Unreadable Chinese, revisited...

Back in 1991, sardonic linguist Jacques Guy concocted a deliberately false theory about the Voynich, "to demonstrate how the absurd can be dressed in sensible garb". His "Chinese Hypothesis" had Marco Polo bringing back two Chinese scholars to Venice, who wrote down their encyclopaedic knowledge into a book in some semi-improvised European script... you guessed it, Voynichese. He never believed his pet canard for a moment: it was a rhetorical gesture to the interpretative folly - which I call "the curse" - that surrounds the study of the manuscript.

But then in 1997, Brazilian computer science professor Jorge Stolfi pointed out that, actually, Voynichese as transcribed does share a lot of statistical properties with Mandarin Chinese texts. Though technically true, the problem is not its stats, but rather that the Voynich Manuscript is (with very little doubt) a fifteenth century European cultural artefact. Stats only indicate correlation, not causation: so all Stolfi's results really say is that the Voynich Manuscript transcription correlates moderately well with certain Mandarin Chinese transcriptions. But lifting the abstracted text out of its codicological and stylistical contexts can easily give rise to the kind of plucking fallacy Gordon Rugg's work suffers from. Is the statistical similarity Stolfi found in the texts themselves, or in the methodology used to design the two transcriptions? I suspect it may well be the latter: the map is not the territory.

So why am I so fascinated by the news that some indecipherable Chinese texts have recently been found? They don't look anything like Voynichese (and why should they?): but they do look like a pictographic script not entirely dissimilar to Chinese. Their finder, 38-year-old Zhou Yongle, suspects they might be written by the Tujia, a large ethnic minority in mainland China which has a spoken language but (as far as anyone knew) no written one. For what it's worth, Wikipedia asserts that Tujia is a Tibeto-Burman language with some similarities to Yi: but - come on - you'd have to be a pretty h4rdc0re linguist to know or care what that means.

No: what I find intriguing is that these texts do look precisely like the kind of cultural artefacts you would expect, with (real) Chinese annotations and marginalia. If Jacques wants a proper historical linguistic puzzle to get his teeth into, then this would surely be exactly the right kind of thing for him: honestly, where's the fun in devising a Sokal-like hoax at self-mystificating Voynichologists, when they're already more than capable of tying themselves in knots over essentially nothing?

Of course, we mustn't forget the possibility that Zhou Yongle may (for whatever reason) have faked these unreadable documents. You may not have heard of the huge "paper tiger" scandal in China recently over photos of the South Chinese Tiger, believed to have been faked by hunter Zhou Zhenglong; or indeed the whole issue of the 1421 (1418/1763) map hoaxery, as ably deconstructed by Geoff Wade et al. Were all three simply 'Made In China'? It's a good question...

"Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can"...

If you like Voynich-themed short stories, there's most of one posted on the Analog website here. It's called "Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can", by Thomas R. Dulski: I mentioned it here a few days ago. Of course, the extract stops just at the point the story starts getting interesting, to try to get you to buy a copy of the April 2008 issue (where it appears in full): but that's fair enough, I suppose.

Voynichologically, a few minor typos ("Athansius", "Kirchner", "Baresche", etc), but it's basically all there. Yet to my jaded eyes it reads like a brandname-laden faux-noir short story and a Wikipedia article whose pages have all been shuffled together, not unlike Herbal A and Herbal B.

Turning the whole Big Jim/UFO/Voynich link on its head (as the remainder of the story undoubtedly does) is a nice idea: but writing Voynich fiction is a desperately hard balancing act, and I can't help but feel the attempt to shoehorn plot and history into a short story needs a lighter touch than this.

Two alternative histories vying for the mainstream...

One noticeable thing about the Voynich Manuscript is how theories and hypotheses in the 'cloud of the possible' surrounding it are perpetually trying to enter the mainstream consciousness. From Gordon Rugg's "Verifier" nonsense, to John Stojko's Old Ukrainian, to Leo Levitov's Cathar make-belief, even though they give it their best shot, the ramshackle pile of fairground cans they're aimed at mysteriously fails to topple.

But this is far from unusual: many other well-known alt.history topics have resisted the best attempts of the gifted and brilliant to bring them to heel. And seeing as two separate assaults on these had stepped into the limelight this week, I thought I'd blog away, see where it goes...

First up is a new assault on the secret history of the Knights Templar here, published as a series of DVDs: its author, Barry Walker, has been researching neolithic sites for decades, and claims to bring out a whole new connection between these and the Knights Templar. DVD#1 opens up a new cave in Royston (to go with the well-known Templar-esque cave that is a tourist spot already): the subsequent 11 DVDs planned are described in fairly open terms.

The problem with this is that if you have already read Sylvia Beamon's excellent "The Royston Cave: Used by Saints or Sinners?" (there's a well-thumbed copy on my shelf), you'd know (a) that Sylvia has long pointed to sites within Royston that should be examined; (b) that these are likely to be little more than abandoned cellars; and moreover (c) that according to most Templar historians, the UK was only ever of marginal interest (as compared to, say, Languedoc).

I'd love it to be true that there was some kind of subtle iconological connection between the Knights Templars and neolithic sites: but I have to say this is right at the edge of the possible, if not over it. To be honest, unless there's some truly amaaaaaazing evidence here, I think I'd rather buy into something a bit more plausibly mad (like the whole Titanic "insurance fraud" conspiracy theory) than this. All the same, a meagre £19.99 will buy you the first two DVDs of "The Quest": and I'm sure it would be an entertaining diversion, if you like that kind of thing.

Second up is a rather more pleasantly gritty work of historical obsession. Tudor Parfitt spent 20+ years trying to track down the lost Ark of the Covenant: and, incredibly, appears to have found its 700-year-old duplicate/replacement in Harare. His book ("The Lost Ark of the Covenant", to be published on 3rd March 2008 by HarperCollins) details the driven and (unavoidably) Indiana Jones-esque path he took along the way.

I've got a lot of sympathy with the 'verie parfit Tudor': he has clamped the meagre historical clues available to him in his bulldog-like jaws, and repeatedly stepped sideways with the subtle literary and DNA evidence available to him to give them colour, shape, depth - and hopefully to find the truth behind them all, whatever it happens to be. Though the hardback is £18.99 (if, inevitably, cheaper at Amazon etc), it's something I'll definitely be ordering: and will (of course) review here.

Corrections and updates...

A few errata and notes on the virtual pinboard, tacks don't have to be taxing...

(1) Warburg librarian Francois Quiviger kindly points out that my description of the layout of the Warburg Institute (in the Day Two blog entry) wasn't totally precise: though the overall layout matches Warburg's arbitrary Mnemosyne plan, books within a section are arranged chronologically (or rather, by date of author's death). Hmmm... hopefully it'll be 60+ years before his successors will be able to place my book in its final order... :-o

Re-reading my blog entry with Francois' other comments in mind, I think its emphasis (on madness) somewhat diverged from what I originally planned to say. In computer programming, you can "over-optimize" your solution by tailoring it too exactly to the problem: and this is how I felt about the Warburg. One tiny architectural detail at the Institute tells this story: the oddly hinged doors in the men's toilets, that appeared to have been mathematically designed to yield the most effective use of floor space. For me, this is no different to the filing cabinets full of deities, all laid out in alphabetical order: and so the Institute is like a iconological Swiss Army Knife, optimally hand-crafted for Aby Warburg and the keepers of his meme. But the cost of keeping it functioning in broadly the same way goes up each year: programming managers would call it a "brittle" or "fragile" solution, one with a high hidden cost of maintenance.

But am I still a fan of the Warburg? Yes, definitely: it's a fabulous treasure-house that only a particularly hard-hearted historian could even dream of bracketing. And in those terms, I think I'm actually a bit of a softy.

Finally, Francois very kindly offered to put in a reference for me (thank you very much indeed!!): so there should be a happy ending to the whole rollercoaster story after all. I will, of course, post updates and developments here as they happen. :-)

(2) Thanks to a flood of HASTRO-L subscribers dropping by to read my review of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks", Voynich News has just broken through the 1000 visitor mark (and well past the 2000 page-view mark). Admittedly, it's not a huge milestone... but it's a start, right? And though Google seems to like it, only Elias Schwerdtfeger and Early Modern Notes link to it: and nobody has yet rated it on Technorati etc, bah!

(3) Though in the end I was unable to get to the recent CRASSH mini-conference on books of secrets (which was a huge shame), I'm still up for the Treadwell's evening on Magic Circles at 7.15pm on 19th March 2008 (which I mentioned here about ten Internet years ago). Should be fascinating, perhaps see you there! ;-)

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day Two...

It's been a rollercoaster of a day for me at the Warburg Institute on the Early Modern Research Techniques course, like being given the keys to the world twice but having them taken away three times. I'll try to explain...

Paul Taylor kicked Day Two's morning off in fine style, picking up the baton from Francois Quiviger's drily laconic Day One introduction to all things Warburgian. My first epiphany of the day came on the stairs going up to the Photographic Collection: an aside from Paul (that the institute was "built by a madman") helped complete a Gestalt that had long been forming in my mind. What I realised was that even though the Warburg's "Mnemosyne" conceptual arrangement was elegant and useful for a certain kind of inverted historical study, it was actually pathological to that entire mindset. Essentially, it seems to me that you have to be the "right kind of mad" to get 100% from the Warburg: and then you get 100% of what?

(The Warburg Institute is physically laid out unlike any other library: within its grand plan, everything is arranged neither by author, nor by period, nor by anything so useful as an academic discipline, but rather by an arbitrary conceptual scheme evolved to make similar-feeling books sit near each other. It's not unlike a dating service for obscure German publications, to make sure they keep each other company in their old age.)

My second epiphany arrived not long afterwards. On previous visits, I'd walked straight past the Warburg Photographic Collection, taking its darkness to mean that it was closed or inaccessible: but what a store of treasures it has! My eyes widened like saucers at all the filing cabinets full of photographs of astrological manuscripts. I suddenly felt like I had seen a twin vision of hell and purgatory at the core of the Warburg dream - both its madness and its hopefulness - but had simultaneously been given the wisdom to choose between them.

It was all going so well... until Charles Hope (the Warburg's director) stepped forward. Now: here was an A* straight-talking Renaissance art historian, sitting close to the beating heart of the whole historical project, who (Paul Taylor assured us) would tell it like it is. But Hope's message was both persuasive and starkly cynical: that, right from the start, Aby Warburg had got it all wrong. And that even Erwin Panofsky, for all his undeniable erudition, had (by relying on Cesare Ripa's largely made-up allegorical figures) got pre-1600 iconology wrong too. With only a tiny handful of exceptions, Hope asserted that Renaissance art was eye candy, artful confectionery whipped up not from subtle & learned Latin textual readings (as Warburg believed), but instead from contemporary (and often misleading and false) vulgar translations and interpretations - Valerius Maximus, Conti, Cartari, etc. And so the whole Warburgian art history research programme - basically, studying Neoplatonist ideas of antiquity cunningly embedded in Renaissance works of art - was dead in the water.

To Hope, the past century of interpretative art history formed nothing more than a gigantic house of blank cards, with each card barely capable of supporting its neighbours, but not of carrying any real intellectual weight on top: not unlike Baconian cryptography (which David Kahn calls "enigmatology"). All of which I (unsurprisingly) found deeply ironic, what with Warburg himself and his beloved Institute both being taken apart by the Warburg's director.

The second step backwards came when I tried to renew my Warburg Institute Reader's Card: you're not on the list, you can't come in. (Curiously, there were already two "Nicholas Pelling"s on their computer system, neither of them me.) It seems that, without direct academic or library affiliation, I'm now unlikely to be allowed access except via special pleading. Please, pleeeease, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease... (hmmm, doesn't seem to be working, must plead harder). If I had a spare £680 per year, I'd perhaps become an "occasional student" (but I don't).

My third (and final) step backwards of the day was when I raced up to the Photographic Collection both during the afternoon tea-break and after the final lecture and had an Internet-speed finger-browse through the astrological images filing cabinets. Though in 20 minutes I saw more primary source material than I would see in a fortnight at the British Library, I ended up disappointed overall. Yes, I saw tiny pictures of a couple of manuscripts I had planned to examine in person next month (which was fantastic): but there didn't seem to be anything else I wasn't already aware of. Rembrandt Duits has recently catalogued these mss in a database (though only on his PC at the moment), so perhaps I'll ask him to do a search for me at a later date...

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seemed to me that even though old Warburgian/iconological art history is basically dead, the new art history coming through to replace it revolves around precisely the kind of joint textual and stylistic interpretation I'm doing with the Voynich Manuscript, with one eye on the visual sources, and the other on the contemporary textual sources. Yet the problem with this approach is that you have to be an all-rounder, a real uomo universale not to be fooled by spurious (yet critical) aspects along the way. All the same, though I'm no more than an OK historian (and certainly not a brilliant one), I'm now really convinced that I'm looking at a genuinely open question, and that I'm pointing in the right kind of direction to answer it.

Don't get me wrong, Day Two was brilliant as a series of insightful lectures on the limits and origins of art historical knowledge: but I can't help but feel that I've personally lost something along the way. Yet perhaps my idea of the Warburg was no more than a phantasm, a wishful methodology for plugging into the "strange attractors" beneath the surface of historical fact that turned out to be simply an illusion /delusion: and so all I've actually lost is an illusion. Oh well: better to have confident falsity than false confidence, eh?

As a curious aside, for me this whole historical angle on the Warburg also casts a raking light across the "Da Vinci Code". The book's main character (Robert Langdon) is a "symbologist", a made-up word Dan Brown uses to mean "iconologist": and as such is painted on the raw canvas of the Warburg 'project'. What cultural archetype is the ultra-erudite, friendly (yet intellectually terrifying) Langdon based upon? A kind of Harvardian Erwin Panofsky? In my mind, the "Da Vinci Code" (and its 'non-fiction' forerunner, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail") both sit astride the ebbing Warburg wave, both whipping at the fading waters: and so the surge of me-too "The [insert marketing keyword here] Code" faux-iconology books and novels is surely Aby Warburg's last hurrah, wouldn't you say?

R.I.P. 20th Century Art History: now wash your hands. :-(

Voynich news-bites...

Some tasty bite-sized morsels for you: don't eat them all at once, though...

The April 2008 edition of sci-fi monthly Analog has a 10,000-word Voynich-based story, "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can" by Thomas R. Dulski. When super-bright billionaire's daughter Pamela Roderick writes an academic book on the idea of UFOs, people are surprisingly OK: but when her second book claims that the Voynich Manuscript describes 15th century humans being taken on a journey into space, the people around her become more tense... Hey, any novelistic take on the VMs without a papal conspiracy or evil Jesuit priests is fine by me. :-)

Incidentally, a key part of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks" surprisingly revolves around anti-Jesuit propaganda, most notably Johannes Cambilhom's "Discoverie of the Most Secret and Subtile Practises of the Iesuites", which claimed to dish the dirt on the Jesuits' buried treasure, sadistic treatment of novices, sexual misadventures, and mad politicking. And the Jesuits had only been going 70 years at the time! Anyway...

Change of direction: here's a cool picture called "Arizona" by ~HinoNeko / A. Brenner, depicting a young guy with a Voynich-themed T-shirt (basically, the centre of the 'sun-face' on f68v1). Yet more VMs things edging into the mainstream consciousness, one meme at a time...

Finally: I don't know how I managed to miss the decade-old story of the Swedish parents who were fined for wanting to name their son "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116", in a kind of pataphysical protest at Sweden's child naming law. Amazing: a name that makes Voynichese look sane. ;-)

Review of "Galileo's Glassworks"...

Back to the non-fiction grindstone, and next up on my list to read was the very promising-looking "Galileo's Glassworks", by Eileen Reeves: though this has as its main focus the issue of what Galileo knew (and when) about the Dutch telescope, I was told (by Peter Abrahams on HASTRO-L) that it also covers the pre-history of the telescope, which I was more interested in. I was intrigued to see how it would blend these two topics together: it sounded quite ambitious.

And indeed, just as promised, the book turned out to be a game of two very distinct halves. The first half was a kind of wide-roaming literature review of the classical, medieval and early modern texts that promised some kind of proto-telescopes or burning mirrors to their readers: that this was built on broadly the same foundations as Albert van Helden's 1977 monograph "The Invention of the Telescope" is made completely clear in the acknowledgements at the end. Let's be clear: the primary sources for this form a fragmentary, piecemeal soup, whose components interlock and separate eternally - despite all Reeves' hard work, there is no emergent narrative, no thread, no causal proof to be had here. Yet she gives the impression of needing to draw out a story based on the 16th century reception of travellers accounts of the Pharos, in order to give a structural punchline to this section: but unfortunately this never quite hits the spot.

The second half is very much more focused, and reads quite differently: it focuses on the minutiae of correspondence of Galileo and his circle circa 1608-9, as they received (possibly unreliable) reports of mirrors and telescopes coming from France and Holland (often embedded in pro- or anti-Jesuit propaganda), and tried to make up their minds what to make of them - was the new Dutch telescope truly something amazing, or based on the mirror, or was it yet another tall tale?

In the end, Reeves' central point (which hinges on whether Galileo thought the new telescope was built with a mirror or purely with lenses) is well argued, but extremely marginal: and it fails to mesh comfortably with the first half of her text. I came away feeling like I had read two 90-page monographs in quick succession: I desperately wanted her to find a way to knit the two together, to redeem her choice of structure - but this never really happened.

Look: "Galileo's Glassworks" is a lovely, compact, readable book, and pleasantly affordable too (a snip at £14.20 for the hardback). But Reeves can't really reconcile the broad generalities of the pre-history of the telescope with her ultra-close reading of Galileo's "Starry Messenger" and his letters. Ultimately, what's going on is some kind of mismatch in epistemological tone: the first half raises many open-ended issues, while the second half answers a single (quite different) question.

I suspect that somewhere along the way, Reeves lost track of whom she was talking to, and about what: the book ended up being just as much about Sarpi (or even about the ghost of della Porta!) as about Galileo himself, which is surely a sign that her aim drifted off true. Perhaps in the end she simply didn't have enough to say about Galileo in the second half that hadn't been amply said before: which would be a shame, as I would say the first half of her book is really very good, well worth the cover price on its own.

The Book of Soyga, revisited...

It's a nice historical detective story, one kicked off by John Dee, Frances Yates' favourite Elizabethan 'magus' (though I personally suspect Dee's 'magic' was probably less 'magickal' than it might appear), when he claimed to have told an angel that his "great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga". Dee lost his precious copy of the "Book of Soyga" (but then managed to find it again): when subsequently Elias Ashmole owned it, he noted that its incipit (starting words) was "Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor...".

However, since Ashmole's day it was thought to have joined the serried, densely-stacked ranks of long-disappeared books and manuscripts, in the "blue-tinted gloom" of some mythical, subterranean library not unlike the "Cemetery of Lost Books" in Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novel "The Shadow of the Wind" (2004)...

Fast-forward 400 years to 1994, and what do you know? Just like rush hour buses, two copies of the "Book of Soyga" turn up at once, both found by Deborah Harkness. Rather than searching for "Soyga", she searched for its "Aldaraia..." incipit: which is, of course, what you were supposed to do (in the bad old days before the Internet).

It is a strange, transitional document, neither properly medieval (the text has few references to authority) nor properly Renaissance. There are some mysterious books referenced, such as the Liber Sipal and the Liber Munob: readers of my book "The Curse of the Voynich" may recognize these as simple back-to-front anagrams (Sipal = Lapis [stone], Munob = Bonum [Good], Retap Retson = Pater Noster [our Father]). In fact, Soyga itself is Agyos [saint] backwards.

But what was the secret hidden behind the 36 mysterious "tables of Soyga" that had vexed John Dee so? 36x36 square grids filled with oddly patterned letters, they look like some kind of unknown cryptographic structure. Might they hold a big secret, or might they (like many of Trithemius' concealed texts) just be nonsense, a succession of quick brown foxes endlessly jumping over lazy dogs?

• oyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  rkfaqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  rxxqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  azzsxbqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  sheimasddtguoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  eyuaoiismspkfaqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  enlxflfudzrxxqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  sxcahqczfbtfzsxbqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  azepxhheurgmyknqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  rlbriyzycuyddpotxbqtyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  ryrezabirhdiszeknqnkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  ogzgfceztqalpntsxhssyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  opnxxsnodxqhuekknykkoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy
  rcqsfueesfsqrqgqrossyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo
  roauxmdkkxkhyhmpzqphdtgtguoyoyoyoyoy
  aqxmudiamubkoqifbszktdmspkfaqtyoyoyo
  sazoesrmlrnaqnzhgabmsmlpeahfsddtguoy
  ....................................
  (etc)

Jim Reeds, one of the great historical code-breakers of modern times, stepped forward unto the breach to see what he could make of these strange tables: he transcribed them, ran a few tests, and (thank heavens) worked out the three-stage algorithm with which they were generated.

Stage 1: fill in the 36-high left-hand column (which I've highlighted in blue above) with a six-letter codeword (such as 'orrase' for table #5, 'Leo') followed by its reverse anagram ('esarro'), and then repeat them both two more times

Stage 2: fill each of the 35 remaining elements in the top line in turn with ((W + f(W)) modulo 23), where W = the element to the West, ie the preceding element. The basic letter numbering is straightforward (a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, ... u = 20, x = 21, y = 22, and z = 23), but the funny f(W) function is a bit arbitrary and strange:-

• x f(x) x f(x) x f(x) x f(x)
  a...2, g...6, n..14, t...8
  b...2, h...5, o...8, u..15
  c...3, i..14, p..13, x..15
  d...5, k..15, q..20, y..15
  e..14, l..20, r..11, z...2
  f...2, m..22, s...8

Stage 3: fill each row in turn with ((N + f(W)) modulo 23), where N = the element to the North, ie the element above the current element.

For example, if you try Stage 2 out on 'o', (W + f(W)) modulo 23 = (14 + 8) modulo 23 = 22 = 'y', while (22 + 15) modulo 23 = 14 = 'o', which is why you get all the "yoyo"s in the table above.

And there (bar the inevitable miscalculations of something so darn fiddly, as well as all the inevitable scribal copying mistakes) you have it: the information in the Soyga tables is no more than the repeated left-hand column keyword, plus a rather wonky algorithm.

You can read Jim Reeds paper here: a full version (with diagrams) appeared in the pricy (but interesting) book John Dee: Interdisciplinary essays in English Renaissance Thought (2006). The End.

Except... where exactly did that funny f(x) table come from? Was that just, errrm, magicked out of the air? Jim Reeds never comments, never remarks, never speculates: effectively, he just says 'here it is, this is how it is'. But perhaps this f(x) sequence is in itself some kind of monoalphabetic or offseting cipher to hide the originator's name: Jim is bound to have thought of this, so let's look at it ourselves:-

• 1.2.3.4..5.6.7.8..9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.21.22.23
  2.2.3.5.14.2.6.5.14.15.20.22.14..8.13.20.11..8..8.15.15.15..2

If we discount the "2 2" at the start and the "8 8 15 15 15 2" at the end as probable padding, we can see that "14" appears three times, and "5 14" twice. Hmm: might "14" be a vowel?

• 2 3 5 14 2 6 5 14 15 20 22 14 8 13 20 11 8
• a b d n a e d n o t x n g m t k g
• b c e o b f e o p u y o h n u l h
• c d f p c g f p q x z p i o x m i
• d e g q d h g q r y a q k p y n k
• e f h r e i h r s z b r l q z o l
• f g i s f k i s t a c s m r a p m
• g h k t g l k t u b d t n s b q n
• h i l u h m l u x c e u o t c r o
• i k m x i n m x y d f x p u d s p
• k l n y k o n y z e g y q x e t q
• l m o z l p o z a f h z r y f u r
• m n p a m q p a b g i a s z g x s
• n o q b n r q b c h k b t a h y t
• o p r c o s r c d i l c u b i z u
• p q s d p t s d e k m d x c k a x
• q r t e q u t e f l n e y d l b y
• r s u f r x u f g m o f z e m c z
• s t x g s y x g h n p g a f n d a
• t u y h t z y h i o q h b g o e b
• u x z i u a z i k p r i c h p f c
• x y a k x b a k l q s k d i q g d
• y z b l y c b l m r t l e k r h e
• z a c m z d c m n s u m f l s i f
  

Nope, sorry: the only word-like entities here are "tondean", "catsik", and "zikprich", none of which look particularly promising. This looks like a dead end... unless you happen to know better? ;-)

A final note. Jim remarks that one of the manuscripts has apparently been proofread, with "f[letter]" marks (ie fa, fb, fc, etc); and surmises that the "f" stands for "falso" (meaning false), with the second letter the suggested correction. What is interesting (and may not have been noted before) is that in the Voynich Manuscript, there's a piece of marginalia that follows this same pattern. On f2v, just above the second paragraph (which starts "kchor...") there's a "fa" note in a darker ink. Was this a proof-reading mark by the original author (it's in a different ink, so this is perhaps unlikely): or possibly a comment by a later code-breaker that the word / paragraph somehow seems "falso" or inconsistent? "kchor" appears quite a few times (20 or so), so both attempted explanations seem a bit odd. Something to think about, anyway...

Voynich euro-miscellany...

Some European Voynichy things that have caught my eye recently: make of them what you will...

A 3-part Spanish-language documentary on the VMs written by Eric Frattini, and viewable online (just click the big green buttons). Voynich News regulars will recognize him as the author of Voynich-themed novel "El Quinto Mandamiento" (the fifth commandment), which I touched upon here.

Here's some Italian poetry, including a couple of poems apparently on the Voynich (hence the image of the VMs' nine-rosette page at the top). The first of the two starts something like "I have a strange form of nausea": yup, that's the VMs, alright. :-)

On Tuesday (19th February 2008), there's a program scheduled on German radio WDR 5/530 at 16:05 about our old friend Beinecke MS 408 (A.K.A. the Voynich Manuscript), presented by Sven Preger.

You might reasonably wonder whether this is all part of a diffuse European interest in the VMs: and I think you'd be right. According to Google Trends, the primary languages of people who Google for "Voynich" is (in descending order): French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Portuguese. Though I should also note that over the last 12 months (probably thanks to the novels by Enrique Joven and Eric Frattini) Spaniards searched for "Voynich" slightly more than the French. Anglophone interest in the VMs would appear to be practically nil (apart from Melvyn Bragg): which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing. I'm not sure which... you'll have to decide for yourself.

Boole / Voynich Manuscript painting...

Here's a nice Voynich-themed oddity from the much-frayed edge between C.P.Snow's "Two Cultures" of art and science.

A contemporary painter called Shardcore explores the history of science by painting famous scientists and historical scientific objects: and was so entertained by the notion that Ethel Lilian Boole - the daughter of the famous logician George Boole - came to own the Voynich Manuscript (she married Wilfrid Voynich, of course) that he decided to paint a picture celebrating it: and you can see the result here, together with a time-lapse recording of the painter as he painted it.

In Voynichological circles, this connection is old news: the website of my old Voynichian chum Jeff Haley is called The George Boole Fanclub, for precisely this reason. Incidentally, I have spent five years trying not to think of Julian Clary's former life as The Joan Collins' Fan Club (terrible, but surely better than "Gillian Pie-Face"?) whenever I see this, but as yet without success. Perhaps in another five years, when Julian Clary has become as horribly mainstream as Jim Davidson (sorry, but that's how showbiz works)...

The quotation which adorns the picture is from George Boole: "Language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought". Which is nice. But it this true of Voynichese?

Review of "Vellum"...

Having just worked my way through Vol III of Lynn Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science", I thought I'd give my reading eyes a rest with some fiction: and so turned to "Vellum" by Australian writer Matt Rubinstein, a 2007-vintage Voynich-themed novel I mentioned here before.

The story revolves around Jack, a translator/subtitler who, while working on a near-untranslatable Russian film, stumbles upon an unreadable (and unapologetically Voynich-like) manuscript. Many of the other characters are librarians or collectors of obscure aphorisms, who seem to share his delight not so much in etymology, but in the living texture of language, its flow. However, the book's central irony is that though Jack can read many languages, he cannot read the people around him: while their lives are complex and conflicted, his is empty - and so he allows the strange manuscript to fill his void.

Of course, while at first he can make no sense of it, under UV light its margins yield many clues to its provenance and history: and as Jack becomes progressively more attuned to its nuances and strange ur-language, it begins to reveal details to him of a fantastical machine to build, not entirely unlike a medieval version of the one in Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" (you know, the one filmed with Jodie Foster).

I have to say that at one point while reading Vellum, I did find myself completely immersed: this was when Jack's growing obsession for his pet manuscript (and his disconnection from the world) suddenly lurched and exceeded my own. I felt the urge to try to pull him back from going over the brink: perhaps this was Matt Rubinstein's focus for the book, to help readers find and explore the point where they felt uncomfortable with the change in Jack's downward arc.

Though it has a contemporary European vibe to its vocabulary, Vellum is firmly situated in the Australian geographical and historical landscapes (spinifex, First Fleet, etc): and is all the fresher and more engaging for it. The paradoxical idea of an inland desert lighthouse recurs through the book, and (surprisingly to me) one such does exist, at Point Malcolm: I think this nicely mirrors various Voynich-like conundrums, which I'm sure you can work out for yourself.

In short, I like Vellum: though not perfect (plot-wise, the explosion is a bit clumsy, for example: and half-quoting Foucault's quoting Borges don't really work), it does have a lot going for it. For the mass market, though, I think the issue is whether Rubinstein manages to find just the right balance between research and story, between exposition and narrative: even though a few times he does err a little too far towards the former, overall I think he earns enough goodwill from the latter to get away with it. Buy it, read it, enjoy it! :-)

Codice Olindo, cipher thoughts...

Yesterday, I posted up a low-resolution image of some Codice Olindo ciphertext: it appears to be a set of slightly-accessorized 8-directional arrows (and a few double-headed arrows, plus some additional shapes (punctuation?)). It struck me when I woke up this morning that - statistics aside - this might simply be a kind of arrow-based pigpen cipher, where the arrows point to the appropriate corner of the 3x3, and the accessorization indicates which 3x3 block to refer to.

Typically, modern-day code-breakers focus (if not over-focus) on the transcription and computer analyses. However, people are sometimes motivated by quite different things from pure security - the psychology is at least as important. Pigpen is easy because you can decrypt it very fast (an arrow-based pigpen would be at least as quick to read as a 'proper' one), and perhaps this is what Olindo Romano wanted. And it seems likely to me that he thought/thinks he's cleverer than all the people around him (whether that's true or not).

Of course, this is the kind of approach I have used when looking at the Voynich Manuscript, so it should come as no surprise that this is how I look at things. I wonder: if the Italian "mathematicians" who have deciphered this cipher plotted out the letters they have found on 3x3 arrow-pigpen grids, what would they find?

"Codice Olindo", update...

First sight (for me at least) of the Codice Olindo's cryptography: admittedly the quality is abysmal, but it's better than no picture at all. I found it on the Corriere di Como's website. Pieces of ciphertext are interspersed with cleartext: the third (clear) line appears to read "Rosa non posso e..." (Rosa is the wife of Olindo Romano, the main accused in the case).

For more background on the trial, here's an article from The Scotsman (30th January 2008), and a Agenzia Giornalistica Italia page from yesterday (11th February 2008).

Massacring your noisy neighbours seems a little bit extreme to me: I think I'd prefer to send them unsettling notes, as in this wonderful true story from New York (called The Astoria Notes, from David Friedman's Ironic Sans blog), with its surreal follow-up. Enjoy!

The Montefeltro Conspiracy...

Here's a book I'm really looking forward to reading: "The Montefeltro Conspiracy", by Marcello Simonetta (due for hardcover release 3rd June 2008, 304 pages). Readers in Italy will get to see it earlier: Rizzoli will be publishing the Italian version first, on 26th April 2008... the 530th anniversary of the well-known Pazzi conspiracy.

And here is why I'm so excited...

Several years ago, I uncovered an apparent cryptographic link between the '4o' letter pair in the Voynich Manuscript and a number of ciphers apparently constructed by Francesco Sforza's cipher minions, both before and after his takeover of Milan. Sforza's long-time chancellor was Cicco Simonetta: and so, I reasoned, if there was anything out there to be found, it would be sensible to start with him. However, as normal with the history of cryptography, most papers and articles on Cicco dated from the 19th century, when the subject was last in vogue. *sigh*

After a lot of trawling, the best recent book I found was "Rinascimento Segreto" (2004) by the historian Marcello Simonetta (FrancoAngeli Storia, Milan). Even though Marcello's eruditely academic Italian was many levels beyond my lowly grasp of the language, I persisted: and my efforts were rewarded - the book's chapters III.1 and IV.1 had everything I hoped for on Cicco.

Initially, Marcello Simonetta's interests in Cicco Simonetta seem to have been stirred up simply by their shared surname, rather than by any focus on cryptography per se: but over time this developed into something much larger. And when Marcello found a ciphered 15th century letter in the private Ubaldini archive in Urbino, he couldn't wait to try out Cicco's Regule (rules) for cracking unknown ciphers, to see if they actually worked. And they did!

What he found was that it was in fact a letter detailing an inside view of the Pazzi Conspiracy, a 1478 plot to kill the heads of the Medici family (Lorenzo only just managed to get away). When Marcello's discovery was announced (around 2004), there was a bit of a media scrum: but since then he has kept his head down and written an accessible book (I hope!), and got a deal with Random House (well done for that!).

Cryptographically, the supreme irony (which I hope Marcello picks up in his book) is that we have no evidence that Cicco Simonetta's Regule were ever used to break real ciphers in the wild - to me, it seems likeliest that the Regule were instead mainly used to keep the Sforza's code-clerks honest, as they spent their (probably abundant) spare hours cracking each others' ciphers. But perhaps Marcello has more to say about this in his book... we shall see! :-)

The "Codice Olindo"...

Here's a cryptography story from Italy that is astounding (though perhaps not for good reasons). I found it thanks to an Italian blogger who called it the new Voynich ('il nuovo Voynich'), but that's perhaps a little bit strong.

While on trial accused of a "massacre" ('strage Erba'), the accused writes down a long series of enciphered notes in a bible... the cipher then gets broken (by Andrea Rizzi, Gregorio Guidi, and Roberto Frigerio), revealing the defendant's thoughts on many (probably too many) aspects of the case. The trial continues: there is extensive coverage on the Wildgreta blog (in Italian). I've tried to find online pictures of the cipher (without success): but as it has already been definitively cracked (it would seem), there's no huge sense of urgency.

Cryptographically, the tragedy is that it sounds (by all accounts) like a monoalphabetic cipher with a few nulls that even Cicco Simonetta's Regule could have cracked 550 years ago (I'm sure Augusto Buonafalce and Marcello Simonetta would agree); while the Voynich Manuscript (from the same era) still can't be decrypted today. Madness. :-(

Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript...

Every few days, I get asked to recommend a good introduction to the Voynich Manuscript (the 'VMs' for short). But each time this happens, my heart sinks a little: given the size and scope of historical research you'd need to have to properly grasp the subject, it's a bit like being asked to recommend a good 5-page encyclopaedia. Or rather, as none such exists, like being asked to write one.

However, you can describe it in a paragraph: it's a handwritten book that's 230+ pages long, very probably about 500 years old, and filled with strange words and obscure pictures no-one can understand. I call it "a Scooby Doo mystery for grownups", but one where everyone is trying to pin the blame on a different janitor: and so the story loops endlessly, as if on a lost satellite cartoon channel.

For once, the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript page falls well short of being genuinely useful: the VMs is so contested, so politicized, so intensely rubbish that the whole neutral tone Wiki-thing fails to please (I gently satirized this in my VQ questionnaire). Bucketfuls of worthlss opinions, and endless pussyfooting around: throw all that junk away, I say, and start from scratch. *sigh*

But if Wikipedia's faux-scientific neutrality can't get you started, what can? If (like me) you are a fan of Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary" (1911), your ideal introduction to the Voynich Manuscript might well be succinct, partial, and cynical (in fact, almost toxically so). In this vein, I heartily recommend "Folly Follows the Script", an article by Jacques Guy (AKA "Frogguy") in the Times Higher Education supplement from 2004. While ostensibly reviewing Kennedy and Churchill's recent book on the VMs, Guy rips apart a lot of the pretension and falsity that now surrounds the manuscript, in particular Gordon Rugg's much-vaunted (but actually resoundingly hollow) hoax papers. Which is, errrm, nice.

If you prefer lots and lots (and did I say lots?) of data, the best introductory site by miles is Rene Zandbergen's excellent voynich.nu, in particular his "short tour", and the even shorter tour. But frankly, it's hard for most people to care about Newbold, Petersen, Friedman, Strong, Brumbaugh, O'Neill, Feely, Manly, and even John "The Brig" Tiltman unless you've already lurched over the line into Voynich-obsessive mania: none of them could read a word of the VMs, and they're all long dead.

Alternatively, if you prefer a kind of gentle postmodern defeatism, I could happily recommend a very readable article by Lev Grossman called "When Words Fail", which first appeared in Lingua Franca magazine way back in April 1999: sadly, nothing much of substance has changed in the intervening decade (or, indeed, over several preceding decades too).

This might seem a horrible thing to say, given that so much ink has been spilled (and, more recently, so many HTML tags wasted) on the VMs over the last century in the honest pursuit of this wonderful (yet devastatingly cruel) enigma. But we still know next to nothing of any real use: the kind of intensely Warburgian art-historical research I've been slaving over for the last six years seems totally alien to most 'Voynichologists', a title that perpetually hovers too close to David Kahn's Baconian "enigmatologists" (see "The Codebreakers" (1967), pp.878-9), with their "deliriums, the hallucinations of a sick cryptology".

All of which is to say that both cynicism and nihilism are probably good starting points for reading up on the VMs: a century of careless credulity has got us all nowhere. But this is not to say that I am pessimistic about any advances being made. In fact, I would say that "the Devil's in the details" or the alternative "God is in the details" (both of which are sometimes attributed to Aby Warburg!) to flag that, beyond the superficial flurry of foolish and wishful opinions out there, I think there are things we can (and eventually will!) know about the Voynich Manuscript; but that for the moment these remain hidden in its vellum margins.

All of which is another story entirely...

Dots for vowels, revisited...

One very early cipher involved replacing the vowels with dots. In his "Codes and Ciphers" (1939/1949) p.15, Alexander d'Agapeyeff asserts that this was a "Benedictine tradition", in that the Benedictine order of monks (of which Trithemius was later an Abbot) had long used it as a cipher. The first direct mention we have of it was in a ninth century Benedictine "Treatise of Diplomacy", where it worked like this:-

• i = .
• a = :
• e = :.
• o = ::
• u = ::.

"R:.:lly", you might well say, "wh:t : l:::d ::f b::ll::cks" (and you'd be r.ght, ::f c::::.rs:.). But for all its uselessness, this was a very long-lived idea: David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" (1967) [the 1164-page version, of course!] mentions the earlier St Boniface taking a dots-for-vowels system from England over to Germany in the eighth century (p.89), a "faint political cryptography" in Venice circa 1226, where the vowels in a few documents were replaced by "dots or crosses" (p.106), as well as vowels being enciphered in 1363 by the Archbishop of Naples, Pietro di Grazie (p.106).

However, perhaps the best story on the dots-for-vowels cipher comes from Lynn Thorndike, in his "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Volume III, pp.24-26. In 1320, a Milanese cleric called Bartholomew Canholati told the papal court at Avignon that Matteo Visconti's underlings had asked him to suffumigate a silver human statuette engraved with "Jacobus Papa Johannes" (the name of the Pope), as well as the sigil for Saturn and "the name of the spirit Amaymom" (he refused). He was then asked for some zuccum de napello (aconite), the most common poison in the Middle Ages (he refused). He was then asked to decipher some "'experiments for love and hate, and discovering thefts and the like', which were written without vowels which had been replaced by points" (he again refused). The pope thought it unwise to rely on a single witness, and sent Bartholomew back to Milan; the Viscontis claimed it was all a misunderstanding (though they tortured the cleric for a while, just to be sure); all in all, nobody comes out of the whole farrago smelling of roses.

(Incidentally, the only citation I could find on this was from 1972, when William R. Jones wrote an article on "Political Uses of Sorcery in Medieval Europe" in The Historian: clearly, this has well and truly fallen out of historical fashion.)

All of which I perhaps should have included in Chapter 12 of "The Curse of the Voynich", where I predicted that various "c / cc / ccc / cccc" patterns in Voynichese are used to cipher the plaintext vowels. After all, this would be little more than a steganographically-obscured version of the same dots-for-vowels cipher that had been in use for more than half a millennium.

As another aside, I once mentioned Amaymon as one of the four possible compass spirits on the Voynich manuscript f57v (on p.124 of my book) magic circle: on p.169 of Richard Kieckhefer's "Magic in the Middle Ages", he mentions Cecco d'Ascoli as having used N = Paymon, E = Oriens, S = Egim, and W = Amaymen (which is often written Amaymon). May not be relevant, but I thought I'd mention it, especially seeing as there's the talk on magic circles at Treadwell's next month (which I'm still looking forward to).

Finally, here's a picture of Voynichese text with some annotations of how I think it is divided up into tokens. My predictions: vowels are red, verbose pairs (which encipher a single token) are green, numbers are blue, characters or marks which are unexpected or improvised (such as the arch over the '4o' pair at bottom left, which I guess denotes a contraction between two adjacent pairs) are purple. Make of it all what you will!

Michael Cordy's "The Source"...

A quick update on Michael Cordy's forthcoming Voynich-themed oeuvre: it has now been retitled "The Source" (let's just pray it's not re-released later on as "The Source Code", that would be awful), is due for hardback and softback release in August 2008, and can already (inevitably) be pre-ordered from Amazon.

I also dug up a (possibly deleted?) snippet from Google's cache of the My Irrationalities blog. This mentioned translations for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, and Poland: and Warner Bros optioning the film rights, with Akiva Goldman's Weed Road to produce. It sounds like it's all getting up a head of steam, let's hope the book delivers the goods.

You know, I'd really like to write The Source screenplay: that would be a lot of fun. Any offers, Mr Goldman? ;-)

More & more Voynich books...

Today, I stumbled across yet another Voynich book: which then led me to a whole cache of them, like a hidden nest of gremlin eggs high atop a mountain. Don't give them any water, whatever you do...

First up was "Les Livres Maudits" (1971, J'ai Lu) by Jacques Bergier, chemical engineer and [al]chemist, French resistance fighter and spy, writer and journalist: in it, he painted a picture of the VMs as containing a secret so powerful that it could destroy the world. Could it have simply been an idea: like "being nice to people doesn't work"? According to my old pal Jean-Yves Atero, Bergier was convinced this secret was so devastating that (basically) Men In Black will always track its progress, and will stop at nothing to keep the truth about it from being brought into the open. Errrm... hold on a minute, there's someone at the door...

Rather more recently, there was "The Magician's Death" (2004) [published in French as "Le livre du magicien" (2006)] by prolific historical mystery writer Paul C. Doherty, in his 'Hugh Corbett' series. This has Roger Bacon writing an unbreakable code, various English and French factions trying to crack it, and loads of people getting killed (or something along those lines).

Coming out in the same year was "Shattered Icon" (2004) (later re-released as "Splintered Icon" (2006), and published in German as "Der 77. Grad." (2007)] by Bill Napier. As far as I can tell, this uses the deciphering of a Voynich-style 400-year-old journal / map to tease out a mystery thriller take on the Roanoke Island expedition.

Scarlett Thomas's novel PopCo (2004) also mentions the Voynich Manuscript (it claims on the German Wikipedia page), as part of a "richly allusive" [Independent on Sunday] pop-culture novelistic riff on cryptography. She now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I find this a bit worrying: it conjures up an image of a classful of uber-literate proto-writers, all looking at the VMs and thinking "Hmmm... an 'unreadable book', eh? An excellently ironic leitmotif for my postmodern anti-novel..." [*], which I will then have to laboriously add to the Big Fat List, and perhaps even to try to read (Lord, protect me from any more Generation X knockoffs). Blogging can be hell, I'll have you know.

• [*] Doubtless spoken in a E.L.Wisty voice

Other VMs-linked novels mentioned on various language Wikipedia sites include:

• "L'intrigue de Il Romanzo Di Nostradamus" by Valerio Evangelisti apparently has Nostradamus battling the VMs and its black magic ilk;
• Dan Simmons' 832-page epic "Olympos" (2006) apparently namechecks the Voynich as having been bought in 1586 by Rudolph II (though how this gets fitted in to a story about Helen of Troy is a matter for wonder: I'm sure it all makes sense, really I do); and
• "Datura tai harha jonka jokainen näkee" (2001) by Finnish writer Leena Krohn (published in German as "Stechapfel") is centred on the hallucinogenic plant Datura (AKA jimsonweed, Magicians' weed", or Sorcerors' weed), and it is an easy step from there to the Voynich Manuscript. Back in 2002, I posted to the VMs mailing list about various plants such as Datura: so this is no great surprise.

Oh well, back to my day job (whatever that is)...

Voynich Manuscript & 42...

I just stumbled upon a French Yahoo Answers page that asks why 42 is the answer. Of course, it's because Douglas Adams (I once met him, he went to the same school as me) thought it was the number with the greatest comedic potential: and possibly even because he half-remembered that John Cleese once thought it was a funny number.

But I digress.

One of the Yahoo answers suggested was that 42 was the number of missing pages in the Voynich Manuscript. Well... according to Rene Zandbergen's splendiferous site, there are probably at least 14 folios missing, which would account for 28 or so missing pages (depending on how wide the folios were): but sorry to say, this is still a fair bit short of 42.

Nice try, though! :-)

"Voynich, a cyber-noir screenplay"...

This 2006 oeuvre by Matthew Thomas Farrell in three PDF parts (1, 2 , and 3) seems destined for the Big Fat List of Voynich books/screenplays. Lots of mysterious international dealers in information, Referees, odd (code) names, odd conspiracies, a little bit of Area 51, you get the idea. It's a bit hard to describe (and, frankly, to read): but maybe that's the whole point.

*sigh* I think I'd better sit down and update the List soon, it's starting to get out of control...

Books, books, books...

My copies of Eileen Reeves "Galileo's Glassworks" and Matt Rubinstein's "Vellum" have both arrived in the post: and so the inevitable book triage process sets in, whereby I work out which of the books I'm currently reading to put to one side to make time/space for the new arrivals.

Unfortunately, I'm so utterly captivated by Lynn Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Vol III (covering the 14th century), I'll probably have to finish that one first. Only a few hundred pages to go, then...

A Latin aside: I've been programming with a code library from 3Dlabs with a function that normally appears as "des.init()". However, desinit is a proper Latin word meaning "it ceases", and refers (as anyone who has read Thorndike will know) to the words at the end of manuscripts, just as incipit refers to the words at their start. What I didn't know until this week was that there is also a nice saying from Horace desinit in piscem (or in full "desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne"), which refers to a statue that starts beautiful at the top but ends up as a ugly fish at the bottom (it even gets quoted in Asterix and the Secret Weapon) - a handy metaphor for things which seem to start out well but end up badly. Nothing at all to do with 3Dlabs, then.

On the subject of books, I recently found a reference on WorldCat to a a real (ie non-fiction) Voynich book I'd never heard of, written by VMs mailing list member Jim Comegys in 2001, and with the catchy title "Keys for the voynich scholar : necessary clues for the decipherment and reading of the world's most mysterious manuscript which is a medical text in Nahuatl attributable to Francisco Hernández and his Aztec Ticiti collaborators." I'll see if I can get a copy from Jim (though I suspect he may not have properly published it per se).