems to me to have been selected more for its low-impact liberal resistance values than for intrinsic artistic, stylistic, or technical value.

But even so, the academic genre itself projects back a modern dialogue about what (capital W) War is about / for (and let’s not forget it took until 1970 for Edwin Starr’s answer to emerge, famously rhyming “heartbreaker” with “undertaker”), and about what relation War has with the ‘common man’ (or indeed ‘common woman’), a dialogue only marginally in place in 1914. I think it’s safe to say that there are plenty of academic contradictions in play here.

For me, WW1 war poetry ranges all the way from the most moving and affecting to muddy drivel: but neither the best nor the worst makes me want to value it as more than just an interesting cultural phenomenon. So unfortunately I have to say that, though Jane Potter’s talk was both engaging and well-presented within its limits, I still don’t buy into the whole academic study of war poetry as something which continued study of can keep on eliciting genuine value: circa 2018 it seems more like a long-running Humanities cult, a Kodakian “gift that keeps giving” but with ever-diminishing returns, sorry. 🙁

The Moral Endeavour Driving WW1

The second speaker of the evening was Dr Edward Madigan (a Lecturer in Public History at the University of London’s Royal Holloway), and his talk was on altogether more solid ground. His starting point was that even though people in the UK now generally grasp that the Second World War was a genuine moral fight against the fascistic inhumanities of Nazism, few genuinely seem to understand what the equivalent British moral angle was in the First World War – A.K.A. ‘errrrm, what was that whole WW1 thing about, again? Franz Ferdinand or something?‘

What clearly came out from his slides and description was how British moral indignation at the 1914 German atrocities in Belgium (in particular in Louvain / Leuven) grew and grew, a sense of outrage that increased courtesy of the sinking of the Lusitania (yes, I do know about the various histories there, *sigh*), the Zeppelin raids, the raider attacks on Scarborough, and the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell. These moral flames were religiously fanned by such peopls as Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of Westminster, whose 1915 anti-German diatribes were extraordinarily inflammatory, to the point of being somewhat hard for modern ears to take in. (Even Herbert Asquith called it “jingoism of the shallowest kind”.)

And so Madigan’s overall argument – though he never quite framed in this precise way – seemed to be that moral outrage against the Germans grew in Britain like a kind of out-of-control viral meme, taking over the thinking of all bar the most doggedly pacifistic. And this from a country that was, right up until the start of WW1, a close partner with Germany, both culturally, fraternally, commercially, and even historically. (It is no coincidence that the British Royal Family is basically German.)

But… was that the whole story? I think not, and the evening’s final speaker helped illuminate a different side of the same history.

WW1 Propaganda

Professor Jo Fox is the Director of the IHR: the topic of her talk was “Propaganda and the First World War”. We’re now familiar with the idea of agitprop (a portmanteau of “agitatsiia” and “propaganda”, as per the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, set up in 1920): but Jo Fox showed a series of images of British First World War propaganda, courtesy of the various enlisting committees and even the graphic journals of the day – intentional propaganda and unintentional propaganda, broadly speaking (echoing Marc Bloch).

One curious thing she noted was that German historians (though she didn’t say who), looking back at the First World War, pointed to the power of British propaganda as being one of the key things that swayed not only national opinion but also international opinion against Germany: and that this was one of the key mechanisms that served to isolate Germany and, ultimately, to lose it the war. Was propaganda really that powerful? Fox clearly thinks so, and indeed argued her case persuasively.

Perhaps the interesting follow-on question here is whether the Soviets ultimately stole agitprop from the Brits’ culturally weaponised WW1 propaganda. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the case, though Fox didn’t suggest an answer: maybe she’s saving this for her next book. 😉

Towards A Secret History of WW1?

From my own historical viewpoint, the problem with all three accounts presented during the evening wasn’t what they included but what they excluded. By which I mean: the act of trying to capture the vast vista of war though such narrow lenses as poetry (or even social history), viral moral outrage, or even pro-war propaganda is doomed to failure, for these are all surface symptoms. Instead, the single (but never really mentioned) driving force behind War is neither military, social, nor even moral, but political. Even Edwin Starr got it wrong: the one thing that war is good for is politics, plain and simple.

In my opinion, the thing pervasively missing from the evening was a single secret history question: how did the British Government manage to bring the Church, the State, the Establishment, the Media, and indeed just about everyone else (including writers, artists and mainstream poets) on-message with its political programme, culminating in the deaths of approximately 37 million people? Just about everyone played their part in disseminating pro-war propaganda: if there is a categoric difference from the kind of Soviet agitprop that followed not long after, it’s not one that I can easily detect.

So why, even a century on, are historians still apparently unable to peer behind the political curtain of WW1, to bring the machinations that made the propaganda possible into the light? What made the British Government’s (proto-)agitprop so effective, so far-reaching, so total? It seems to me that – unless, dear reader, you know better – the definitive secret political history of WW1 has not yet been written: or, rather, the awareness of the political framing of the war seems to be missing in action. Our historians seem to lack access to the definitive accounts of the scheming, manipulation, and political stage management that would give their own accounts context and genuine meaning: and so we seem to have fragmented histories that, for all their depth of research and technical professionalism, remain politically shallow.

Or is it the case that, even now, nobody wants to talk about how countries manipulate their peoples into going to war? Might it be that, in an age where politically unjustifiable wars continue to happen on a regular basis, this is all still too close for comfort? Might a hundred years be too soon for the real history of something so politically sensitive to emerge?

“Mario translates the Voynich Manuscript”

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“Among other revelations, he discovers it was a treatise on Spacesynth“, says the author of the following video, Hagar Hogan. I’m not sure if that actually helps explain it, but it may possibly be some kind of starting point. For some people.

This has taught me a lot about the relationship between Mario and Luigi and the Voynich Manuscript. But probably more about where the volume dial is on my speakers.

Of course, readers might consider that the above is a waste of time, and that I should instead use my blog as a platform for discussing serious-minded Voynich videos by earnest researchers.

Here, it has to be said that I’m specifically thinking of “Mystical Voynich Manuscript Interpretation – Part 1” on the ‘High Elven Wisdom And Love’ YouTube channel. Its author is “an empath […] an elvenkin […] a soul that expresses themself as an elf in this lifetime”, and who wants to post 45-minute videos on the powerful energy behind the Voynich Manuscript.

Me, I’ll stick with Mario, if that’s ok with you. 😉