The secret history of “Xmas” (the word)…

by ⋅ 6 Comments


Where, you may ask, does that annoying word “Xmas” come from? Is it just a linguistic marketing ploy to get a blunt message across in fewer letters? Well… yes, sort of. But perhaps not quite in the way you think…

In English, we write “Christ”, but his name was originally “Χριστος” [Christos] in Greek – for according to Thomas S. McCall, “there is no evidence that the Gospels were written originally in any other language but Greek”. Yes, I know, parts may possibly have been written in Aramaic, but all the same they seem to have made the transition to Greek very quickly.

Fast forward to 324 CE when the newly-converted Emperor Constantine the Great (indeed, he of Constantinople fame) was inspired by a dream – as some chroniclers would have us believe – to modify his army’s labara (errrm, the standards soldiers carried into battle) to [presumably] display its allegiance with Christ. This intersecting “chi-rho” (Χ-ρ) shape was a favoured propagandist accessory for Constantine, appearing on his helmet as well as many coins of the period. My point here being that “Χρ” was used right from the start as an abbreviating shorthand, though for Constantine arguably more for political reasons than for religious ones.

Once again, fast forward to 1100 CE when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle mentioned “Xp̄es mæsse” where the rho was superscripted with a scribal ‘macron’ (or, more precisely, a horizontal overbar) to indicate contraction of the following syllable). OK, this isn’t exactly “Merry Xmas” yet, but you can at least now see where this is headed.

With the introduction of printing, using “X” as a shorthand for “Christ” started to accelerate. Remembering that the 15th century fell in the historical shorthand lull between the mad proliferation of early medieval Tironian notae and the start of modern shorthand (with Bright’s Characterie in the late 16th century), and you can see why “X” was frequently used by early printers as an abbreviation for Christ. From that same general abbreviating period came Mr Ratcliff of Plymouth, who aggressively hacked away at the Lord’s Prayer thus:-

Our Fth wch rt n hvn ; hlwd b y Nm
Y Kgdm cm Y wl b dn n rth z it s n Hvn

All in all, if you’re looking for a way to write “Christ” quickly and precisely, rest assured that “X” marks that particular spot, and has done for nearly two millennia. And in case you still think “Xmas” is a little bit, errrrm, ‘Asda’, do please consider that Coleridge (1801), Byron (1811) and Lewis Carroll (1864) all happily used the word (so says Wikipedia, though I slightly doubt that it appeared in any of their canonical poems, nonsense or otherwise).

Curiously, the predictive texting on my vintage-2010 mobile doesn’t deign to recognize “xmas”, which is surely just anti-historical snobbery on the part of T9’s English dictionary compilers. Yet even now X still abbreviates for quite a few different “Christ” soundalikes:
* florists despairing at the length of the word “chrysanthemums” write “xanths”;
* electronics engineers have long written ‘xtal’ for “crystal (oscillator)”; and
* Christina Aguilera sometimes writes her name as “Xtina”, bless her sort-of-dirrty little tush. “X/bike”!

Love or loathe the word, it seems that we’re stuck with Xmas. I just wish you all a happy one! 🙂

Amazing news on The Unknown Man…

by ⋅ 58 Comments

A massive thanks to Cipher Mysteries reader Cheryl Bearden for passing along to me some breaking news on the Somerton Man case: a story by Emily Watkins in Adelaide’s Sunday Mail dated 20th November 2011, already inserted in the Taman Shud Wikipedia page by retired Southern Australian WLRoss.

So, what’s the big news, Nick? Well, an unnamed Adelaide woman found a US identification card in her (late?) father’s collection of documents & photos, showing a fresh-faced 18-year British seaman called “H. C. Reynolds”.

The general resemblance between this person and the Unknown Man is extremely strong, but specific similarities between their ears (again) and a mole on their faces was enough to convince Adelaide University’s “internationally renowned anatomist and biological anthropologist Professor Maciej Henneberg” that the two were a perfect match. Personally, I’m not 100% convinced yet, but the parallels between this and what I concluded here a few days ago are pretty impressive.

The only downside is that searches carried out for the Adelaide Sunday Mail for H. C. Reynolds at the “US National Archives, UK National Archives and Australian War Memorial Research Centre” all drew a blank. So… what was the secret history of H. C. Reynolds?

Firstly, the date stamped on his id card is intriguing: 28th February 1918 was towards the end of the First World War, not too long after the US had joined in. A US draft of 21 year olds was already running, and would be extended later in 1918 to a draft of 18 year olds. Conscription in the UK had already been put in place in 1916 for single men aged 18 to 41, so if Reynolds (apparently aged 18) had just come from the UK, then he was apparently dodging the UK draft. Hence, I have to caution that this might possibly be a false name… just so you know!

It also struck me that Reynolds might possibly have been a British merchant seaman somehow shipwrecked or otherwise forcibly landed in a US port. One of the most notable WWI sea incidents connected to the US was the sinking just off Nantucket of three or four British merchant ships (and some Dutch ships) by the German submarine SM U-53 on 8th October 1916. This caused widespread consternation, and may well have been a prime thing that helped persuade the American people that the US should enter the war.

It’s a fascinating story, and I eventually tracked down the list of survivors and passengers of the Strathdene, the Stephano, and the West Point (it’s in the New York Times archive for 10th October 1916, if you’re interested). However, there was apparently no “Reynolds” on board any of them. I also managed to find the passenger & crew list for the Florizel which sank on February 24th 1918 (though from hitting a reef, not from another U-Boat action) off Newfoundland, but there was no Reynolds there either. (Just so you know, it was named after Prince Florizel in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale).

Having said that, I wasn’t able to fully determine whether or not U-53 sank the British freighter “Kingston” / “Kingstonian” (the newspapers of the day ran numerous conflicting reports on this, probably the most reliable source would be Hans Rose’s reports), so it is just about possible Reynolds could have been on one of the Kingston’s lifeboats allegedly seen “30 miles SE of Nantucket”. Alternatively, if you happen to know of other British ships that sank just off the US coast between 1916 and 28th February 1918, please let me know!

To be honest, though, I find the date of the sinking of the Florizel (a mere four days before the id card was issued) more than just a touch coincidental: I do wonder whether (for example) the Florizel’s waiter “Henry Snow” (whose age we don’t know) might possibly have changed his name to “H C Reynolds” in order to somehow stay on the USA.

Right now, Reynolds’ id card would seem to have triggered far more questions than answers: but that is, at least, a better place to be in than having no questions at all, right?

Review: Gavin Menzies’ “The Lost Empire of Atlantis”…

by ⋅ 19 Comments

Ex-submariner Gavin Menzies attracted global attention with his eye-catching farragos “1421” and “1434”, books laying out how he imagined 15th century Chinese fleets sailed through a dried-up Egyptian canal to reach Renaissance Europe and beyond. And now he’s moved onwards and backwards to the Minoans, an ancient Mediterranean civilization he proposes were in fact the sea-faring glue holding European Bronze Age trade together. Yes, and he thinks that it was the volcanic eruption on Thera / Santorini that destroyed the Minoans (though via a tsunami), and that this is what Plato was talking about when he talked about “Atlantis”. Hence Menzies’ book is entitled “The Lost Empire of Atlantis“.

So far, so nondescript – nothing that isn’t already in a thousand books (and disputed or disproved by ten thousand more). However, Menzies’ particular new shine on all that rusty metal is that he has a vastly grander vision of the Minoans’ geographic sprawl. For one, he thinks not only that it was they who were the first Europeans to discover North America, but also that they mined and shipped out millions of tons of extraordinarily high-purity copper from beside Lake Superior. Oh, and that the Egyptian Pharaohs basically outsourced sea-trading to the Minoans, and that you can (if you squint at all the evidence) see evidence of the Minoans on the Red Sea and even in India, too. [Though not Australia and New Zealand yet, but perhaps Menzies is holding those back for a sequel, wouldn’t be the first time, eh?]

I think the main things just about any reader would notice are the book’s relentless stylistic tics and its metronomic structure. In pretty much every chapter, Menzies jumps on a plane or boat with his wife Marcella to some vaguely-connected place, looks out of a hotel window while musing to himself on how much it had all changed since he had last visited it while still in the Royal Navy, and then trolls round a local museum or historical site, where he is suddenly struck by the ineffable kindness of the ancients to have left him yet another glaringly obvious clue to add to his list – another cookie crumb in his global trail.

This struck me most strongly in Menzies’ mercifully brief Chapter 21, where he is transfixed in the Prado by the similarities between a 19th century AD drawing of bullfighting by Goya (Sketch No.90) and another image of bullfighting he had previously seen at Knossos. “What I’d been witnessing – had I stopped to think about it – was a calling card. It had been sitting out the centuries, but it was there, written in the colourful script of the Minoans.” Yes, in this book Menzies does indeed raise his pursuit of historical bull to an epic new level.

In many key ways, all he’s really doing is trying to fit into the idiot wet dream vision of ur-historians that TV producers have talked up over the last decade: genially talkative late-middle-age buffoons buffers who (conveniently for the constraints of the medium) practise history just by striding around, all the while making dramatic & striking connections to camera. But of course that’s simply a nonsensical fiction: to a very great degree, history is driven more by detailed textual study and a curiously rigorous kind of critical empathy than a series of ever-longer intuitive leaps towards an eerily uncanny mega-Truth That Lies Beneath.

For me, I think Menzies sees the great swathe of historical textures not with an historian’s eye but more as an abstract artist might see a series of impressive colours: as things demanding to be used, appropriated and joyfully displayed. Enjoy the scenery as a whole sequence of contested Bronze Age artefacts – the Nebra Disk, Stonehenge, the Amesbury Archer, the Uluburun wreck, the Antikythera device, Orkney voles, the Nabta stones, Cornish tin mines, the Great Orme copper mine, and countless others including (yes, finally) the Phaistos Disk – drift pleasantly past your eyes.

Of course, for a cipher mystery reader, YABOA (“yet another book on Atlantis”) ain’t no big thang at all: but sporting the Phaistos Disk on the front, spine & back of Menzies’ book is surely intended as some kind of provocation, right? But given that he clearly does not have the historical apparatus for decrypting the Disk’s mysterious spiral messages, why does his book sport it so jauntily?

The answer is that Menzies happened to meet Dr Minas Tsikritis, who has long been studying all the extant Cretan hieroglyphs, including the Phaistos Disk, the Arkalochori Axe, seal fragment HM 992 [which contains the Phaistos Disk’s distinctive “double-comb” symbol #21], together with all the known Linear A inscriptions… and who believes that he is now able to account for a large proportion of them. So, what’s the Phaistos Disk, then? Well, according to Tsikritis (p.320), “at least one side is a [Tragoudi]”… basically, a sea-shanty. Well, pickle my timbers and sell my soul to Captain Teague: who’d have thunk it, eh?

Buy Gavin Menzies’ book if you like: but please bear in mind that his ongoing Voyages of the Damned proceed despite capital-aitch ‘istory, not because of it. Despite a sensitive nose for what’s wrong with big picture accounts, his syncretistic urge to jam all his pieces together serves only to weaken his overall case, not to strengthen it. The reader departs with the impression of having met a kid trying to build a Lego wall without knowing how to make brick bonds: for as a discipline, history is far less about simply accreting evidence than about examining the nature and limits of the bonds binding those pieces of evidence together.

To me, Menzies’ Lego walls really don’t stand up to close scrutiny: though they’re formed of all the right sort of brightly coloured bricks, their bonds – those connections that move us along the continuum from coincidence to correlation to causality – are simply absent. So, even though what his approach yields is a series of vividly-coloured, imaginative accounts of how things might have been, these ultimately are little more than modern-day sea-shanties. What shall we do with him? Shave his belly with a rusty razor!

Voynich Manuscript decrypted by Finnish ‘prophet of god’ via Fox News…

by ⋅ 17 Comments

Apparently, today’s big cipher mystery news story is the announcement that Finnish businessman “Veikko Latvala, a self described ‘prophet of god’” has allegedly “decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world’s most mysterious manuscript.“. Voynich researchers will no doubt be amazed to learn that “The sound syllables are a mixture of Spanish and Italian, also mixed with the language this man used to speak himself. His own language was a rare Babylonian dialect that was spoken in a small area in Asia.”

Being brutally honest, though, this kind of thing makes me dreadfully sad. Cryptanalytically, the whole point about the way Voynichese was constructed was to make it resemble a nonsense language: a semantic half-entity with a great big meaning-size hole left empty in it for the reader to fill with their own pareidoilia, to gestaltically complete. As a result, the VMs is hugely attractive to people whose heads are already full of a self-contradictory chorus of noise, whose need is merely for a vessel to pour their own internal message into.

Once you grasp that in all its awfulness, it is little more than a miserable half-hop to seeing the Voynich Manuscript as a virtual car crash perpetually about to happen yet with doors wide open beckoning the unstable to jump in: a DIY tragedy that seems fated to be replayed endlessly by successive generations.

Of course, I’m perfectly happy to concede that it’s entirely possible that Veikko Latvala is right here, though doubtless it would be for utterly the wrong reasons, and at a high enough level of improbability to drive the “Heart of Gold” (as famously stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox) all the way to infinity and beyond.

Actually, for me the big news here is that the whole miserable non-story broke first on Fox News. Even though The Da Vinci Code already seems a very long time ago (though arguably not nearly long enough), perhaps the Fox newsroom got a kick off covering Kevin Knight’s Copiale Cipher story recently (in fact, they asked Knight about Latvala’s claims, but he declined to comment, can’t think why), and wondered if they could reprise that populist cryptographic high.

All the same, I suppose I’m contractually bound to quote what Latvala says about “16152” (by which I presume he means the Beinecke’s scan “1006152.sid”, i.e. f40r):-

“The name of the flower is Heart of Fire.
It makes the skin beautiful when made as an ointment.
The oil is pressed from the buds.
This ointment is used for the wrinkles.
Is suitable for the kidneys and the head,
as the flower prevents inflammations, is antibiotic.
Plant is 10 centimeters by its height.
It grows on hot and dry slants.
The plant is bright green by its color.”

Of course, the obvious historical non-sequiturs here are “antibiotic” (~1889) and “centimeters” (~1790). But it’s also interesting that he lists 9 lines, when f40r has 11 to the left of the plant-thing and 10 to the right.

As far as my own observations on what is actually on f40r go, I personally rather like the tonal contrast between the two green paints: perhaps the stem green was original but the leaf green was from the ‘heavy painter’? I also like the way that the two root sections merge into a single vertical stem, nicely mysterious. 😉 The text also has some nice verbose cipher sequences (“ar ar al or” at the end of line #2, plus “ar ar or” at the end of line #5 quickly followed by “or or ar” at the start of line #6), and a particularly clear ‘Neal key’ at the middle-right of the second paragraph’s topmost line. But that’s just by the by: I’m sure all Voynich researchers have their own favourite features. 😉

Nick’s thoughts on the Somerton Man, Part Three…

by ⋅ 50 Comments

If you’ve followed parts one and two, you’ll know that I’m pretty sure that
(a) that The Unknown Man had worked on a ship (probably as a Third Officer), but was unemployed & nearly destitute;
(b) that Jestyn had probably first met him in the hospital where she worked, and – as with Alfred Boxall – had given him a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as well as her new phone number; and
(c) that he had recently been acutely ill, possibly even hospitalized following a bad virus.

Some other facts that strike me as relevant:
(d) the Somerton Man, Alfred Boxall, and Jestyn’s husband were all much the same age
(e) the Rubaiyat is a collection of love poetry

The first issue is why the Unknown Man travelled far across Australia to see a nurse who had once treated him, carrying a book of love poetry she had apparently given him, despite being unemployed and outrageously poor. Personally, I suspect the answer to this lies in the question: love. A number of people have speculated that the unknown Man had fathered the nurse’s son (some based on the observation that their earlobes apparently shared the same rare structure): travelling long-distance to see your own young son would be a perfectly consistent scenario.

But Jestyn now had a new partner, whom she consistently referred to as her “husband” (though it was to be several years before his divorce came through and they were able to marry). Given that she had already refused Alf Boxall’s request after the war to meet up with her, it seems odd that she allowed the Unknown Man to visit: why one and not the other? I believe this points to a different dynamic between her and the Unknown Man: indeed, if the Unknown Man were her young son’s father, I believe Jestyn wouldn’t comfortably have been able to turn him away, even if she did now have a partner she intended to marry.

All in all, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that this is what connected them together, and that rather than conspiracy or subterfuge, it was love that had bound him to her (even if it was not necessarily reciprocated): but what then are we to make of his mysterious enciphered note? After all, this is a cipher mystery, right?

MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABO AIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

For all the speculative and hallucinatory code-breaking efforts that have gone into cracking these few short lines, there’s no doubt in my mind what it actually is: nothing more than a performance aide-memoire, the first letters of a poem dedicated to Jestyn that the Unknown Man had himself written, perhaps composed on the train on his way over to Glenelg. In his mind, I suspect he was aspiring to something close to:-

“The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Of course, few poets reach such sublimity and subtlety of expression, and I have little doubt that the Unknown Man’s own poetry fell well short of that league. But if it is a love poem, it seems a reasonably safe bet to me that each line has only four feet (there seem to be too few initials there for it to reach FitzGerald’s five feet per line), and so the lines probably also divide into four sets of two halves:-
MRGOA
— BABD
MTBIM
— PANETP
MLIABO
— AIAQC
ITTMTS
— AMSTGAB

Given that there’s a high chance that the letter [L] (which only appears once) probably stands for ‘[L]OVE’, I’d expect that [MLIABO] will turn out to be something not far off from “My Love Is Almost Boiling Over”. Intensely felt no doubt, but probably far from sublime.

Perhaps a retired crossword enthusiast with plenty of time on their hands might care to try to reconstruct this poem? There are plenty of reasonable clues to be had: [ITT] could well be not too far from “I Think That”; the last word of [BABD] probably rhymes with the last word of [PANETP], and similarly for [AIAQC] and [AMSTGAB]; the lines beginning [A-] could well be “AND…”, while [M-] could be “MY…”; the [Q] strongly constrains the [AIAQC] line; etc.

To sum up, I’m completely comfortable with the idea that the Unknown Man travelled to Glenelg not long after coming out of hospital to see Jestyn and their son, and that it was there he died, possibly poisoned by digitalis, but more likely from an allergic reaction to something in the pasty he’d had for lunch. But none of that really touches on the question of where he came from: really, what happened before the curtain rose on his relationship with Jestyn?

People don’t tend to speculate on this much, which is a shame because in many ways I think we do now have enough information to to give it a go. Perhaps the chewing gum he was carrying was the clue: for, as Diane O’Donovan thoughtfully pointed out in her comments to Part Two,

Well, I’d say that one thing is quite sure; he wasn’t Australian.

Gum-chewing was considered an exclusively American habit in the forties, and even into the sixties, positively loathed by most adults and by middle class teenagers too.

And if you tenaciously follow that idea through to the end…

So how about this? Mystery man is American, contracts malaria in the tropics and is sent to a hospital in Australia, as was usual. This first time, in Sydney. But then he gets orders to return to the front, prefers to go AWOL, gets caught and is put into an internment camp [perhaps already in Victoria; Melbourne Hospital was one of the internment camps. While there, he gets plenty of sun and exercise, but little really hard work. Fortunately, war ends. He’s finally tried for AWOL, but only sentenced to 12 months in prison (or gets sick again) so no sun for the final year.

Now released, he asks to be accepted as a new migrant, claiming to be a sign writer. He’s accepted, and buys the tools of the trade intending to start a new life and find Jestyn. Suitcase and clothes were given from a refugee/charity organisation, as part of a routine de-mob and welcome to Aus. etc.
BUT – While at Melbourne Hospital .. and so forth.

With my only proviso being that the Unknown Man was arguably more likely to be in the US Navy than the US Army, I think this is pretty much the best scenario currently going. Might the answer to the Somerton Man mystery therefore lie not in Australian hospital archives, but in US Navy files? As Diane muses, perhaps the most telling clue of all here might turn out to be the smallest: the pack of Juicy Fruit. Something to chew on! 😉

The Voynich Translation, Chapter 5…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

The crew were spending the rest of the day on those interminable fly-past shots of the Voynich Manuscript all modern documentary editors demand, their rostrum camera a microlight buzzing across a lightly-inked vellum landscape. But Marina Lyonne would be interviewing Mrs Kurtz tomorrow morning, which was when the real fun would begin.

Graydon shifted uncomfortably in his chair, looking sideways at Emm. “So… dare I ask why Mrs Kurtz is so bothered?”, he asked.

“It’s more than just her”, Emm explained, “it’s all the curators. On the one hand, they completely grasp that while the Voynich is ‘Beinecke MS 408’, they’ll never truly be free of the alien artefact, Knights Templar & Rennes-le-Chateau nutjobs.”

“Yeah”, he said, “they do go with the territory, I guess.”

“OK: but on the other hand it’s the hoax theorist academics who annoy them much more. To the curators, whatever the Voynich turns out to be, it’s still a genuinely old historical object: so those hoaxologists ought to know better than to treat it as some kind of postmodernist joke. Which is why the Beinecke tried hard to shut its metal and glass front doors to the French film makers.”

“So, they then – let me guess – brought on board the impeccably-connected Marina…”

“…who managed to pull some stratospherically high-up strings within Yale, right. Et puis“, Emm continued, gesturing expansively in the general direction of the film crew downstairs, “voici tout le monde. Still, none of that means the curators appreciate being powerplayed by her… or, indeed, that they will necessarily play boules.”

“So”, mused Graydon scratching his head, “my job now is to give Mrs Kurtz plenty of powerful petards to place under the whole hoax argument. I’m happy to do my best: I just wish I knew what would give the biggest bang.”

He stood up slowly, pausing as the scale of the challenge hove slowly into view. How on earth could he prove that it wasn’t a hoax? Given the pervasive fog of uncertainty that surrounds nearly aspect of the Voynich, how can anyone prove anything about it at all?

“Perhaps we should start with the dating evidence?”, suggested Emm: she took notes as Graydon patiently went through the early 15th century radiocarbon dating, the mid-15th century parallel hatching, the late-15th century quire numbers, the 14th century hunting crossbow, and the mid 14th to early 15th century Savoy-like marginalia handwriting. They all told much the same story: the Voynich was an object rooted in 14th and 15th century ideas, but written on early 15th century vellum.

Emm shook her head. “Marina’s bound to point to the disparities between the dates. Surely a 16th century hoaxer making something mysteriously old-looking would just copy lots of plausible bits onto old vellum?”

“It’s not really like that”, said Graydon. “None of these dates are exact, not even the radiocarbon dating. Yet they come from such different directions – radiocarbon, Art History, palaeography, history of science. A hoaxer would need a very much more multimedia notion of what it means to be old than was in play during the 16th century. Piece all those fragments together, and an overall story does emerge: it’s just that it’s not a 16th century story. Hence we can basically rule out John Dee and Edward Kelly as authors.”

“Oooh, your ex-wife definitely won’t like that“, smiled Emm. “But I don’t think it’s going to be enough to sink her ship. What about the cryptography – can you prove it’s a cipher?”

Graydon’s face dropped. “Really, that’s what’s been bothering me for the last couple of years or so – it’s why my PhD has taken so long. Pass those new scans, let’s see what Mrs Kurtz has got for me…”

The first one was something he’d asked for five years ago: multispectral scans of the “michiton oladabas” marginalia, highlighting the different inks used. Mapping iron, carbon and phosphorus to red, green and blue, the page came alive with layered detail, laying out what was clearly… a tangled, gritty mess.

“Oh no“, he groaned, “we don’t have anything like the weeks it would take to sort this out. But at least the ‘nichil obstat‘ part is reasonably clear now.”

Emm shrugged blankly. “Which means…?”

“…’that it contains nothing contrary to faith or morals’. Essentially, it would seem that a 15th century church censor – possibly a bishop – has examined the manuscript and decided that its contents weren’t anti the Church. Nice to know, but not hugely informative.”

On they went to the next scan, and to the next, and the next, only to find that they all told the same tangled ur-story. Though there were plenty of subtly-sedimented ink layers in all the trickiest sections, there was nothing to be found that could obviously be used to disprove hoax theories… really, nothing at all. It was evening now, almost time for the Beinecke to shut for the day: Emm idly looked across to Mrs Kurtz’s cameo-lapelled grey coat hung up in the corner, and wondered where she was.

“Let’s try that first scan again”, Graydon sighed wearily. The pair of them looked again at the back page’s spectrally-enhanced marginalia, their faces pressed close to each other, both now squinting at the mysterious top line, tracing out the ductus, weft and weave of the letters with their fingers.

Graydon could feel the skin on Emm’s cheek buzzing hot with their intensely shared concentration: he was sharply reminded of the intensity of his marriage to Marina. For all the sexual bravado and defensive sparkiness of Emm’s verbal fencing, working with her in this way was provoking feelings in Graydon that nobody since Marina had managed. The timing was just plain wrong, and he hated to admit it, but right now his mind was turned on.

“It all makes sense apart from that last word”, Emm was saying, several thousand miles away from his runaway train of thought. “Por le bon Simon Sint… what?” She grabbed his hand and started carefully tracing out the super-enlarged letters with his index finger, as if he was the quill, her quill. However, her attempt at reconstructive history was having a dramatically different effect on Graydon from the one intended. It now wasn’t just his mind that was turned on.

For a minute that seemed to stretch out into an hour or a day, his gaze tennis-matched back and forth between the word she was tracing out imperfectly with his finger and her implausibly attractive face. Even though time was rapidly running out, he felt there was something he really had to tell her. “Emm”, he began, dredging the words out, “I really think we should…”

And then the door burst open: it was the security guard Davis, with a wrecked, slapped look to his face. “You better come quick. Mrs Kurtz is in trouble. Miss Lyonne gave her the kiss of life: an ambulance is on its way.”

They ran, taking ten steps at a time down the stairs to the reading room area. And there she was, lying on the floor by the desk, glasses askew but still on the chain round her neck, her skin white-grey as high winter cloud. Marina, sitting on the floor next to the librarian and holding her limp hand, looked wearily up at Emm and Graydon. “Heart attack”, she mouthed at them.

For a few moments, they all stuck in position in an awkward tableau, unsure what to say or do: then Davis reappeared with the paramedics in tow, and the whole resuscitatory logic took over.

Before long, Gray, Emm, and Marina found themselves outside the Beinecke in the cool evening air, an odd silence having fallen over them all. The Voynich didn’t seem important any more.

“So, this your new girlfriend?”, Marina sniped artlessly at Graydon.

“Why, yes she is”, interjected Emm, and before Gray could say a word had dragged him into an intensely full-on kiss. “Still, no time to rake over old ground, lots of new furrows to plough, we’ll see you in the morning, Miss Lyonne.” She swiftly yanked Graydon away from Marina’s burning red gape and off into the night.

As they marched away from the library, Graydon whispered to her “Err… am I going to regret asking you what that was all about?”

Emm paused: “It originally was a spur of the moment thing, but the more I think about it, the more support you’re going to need. After all, tomorrow will probably be the hardest day of your life.”

“Errr… sorry?” Graydon stammered.

Emm sighed. “For a bright bloke, you’re not very fast, are you? With poor Mrs Kurtz in hospital…”

But their conversation was interrupted in stereo by the same text message arriving at both their mobile phones:

Dear lovebirds (smile, you’re on CCTV), the Provost needs to see you ASAP. Perhaps you’ll join him for dinner at the Skull & Bones club at 8pm? A.Friend.

Review: “Steve Santa and the secret of the Last Parfait”…

by ⋅ 6 Comments

It’s funny how two things can have all the same basic ingredients and yet end up wildly different. A Maclaren MP4-12C and a Fiat 500 are both cars: yet few would disagree that they’re worlds apart.

Similarly, even though Emery Borka has – in Steve Santa and the secret of the Last Parfait – succeeded in producing a novel that combines all the classic airport novella ingredients with a home-spun accidental-hero vibe, I’m sad to say that the result is less like The Da Vinci Code than a long series of knowing nods to (and in-jokes for) the writer’s family and friends combined with Internet research.

The reason I’m reviewing it here is that the Voynich Manuscript makes a solid Macguffinly appearance in it, the idea being that it is written in the Dongba language. Though, technically speaking, Dongba is a set of ideographic (and, indeed, very idiosyncratic) pictographs developed ~1000 years ago in parallel with the Naxi language, whereas I suspect Voynichese is rather more similar to the Geba syllabary more typically used to write Naxi. But that’s by the by. 🙂

If I mentioned that Borka’s story also has various modern-day Knights Templar factions, the Daughters of Tsion, Cathars, Paris, Xiamen, GulangYu, Rennes-le-Chateau, Carcasonne, Toulouse, Rocamadour, Padirac, and (yes) Black Madonnas, you’d get the idea: but even that fails to do justice to arguably the book’s best (and simultaneously worst) feature – the food.

You see, everywhere in the world that Borka’s retired, divorced, cashed-out hero pinballs onwards to, he gets to eat (and describe in depth) the most authentic-sounding regional dishes possible, while simultaneously being given high-velocity touristic mystery history by some implausibly well-informed Wikipedia page local expert. It’s a bit like being strapped to a wall and having the world’s food fired at you by a rapid succession of international chefs.

So, I have to say I’m not sure the world is quite ready for Borka’s historical mystery food tourism proto-genre: treating it as airport fiction and trying to read it too quickly would probably give you indigestion. But all the same, it is what it is and there’s no point hiding it: as Popeye said to the sweet potato, “I yam what I yam“. 😉

The Voynich Translation, Chapter 4…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Absent-mindedly dusting breadcrumbs off a beard no longer there, Graydon Harvitz paused in thought at the glass doors of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Was the building a sublime symphony in concrete for keeping old books alive, or a big ugly mausoleum for entombing struggling grads?

More immediately, was his ex-wife Marina there to bury the hatchet or to twist the knife?

He tried – not entirely successfully, it has to be said – to console himself that she was almost certainly far too busy servicing her own self-gratificatory academic career to try to destroy his rapidly withering vineage. Taking a deep breath and holding grimly on to that reassuring feeling of irrelevance, he launched himself inside: but, as had always been the case, Marina caught sight of him within microseconds and marched over, her red hair and sharp eyes a visual siren, ringing alarm bells deep in his soul.

“Graydon, you useless ass,” she spat, missing neither a semiquaver nor a beat, “if you’ve checked into Planet Yale to rain on my freakin’ parade…”

“Nice to see you too, Marina”, he soothed, “glad those anger management classes are finally paying off.”

They stood there in the lobby, gladiatorially nose to nose. The time that they’d loved each other so intensely, feasting on each other’s rich minds and young bodies in an intellectual and physical fugue, was so long ago now – it may as well have been another life entirely. Everyone had said they’d been mad to get married while still at college: and yes, everyone had indeed been proved right. Guess that’s what happens when you surround yourself with clever bastards, he mused.

“So”, she glared, “still using blank maps to hunt for a snark?”

“I prefer to think of it”, Graydon murmured, “as trying to pick the right snark. A lot of fish in that sea.”

It was, of course, the Voynich Manuscript that had ripped them apart. Right at the height of their mutual obsession, Marina had seen a lecture on the tables and grilles Gordon Rugg asserted had been used to construct its “Voynichese” text, and had been simply electrified. In a moment, the polarities of all the mysterious deep magnetisms holding the couple together – the passion, the logic, the sheer quest-iness – had been dramatically reversed. Everything that had joined them so tightly suddenly divided them with equal force.

And now it was the Voynich Manuscript that had brought them back together, if only for a day. Or rather, for however long during that day Graydon could manage to avoid being killed by her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the film crew surreptitiously filming their spat. “You’d better get back to your Quattrocento Candid Camera”, he said to her, methodically rotating a middle finger to the vertical in the direction of the cameraman. “The French love their romans historiques, don’t they?”

“Actually, it’s part of a series on the science of meaninglessness and hoaxes”, she sniffed, “not that a mid-ranking historian such as you would recognise capital-S ‘Science’ if it stamped on your damn foot.”

Oh yes: hadn’t she just loved leaping on C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” Arts vs Science bandwagon, as yet another way of post-rationalizing and institutionalizing their separation. Really, Marina was not unlike the “little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead”: when she was good, she was very very good – but when she was bad, she was utterly horrid. In that way, her logic was resolutely Aristotelian: unable to even exist in the excluded middle between the two extrema of true and false.

Yet since their divorce, Graydon had found himself becoming ever greyer: though not in the sense of being dull, but rather that he found his belief in the black and white certainties that Marina worked with gradually fading. Working so long with the Voynich Manuscript’s overlapping uncertainties had stripped him of his ability to see things in absolute terms.

And then – suddenly jolting them both out of bullet-time back to the present – Mrs Kurtz came over and gently took Marina’s arm, leading her off towards the stairs, to the room downstairs that had inevitably been prepped up for the filming. And as they turned to move away, Graydon could swear – for one curious moment – that he saw the formidable Mrs Kurtz wink at him. What? Mrs Kurtz, winking at him? What was that all about?

As the building quickly swallowed up the two women and the crew, the elderly security guard came over from the front desk and silently handed him a note. Graydon opened it out:

“Davis will let you through to the staff room. Lots to do! Emm x”

The guard wordlessly guided him round to the door and keyed in the access code. As he went through, Graydon was amazed to see the staff room table filled with dossiers, scans, diagrams, graphs, and even pictures of him. Behind them sat Emm deep in beautiful thought, running her fingers over ultra-high-resolution micro-photographs of the Voynich Manuscript he didn’t know existed. The unexpected notion that the Beinecke curators had some Voynich secrets they didn’t want let out began to form in his mind… but all the same, it did have the air of a somewhat creepy job interview.

“Do you expect me to talk, Miss Goldfinger?”, he said.

“No, Mr Harvitz, I expect you to die!”, Emm replied, “particularly if you keep butting up against your ex-wife like that.”

“OK… but would it be rude of me to ask, ummm… what the heck’s going on here?”

“It’s very simple”, Emm plonked. “Marina’s here to prove that the Beinecke’s star exhibit is garbage. But Mrs Kurtz has other ideas. And, much as we all hate the concept, right now you’re probably the library’s only hope.”

“You mean, Mrs Kurtz wants li’l ol’ me to find a way to rescue the Voynich Manuscript’s reputation while simultaneously destroying my bitter ex-wife’s international TV career and getting my PhD?”

“Yup, that’s basically it. So, behind your back over the last few weeks, Mrs Kurtz has been secretly getting you all the ammunition you’ll need. As long as you load the gun, she’s more than happy to fire it. Sorry, I thought you’d worked all that out already.”

Graydon paused, perplexed, the politics and permutations pirouetting precipitously in his washing-machine mind.

“I… guess I only really have one question. Where do I sign?”

Nick’s thoughts on the Somerton Man, Part Two…

by ⋅ 16 Comments

A quick update on Part One: I note in the Taman Shud Case Wikipedia page that:

Initially, the clothes were traced to a local sailor, Tom Keane. As Keane could not be located, some of his shipmates viewed the body at the morgue, and stated categorically that the corpse was not that of Keane, nor did the clothes belong to the missing sailor.

This does make me wonder if Tom Keane the sailor had given some older clothes away to a Mission to Seafarer’s branch. Did anyone ever try to follow up Tom Keane? An interesting thought…

Anyway, before I carry on discussing the Unknown Man’s life, death, and cipher, I need to post about the timeline for ‘Jestyn’, the unnamed nurse whose phone number was in the back of the 2nd Rubaiyat (i.e. not Alf Boxall’s copy) found thrown in a car in Glenelg’s Jetty Road, and from a page of which the words “Taman Shud” had been torn and put in one of the Unknown Man’s pockets.

The diagram below summarizes pretty much all the top-level details of the nurse’s timeline, but with one addition from me. Gerry Feltus quotes [p.111] Adelaide’s “The News” of 28th July 1949 as saying that the nurse had “told police that about three years ago she had given the man, Lieut. Alfred Boxall, a copy of Omar Khayyam’s ‘Rubaiyat’ when he was in hospital“. Except, of course, Boxall never was in hospital: they met at the Clifton Gardens Hotel (which was demolished in 1966, just in case you accidentally try to go looking for it).

Was this just lazy journalism [Gerry Feltus says “possibly”], or a slip of the tongue from the nurse? I suspect the latter, for this would tie together many elements very neatly: and will continue discussing this in Part Three…

More to come… 🙂

Nick’s thoughts on the Somerton Man, Part One…

by ⋅ 26 Comments

The news of the moment is that Australian Attorney-General John Rau has refused Professor Derek Abbott’s request that the Somerton man’s body be exhumed for DNA / autosome testing, commenting that Abbott’s application wasn’t “compelling”. Well, I guess that means we’re going to have to do it the hard way, then… 🙂

So here (as long-promised) is Part One of my thoughts on the Unknown Man and his mysterious cipher note, perhaps they’ll open up some new research avenues. Overall, while I’m pretty sure my reasoning is basically sound, please feel free to disagree! (PS: I’ve included a few page references to Gerry Feltus’ book for Klaus Schmeh and other hardcore cipher mystery buffs).

[For background on the Somerton Man / Unknown Man / Taman Shud / Tamam Shud case, here’s a pair of links that should get you started]

(1) Why was the Unknown Man in Somerton? As with pretty much all historical mysteries, it is ‘within the realms of possibility’ that all the evidence that the police were (eventually) able to assemble had been consciously constructed and arranged to give a certain impression, and that the real story behind them all was entirely different. Yet while we should acknowledge that each individual piece of evidence might well have been influenced, finessed, modified or even faked, we should be trying to look through them to the overall narrative. So, I view as basically reliable the link between the Unknown Man and the copy of Taman Shud subsequently found nearby – and hence between the Unknown Man and the nurse ‘Jestyn’, whose private phone number was written in the back, and who lived close to Somerton Beach in Glenelg.

Given that a man was seen knocking at Jestyn’s door during the day before the Unknown Man’s appearance on the beach, it seems to me a wholly unremarkable conclusion that the Unknown Man almost certainly came to Glenelg specifically to visit her. Moreover, Jestyn had not long lived in Glenelg, so had had that phone number for only a short time: and must therefore have given the Unknown Man her phone number relatively recently.

(2) Where did the Unknown Man die? I think the answer – without a shadow of a doubt – is “not on the beach“. He was found propped up on Somerton beach yet with “lividity above the neck and ears” [p.204] – i.e blood pooled at the back of his head after death. If he had quietly died in the position in which he was subsequently found, gravity would have pushed his blood to his feet: hence I conclude that he died somewhere else entirely, where in fact his body was left for a while with his head below the rest of his body, before being carried to the beach and arranged in that oddly casual pose.

Moreover, Somerton Beach is sandy – so if the Unknown Man had lain on that beach for any period of time with his head at its lowest point before being physically rearranged by a random passer-by, there would surely have been sand in his hair… but there was none. As such, I disagree with the Coroner T.E.Erskine who concluded that “He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1st December, 1948.” [p.205] – rather, though the man was found dead there, I find it highly unlikely that it was the scene of his death.

No: to my mind, the only realistic scenario is the Unknown Man died somewhere else entirely and was carried to the beach – probably, from his weight, by a man. The report mentioned by Gerry Feltus [pp.143-144] of someone seen apparently doing exactly this around 10pm on the previous evening would seem to be entirely consistent with this scenario.

(3) How did the Unknown Man die? The first pathologist noted that the man was in good physical shape, and that his “heart was of normal size, and normal in every way”. There was blood in his stomach along with the remains of a pasty eaten roughly three hours before his death.

Though his spleen was significantly enlarged (3x times normal size) AKA splenomegaly, note that this is most likely a symptom of a different problem rather than the problem itself. As I understand it, your spleen can’t suddenly enlarge in a matter of a day: and given that the Unknown Man was apparently only in Somerton for less than a day, he must have arrived there with his spleen already enlarged. The lack of any obvious signs of another problem points to a problem that had just receded, quite probably a recent viral infection. So to me, the presence of an enlarged spleen implies that the Unknown Man had only just recovered from an significant illness, and that he was perhaps still in quite a fragile state. He would very probably have also had some lingering discomfort or back pain from his enlarged spleen.

(4) What was the cause of the Unknown Man’s death? It’s important to remember that coroners and pathologists repeatedly examined his body and screened his blood, looking for any faint clue that might help to narrow down the cause of his death, but with no success. Given the healthy state of his heart, the two best theories left standing (in my opinion) are (a) a deviously hard-to-pin-down poison deliberately administered either by himself or by someone else but which quickly disappeared from his system after death; or (b) an unexpectedly strong allergic reaction to something he had ingested, with the most notable candidate being excess sulphur dioxide used as a preservative in the pasty, which in 1948 was yet to be controlled [pp.202-203].

For me, I have to say that there is only one likely scenario I’m at all comfortable with: that while at Jestyn’s house late that afternoon, he had an unexpectedly strong allergic reaction to something in the pasty he had had for lunch (for why else would there be blood in his stomach?) In my mind, he must have laid down on a bed suffering from acute stomach cramps; but because he was so weakened by his recent illness, he unfortunately died as a result of his reaction, slumping with his head falling backwards over the edge of the bed – not upside down, but with his neck supported at an angle by the edge of the bed, leading to the distinctive lividity observed by the pathologist.

Even though Jestyn had worked as a nurse (and more on that later), I suspect she was not physically strong enough to move him from that position, so left him just as he was until her husband arrived home in the evening. I believe the Unknown Man remained on the bed until later that evening, when they carried him to the beach to pose him there, to be found in the morning.

(5) What was the Unknown Man’s personal situation? In his modest suitcase, there were stencilling tools for making signs such as Third Officers use on ships to mark baggage and crates, along with the princely sum of sixpence. It was December (the middle of the Australian summer), and his body had the remains of the kind of outdoor tan you’d expect from someone who had worked outside the previous summer, but not that summer. His clothes came from a variety of places, and in a variety of sizes (his slippers were smaller than his shoes), and most had their labels removed. The items that did have a label were marked “T. Kean” or “T. Keane”.

This has led to a lot of spy theories (“an international man of mystery who didn’t want to be identified“, etc) and conspiracy theories (“his killers removed the labels from his clothes in order to conceal his identity“, etc), none of which rings true at all to me. For me, however, the simplest explanation by a mile was simply that he was poor (if not actually destitute), and had been given these clothes by a charity. The original owners’ name tags would have been removed by the charity before being given to the needy.

Furthermore, given the probable connection with sea-faring implied by the stencilling tools in his case, my prediction is that he was given these clothes by a local Mission to Seafarers or Stella Maris branch.

So: as far as I can see, the most likely overall scenario is that the Unknown Man had recently had a serious viral infection, travelled to see Jestyn in Glenelg, had a pasty for lunch, was taken ill with an allergic reaction, died on her bed, but was posed on Somerton beach that night. But… why was he there at all, and what of his mysterious enciphered note? More on that in Part Two…