Does the ‘Voynich = migraine’ theory make your head hurt too?

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In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two “dry migraine” attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps a meta-theory) to post about here…

In Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill’s book, they float the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript might possibly have been written by someone suffering a prolonged (months- or years-long) migraine attack; and point to the streams of stars and the repetitive series of nymphs as vaguely supporting (if far from smoking-gun causal) evidence. However, nobody (to my knowledge) really took the notion particularly seriously until German blogger Markus Dahlem decided to carry their conceptual baton a little further in the general direction of… Hildegard of Bingen.

Might the castle in the nine-rosette page actually be a representation of the Aedificium, the piously hallucinatory City of God drawn by Hildegard in her Zelus Dei or her Sedens Lucidus? Are the Voynich’s stars simply “showers of phosphenes” cascading wildly through Hildegard’s retinal circuits?

I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards … And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals… and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.

To me, the fact that Hildegard is discussed by both Charles Singer and Oliver Sacks is no more than an expression of her outlierness: she not only had the repeated experience of migraine auras, but also had the literary imagination to stitch that into her religious worldview. Basically, I’m pretty sure that there is almost no real chance that the author of the Voynich Manuscript was a migraine sufferer.

And besides, Hildegard drew square merlons in her City of God, not swallow-tail merlons. D’oh! 🙂

Happy Voynich New Year 2012!

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A Happy New Year to all Cipher Mysteries readers, for it might well be a good year for historical cipher mystery research!

As doubtless most of you know, 1912 was the year when Wilfrid Voynich [very probably] bought the “ugly duckling” artefact now named after him from the Villa Mondragone in Frascati in Italy, making this year (in the absence of any specific dating evidence) its modern centenary.

Now, the media love centenaries (e.g. Charles Dickens’ 2012 bicentenary) because it’s news that they can project manage in advance; and so this Voynich Manuscript centenary is bound to inspire plenty of glossy magazine articles and perhaps even documentaries and films. In fact, I know there’s at least 22 minutes of new Voynich TV documentary coming this Autumn, because the director had me running round in an Italian heatwave to make it (though as normal, I’m not allowed to talk about it until it’s all announced la-la-la).

But how should we best celebrate a hundred years of patchy history, failed cryptology and hallucinogenic theorizing? [Well, apart from cracking its cipher, of course. 😉 ] The longstanding joke on Jim Reeds’ VMs Mailing List (before it lost both its momentum and its way) was that we’d all share a pizza to celebrate breaking the Voynich, with the slices loosely signifying the many contributions different people made. Yet as the decades have accumulated, this jokey pizza base has worn rather thin: the Voynichian collaborational camaraderie dwindled long ago, to the point that we now have little or no consensus on even basic aspects: the sweet taste of Voynich success pizza looks likely to elude us for some time.

All the same, I’ve long thought it would be really great if we could collectively do something for 2012, if only to stop lazy journalists and bloggers cutting-and-pasting the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript article for the thousandth time. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could conjure up – however fleetingly – a real-world forum where well-informed, thoughtful people could, well, just talk sensibly and openly about the manuscript, its curious text, its odd drawings, its murky history, its codicology… a bit like a “Voynich pub meet” but to the nth degree…

And so it is with very great pleasure that I am delighted to announce that an international Voynich conference has been organized for 11th May 2012 at the Sala degli Svizzeri at the Villa Mondragone itself, no less. The organizers are Claudio Foti (author of an Italian Voynich book) and Voynich researchers Michelle Smith and Rene Zandbergen: even though booking for attendees doesn’t open till 1st February 2012, would it be forward of me to hope that I see many of you there?

It’s entirely true that I’ve agreed to give one of the presentations: but don’t let that put you off 😀 , there are plenty of high-calibre attendees who may well be speaking too, such as (though none of these are yet confirmed):-
* Rene Zandbergen – long-term Voynich researcher, & creator of the excellent voynich.nu
* Greg Hodgins – carried out the recent vellum radiocarbon dating
* Joe Barabe – performed the ink and paint analysis for McCrone Associates
* Paula Zyats – Assistant Chief Conservator at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
* Rafal Prinke – expert on the history of alchemy (and all kinds of other wonderful stuff)
* Philip Neal – long-term Voynich researcher and Latinist (translated many Kircher letters)
* etc

I don’t yet know if the whole day is going to be podcasted, webinared, or Twitter hashtagged. Frankly, I hope that it is, because I do appreciate that not everyone can afford to take a couple of days off from their working life to engorge (on fantastic Italian food) and engage (in Voynich-related chat). All the same, all credit to Messers Foti, Smith & Zandbergen for making this splendid thing possible – and let’s hope that it encourages someone with sufficient leverage to convince the Beinecke curators to allow a multispectral scan for Paula Zyats to announce at the conference… wouldn’t that be great! 😀

The elusive Reynolds: from HC to C…?

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Yet more for you on our elusive young Tasmanian merchant seaman H. C. Reynolds, who may or may not be the mysterious “Unknown Man” found dead on Somerton Beach in 1948, etc etc.

Firstly, I note with great interest Gerry Feltus’ comments on the whole H. C. Reynolds thing. He writes:-

In early February 2011, I received a letter from the woman (not identified in the article) containing comprehensive detail, a photograph of HC Reynolds and the circumstances under which it was found. This was followed up by a number of telephone conversations. I had no doubt about the authenticity of the information supplied to me. I became aware that the same photograph and details had been forwarded to a number of other interested parties. I was also advised that Professor Henneberg had advised her: “The similarity, however is substantial and in my opinion warrants further investigation.” I wrote in my reply inter alia, “I have no alternative but to accept his (Prof Henneberg) learned opinion. As I explained to you during our conversation I don’t see any resemblance to the ‘Unknown Man’. After studying his photograph for years (the Unknown Man) there is nothing in the face of Reynolds that ‘jumps out’ at me that is similar… Also Reynolds has a square chin with what appears to be a cleft or dimple, whereas the ‘Unknown Man’ has a rounded chin. My opinion, and I will stand corrected if I am wrong.” I provided details of a record relating to H Reynolds, Able Seaman, on ‘Empress of Asia’, Suez Canal 1941, and advised that I could not locate any details to authenticate the U.S. Identity Card.

It soon became obvious that a number of people were ‘tripping over each other’ to obtain information about Reynolds so I removed myself from that line of inquiry. I have not seen an official statement from Prof Henneberg. I have every respect for Prof Henneberg and accept his qualifications. If he is positive that Reynolds is identical to the ‘Unknown Man’ I will reconsider my views on the subject.

Personally, I’m not sure over whom Gerry thinks people like me would be tripping: just about every stone I examine seems to be turning over for the first time. Historically, the nice thing about the Reynolds claim is that (true or false) it should, with persistence and lashings of lateral thinking, be checkable: the more of his antipodean sea career we can find, the more chance we stand of uncovering some instance where he crosses over into another (hopefully land-based) archive or database.

What have I been doing? Well, without any access to the archival omniscience of the “Log of Logs” as yet, I’ve been trying to find log books for the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara. However, it turns out that this is complicated by the fact that ships can reasonably have multiple types of logbooks, which often overlap:
* rough logs (compiled on the go)
* smooth logs (copied out nicely)
* compass logs (or “compass error logs”)
* incident logs, and so forth.

For the SS Manuka, Archives New Zealand have a compass log but the ship’s log has been destroyed bar one fragmentary page. Similarly, MS 851 in Auckland Museum contains RMS Niagara’s compass log for 1917-1918 compiled by M. Clark-Campbell, who was presumably the third mate “C. Campbell” on board at the same time as Reynolds. However, this is probably both a rough log (because it’s for two ships Clark-Campbell served on, the Niagara and the HMNZT Willochra) and a compass log: Hamish Lindop at the Auckland Museum very kindly examined MS 851 for me, and told me that “the information in it is strictly pertaining to coordinates for sailing; it doesn’t have any information about what was happening on board or Reynolds.”

So, a bit of a dead end, really. But at least now we know that the Manuka and Niagara probably had multiple log books: hopefully the “Log of Logs” will point us to some of the others.

But that’s not the really exciting news. Cipher Mysteries regular Cheryl Bearden has been carefully trawling ancestry.com’s online copies of the crew lists arriving at Sydney, and has found (what seems to me, at least, extremely likely to be) the next section forward in young Mr Reynolds’ timeline. Unless there just happened to be two 18-year-old pursers from Hobart called Reynolds active in the same port at the same time, it seems very probable that the two were the same person, and that he preferred to be called by his middle name:-

19th November 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
17th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
26th January 1918. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, 17, born Australia, Assistant Purser.
17th February 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Vancouver). H. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Assistant Purser.
20th April 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Auckland). H. C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, 2nd Mate.
5th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobert, Purser.
20th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
16th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
12th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & D’port). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
26th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
22nd September 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
21st October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
4th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
19th January 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
9th March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Newcastle). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser. [*]
31st March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 19, born Hobart, Purser.

As before, the next plausible sighting we have is of a foot-passenger called “Mr H. C. Reynolds” travelling on the TSS Ulimaroa on the 22nd November 1920. So, thank you very much indeed, Cheryl, for this nice long set of sightings! But once again this is where the Reynolds trail goes cold. 🙁

Curiously, onboard the SS Koonya in August there’s also a fireman (i.e. for stoking fires, not for putting them out!) called “R Reynolds” age 18, but born in Birkenhead. Probably just a coincidence, though. 🙂

The SS Koonya was registered in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island: its Master was the 39-year-old New Zealander P. L. Molyneux. Note that the Tasmanian archives hold a number of logs and crew records for a previous ship called ‘Koonya’ (sank in 1898), which are almost certainly no use to us. The Koonya we’re interested in was, according to this online list of Tasmanian shipwrecks, a

Steel steamship, 1093/663 tons. # 109641.Built at Grangemouth, UK, as the Yukon. Owned by Union Steamship Co. Lbd 225.0 x 34.2 x 13.2 ft. In 1908, she had towed Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod 1510 miles from Lyttleton, NZ to the Antarctic Circle and was the first steamer in the Antractic. She was then employed in the New Zealand and Tasmanian coastal trades. Captain Francis Warner Jackson. Sailed from Strahan for Burnie on 3 June 1919 but failed to arrive; wrecked on Sandy Cape, Tasmania, 6 June 1919. Vessel Taviuni sent to search and found her wrecked on Sandy Cape, north west coast Tasmania. All saved. [NH],[#TS2],[DG]

Once again, we see Reynolds employed by the Union Steamship Company. However, when the Koonya went down in 1919, Reynolds was not on board! The report of the wreck that ran in Adelaide’s Register on 9th June 1919 listed the crew (who luckily all survived) as:-

Capt. F. Jackson, S. L. McDonald (chief officer), R. Sanderson (second officer), McNeill (third officer). Ward (chief engineer), Stewart (second engineer), Davis (third engineer), Thorby (chief steward), Dodd (purser), Kohler, S. Foley, and R. Millhouse (firemen), McLeod, Mulholland, Neilson, Newlands, and Stavis (A.B.s), Harris (chief cook), Alexander (assistant cook), Marshall (donkeyman), Foley, Howard, and Armstrong (trimmers), and Allen (boatswain). The names of the second steward and two other ordinary seamen were not obtainable.

It seems likely to me that between March 1919 and June 1919, Reynolds had served a full year on the Koonya and so moved on to work on another ship, most likely within the same Union Steamship Company fleet… perhaps Cheryl will now find this! All the same, the Koonya is another ship whose various logbooks I will now try to track down when I finally get to see the legendary Log of Logs…

H. C. Reynolds: where next? Well…

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If you’ve been following the flurry of recent posts (and indeed comments) here on the Unknown Man, you’ll know we’ve done two things:
* successfully linked the “H. C. Reynolds” on the US seamen’s temporary ID card to a young “H Reynolds” working on the SS Manuka and the RMS Niagara, and constructed a six-month timeline for his sea-life from late 1917 to early 1918; and
* eliminated pretty much every other “H C Reynolds” of broadly the right age and location.
So, the question is… where to look next?

Following the Manuka trail, there are plenty of plausible looking documents in the National Archives of Australia office in Tasmania relating to the Manuka’s arrivals in Hobart. If you just happen to be passing the State Library building at 91 Murray Street on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and want to look these up, here are the Manuka references you’d need in volume P2005 which covers arrivals (though volume P2004 covers departures, it unfortunately has a big fat gap from June 1917 to December 1923, bah!):-
* 22 Nov 1917 – 767481 – passenger list
* 24 Nov 1917 – 767502 – ships report inwards
* 13 Dec 1917 – 767523 – passenger list
* 02 Jan 1918 – 767583 – passenger list
* 24 Jan 1918 – 767701 – passenger / crew list

Of course, it’s an outside shot that any of these would reveal (for example) H. C. Reynolds’ first name, but it’s probably worth a shot. Having said that, given that Reynolds was from Hobart, it would seem likely that he worked on other ships out of Hobart prior to Nov 1917: so it would probably be a worthwhile exercise to check the (relatively small) number of other ships’ entries in P2005 for 1917. After all, did he really land the Assistant Purser role as his first ever job on a ship? (I suspect not, but that’s just my guess…)

Alternatively, following the RMS Niagara trail, I managed to dig up the passenger manifests for Victoria and Vancouver (both in British Columbia) for what appears to be Reynolds’ final journey on the Niagara [RG 76 T-4873] and [RG 76 T-4858]. These noted the following dates:-
* 28th February 1918: dep. Sydney, New South Wales
* [no date] Suva, Fiji
* 15th March 1918: dep. Honolulu, Hawaii
* 21st March 1918: arr. Victoria, B.C.
* 22nd March 1918: arr. Vancouver, B.C.

From this, we can see that the date stamped on the US seamen’s temporary ID card was not the arrival date in Hawaii, but the departure date from Sydney. I think it likely that these cards were issued on board the Niagara at the start of the voyage by (say) the Purser – this would also account for the British date field order (which some people have flagged as implying a forgery). Sadly, though, both manifests only contain passenger lists, not crew lists: and so fail to move us any further forward. 🙁

It may seem that we’ve hit another brick wall: but given that all we’re really hoping for at this stage is Reynolds’ first name, the Australian archives still has a vast number of plausible-sounding documents for us to grind our way through, such as:-
* “Registers of ships crew engaged and discharged at South Australian outports (including Darwin).” [D8]
* “Registers of ships crew engaged for the home trade at South Australian ports” [D9]
* “Register of vessels (arrivals and departures), Port Adelaide” [D1]
* “Original Agreements and Accounts of Crew (Form M & S 3)1, with Ships Official Log Books (Form M & S 16 & 12),alphabetical series” [D13]
* “Statistical chart of ships’ movements and list of persons not required to pass education test” [SP83/11]
* Crew and passenger lists for the Port of Newcastle [C667] (even though Cairns and Townsville both have passenger lists for this period, neither seems to have crew lists).

Yet even though Reynolds was from Tasmania, I suspect that it will be New Zealand’s ships’ log books (at Archives New Zealand’s Christchurch Regional Office, descriptions accessible via Archway) that will have some answers, because the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara were both New Zealand-owned:
* Shipping Report Books, Foreign – Outwards (R18282773) – CAVL CH443 26 / 6/6/3
* Shipping Report Books, Foreign – Inwards (R18282772) – CAVL CH443 25 / 6/6/2

In fact, the definitive answer of where to look next may well come from the ominously huge-sounding 8-volume “Log of logs : a catalogue of logs, journals, shipboard diaries, letters, and all forms of voyage narratives, 1788 to 1988, for Australia and New Zealand, and surrounding oceans” by Ian Nicholson. If anyone reading this happens to have access to this truly stonking epitome of maritime bibliomania, please let me know if it lists the Manuka’s and Niagara’s log books and/or related crew records, thanks! Even knowing which volume(s) to be looking at would be a great help to me (the British Library only has an incomplete set).

As far as pursuing our elusive man via normal avenues, I hate to say it but we may well be out of luck. Because voting was reserved for the over-21s, the young H. C. Reynolds won’t appear on Australian electoral rolls prior to 1921, and I have a sneaking suspicion he had left Australia by then (probably for America). But if (as I suspect) he left the RMS Niagara in early 1918 for medical reasons, will he be listed in the Auckland Hospital Register of Patients Admission and Discharge, first series, Vol. 3 (1918-1920) (ref: R20388997), shelfmark “YCAB 15266 4/a D”? Hopefully we shall see… I remain optimistic! 🙂

Curious runic cipher found on a Cincinnati fence…

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A few days ago on an ‘AboveTopSecret’ online forum, user ‘NerdGoddess’ posted links to photos of a curious runic cipher her boyfriend found on a piece of paper on his fence not long before, and asked if anybody could decrypt it.

Of course, the fact that the cipher half comprises eleven miscellaneous shapes (letters & runes, all different) plus a dot would seem to make reliable decipherment unlikely, unless it just happens to be extremely close to an existing cipher alphabet. Similarly, the thirteen digits seem pretty non-specific (phone numbers and Swiss bank accounts aside), apart from the way that the first three (‘463’) are the same as the last three (‘364’) reversed.

All the same, her post provoked fourteen pages of responses (probably even more by now) ranging from the sensible to the speculative to the downright opportunistic:-
* Maybe it’s a mixture of various Futhark runic alphabets?
* Maybe it’s a phone number concealed by someone called Amy?
* Maybe it’s related to the Rushville Runestone?
* Maybe it’s written in a gang cipher?
* Maybe it’s Gnommish (from Artemis Fowl), Enochian, hobo, Roma or Pavee markings?
* ‘Dump your loser boyfriend, baby, and go out with me instead’ (Ha!)

Incidentally, the Rushville Runestone has its own nice (but thoroughly solved) cipher mystery story: found in woods near Rushville, Fairfield County, Ohio in 1972, it turned out to be a physical copy of some runes shown in a hand-drawn picture illustrating Neil Shute’s novel “An Old Captivity” (1940), and saying “Haki / Hekja”.

Back to Cincinnati: and I have to say it’s clear to me that when we look at this ciphertext, we’re supposed to think ‘cipher runes‘, in particular based on either the Elder Futhark…

…or the Younger Futhark…

Having said that, it’s basically a lousy fit for any of them. If you optimistically pick & choose letters from whichever Futhark alphabet you futharking well like, about as close as you can get is “f h e n [A] . s h [H] d t [?]”. Which is my cryptographic way of saying ‘not even close’. Put it this way: it wasn’t a runic purist who left this message. 🙂

All the same, I quite like the way that the letters seem (if you reverse them) to spell out AMY, which is why several people have proposed that the author of the note was someone called Amy, perhaps leaving her phone number in a mysterious (and steganographic) way: but there’s one last theory that hadn’t (last time I looked) yet been proposed.

You see, the other interesting thing about the digits is that few of them repeat, and all of the numbers 1-9 appear. So… what if these digits are the key to a transposition cipher? That is, what does the bottom line become if its shapes are transposed in the order given in the top line? Here’s what it looks like before transposition (admittedly not 100% sure)…

…and after transposition…

The nice thing about doing this is that the dot gets transposed to the very end of the cipher, which would seem to provide weak confirmation we’re going in the right direction. But… what does it say? If you squint, does it say “TO MY WITCH WA.”? Curious, and very possibly wrong, but perhaps this might be enough to help someone to recognize the kind of cipher being used here and to decrypt it more reliably. Enjoy!

H. C. Reynolds – possibly in Auckland Hospital?

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I’ve done a bit more digging on our ever-elusive “H. C. Reynolds”, and thought it was time to post a quick update.

Firstly, though there was indeed an “H. C. Reynolds” playing golf in Murray Bridge in the late 1930s (and he would almost certainly have played some away matches at Glenelg Golf Club, perilously close to where the Unknown Man died), it seems that this particular Harry Reynolds was still alive in December 1953 when his son Graeme Campbell got engaged to Christobel Jane Taylor (ref#1, ref#2). So it seems we can basically rule him out. 🙁

All of which reduces our scope back to the only two remaining leads of any substance: (a) Reynolds’ relatively brief employment on the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara (1917-1918), and (b) the birth (and apparent death) of a Horace Charles Reynolds in Tasmania, who may or may not be the same person.

However, a few days ago I realized that seaman Reynolds almost certainly had structured employment, because the Manuka and the Niagara were both owned by the same company, the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand – though this was taken over by P&O in 1917, it retained its own identity and archives. Searching the New Zealand Maritime Index (a database maintained by the Bill Laxon Maritime Library) yielded three interesting hits relating to seamen’s sick pay in 1916-1917 and 1918-1919 for “Reynolds, H.” (1, 2, 3).

It seems tempting to infer that this was the same person, and indeed very tempting to speculate that Reynolds contracted influenza as part of the 1918 pandemic and was incapacitated in New Zealand – the records relate to sick pay to an “H Reynolds”, and the virus was most devastating to young adults (paradoxically, because of their strong immune systems). However, the pandemic only properly hit Australia in December 1918 while the last sight of Reynolds we have is in April 1918, so none of this is in any way certain as yet.

All the same, because this money was paid out as sick pay in New Zealand, it seems highly likely to me that the recipient would have been admitted into a New Zealand hospital: and with the major port there at the time being Auckland (which is where the Niagara docked), I’d predict the place to look next would be the admissions and discharges register for Auckland Hospital.

Luckily, the NZ government’s Archway archives portal points us to the Auckland Hospital Register of Patients Admission and Discharge, first series, Vol. 3 (1918-1920) (ref: R20388997), shelfmark “YCAB 15266 4/a D”. This is a “heavy, bound volume” in the Auckland Regional Office (close to Auckland Airport), and contains exactly the kind of meaty information we’re hungry for:-

Register number, ward, date of admission, name, address, sex, age, occupation, malady, nature of operation (if any), date of operation, result (relieved, cured, incurable, died), date of discharge or death, number of days in hospital, married or single, if married number of children, nationality, if child or married state father’s or husband’s occupation, length of time in New Zealand, name of medical practitioner, religion, amount owing at date of discharge, remarks.

It’s not clear whether these records are indexed (my guess is that they probably are), but I strongly suspect that there will be an entry in there for late April, May or June 1918 for 2nd Mate H. C. Reynolds admitted off R M S Niagara, possibly with influenza. Who will be the first to find it? Do we have any Cipher Mysteries readers in NZ?

The Ultimate Christmas Game… the Phaistos Disk?

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In a recent Cipher Mysteries post, I mentioned Peter Aleff’s theory that the Phaistos Disk was based on Senet, an Ancient Egyptian board game. All very fascinating… but something about it all triggered an old memory, one I couldn’t quite put my finger on. However, when yesterday I did finally manage to find what I had been reminded of – Mehen – it set a much larger train of thought in motion, that might point to a new Phaistos Disk board game theory. I’ll try to explain…

Five thousands years ago, board games started as Pharaonic courtly pursuits, only becoming accessible to a wider audience three thousand (!) years later when the idea of abstract gaming spread through the Roman upper middle class. With that basic framework in mind, Aleff theorizes that the Ancient Egyptian game Senet (a rectangular race game with pawns and various hazard squares) morphed – millennia later, and by routes entirely unknown – into the relatively modern Game of the Goose (a spiral race game with pawns and various hazard squares): Aleff proposes ingenious ways in which the spiral structure of the Phaistos Disk somehow fits into that mysteriously missing multi-millennia lineage. All the same, just about the only fragment of supporting near-evidence of the modern game’s ancient parentage comes from a throwaway line in Molière’s (1668) “The Miser”:-

La Flèche: Item: a trou-madame table, a draught-board, with the game of mother goose, restored from the Greeks, very agreeable to pass the time when one has nothing else to do.

Well… that’s one theory, with a lot of speculation to back-fill an inevitably enormous historical gap. But what I don’t really like about it is the lack of any cultural mechanism by which ideas were carried down the centuries. We have plenty of evidence of various Roman versions of Senet, such as Duodecim Scripta and Felix Sex (Lucky Sixes), which developed into a game called Tabula, which then developed (eventually) into modern Backgammon. The problem? These all use rectangular boards, very much like Senet and very much unlike the spiral Phaistos Disk. If you believe – wearing your Anthony Grafton-like Intellectual Historian hat – that ideas flow through time, it’s hard not to conclude that these particular ideas aren’t really flowing past the Phaistos Disk.

Yet as every X-Files-ophile knows, for every thesis, there’s an equal and opposite antithesis (let’s not talk about ‘syntheses’, they do complicate things so): so here’s my own theory. Of course, I doubt it’s new, and I’m entirely aware that there’s more than a whiff of Gavin Menzies to its intuitive leapery, but I’m generally pretty comfortable with it, feel free to disagree all you like. 🙂

While I think that Aleff’s basic idea – that the Phaistos Disk is probably a courtly board game for the Minoan palace set – is sound, I suspect the braided historical strand of games he’s trying to tie it into is the wrong one. In my opinion, if the Disk is the board for a race game such as Senet, it is far more likely to have derived from a quite different Ancient Egyptian race game, a spiral race game called Mehen (Mehen = “coiled one”, a serpent god who protected Ra at night).

Fascinatingly, there are numerous spiral Mehen game boards still extant: this illustrated list on the Jocari site is an exceptional resource. Aleff would be right to point out that these contain many more sections than the Phaistos Disk: but for me, the big question is: what happened next? Did Mehen – a game which seems to have flourished 3000BC to 2300BC during the Old Kingdom – just disappear, or might it, like Senet, have then morphed into other spiral race games on an equally winding passage through the centuries?

Fast forward to the present, and we can see a quite different race game based around snakes and hazard squares: yes, I really am referring to Snakes and Ladders. This has a direct Indian parentage going back to at least the 16th century under the names Moksha Patamu, Gyanbazi, etc: the V&A Museum has a nice game board here. According to this site, Harish Johari’s book “The Yoga of Snakes and Arrows” claims:

The origins of this game appear to be found in 2nd century BC documents from India. Some historians point out that the game may be a variation of the ancient game of dasapada played on a 10×10 grid.

Dasapada (10×10) and ashtapada (8×8) were both race games which it is reputed that Gautama Buddha would not play in the 5th century BC. Apparently, Ashtapada was played on a square board with crosses on certain squares: though intriguingly, the game’s race did not – according to famous board-game historian H. J. R. Murray – proceed in the kind of boustrophedon (alternate rows go forward and backwards) order we now associate with Snakes and Ladders, but in a spiral pattern, moving clockwise to enter/capture a castle and then anticlockwise to return. (Though here’s a link to a dissenting opinion on this that doubts Murray’s certainty.)

Of course, you’ve already worked out where all this is, errrm, racing towards: that the Phaistos Disk probably fits not into the whole Senet…Backgammon game development line, but into an entirely different line moving from [spiral snake race] Mehen to [spiral race] Ashtapada/Dasapada to [boustrophedon race] Moksha Patamu to [boustrophedon race] Snakes & Ladders.

Perhaps the “snake” in the modern game was some kind of long-standing memory of (or some long-lost cultural reference to) to the Egyptian snake god Mehen, or perhaps just the snake-like Mehen game board: I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?

Ultimately, however, I can’t prove a single thing of this whole tenuous chain (you know that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise). And there’s the the awkward issue of the awkward gap between Phaistos and India to fill: how did idea in place A travel to place B?

The Menzies-like lateral ‘bridging’ step is the observation that it’s entirely possible that the Minoans were trading with India circa 1500 BC. For instance, chapter 17 of Gavin Menzies’ Bronze Age speculatiathon “The Lost Empire of Atlantis” (called “Indian Ocean Trade in the Bronze Age”) wonders whether the ancient Indus civilization’s port of Lothal (built around 2400BC) was connected with the Minoans (hint: Menzies concludes ‘yes’). However, my suggestion is rather more modest in scope than Menzies: it’s merely the story of a single idea, travelling with the flow of Bronze Age trade traffic.

Ultimately, for the Minoan palace elite, was the Phaistos Disk the ultimate board game, insofar as (like Mehen) might it have been a way of improving your odds in the afterlife? And if we now play Snakes & Ladders, are we not merely recapitulating 16th century Jain morality but also travelling in time on the back of a serpent to the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt? When our counter lands on a snake, is it Mehen we’re landing on? Just a thought!

A Happy Cipher Mysteries Christmas to you all! 🙂

Announcing “The Blitz Ciphers”…

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A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I’ve called them “The Blitz Ciphers”, but they’re probably much older than the 1940s…

They were handed down to the discoverer’s nephew (the present owner), who now finds himself caught between a desire for relative anonymity and a desire to know what they say. So far, he has been good enough to release three tolerably OK photos from a much larger set he took: but will these be enough for us to crack their cipher?

[Of course, despite the story’s plausibility, I have to point out that this might conceivably still be a hoax designed to make cryptographic fools of us: but if so, it’s such a classy job that I really don’t mind. 🙂 ]

Description

Generally, the Blitz Ciphers’ writing appears to have been added in two hands: a larger, paler, more calligraphic presentation hand, and a smaller, darker, tighter annotation hand. While the presentation hand serves to establish the content and layout structure, the annotation hand is restricted to supplementary paragraphs and additional short notes apparently explaining key letters or terms.

Broadly speaking, the text on the first page (the ‘title page’, above) seems to have been laid down in three sequential phases:-
* #1: the circular ‘boss’ / ‘plaque’ and the two large paragraphs – large presentation hand, brown ink, quite faded in places.
* #2: the third large paragraph at the bottom – mid-sized annotation hand, brown ink.
* #3: the annotations to the other paragraphs – small-sized annotation hand, darker ink.
This general construction sequence seems to hold true for the other pages too.

The second page we have contains two curious diagrams: one a drawing of an octagon (though note that there is a square missing from the lines connecting all the vertices of the octagon), and the other an abstract tree-like representation of something unknown.

Our third page contains a large “John Dee”-like 20×20 square table, where each grid square contains individual cipher letters. The table has an array of red dots gridded within it, where each of the 16 internal red dots is surrounded by a letter repeated four times in a 2×2 block. Red dots near the sides all have two dotted square characters on the edge beside them, apart from a single one near the top right, suggesting a possible copying error. There is also a single correction (near the top left of the 20×20 table) made in the presentation hand.

The support material appears to be handmade paper (I don’t have access to them to look for a watermark, sorry!), while the inks for the two hands appear to be quite different. Though I can’t prove it, I suspect that the larger presentation hand was written using a quill pen (suggesting genuine age or some kind of ceremonial presentation aspect) while the smaller annotation hand was written several decades later with a metal nib. They could possibly have been written by the same person using different pens, but differences between the two hands argue against this.

My initial dating hunch was the first layer could well be 16th century and the second layer 17th century: but having said that, the whole thing could just as well be much more recent and instead have been deliberately written in that way to make it appear ‘venerable’ and old-looking. (More on this below.)

The Blitz Cipher Alphabet

The letter forms are clear, distinct, and upright: the presence of triangles, squares and circles and various inversions perhaps points to a cryptographer with a mathematical or geometric education. It’s closer to a demonstration alphabet (designed for show) than a tachygraphic script (designed for repeated large scale use). Here’s the provisional transcription key I’ve been working with:-

Despite some apparent ambiguities in how to parse or transcribe the various cipher shapes used, the fact that the 20×20 table has only a single letter in each cell is a fairly strong indication that each table cell contains a single cipher glyph, suggesting that about 50 distinct characters are in use. The text has a language-like character frequency distribution, with “:” [E] being the most frequently used character (the “tilted Jupiter glyph” [B] and the “joined-up-II glyph” [D] are #2 and #3 respectively). The “Greek phi glyph” [S] often appears at the start of lines and paragraphs.

I’ve shown all this to some cipher historians and codebreakers for their early reactions. Glen Claston notes that “the alphabet is based on the types of symbols used by astrologers, with a few I recognize as alchemical symbols“, though – inevitably contrariwise – I suspect this might well be a coincidence arising from the simple shapes and symmetries employed. Peter Forshaw suggests parallels with some geometric cipher shapes used in Della Porta’s “De furtivis literarum notis“, though Tony Gaffney similarly cautions that such “shapes were very common back then, the numerous ‘ciphers of diplomatic papers’ in the British Library are full of them“.

The Blitz Cipher System

As with the Voynich Manuscript, the peaky frequency distribution probably rules out complex polyalphabetic ciphers (such as Alberti’s code wheel and Vigenere cipher): yet it doesn’t obviously seem to be a simple monoalphabetic substitution in either English or Latin (but please correct me if I’m wrong!)

Unlike the Voynich manuscript, however, I can’t see any obvious verbose cipher patterns significantly above chance: so the main techniques left on the cryptographic smorgasbord would seem to be:
* a homophonic cipher, like the Copiale Cipher (but if so, the encipherer didn’t flatten the stats for “:” [E] very well)
* a nomenclator cipher (i.e. using symbols for common words, like “the”, “Rex”, or “Mason” 🙂 )
* an acrostic / abbreviatory / shorthand cipher.

All the same, there are some intriguing patterns to be found: David Oranchak points out that “‘SBDBlDMDBl’ is an interesting sequence, since it is length 10 but only consists of 5 unique symbols.” I suspect that the presentation hand uses a slightly different enciphering strategy to the annotation hand, which possibly implies that there may be some kind of homophone mapping going on. The fact that there is also an annotation applied to a single letter [c] on the title page may also point to a nomenclator or acrostic cipher.

Personally, I’m intrigued by the circular ‘boss’ at the top of the title page: this has three letters (C, M and E) calligraphically arranged, i.e. the two dots of the colon have been separated above and below the M. To my eyes, this looks suspiciously like a cryptographic conceit – might it be the case that “:” (E) is in fact a kind of letter modifier? For example, it might encipher a repeat-last-letter token (if the text had a lot of Roman numbers), or perhaps a macron-like “overbar” superscript denoting a scribal abbreviation (i.e. contraction or truncation). Something to think about, anyway!

As for the plaintext language: if this was indeed found concealed in an East London cellar, English and Latin would surely be the main suspects, though Tony Gaffney tried Latin and couldn’t find any kind of match.

Blitz Cipher Theories & Hunches

If you’re expecting me to start speculating that these documents were from a 16th century Elizabethan secret society frequented by John Dee and/or William Shakespeare, sadly you’ll be quickly disappointed. Similarly, though I concur heartily with Glen Claston that these genuinely intriguing ciphertexts may well ultimately prove to be high-ranking 18th century Mason or Freemason ciphers, it is just too early to start saying. We simply don’t know as yet enough of the basics.

What I personally have learned from the tragically fruitless, long-term debacle that is Voynich Manuscript research is that speculative theories are almost always a hopeless way of trying to decipher such objects. Hunches are cool and useful, but they need to stay restrained, or everything goes bad. Please, no theories, let’s try to crack these using the proper historical tools at our disposal!

Alchemy decoded, finally…?

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Like many people, I’ve always vaguely wondered how the alchemical ‘code’ worked: that is, how the abstruse (and indeed playfully indirect) language of alchemy mapped onto actual things and processes in the real world. Even though the early 20th century saw a succession of natural philosophers and historically-minded empirical physicists who attempted to decode the rather confused alchemical canon, a century later the quest to reveal meaning in its alembics, retorts and green lions seems somewhat quaint to most people.

And so it is with great pleasure that I can point you to a modern document that I suspect may well have done just that (to a certain degree, at least). The Book of Aquarius‘s 56 chapters claim to reveal the answer to many long-standing open questions about alchemy, perhaps none more central than: “What Is The Stone Made From?”

You may, as I was, already be generally familiar with some of the puzzling and paradoxical riddles around this mysterious prime material, a number of which the Book of Aquarius’s anonymous author gleefully quotes in Chapter 14:-

“This Matter lies before the eyes of all; everybody sees it, touches it, loves it, but knows it not. It is glorious and vile, precious and of small account, and is found everywhere.” The Golden Tract Concerning the Stone of the Philosophers, by An Anonymous German Philosopher, 16th – 17th Cen. (?)

“Know that our Mercury is before the eyes of all men, though it is known to few. When it is prepared, its splendour is most admirable; but the sight is vouchsafed to none, save the sons of knowledge. Do not despise it, therefore, when you see it in sordid guise; for if you do, you will never accomplish our Magistery—and if you can change its countenance, the transformation will be glorious. For our water is a most pure virgin, and is loved of many, but meets all her wooers in foul garments, in order that she may be able to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy.” The Fount of Chemical Truth, by Eirenaeus Philalethes, 1694 AD

“When you shall be acquainted with the causes of this disposition you will admire that a Matter so corrupt should contain in itself such a heavenly like nature.” Verbum Dismissum, by Count Bernard Trevisan, 15th Cen.

“Our substance is openly displayed before the eyes of all, and yet is not known. […] our water that does not wet the hands.” The New Chemical Light, by Michael Sendivogius, 17th Cen.

“There is something which everyone recognizes, and whoever does not recognize it will rarely, perhaps never find it. The wise man will keep it and the fool will throw it away, and the reduction comes easily to the man who knows it.” A Magnificent and Select Tract on Philosophical Water, by Anonymous, 13th – 17th Cen. (?)

What, then, is “our water”, this curiously familiar substance that is openly displayed everywhere (for Sendivogius was no fool) and that does not wet the hands, yet the fool will see it as corrupt and discard it? The book’s rather surprising answer: urine. In fact, to make the Philosopher’s Stone, you should – it claims here – start with a litre of early morning urine, and progressively reduce it down in a sequence of stages over a period of months.

Now, even though I happen to think (for example) that Fulcanelli was a literary hoax (however highly cultured and well-informed) and that almost all alchemical texts after Michael Sendivogius fall closer to a kind of gold-crazed Ponzi scheme, I do actually find a lot of the information presented in the Book of Aquarius deeply satisfying and historically sensible (well, up to chapter 30, anyway).

[And in fact chapter 31 on perpetual lamps also covers a lot of interesting historical material collected by Ellen Lloyd I hadn’t previously seen, even though I’d blogged about them here, here and here before. It has to be said, of course, that Lloyd’s assessment that these are “alien technology” may well turn out to be a tad strong. But I digress!]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “omg this works” or anything: but rather, that the book’s surprising rationalization of how alchemy was supposed to work within its historical context does chime well with an awful lot of what I’ve read and thought about the subject over the years.

If you want to know more, or even fancy trying to use urine to create your own Philsopher’s Stone, I should perhaps point out that there’s a reasonably active online forum of people trying to do just this. Though I personally doubt that Nicolas and Peronelle Flamel are lurkers there, perhaps the Comte de Saint-Germain occasionally drops by for a chat, who knows? Eternal life can be such a bore… 😉

Voynich colour inference, a sure path to madness…

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Here are a couple of items for you that turned up this week. In my (thoroughly unexalted) opinion, I think both demonstrate something I’ve been arguing for years: that trying to infer things about the Voynich Manuscript based in its colours is, sadly, a sure path to madness.

Why? Well, ever since Jorge Stolfi pointed out the disparity between the Voynich’s various paints (in terms both of the range of painting materials used, and of the degree of skill employed) and suggested that a “heavy painter” may have added his/her paint much later (say, a century or more), there has been significant doubt about how much paint the manuscript originally had – really, which paints were (deliberately) original, and which were (speculatively) added later? And given that there is now strong evidence that many of the bifolios and even quires were scrambled several times over the manuscript’s history (apparently by someone with no understanding of the system) and yet nearly all the paint transfers appear to be between pages in their current order, it seems that a great deal of the Voynich Manuscript’s paint was added later on in its life by someone who similarly didn’t understand what it was saying.

It would therefore seem highly likely that the Voynich Manuscript was even more of an “ugly duckling” in its original ‘alpha’ state than Wilfrid Voynich realized – a particularly plain-looking artefact. As a result, I think that trying to reconstruct the mental state or attitude of the author based mainly on the colours used but without an in-depth grasp of the codicology is an approach that surely has ‘big fail’ written all over it.

Yet some aspect of human nature drives people to persist in employing this wobbly methodology. And so my first exhibit, m’lud, is something that popped up on Scribd this week: a 22-page document by Joannes Richter called Red and Blue in the Voynich Manuscript. I can do no better than give a sample quotation:-

The illustrations seem to follow a strange color convention, in which the primary color bright yellow is missing in all flowers. This is an uncommon practice in a manual for herbal flowers, as statistically there should at least be one singular flower colored in a yellowish paint. A missing color yellow (amidst an abundance of red, blue and green) for flowers suggests to consider the idea of a religious document, which had to be encrypted to avoid conflicts with the Church. In the Middle Age the primary color yellow had been used as a traitor’s color and an evil symbol.

Well… given that you already know my views, I needn’t add anything to this at all: I’ll just think my opinion really hard for a couple of seconds for you… … … so there you have it. But all the same, if you want to know more about how this fits into Richter’s research on the ancient androgynous sky-god Dyaeus, I can do no better than refer you to his blog Spelling Thee, U and I. Eerily, this turns out to be an anagram of “Need Pelling Hiatus“, make of that what you will. 🙂

My second exhibit is from Lincoln Taiz (Professor Emeritus in the Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, Sinsheimer Labs, University of California) and Saundra Lee Taiz, whose ideas I first flagged here back in March but who have now published their paper in Chronica Horticulturae, Vol 51, No. 2, 2011. Essentially, despite having countless herbal and pharmacological pages to work with in the Voynich Manuscript, they’ve instead focused their horticultural attention on the ‘balneological’ quire 13, with all its curiously-posed water nymphs and funny coloured pools.

Their working hypothesis is that quire 13 visually expresses the ideas in “De Plantis” by Nicolaus of Damascus, who lived two millennia ago. Ultimately, they somehow infer that in this particular section, the Voynich Manuscript’s “…author depicts a philosophical scene in which women represent vegetative souls located within the very marrow of the plant, driving the processes that make plants grow and reproduce.” Errrr… sorry, but I just don’t think you can build that lofty a tower on top of the use of the colour green in Q13.

And here’s why: if you codicologically reconstruct the original page order of Q13 (as best you can), I’m 99% sure that f84v sat facing f78r in the original gathering order. Here’s what they looked like:-

Voynich Manuscript, f84v placed next to f78r

Here, one set of pools is blue and faded (my guess: original paint), yet the other is green and vivid (my guess: heavy painter, added a century later by someone who had no idea about what the text meant or signified). Yet all the Taizes’ inference chains here are based on the – probably much later – green-coloured pools. As for me, I simply don’t think there’s any significant chance that any historical or horticultural reasoning based on this green colour will have any validity: but feel free to make up your own mind.