Saturday 31 May 2008

Enigmatic Instrument...

Here's a nice bit of craft by someone called "iisaw" (Eric Coyote Elliott), who's made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website - click on the picture there for a detailed view. As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA font) when etching enigmatic script on his enigmatic instrument. He writes:-

This "Cosmolabe" is a prop for a movie. The fifteen circular symbols on the front represent different worlds and the signs on the outer rim are components of magical runes used to travel between the worlds. The instument itself is a way to calculate which runes need to be used for opening gates between specific places.
Cool! What's also nice is the way that it mirrors many of the circular diagrams in Quire 9. As to the text, I can see "qoksheedy" (which only appears on f108v) there, though the phrase it is in does not: so it looks to me like he's done a nice job of simulating Voynichese, possibly even better than Gordon Rugg's grilles ever did. :-)

Friday 30 May 2008

Perpetual Lamps...

At last, my copy of Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume's "Perpetual Motion: The history of an obsession" (which I mentioned here) has arrived, though I must admit to a certain amount of disappointment that its chapter 15 ("Perpetual Lamps") only runs from page 194 to page 199. All the same, if that is all we have, then let us pick up that baton and run with it...

Ord-Hume discusses Fortunio Liceti's "De Lunae Subobscura Luce prope coniunctiones", which turns out (I think) to be Chapter 50 (L) of his 1640 book "Litheosphorus": there's an online scan at the Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek here, though (once again) it turns out to be only some six pages long.

Though Ord-Hume mentions various bits from Della Porta, his main source seems to be the section in Bishop John Wilkins' 1648 "Mathematicall Magick, or The wonders that may be performed by Mechanical geometry" entitled "Subterraneous lamps, diverse historicall relations concerning thsir duration for many hundred years together".

I'd heard of the book before: it merits a mention on p.309 of William Eamon's enjoyable "Science and the Secrets of Nature" (1994), who notes both that it used the word "Magick" in an ironic sense, because "vulgar opinion... doth commonly attribute all such [machines and devices] unto the power of Magick", and that Isaac Newton was an "avid reader" of it [as was Christopher Wren]. Also on my bookshelf is "The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited" (1999), where Paul Bembridge (in his article "Rosicrucian Resurgence at the court of Cromwell") briefly namechecks Wilkins' mention of the eternal lamp allegedly in the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz. (It's in Yates too, of course).

[Incidentally, because Curse readers will remember my discussion of early modern wind-powered cars, I should say that Wilkins also talks about Simon Stevin's wind-wagon, and even includes a rather faked-up line drawing of it (you can see a copy of it here).]

Yes, I'd love to buy a proper copy of Wilkins' book, but... a first edition apparently went at auction earlier this year for £1000: oh, and there's a copy at B & L Rootenberg up for $3500. OK, the dollar's weak, but it's not that weak, right?

Thankfully, Kessinger Publishing sell (for rather less cash) a print-on-demand reproduction which you can buy through Amazon etc: but note that (rather unhelpfully) they've modernised the spelling of the title to "Mathematical Magic". Anyhow, I've ordered a copy, and will post a blog entry about it when it arrives...

Thursday 29 May 2008

Voynich Manuscript and Chelsea FC...(?!)

Yes, I'm probably just as amazed as you are: that a lowly pop-culture artefact such as the VMs could ever be plausibly mentioned in the same sentence as Chelsea FC. Tolstoy or Chekhov (the writer, not the Star Trek navigator, you fooool) maybe: but... the Voynich Manuscript? Naaah.

Yet in post #566 on "The Intelligent Forum" at CFCnet forums, long-time forum member "Hanuma" writes:
"We weren't the first or last side to struggle against [Liverpool], so Rafa hardly worked out the Voynich Manuscript when he went all-out defence and hoped for the best."

Stunning stuff! :-)

Wednesday 28 May 2008

Review of "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone"...

No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I'm talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film's gigantic marketing spend?)

The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, actually the first page of Chapter 1): McCoy manages to present its history very lightly and not bog the reader down in too many details. But as the book is set in 1933, there wasn't a whole UFO angle to cover (or other such modern confections). Instead, you get a little bit of Newbold, Bacon, alchemy, Major John M. Manly (!!!), John Dee, Kelly, the Shew Stone, and even a quick reference to Wilfrid Voynich in New York: basically, everything moves briskly along in the kind of proper screenplay-like way you'd hope from an Indy novel. Yes, there's even the occasional snake (for readers playing Indy buzzword bingo, I guess).

I'll admit it: I was charmed by the book. It's small (293 pocket-size pages), no larger than you'd imagine a Japanese commuter squeezing into a pocket, and reads so quickly that at some points (most notably in the end sequence past the oasis) I deliberately closed my eyes to slow the pace down so that I could properly picture the scene in my mind.

Historically, the book has a deliciously light touch throughout, in particular when Indy and his companion are improbably rescued by an elderly French couple called Nicholas and Peronelle (p.200) - and if you can't work out who they are by that stage in the story, you very possibly deserve to be shot.

I liked all the atlantici history and the Shelta Thari stuff (there's a Wikipedia page too) woven in: but note that when McCoy writes "Nus a dhabjan dhuilsa", he probably means "Nus a dhabjon dhuilsha" ['The blessing of God on you'], though I'd prefer not to pick a fight with a tinker / tinsmith as to which one is correct. Incidentally, my guess is that McCoy picked up the reference to Thari from Roger Zelazny's 10-book 'Amber' series.

Inevitably, there are some historical mistakes in the book (the VMs wasn't in Yale in 1933, I'm pretty sure that the British Museum had a positive rotograph of at least some of the VMs in 1929, etc), but frankly I couldn't care less. It's a delightful, frothy, whip-cracking romp through alchemical history, that I think should be required reading for any modern Voynich novelist.

Tuesday 27 May 2008

"The Voynich Prophecy"...

Well, we now have a name for Richard Douglas Weber's forthcoming Voynich novel: "The Voynich Prophecy". His author page on the Publisher's Marketplace site seems to describe his novel as a euro thriller with a kind of neo-Nazi alchemy twist: he's also posted up a four-minute video montage on YouTube for the book, where it is described as an "occult conspiracy thriller".

Curiously, Weber's whole media approach to novel promotion / marketing seems quite opposite to the kind of thing novelists have been doing. I went to a lecture in the Borders in Kingston a few days ago given by the very pragmatic Alison Baverstock (soft-promoting her actually very good book "Marketing Your Book: an author's guide"): sadly, the best current advice she had for authors seemed to be to try to make press out of your personal circumstances, the examples given being (a) losing half a limb (b) sleeping with a celebrity, or (c) having police take over your house during an armed incident.

As for me, I feel caught in the no-man's land between these two extrema: while I have no huge faith in the traditional book-selling industry's agenda and methodologies in the age of the Internet and digital print, I'm still just that bit too old-fashioned to montage loads of borrowed images on YouTube. But I have an MBA: and MBAs are forever looking for a "middle way" that finesses the best of both worlds, rather like intellectual historians steering a path between unreliable accounts. Hopefully I'll find my own answers in the end...

Monday 26 May 2008

The d'Agapayeff Cipher, continued...

In a recent post, I mentioned the idea that the d'Agapeyeff cipher might involve a diagonal transposition on the 14x14 grid cryptologists suspect it may well have been based upon. To test this out a bit, I wrote a short C++ program (which I've uploaded here) which turns the number pairs into characters (for convenience) and prints out all four diagonal transpositions (forward, reverse, forward boustrophedon, reverse boustrophedon) starting from each of the four corners.

Because the number of doubled and tripled letters is a simple measure of whether a transposition is likely to be plausible or not, I counted those up as well. The next metric to calculate would be the unique letter adjacency count (i.e. how many unique pairs of letters appear for each ordering)... but that's a task for another day.

Interestingly, transpositions starting from the top-left corner (and their reverse-order reflections in the bottom-right corner) have no triple-letters at all, as well as far fewer double-letters (9/10/11 compared to 13/14/15) than transpositions that start from the top-right. Though intriguing, I don't know if this is statistically significant: I haven't determined what the predicted doublet and triplet count would be for a totally randomised transposition, perhaps calculating that too that would be a good idea.

For any passing cryptologers, here is the ASCII version of the d'Agapeyeff cipher (as output by the C++ code) when arranged as a 14x14 grid (in numerical order but without J), followed by the 16 diagonal transpositions with their associated double & triple counts. My guess is that the top left corner reverse diagonal transposition (the second one down, starting "KBDMIDPIK...") is most likely to be the correct transposition, but we shall see (hopefully!) if this is true...

K B M P Q B Q D L D Q I P O
D I I M O N L C L L I I M B
D K N M O Q K I E N K K K S
C E E L C L K P K K D B M R
P I C M K I N L E L O P D P
D P P C M G B N B L L G L D
C K M L D N C M P L C C C Y
I L Q Q O C P O E D P E B T
B B P Q P Q I Q G K D E K F
E N B D I L M O B M D Q L S
E B D O O Q N P I Q L E G I
N N P M N D B G B E B N K R
G C M M G G N M P O K M L N
G O B M N K L D K I P L B R

*** Top left corner ***
Forward order...
KDBDIMCKIPPENMQDIEMOBCPCLONQIKPMCQLDBLMCKLKCLEBQLMIKILDE
NPQDGNPELQNBBQONBLKNIIGNDDPCCNEKKIPGCPOIQPMBLDKMOOMMOLIO
PLOBKBBMNQMQELLPMSMGDNOGDCGDRNGBPBKPCLPKNGIMDECDLMBQDEBY
DPELQKTKOBELFIKNGSPMKILLRBNR
--> number of doubles = 11, number of triples = 0
Reverse order...
KBDMIDPIKCQMNEPBOMEIDQNOLCPCDLQCMPKILCKLKCMLBDLIKIMLQBEQ
LEPNGDQPNEIINKLBNOQBBNPIKKENCCPDDNGOMKDLBMPQIOPCGBKBOLPO
ILOMMOSMPLLEQMQNMBRDGCDGONDGMPLCPKBPBGNDCEDMIGNKYBEDQBML
TKQLEPDFLEBOKSGNKIIKMPRLLNBR
--> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)...
KBDDIMPIKCPENMQBOMEIDCPCLONQDLQCMPKIBLMCKLKCLDLIKIMLQBEE
NPQDGNPELQIINKLBNOQBBNGNDDPCCNEKKIPOMKDLBMPQIOPCGOMMOLIO
PLOBKBSMPLLEQMQNMBMGDNOGDCGDRPLCPKBPBGNKNGIMDECDYBEDQBML
DPELQKTFLEBOKIKNGSIKMPLLRNBR
--> number of doubles = 10, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)...
KDBMIDCKIPQMNEPDIEMOBQNOLCPCIKPMCQLDLCKLKCMLBEBQLMIKILDQ
LEPNGDQPNENBBQONBLKNIIPIKKENCCPDDNGGCPOIQPMBLDKMOBKBOLPO
ILOMMOBMNQMQELLPMSRDGCDGONDGMNGBPBKPCLPDCEDMIGNKLMBQDEBY
TKQLEPDKOBELFSGNKIPMKIRLLBNR
--> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0


*** Top right corner ***
Forward order...
OPBIMSQIKRDIKMPLLKBDDDLNDPLYQCEKOGCTBLIKLLCBFQNKPELCEKSP
OQKLBLPELIMMOLNNPDDQGRBIMCIBMEKDEKNKINLKGCOGMLNLRDKEMMNP
QBQBMBDECCDCIOIEKLCIPLOQMPBOPPPMQPLNGPIDKQQIQBMKCLPDODND
IBBONGLBNDMGKEBPMNENMMNCBGOG
--> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 2
Reverse order...
OBPSMIRKIQPMKIDDDBKLLYLPDNLDTCGOKECQFBCLLKILBSKECLEPKNQI
LEPLBLKQOPRGQDDPNNLOMMNKEDKEMBICMIBRLNLMGOCGKLNIKBMBQBQP
NMMEKDLKEIOICDCCEDPOBPMQOLPICIPGNLPQMPPKMBQIQQKDDNDODPLC
LGNOBBIKGMDNBNMPBEMMNEBCNOGG
--> number of doubles = 15, number of triples = 1
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)...
OBPIMSRKIQDIKMPDDBKLLDLNDPLYTCGOKECQBLIKLLCBFSKECLEPKNQP
OQKLBLPELIRGQDDPNNLOMMBIMCIBMEKDEKNRLNLMGOCGKLNIKDKEMMNP
QBQBMBLKEIOICDCCEDCIPLOQMPBOPIPGNLPQMPPDKQQIQBMKDNDODPLC
IBBONGLKGMDNBEBPMNMMNENCBOGG
--> number of doubles = 13, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)...
OPBSMIQIKRPMKIDLLKBDDYLPDNLDQCEKOGCTFBCLLKILBQNKPELCEKSI
LEPLBLKQOPMMOLNNPDDQGRNKEDKEMBICMIBKINLKGCOGMLNLRBMBQBQP
NMMEKDDECCDCIOIEKLPOBPMQOLPICPPMQPLNGPIKMBQIQQKDCLPDODND
LGNOBBIBNDMGKNMPBEENMMBCNGOG
--> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 0


*** Bottom right corner ***
Forward order...
RNBRLLIKMPSGNKIFLEBOKTKQLEPDYBEDQBMLDCEDMIGNKPLCPKBPBGNR
DGCDGONDGMSMPLLEQMQNMBBKBOLPOILOMMOOMKDLBMPQIOPCGPIKKENC
CPDDNGIINKLBNOQBBNQLEPNGDQPNEDLIKIMLQBELCKLKCMLBDLQCMPKI
QNOLCPCBOMEIDQMNEPPIKCMIDBDK
--> number of doubles = 11, number of triples = 0
Reverse order...
RBNLLRPMKIIKNGSKOBELFDPELQKTLMBQDEBYKNGIMDECDNGBPBKPCLPM
GDNOGDCGDRBMNQMQELLPMSOMMOLIOPLOBKBGCPOIQPMBLDKMOGNDDPCC
NEKKIPNBBQONBLKNIIENPQDGNPELQEBQLMIKILDBLMCKLKCLIKPMCQLD
CPCLONQDIEMOBPENMQCKIPDIMDBK
--> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)...
RBNRLLPMKISGNKIKOBELFTKQLEPDLMBQDEBYDCEDMIGNKNGBPBKPCLPR
DGCDGONDGMBMNQMQELLPMSBKBOLPOILOMMOGCPOIQPMBLDKMOPIKKENC
CPDDNGNBBQONBLKNIIQLEPNGDQPNEEBQLMIKILDLCKLKCMLBIKPMCQLD
QNOLCPCDIEMOBQMNEPCKIPMIDDBK
--> number of doubles = 10, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)...
RNBLLRIKMPIKNGSFLEBOKDPELQKTYBEDQBMLKNGIMDECDPLCPKBPBGNM
GDNOGDCGDRSMPLLEQMQNMBOMMOLIOPLOBKBOMKDLBMPQIOPCGGNDDPCC
NEKKIPIINKLBNOQBBNENPQDGNPELQDLIKIMLQBEBLMCKLKCLDLQCMPKI
CPCLONQBOMEIDPENMQPIKCDIMBDK
--> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0

*** Bottom left corner ***
Forward order...
GOGBCNMMNENMPBEKGMDNBLGNOBBIDNDODPLCKMBQIQQKDIPGNLPQMPPP
OBPMQOLPICLKEIOICDCCEDBMBQBQPNMMEKDRLNLMGOCGKLNIKNKEDKEM
BICMIBRGQDDPNNLOMMILEPLBLKQOPSKECLEPKNQFBCLLKILBTCGOKECQ
YLPDNLDDDBKLLPMKIDRKIQSMIBPO
--> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 2
Reverse order...
GGONCBENMMEBPMNBNDMGKIBBONGLCLPDODNDDKQQIQBMKPPMQPLNGPIC
IPLOQMPBOPDECCDCIOIEKLDKEMMNPQBQBMBKINLKGCOGMLNLRBIMCIBM
EKDEKNMMOLNNPDDQGRPOQKLBLPELIQNKPELCEKSBLIKLLCBFQCEKOGCT
DLNDPLYLLKBDDDIKMPQIKRIMSPBO
--> number of doubles = 15, number of triples = 1
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)...
GGOBCNENMMNMPBEBNDMGKLGNOBBICLPDODNDKMBQIQQKDPPMQPLNGPIP
OBPMQOLPICDECCDCIOIEKLBMBQBQPNMMEKDKINLKGCOGMLNLRNKEDKEM
BICMIBMMOLNNPDDQGRILEPLBLKQOPQNKPELCEKSFBCLLKILBQCEKOGCT
YLPDNLDLLKBDDPMKIDQIKRSMIPBO
--> number of doubles = 13, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)...
GOGNCBMMNEEBPMNKGMDNBIBBONGLDNDODPLCDKQQIQBMKIPGNLPQMPPC
IPLOQMPBOPLKEIOICDCCEDDKEMMNPQBQBMBRLNLMGOCGKLNIKBIMCIBM
EKDEKNRGQDDPNNLOMMPOQKLBLPELISKECLEPKNQBLIKLLCBFTCGOKECQ
DLNDPLYDDBKLLDIKMPRKIQIMSBPO
--> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 0

Sunday 25 May 2008

The Big Fat List (of Voynich novels)...

I've been meaning to put this Big Fat List of English-language Voynich-related novels together for a while: I've appended links to the most significant review / blog mentions I've made about them. I'll update this every once in a while, so please feel free to drop me a line if you have or know of a Voynich-themed book you think should be mentioned or reviewed.

English-language Voynich novels in print:

"Return of the Lloigor" by Colin Wilson in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969) [mentioned here]
The Face in the Frost John Anthony Bellairs (1969) [mentioned here]
Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone Max McCoy (1994) [mentioned here]
The Grinning Ghost Brad Strickland (1999) [mentioned here]
Enoch's Portal A.W.Hill (2001) [my review]
Popco Scarlett Thomas (2004) [my review]
The Magician's Death Paul C. Doherty (2004) [mentioned here]
Shattered Icon (2004) / Splintered Icon (2006) Bill Napier [mentioned here]
Codex Lev Grossman (2005) [mentioned here]
Vellum Matt Rubinstein (2007) [my review]

Forthcoming Voynich novels:

"The Castle of the Stars" Enrique Joven [mentioned here and here]
"The Source" Michael Cordy [mentioned here]
"In Tongues of the Dead" Brad Kelln [mentioned here]

Voynich novels in development (working titles where known):

Richard D. Weber [mentioned here and here]
Bill Walsh [mentioned here]
William Michael Campbell ("The Voynich Solution") [mentioned here and here]
Andrea Peters ("I'm Sorry... Love Anne") [mentioned here]

Saturday 24 May 2008

Uptown top (Google) ranking...

Back in the early days of this blog (i.e. last Autumn), Voynich News ranked at about 150th if you did a Google search for "Voynich" - not bad out of 230,000 pages, but certainly with room for improvement. :-)

Earlier this year, it clawed its way up to about 20th, and then last month up to about 12th: it now it appears anywhere between 1st and 11th (!). I don't really have any sensible idea why Google's rankings move around so much: perhaps all the sites are close-to-equally ranked, and the fluctuations arise from a butterfly beating its wings beside an overheated Mountain View server. Yet it seems that this particular butterfly is working especially hard at the moment...

As for the pages that usually rank above Voynich News: well, the Wikipedia entry deserves its place (despite its unbearable focus on the massed ranks of the possible), while I have nothing but praise for Rene Zandbergen's majestic site. But most of the rest of them are starting to look a little bit old and unmaintained: for instance, John Baez's Voynich page dates back to January 2005, while the World Mysteries Voynich page seems essentially unchanged from 2003. Admittedly the Crystalinks VMs page has improved over time, but it is still fairly unhelpful.

I suppose this gets to the core of what annoys me most: there isn't a single Voynich page out there that I would comfortably call "helpful", apart perhaps from the "Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript" blog entry I put up here a while back (and even though this gets to the point and is reasonably brief, it is still twice as large as it really ought to be). To be honest, I'd write a whole book in that style if I could sustain it for more than three pages... but I suspect I probably couldn't. Oh well.

Google, of course, has no obligation to direct people either to helpful or to unhelpful sites: it is merely trying to "Do No Evil" ("Eidolon V"? "Devon Oil"?) in its quirky SMERSH-like way, and if its Byzantine page ranking algorithm somehow manages to get you a bit closer to where you want to go, so much the better. Maybe I should find a way of convincing Google's automated tools to put up some helpful sitelinks (the mini-list of links you sometimes see below search results) for Voynich News: but that's a mountain to climb another day...

Friday 23 May 2008

"You Can Look At The Pictures"...

If you haven't yet been properly introduced to the enjoyable confusion surrounding the Voynich Manuscript, you might well enjoy this very brief New York Times article from 1999 by Michael Pollak, entitled "Can't Read It? You Can Look at the Pictures".

I particularly enjoyed the soundbite from William R. Bennett Jr., who nicely points out that ''The manuscript itself seems to have the attraction of a poisonous flower". And so we're back to that whole Little Shop of Horrors thing again... oh well!

Thursday 22 May 2008

More on Dan Burisch...

A month ago, I posted up a blog entry about Dan Burisch's claimed decryption of the Voynich Manuscript, which a surprisingly large number of people have since read (my blog entry, not the decryption). Burisch claimed that an alien called "#3-15" held by the secret organization known as "Majestic" (presumably an updated version of Majestic-12) had decrypted the VMs, and that its plaintext turned out to be a message from the far future placed in the hands of Roger Bacon 700 years ago about the amazing inventions Dan Burisch has yet to make in the near future: but that whole decryption has been placed in "File 21" somewhere in Europe, and you can't see it, sorry.

As odd arguments go, this is a thing of curious beauty. Let's see: an alien (who you'll never meet) held by the (alleged) modern inheritors of a secret organization (most of whose founding documents appear to have been forged) has decrypted a (probably 15th century) cipher document, revealing that it was written down in (a mangled & ciphered) Hebrew by Roger Bacon (in the 13th century), to whom the actual content was passed from the far future, and which concerned the (yet-to-happen-but-surely-must-be-soon) inventions and discoveries made by Dr Dan Burisch, except that you can't see the decryption apart from four (frankly rather wobbly) words. Fantastic or fantastical? You decide.

Putting on my historical hat... if (like me) you read papers on Antonio Averlino's libro architettonico, you often run into very similar problems trying to parse what is being said. Though Averlino's libro is on one level a kind of encrypted autobiography, it simultaneously functions both as an allegorical novel and as an historical-novel-within-a-novel. Which is to say that readers constantly have to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what is contructed. Would a modern librarian place such a book in fiction or non-fiction?

Of course, Averlino was not crossing those kind of artificial boundaries, because they had not yet been drawn up. Early Renaissance thought was very fluid, very undifferentiated: perhaps the humanistic conceit of trying to gain eternal fama (fame) through their works made sense because the rigid scientific constructions of time we now rely upon had not yet been put in place - perhaps the distant past and remote future somehow felt closer then than they do these days.

In those terms, maybe Dan Burisch's conception of time is so, errm, alien to us in that it is, rather like Averlino's, quite undifferentiated and continuous in a vaguely pre-scientific way: a kind of sci-fi reprise of the early Renaissance mind. Perhaps Burisch somehow experiences past and future events all overlapping and concertinaed together, like a kind of strange temporal synaesthesia. Or perhaps he's just mad, who knows?

Anyway, we have an update on the story. According to a message apparently from Dan Burisch forwarded yesterday to The Golden Thread BBS, "the policy of the Eagles Team [is now] not to comment on the contents of the Voynich Manuscript", because "it contains such dangerous information, going to prison or being executed would be preferable to disclosing it". Furthermore, "When I said to you [Fran?] the annotations to Folio 21 ["File 21"?] were not dangerous, I meant it in the context of you seeing it. I never intended you to post it. I apologize to you for the miscommunication, and to the public about the cryptic nature of this post. With this, that is the way it must FOREVER stand." Which presumably means he won't post anything more on the subject of the VMs: a shame, as I'd like to know what it said.

The Internet is a strange place: these days, you can tell people think something is interesting not when you find a hundred banal blog entries pointing to it, but rather when you discover that it has been appropriated as a plot element in several online alternate-reality role-playing games. In those terms, the whole Dan Burisch saga to me most resembles neither a conspiracy nor a pathology, but instead a kind of fat-rulebook sci-fi RPG played out between a small group of dungeon masters and the opposing team, "the public". Roll that octahedral die one more time, baby...

UPDATE: Yet more on Dan Burisch...

Wednesday 21 May 2008

"In Tongues of the Dead"...

Another Voynich-themed novel is announced: "In Tongues of the Dead", written by Canadian author and forensic psychologist Brad Kelln, to be published by ECW Press in October 2008. It's his third book ("Lost Sanity" and "Method of Madness" were his others, with some kind of Dead Sea Scrolls prophecy hook to the second one). According to Kelln's blog, in his day-job he is "a consultant to the Halifax Police and the Nova Scotia RCMP on hostage negotiation".

In his soon-to-be-published book, an autistic child visiting the Beinecke library is miraculously able to read the VMs... revealing it as "the bible of the Nephilim". The manuscript then gets stolen, the (presumably) bad guys in the Vatican chase the various protagonists across the world, but they get helped out by a plucky Canadian psychologist doctor guy with a sick child: and whatever happens at the end happens at the end.

Perhaps I'm just feeling a bit negative because the ECW Press blurb describes the VMs as "a 400-year-old document" (I don't think so, sorry), but this whole book does sound a bit join-the-dots to me. Look: the Voynich Manuscript is a fantastic cipher mystery, but there's absolutely no reason to think it has any religious (let alone sacrilegious) content. My old friend GC once tried to argue that a couple of the women in the water section were holding things that might possibly be crosses: but that is a pretty thin reed to be balancing any kind of sophistical superstructure upon.

Cryptographically and historically, I think that Kelln should have instead built his story around the Rohonczi Codex or Rohonc Codex, A.K.A. Magyar Tudományos Akadémia ("The Hungarian Academy of Sciences") MS K 114. This has 448 pages filled with as-yet-undeciphered text, is thought to have been written on Venetian paper from the 1530s, and has 87 illustrations apparently depicting "religious, laic, and military scenes" (according to Wikipedia). There's a complete set of scans here.

Older historians thought this codex was simply a hoax: but it actually has a lot of order and structure, all of which seems to point to its being meaningful in some unknown or unexpected way. At the Warburg Institute recently, Professor Charles Burnett mentioned to me in the lunch queue that a European scholar (whose name I half-remember as "Gyula", so might well be Hungarian?) is just about to publish a paper on the Rohonc Codex: a proper academic perspective on this would be very welcome, as just about all the hypotheses circling around it seem fairly lame.

To be brutally honest, if I was Kelln's publisher, I'd negotiate with him to drop the Voynich Manuscript angle, and to rebuild the first part of the story around Budapest (a far more intriguing town than New Haven I would say, having spent time in both) and the Rohonc Codex. But what do I know?

Incidentally, there's a conference currently running at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the fascinating reign of King Mathias. Yet another event I would have loved to attend. *sigh*

Tuesday 20 May 2008

Squaring the circle (with Dante)...

Flicking through a fairly recent copy of the New Yorker in the dentist's waiting room just now, I read a review of Jean Hollander's translation of (and Robert Hollander's extensive notes on) Dante's Paradiso, the third part of the Divine Comedy. To be honest, I never had much patience with the Paradiso, all the fun in Dante was in the Inferno, a point of view this Slate article basically seems to agree with: so I never got to read about the pilgrim's meeting with God right at the end...

Which is a shame, because there's something interesting there which deserves a closer look. While it's not strictly speaking cryptographic, it is linked in with the whole sacred geometry thing which people insist on projecting onto late medieval / early modern paintings and architecture, and which is essentially a form of hidden messaging ("Neoplatonic steganography", if you will).

In the final canticle (Canticle 33) of Paradiso, Dante struggles to find words to describe the experience of meeting God: and in the end settles on an intense light (but one which the eye is attracted to rather than repelled away from), inside of which can be seen "three orbs of triple hue" (though I think the Hollanders translate these as "circles"). Dante finishes by comparing his attempts at describing the experience as no less futile than attempts to square the circle: where Man (extending the geometric metaphor just that little bit further than other poets would) is the square and God is the circle.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Leonardo should be aware of his representation of "squaring the circle" in his 'Vitruvian man'. But there are a number of other early modern artworks which supposedly use a square to represent Man or Earth and a circle to represent God or Heaven. Jerusalem was supposedly round because it was a representation of Heaven, which (as any fule kno) was perfectly circular (Ptolemaic epicycles notwithstanding): which forms a (forgive me) circular argument within whose causal chains it is hard to disentangle the Platonic from the Ideal from the proto-religious.

Having said all that, Charles Hope's argument as to the non-existence of most claimed examples of Neoplatonist allegories in Renaissance art would seem to cut a big Wile E. Coyote hole beneath most supposed examples of Renaissance sacred geometry. Even a big modern book in this general vein such as Richard Stemp's "The Secret Language of the Renaissance" contains hardly any persuasive examples of sacred geometry: Stemp's discussion of Massaccio's Trinity (pp.210-213) seems a little forced in the way he 'finds' a circle in the background to enclose the square he has constructed around Christ.

But there is at least one artwork of the period with an inherently geometrical construction, and where Man is represented as a square and God as a great big dove at the centre of a circle, with Christ in the overlap between the two (though I can't for the life of me think of the name of it). I had thought of this as a possible counterexample to Charles Hope's skepticism about Neoplatonism, in that it does seem to bear the hallmarks of what is generally known as sacred geometry. However, a careful visual reading of it (when I can remember what it is!) may instead simply show it to be no more than an allegory literally derived from the last canticle of Dante's Paradiso: in which case it may well be that we can basically consign Renaissance sacred geometry to the historical scrapheap.

Something to think about, anyway. :-)

Monday 19 May 2008

Review of "Enoch's Portal"...

Another day, another Voynich novel to read: but "Enoch's Portal" by A.W.Hill is certainly one with a heady sense of ambition. The flame the author wants us readers to touch is nothing short of an occult 'Theory Of Everything': a kind of quantum alchemy, linking Cathar euthanasia with Renaissance magic all the way through to Nazi Germany, the Temple of the Sun (though this is the name of a 1969 Tintin film, the Order of the Solar Temple is what is really meant) and the twin modern magics of finance and Hollywood. And the threads binding this bulging mass of ideas together are the Voynich Manuscript, an impossibly virginal woman called Sofia, an impossibly filmic hero called Stephan Raszer, and... former Czech president Vaclav Havel. Ohhhh yes.

The Voynich aspect of the book is straightforward enough: the author buys in to Leo Levitov's whole Cathar Endura ritual reading of the manuscript, along with all the John Dee fairy dust that people like to sprinkle on the VMs to make an otherwise unpalatable mystery taste that little bit sweeter. Yet the author has a character called Dr Noel Branch describe the VMs as "A theurgic riddle in the guise of soft-core pornography" and insisting that the "the key might lie in those silly illustrations" which are usually dismissed as nonsense: which would seen to indicate that Hill has at least properly engaged with the VMs on some level. :-)

But for me, Hill gets enough of the history wrong in important places to break the narrative spell: for example, John Dee was never Emperor Rudolph's alchemist (though Edward Kelly was, and Sinapius / de Tepenecz arguably came close enough too [though one might perhaps call him the "Imperial Distiller"]). Which is a bit of a shame, as this isn't really a key support for the story.

Speaking of the story: in it, Stephan Raszer's job is basically to track down rich women lost in cults, empathize with them, show them his own scarred wrists, have them fall in love with his failed-actor good looks, and convince them to transfer their (implicitly sexual) passion for the cult over to him... so that he can then haul them back to the pampered bland existance in Richville they worked so hard to escape from, thereby earning his handsome fee.

But Raszer is not so much a character as a filmic construct, formed from the unholy merging of a Kundalini/chakra-obsessed later Stevan Seagal (though Raszer never actually fights as such), a later Arnold Schwarzenegger (his "I don't shoot peepul, I only saif cheeldren" phase), and the asexual 1990s James Bonds, who (along with their audiences) were neither shaken nor stirred by the various Dreary Hi-Tech Plot Devices Of Doom placed in their paths.

Females in "Enoch's Portal" fare little better: Raszer's partner comes from the same mop-up-all-the-loose-plot-threads school as did Tom Cruise's impossibly capable assistant in "The Firm" (Holly Hunter); while the empowered modern women Raszer meets are all so, errrm, "enmoistened" by his good looks that they basically make love to him while his soul leaves his body on a brief spiritual holiday. Ghastly stuff.

All the same, there was a good idea in here: though Raszer lives in a supernatural world of walk-ins, succubi, and the like, the cults he deals with are basically spiritual frauds - which leads to an (actually quite interesting) question of whether Raszer is in fact delusional... but this is never obviously addressed.

Really, the problem I had with the book is that (whether it is actually true or not) it comes across again and again as having been written by someone who has watched too many trashy 1990s action movies and taken too many drugs, all the while not really engaging with the world around them. The thought kept returning when I was reading the book that it could all have been redeemed if only the author had done X or pulled back from Y... *sigh*. All in all, I just wish that Hill had had the courage of his convictions and written a screenplay instead, rather than the book of the film in his head. Oh, well!

Sunday 18 May 2008

Hidden writing on f1v...?


I've spent a long time (though "far too long" probably covers it better) hunting down obscured fragments of text in the Voynich Manuscript: so my Spidey-sense tingled almost uncontrollably when I saw a claim for hidden text on f1v in the "Marginal Writing" picture gallery on GC's Voynich Central.

I'd never heard of this before: just to be sure, I checked Reuben Ogburn's 2004 page on "Writing in and around plant illustrations" in case it had slipped in there, but no sign. If you run this through Jon Grove's colour separator filter, you can see that the brown ink used for the drawing and the brown paint used to fill it in are very slightly different: in the image below, the white area is where the filter thinks the overpainting happened.



But is there writing beneath? If you squint at the topmost image here long enough, you can start to make out something that might almost be writing. But if you filter it slightly differently, I think the answer emerges: the "signal" (below) appears to be not writing, but only compression artefacts from the MrSID wavelet encoding. Sorry, guys: false alarm! (Though next time I'm at the Beinecke, I'll have another quick look, just to be completely sure...)

Saturday 17 May 2008

"Is this feeling an eternal flame?"

A quick pop-cultural aside: the song "Eternal Flame" was written by hugely successful American songwriter Billy Steinberg with Tom Kelly and Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles). The inspiration for the song came from an eternal flame seen by Bangles' bass-player Michael Steele burning at Gracelands in Elvis Presley's memory, as well as from one at a Palm Springs synagague Steinberg had seen when very young. Though "Eternal Flame" was produced by Simon Cowell, I won't hold that against it. :-)

But historically, claims of actual eternal flames go back a very long way: in my book, I mentioned briefly that many in the Renaissance believed a "perpetual light" burned in the Temple of Vesta in Ancient Rome. Leon Battista Alberti's 1450 book "Momus" mentions (though admittedly in a fictional context) a "perpetual flame, tending itself even though no material is laid under it and no liquid poured over it", Giovanni Battista Della Porta documented many attempts at reproducing eternal flames in his Natural Magic in XX Books, while in his libro architettonico Antonio Averlino described a continuously-burning candle he saw in Sant Maria in Bagno. Another related story concerns Abbot Trithemius, who allegedly sold two "unquenchable eternall lights" to Emperor Maximilian I for 6000 crowns.

I thought this was one of those things for which there was unlikely to be any significant literature: I'd collected all the pieces together from scattered footnotes. However, recently I was inspired by Archer Quinn's, ummm, perpetual ranting to properly read through Kevin Kilty's well-known page on perpetual motion. All good stuff: and he even mentions eternal flames!

Kilty, who seems to have derived his information on this subject from Arthur Ord-Hume's 1977 book "Perpetual Motion: history of an obsession", mentions that:-
"Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657) made a lifelong study of these lamps, so many of which were supposedly found in old tombs, vaults and temples. Ord-Hume spends several pages examining ways to explain the observation of perpetual lamps. This is giving too much serious attention to a fantasy. It is likely that no one ever observed any such lamp."

(Though I should of course point out that Averlino claimed to have observed an eternal flame). Fascinating! I was not aware of Fortunio Liceti's connection with eternal flames, and so rushed to buy Ord-Hume's book as quickly as I could. I shall continue this thread when it arrives...

Friday 16 May 2008

The Florentine Renaissance & evolution...

OK, I'll admit it: people who talk about the Renaissance as a coherent historical phenomenon get on my nerves. There were numerous strands of thought at the time, all vying for the oxygen of attention, all trying to supplant medieval scholasticism: but arguably the two biggest new kids on the block circa 1400 were Renaissance humanism (think of Petrarch, etc) and Renaissance inventorship (think of Brunelleschi). While the former grew out of philology and a theoretical reverence for Classical texts, the latter emerged from the empirical world of clock-making.

Lynn Thorndike was happy enough (in his "Science & Thought in the XVth Century") to point out that these two major strands were very often at odds with each other: but it should also be noted that the intersection between the two was far from empty. In fact, you might well look at the architects Leon Battista Alberti and Antonio Averlino - both born near Florence near to 1400 - as examples of "Renaissance Men" in the purest sense, in that they exemplified both strands at the same time.

The mystery of the Italian Renaissance (as described by Burckhardt and the generation of gung-ho pro-humanistic historians that followed him) is this: why did it emerge at such a narrow time (circa 1400) and place (Florence)?

For a long time, the dominant view has basically been that this was a random event, just one of those things that happen from time to time. However, some modern writers have begun to speculate whether a particular freak event or a subtle change in diet or eating habits might perhaps been the real "cause" of the Italian Renaissance.

For me, I would be unsurprised if insomnia turned out to be a key: Alberti writes, in his 1441 "On the Tranquillity of the Soul", of "the agitation of his soul"at night, and how he can relieve this by trying to devise amazing machines for lifting and carrying weights. I wonder if an entire generation of Florentines suffered from a kind of intellectual insomnia, perhaps as a result of effectively becoming hyperthyroid from ingesting a particularly iodine-rich salt being brought into the city?

Or might the Florentines have simply become addicted to the sugar confections that had not long before suddenly filled the city's apothecaries and markets? Might the Renaissance have simply been a metabolic balancing act as people tried to compensate for a giant communal sugar rush?

But there's another possibility. If you were looking for a statistical explanation why a particular population produced more geniuses (while the overall bell-curve distribution probably remained intact), there would be two obvious candidates to consider - either (a) the mean IQ got shifted up (i.e. everyone somehow got smarter) , or (b) the variance increased dramatically (i.e. more extreme cases appeared at both ends of the scale).

This set me wondering: as I understand it, one of the problems often put forward with Darwinian evolution is that the natural rate of mutations is too low to support the amount of random change needed. So could it be that stable contexts inhibit mutations (i.e. encourage low adaptation rates), while troubled contexts somehow encourage mutations (i.e. encourage high adaptation rates)?

Interestingly, one medieval obsession presents itself here: that of whether "monsters" (freaks of nature) were signs (de-monstr-ations) of something greater happening in the world. Perhaps "monsters" in the human population were (and possibly still are?) literally a sign that the variance of the population is high.

Thinking about all this, it suddenly then became clear to me why low sperm counts make evolutionary sense: if a body is in significant physical difficulties, it makes no sense for it to try to reproduce offspring that are the same as it, as they would likely experience the same difficulties in the next generation. Instead, perhaps the body deliberately produces crippled, damaged sperm to try to encourage mutations that might be better adapted to the changing physical context. Otherwise, why would the body ever want to deliberately produce poor sperm or eggs? Perhaps the current medical view of "healthy" sperm is somehow clouded by an anti-mutation bias of some sort.

My prediction here is that that there will turn out to be reproductive mechanisms by which (a) healthy eggs repel damaged sperm and (b) damaged eggs discourage healthy sperm: leaving the two pivotal cases of (healthy eggs + healthy sperm) => low mutation rate (low variance, well-adapted to environment), and (damaged eggs + damaged sperm) => high mutation rate (high variance, poorly-adapted to environment).

But there's a timing issue. Whereas sperm production is essentially a "just-in-time" process, women's eggs are produced all in one go, and so form a lagging indicator to environmental adaptation (i.e. egg health in reproduction gives an indication of environmental fit 15-25 years earlier). So, could it be that, when looking for the source of the Renaissance circa 1400, we should instead look for a traumatic event in Florence circa 1380 that significantly affected women's reproductive health, causing a change in the population's IQ variance?

I really don't know (this is a blog, not an article in Nature): but it is tempting to speculate whether it was simply coincidence that the Florentine Renaissance began two generations after the plague had ravaged Florence in 1348 (Boccaccio famously wrote about it). Might children born after the plague have stirred the Florentine gene-pool up in just the right way to set the Renaissance in motion a generation later?

Thursday 15 May 2008

Oldest animation (sort of)...

It all started off with a plausibly-phrased story making an incredible claim via a dodgy animated GIF...

A March 2008 article by Ryan Ball in Animation Magazine claimed that the oldest piece of animation had been discovered: a 5,200-year-old rotating bowl from Tehran, a bit like an inside-out zoetrope depicting a jumping goat. When I saw this, I immediately wanted to blog about it: but there was something wrong about the 9-frame animated GIF at the bottom that held me back...

Reading a little more (as you do), I found a 2006 post on Neil Cohn's Visual Linguist website (apparently the jumping goat bowl had originally been news in 2005) that deconstructed the GIF: the sequence of frames had been doctored to make it look more like an animation (a term Cohn felt wasn't really justifiable) than it really was, because there were only actually 5 "frames" in the sequence on the bowl.

The last comment on Cohn's page points to Alexis Chazard's more appropriate 5-frame animation of the goat, taken directly (as far as was possible) from actual pictures of the bowl. There's also a nice set of photographs from Iran that put the bowl more into context here.

All in all, I think it's a huge shame that someone went to the trouble of mocking up a dodgy 9-frame GIF, apparently to try to oversell the animation aspect of the bowl. If that person had simply assembled the 5 frames exactly as they appeared (particularly if they had found specific evidence of an axis of rotation and had specifically taken 5 pictures at 72 degree rotation intervals, la la la), it would have been a perfectly acceptable demonstration. Basically,in a 5000-year-old artefact, nobody's expecting Shrek to jump out at us, och no, Donkey. ;-)

Incidentally, the first documented zoetrope came from the Chinese inventor Ting Huan in about 180AD: not many people know that, unless you're a bit of a Wikipede (or should I say "Wikipedant"?) (or "Wikipedophile"?)

Wednesday 14 May 2008

The d'Agapeyeff Cipher, revisited...

I know, I did blog about this only three days ago: but science moves ever onwards, OK?

A nice email arrived from Robert Matthews, the author of an excellent page on the d'Agapeyeff Cipher: he mentioned that he had received an email in February 2006 from John Willemse in Holland, who had suggested a novel kind of transposition cipher based around a spiral:-

I'm in no way a cipher expert, but I am a very curious person and I was wondering if the positioning of the 14x14 digram table could have anything to do with a spiral. The reason I suspect this, is that a spiraling positioning of numbers have the property that each upperleft corner of such a spiral (when starting with zero in the center) is a perfect square number. I'll try to illustrate my point:

16 15 14 13 12
17 .4 .3 .2 11 ..
18 .5 .0 .1 10 ..
19 .6 .7 .8 .9 26
20 21 22 23 24 25

Starting from zero, and counting up, anti-clockwise, you will encounter a perfect square of each even number in the topleft corner. 196 is also such a number.

The '04' digram almost in the center could be a break point. If you 'break' after the zero and shift the 4 to the right, creating a new set of digrams, you end up with a set of digrams before the zero and a set after the zero. The set after the zero should probably be reversed, either the whole set or the individual digrams, to create a similar set as the first one (the digrams starting with higher digits and ending with lower digits).

You might then be able to construct a spiral like positioning, with the zero in the center or the zero obmitted. The first set might then be 'twisted' around it clockwise, and the second set anti-clockwise, possibly interweaving each other.

These are just some wild ideas, and I'm in no way capable of constructing and verifying such a table myself, but maybe it's something to investigate?
Willemse's idea is certainly interesting: but let's look again at the (derived) 14x14 layout. To recap: one of the reasons for suspecting that transposition is involved is that there are two sets of horizontal tripled letters (75 75 75 and 63 63 63), while one of the reasons for suspecting that it's not a 'matrix transpose' diagonal flip is that there are two sets of vertical tripled letters (81 81 81 and 82 82 82). That is, unless the plaintext sadistically contains a phrase like "SEPIA AARDVARK" (a phrase which, I'm delighted to note, Google believes currently appears nowhere else on the Internet).

75 62 82 85 91 62 91 64 81 64 91 74 85 84
64 74 74 82 84 83 81 63 81 81 74 74 82 62
64 75 83 82 84 91 75 74 65 83 75 75 75 93
63 65 65 81 63 81 75 85 75 75 64 62 82 92
85 74 63 82 75 74 83 81 65 81 84 85 64 85
64 85 85 63 82 72 62 83 62 81 81 72 81 64
63 75 82 81 64 83 63 82 85 81 63 63 63 04
74 81 91 91 84 63 85 84 65 64 85 65 62 94
62 62 85 91 85 91 74 91 72 75 64 65 75 71
65 83 62 64 74 81 82 84 62 82 64 91 81 93
65 62 64 84 84 91 83 85 74 91 81 65 72 74
83 83 85 82 83 64 62 72 62 65 62 83 75 92
72 63 82 82 72 72 83 82 85 84 75 82 81 83
72 84 62 82 83 75 81 64 75 74 85 81 62 92


From this, it seems that, yes, you could construct a large number of spiral transpositions without tripled letter sequences. Yet I'm not completely convinced by the idea that the 04 token is a good indicator for the centre of a spiral: from the substitution cipher angle, I'd be quite happy to tag that as a likely 'X' or 'Y' in the plaintext instead.

However, I would point out that if you examine the various diagonal transpositions of the 14x14 (i.e. reading through the 14x14 one diagonal line at a time), there is (unless I'm somehow mistaken) apparently only a single tripled letter in two of them, and that only over a line-break:-

75 62 82 85 91 62 91 64 81 64 91 74 85 84
64 74 74 82 84 83 81 63 81 81 74 74 82 62
64 75 83 82 84 91 75 74 65 83 75 75 75 93
63 65 65 81 63 81 75 85 75 75 64 62 82 92
85 74 63 82 75 74 83 81 65 81 84 85 64 85
64 85 85 63 82 72 62 83 62 81 81 72 81 64
63 75 82 81 64 83 63 82 85 81 63 63 63 04
74 81 91 91 84 63 85 84 65 64 85 65 62 94
62 62 85 91 85 91 74 91 72 75 64 65 75 71
65 83 62 64 74 81 82 84 62 82 64 91 81 93
65 62 64 84 84 91 83 85 74 91 81 65 72 74
83 83 85 82 83 64 62 72 62 65 62 83 75 92
72 63 82 82 72 72 83 82 85 84 75 82 81 83
72 84 62 82 83 75 81 64 75 74 85 81 62 92


All in all, Willemse's idea of a spiral transposition does seem intriguing: but perhaps a little more psychologically ornate than d'Agapeyeff would have considered necessary as an exercise for the reader. If I were actively looking for a solution to this cipher (which I'm not), I would instead start with the four basic diagonal transpositions of the 14x14, and see if they led anywhere interesting... you never know! :-)

Tuesday 13 May 2008

"The E. A. Poe Cryptographic Challenge"...

While looking at Elonka's list of unsolved cipher mysteries while composing my post on the d'Agapeyeff cipher, my eye was drawn to the list of solved cipher mysteries she appended to it, and in particular to "The E. A. Poe Cryptographic Challenge".

Edgar Allan Poe often used codes and ciphers in his stories, most famously in "The Gold-Bug" (which incidentally inspired a very young William Friedman to take up an interest in cryptography). He also asked readers of one popular magazine to send him their ciphers to crack: which he (allegedly) managed to do for the hundred such that arrived.

However, in 1839 Poe published two tricky cryptograms allegedly by "Mr. W. B. Tyler" (probably a Poe pseudonym) which nobody at the time was able to break. These were rediscovered in 1985 by Professor Louis Renza, who then tried to raise their profile: before too long (in 1992), Professor Terence Whalen managed to solve the first one, which turned out to be nothing more complex than a simple monoalphabetic cipher.

The second (still-unbroken) cipher attracted the attention of Professor Shawn Rosenheim, who not only described it in his book The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Johns Hopkins, 1997), but also put up a $2500 prize to attract solvers' attention, with the help of Jim Moore of bokler.com who built a website to promote it.

And then, after Rosenheim and Moore had fielded hundreds of fruitless emails and responses, a software engineer from Toronto called Gil Broza finally cracked the second cipher in October 2000: his decryption is detailed here.

For followers of the Voynich Manuscript, this makes for fairly depressing reading: neither of the "W. B. Tyler" ciphers were, even by the standard of Milanese ciphers circa 1465, particularly tricky, yet Broza had to work really quite hard to solve the second one. He worked out his own transcription, wrote his own software... and then still basically had to break into it by hand, a process made even more difficult by the presence of errors in the ciphertext (which were probably introduced in the typesetting). And people wonder why modern supercomputers can't unravel the secrets of Voynichese - a cipher that is ten times harder than the second Poe Cipher.

The real mystery about Poe is actually the manner of his death: but that's an intriguing story for another day... :-)

Monday 12 May 2008

Esperanto Voynich comic strip via Taiwan...?

Here's a little Voynich Manuscript pop-culture link that got excised from Wikipedia last September. Poor thing: I thought I'd give it a second home here.

In the Esperanto-language comic strip "La Veksilologisto" (The Vexillologist), "Dr. Voynich" is the hero's arch-enemy. Gifted by aliens with the "Orb of Esperanto" which allows universal translation, Voynich discovers this to be intolerable (animals speak, humans tell the truth), and sets out in search of the "Orb of Babel" which has the opposite effect.

I dug up a second reference to this comic strip here (also in Esperanto), which I tried to translate back into English courtesy of Traduku (an online Esperanto <--> English translator)... which had problems with cookies both in IE and Firefox (*sigh*). But (guessing at the Esperanto, which usually works), it seems as though it is a comic strip drawn by someone called David Bell, and published in the Esperanto magazine "Formoza Folio".

And then, via this bibliographic page, I found a dead link to a missing file called "ff2.pdf" which (supposedly) contains a copy of the strip (apparently it was published in Taiwan in 2006): but the Wayback Machine didn't have a copy of it. Oh well: I guess I'll just have to carry on living without the joy of reading an Esperanto comic strip. But if anyone does manage to find a copy, please let me know! :-)

Sunday 11 May 2008

The d'Agapeyeff Cipher...

Back in 1939, Alexander d'Agapeyeff wrote a tidy little book called "Codes and Ciphers" on cryptography history: though you can now buy it print-on-demand, cheap copies of the original book often come up on the various second-hand book aggregators (such as bookfinder.com), which is where I got my copy of the "Revised and reset" 1949 edition.

What is now generally understood is that d'Agapeyeff wasn't really a cryptographer per se: he had previously written a similar book on cartography for the same publisher, and so thought to tackle cryptography.

On the very last page of the text (p.144), d'Agapeyeff dropped in a little cipher challenge, saying "Here is a cryptogram upon which the reader is invited to test his skill."

75628 28591 62916 48164 91748 58464 74748 28483 81638 18174
74826 26475 83828 49175 74658 37575 75936 36565 81638 17585
75756 46282 92857 46382 75748 38165 81848 56485 64858 56382
72628 36281 81728 16463 75828 16483 63828 58163 63630 47481
91918 46385 84656 48565 62946 26285 91859 17491 72756 46575
71658 36264 74818 28462 82649 18193 65626 48484 91838 57491
81657 27483 83858 28364 62726 26562 83759 27263 82827 27283
82858 47582 81837 28462 82837 58164 75748 58162 92000


This modest little cryptogram, now known as "the d'Agapayeff Cipher", has somehow remained unbroken for 70 years, and is often to be found alongside the Voynich Manuscript on lists of cipher enigmas.

The first thing to note is that adjacent columns are formed alternately from 67890 and 12345 characters respectively: which is a huge hint that what we are looking at is (in part, at least) a grid cipher, where each pair of numbers gives a position in a grid. If so, then we can throw away the "patristrocat" spaces between the blocks of numbers and rearrange them as pairs.

75 62 82 85 91 62 91 64 81 64 91 74 85 84 64 74 74 82 84 83 81 63 81 81 74
74 82 62 64 75 83 82 84 91 75 74 65 83 75 75 75 93 63 65 65 81 63 81 75 85
75 75 64 62 82 92 85 74 63 82 75 74 83 81 65 81 84 85 64 85 64 85 85 63 82
72 62 83 62 81 81 72 81 64 63 75 82 81 64 83 63 82 85 81 63 63 63 04 74 81
91 91 84 63 85 84 65 64 85 65 62 94 62 62 85 91 85 91 74 91 72 75 64 65 75
71 65 83 62 64 74 81 82 84 62 82 64 91 81 93 65 62 64 84 84 91 83 85 74 91
81 65 72 74 83 83 85 82 83 64 62 72 62 65 62 83 75 92 72 63 82 82 72 72 83
82 85 84 75 82 81 83 72 84 62 82 83 75 81 64 75 74 85 81 62 92 00 0[0]


The first hint that the order of these might have been scrambled ('transposed') comes from the two sets of tripled letters: 75 75 75 and 63 63 63. Five centuries ago, even Cicco Simonetta and his Milanese cipher clerks knew that tripled letters are very rare (the only one in Latin is "uvula", 'little egg'). The second hint that this is a transposition cipher is the total number of characters (apart from the "00" filler at the end): 14x14. If we discard the filler & rearrange the grid we get:-

75 62 82 85 91 62 91 64 81 64 91 74 85 84
64 74 74 82 84 83 81 63 81 81 74 74 82 62
64 75 83 82 84 91 75 74 65 83 75 75 75 93
63 65 65 81 63 81 75 85 75 75 64 62 82 92
85 74 63 82 75 74 83 81 65 81 84 85 64 85
64 85 85 63 82 72 62 83 62 81 81 72 81 64
63 75 82 81 64 83 63 82 85 81 63 63 63 04
74 81 91 91 84 63 85 84 65 64 85 65 62 94
62 62 85 91 85 91 74 91 72 75 64 65 75 71
65 83 62 64 74 81 82 84 62 82 64 91 81 93
65 62 64 84 84 91 83 85 74 91 81 65 72 74
83 83 85 82 83 64 62 72 62 65 62 83 75 92
72 63 82 82 72 72 83 82 85 84 75 82 81 83
72 84 62 82 83 75 81 64 75 74 85 81 62 92

This is very probably the starting point for the real cryptography (though the presence of tripled characters in the columns implies that it probably isn't a simple "matrix-like" diagonal transposition. Essentially, it seems that we now have to solve a 14x14 transposition cipher and a 5x5 substitution cipher simultaneously, over a relatively small cryptogram - an immense number of combinations to explore.

However, we know that d'Agapeyeff wasn't a full-on cryptographer, so we should really explore the psychological angle before going crazy with an 800-year-long brute-force search. For a start, if you lay out the frequencies for the 5x5 letter grid (with 12345 on top, 67890 on the left), a pattern immediately appears:-

** .1 .2 .3 .4 .5
6. _0 17 12 16 11
7. _1 _9 _0 14 17
8. 20 17 15 11 17
9. 12 _3 _2 _1 _0
0. _0 _0 _0 _1 _0


Here, the 61 (top-left) frequency is 0, the 73 frequency is 0, and the final nine frequencies are 3, 2, 1, 0; 0, 0, 0, 1, 0. I think this points to a 5x5 mapping generated by a keyphrase, such as "Alexander d'Agapeyeff is cool" (for example). To make a keyphrase into a 5x5 alphabet, turn all Js into Is (say), remove all duplicate letters (and so it becomes ALEXNDRGPYFISCO), and then pad to the end with any unused characters in the alphabet in sequence (BHKMQTUVWZ)

* 1 2 3 4 5
6 A L E X N
7 D R G P Y
8 F I S C O
9 B H K M Q
0 T U V W Z

For a long-ish (but language-like) keyphrase, rare characters would tend to get moved to the end of the block: which is what we appear to see in the frequency counts above, suggesting that the final few letters are (for example) W X Y Z or W X Z.

Yet 61 and 73 have frequency counts of zero, which points to their being really rare letters (like Q or Z). However, if you read the frequency counts as strings, 61 62 63 = 0 17 12, while 73 74 75 = 0 14 17: which perhaps points to the first letter of the keyphrase (i.e. 61) being a rare consonant, and the second pair being Q U followed by a vowel. Might 73 74 75 76 77 be QUIET or QUITE?

I don't (of course) know: but I do strongly suspect that it might be possible for a cunning cryptographer to crack d'Agapeyeff's keyphrase quite independently of his transposition cipher. It can't be that hard, can it? ;-p

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Update: a follow-up post is here...

Saturday 10 May 2008

Voynich novels latest...

A couple of emails just in from Voynich novelists: it's so much nicer to hear about stuff before it happens, rather than haphazardly 6+ months later (sadly the de facto standard for the Internet).

Firstly, Richard Douglas Weber writes to tell me that his Voynich novel is now very well advanced, and that (though I'm exaggerating a tad) it has a VMs-related plot device that will hopefully jolt me out of my novel-reading seat. I'm really looking forward to this!
(As an aside, the last thing that nearly made me choke on my own intestines with surprise was the "canape" sequence in the "Ali G Indahouse" movie. But perhaps I should say no more about that, aiii...)

Richard came to the Voynich Manuscipt sideways while researching a Dee/Kelly/Enochian writing project, but which then got stalled. When it later restarted, the Dee/Kelly angle got dropped while the VMs took centre stage. Unlike many "Voynichologists" out there (*sigh*), he had taken the time to read Mary D'Imperio's "Elegant Enigma" (good for him!), though he felt it only really amounted to "a long rehash of everything that was conjectured"... (errrm, it's not that long, is it?) All of which is fair enough: we'll all have to wait for his final book to see what angle he takes on the VMs...

I should say that though D'Imperio affects impartiality, if you read "Elegant Enigma" carefully, you can find quite a few places where her actual opinion of the VMs sneaks in. I think it is the structure of Voynichese that particularly fascinated her, the siren singing that pulled her ship toward the manuscript. For example, on p.11 she writes of its "architectonic ... quality", and that "I gain a persistent impression of the presence of rules and relationships, a definite structure with its own "logic", however erratic and bizarre it might appear when compared to present-day concepts. The intricate compound forms in the script and its matter-of-fact, rather austere style all confirm this impression of craftsmanlike and logical construction in my mind", before going on to describe the "persistent tectonic element of style in the drawings." This basic idea recurs on p.16 and elsewhere.

Secondly, Bill Walsh emailed with news of his own Voynich-homage novel with a supernatural twist. It wouldn't be fair to say more than that at this early stage - even in these electronic times, getting from pitch to draft to agent to publisher to marketing to production to retailer to reader is as slow (and tricky) as it was a century ago. But having now seen some of his writing (which I found sparky and enjoyable), I really wish him the very best luck in taking it further.

Finally, I've just picked up a copy of A.W.Hill's 'Stephan Raszer' novel "Enoch's Portal" (2001), which allegedly has its own supernatural take on the Voynich Manuscript. I'll post a review here once I've imbibed its intriguing mix of "visionary doses of Renaissance magic, Kabbalah and sacramental sex" (according to the back cover, anyway)...

Thursday 8 May 2008

Research breakthrough...

Not long ago, I mentioned here that I had made a fist-punching-in-the-air breakthrough in my research, and promised to describe it more fully at a later date. Well, that later date has (thanks to a torrent of two gently chiding emails chivvying me along) now arrived: here's what I found.

Regular Voynich News readers will by now be aware that I've spent a long time this year slowly trawling through various volumes of Lynn Thorndike's vast "History of Magic & Experimental Science". Given that I believe the Voynich Manuscript is an enciphered book of proto-scientific secrets rooted in Italian Quattrocento culture, Thorndike's general focus on Italian scientific documents of the 14th (Volume III) and 15th (Volume IV) centuries is pretty much spot on. This approach has turned up a whole set of research leads to follow up over the next few weeks and months... so far so good.

But I also (sad completist I sometimes tend to be) picked up a copy of Thorndike's rather less-well-known "Science & Thought In The Fifteenth Century" (1929, Columbia University Press): in which I found something pleasantly unexpected. But I'll fill in all the background first...

Once upon a time (oh, in 2006), I wrote & published a book called "The Curse of the Voynich", which described how I concluded from my meticulous codicological study that Quattrocento Florentine architect Antonio Averlino (better known as "Filarete") was probably both the author and the encipherer of the Voynich Manuscript. Part of the textual evidence revolved around a set of "small works" to which Averlino alluded in his larger libro architettonico, and which I suspected were at least in part enciphered in the VMs. However, art historians have long disagreed about whether these other works actually existed, or whether they were just added in for spice to amuse Averlino's (hoped-for) ducal audience: as far as anyone, there has long been no external evidence either way.

But then on p.219 of Thorndike's "Science & Thought", in chapter XII which is largely devoted to Giovanni Michele Alberto of Carrara's "De constitutione mundi", I found the following:

Antonio Averlino Filarete (1410-1470), who is commonly thought of as an architect and sculptor, is listed by John Michael Albert [i.e. Giovanni Michele Alberto da Carrara] among writers on plants as having treated that subject "elegantly in the vernacular tongue". [94]

Thorndike's footnote 94 then says:

Ibid. [MS Ashburnham 198], fol.78r: "Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter." The work of Filarete on architecture was first printed only in 1890 (W. von Oettingen). In it he alludes to his work on agriculture, which is probably what John Michael Albert has in mind. See M. Lazzaroni and A Munoz, "Filarete, scultore e architetto del sec. XV", 1908, p.281.

Somehow this whole mention appears to have gone unnoticed by all recent writers on Filarete: yet its existence would seem to strongly tip the balance of probability towards the likelihood that he did actually write his "other little works". Hence why finding it was so rewarding (for me, at least).

Incidentally, MS Ashburnham 198 (one of the 11,000 manuscripts held by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence) was dedicated to Boniface, marquis of Montferrat: and so was probably written between 1483 (when Bonifazio Palaeologo became marquis) and 1488 (when Alberto was given the title Count Palatine by Frederick III) or 1490 (when Alberto is thought to have died).

I then wondered where Alberto might have seen Filarete's herbal manuscript. Alberto was born in Bergamo, trained in Padua, returned to Bergamo, and practised medicine at Rovato, Brescia, Chiari: and for a time was private physician to Roberto di Sanseverino, as well as Prior of the College of Physicians in Bergamo. I'd therefore guess that Alberto probably saw Filarete's work (and perhaps even had a copy made of it) while in Bergamo, where he spent most of his life, only 50km or so from Milan where Filarete was working: or he may even have met Filarete, who is believed to have designed the plans for Bergamo Cathedral circa 1459, and who doubtless visited Bergamo on several occasions.

It would be amazing if Filarete's elegant vernacular work on plants (or even just its incipit) could be identified: and so I started, emboldened by the archival research content of Day Three of the Warwick/Warburg Course, to think about where I might search (and for what, and for how long).

Identifying herbals from purely written descriptions is not unprecedented. In Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Vol.IV (p.599), he describes Pandolphus Collenucius of Pesaro learning about herbs in Venice: "There in the street of the spice-dealers in a shop having as its sign the head of an Ethiopian he had consulted an herbal in which the plants were represented so carefully and artfully that you would have thought they grew on its pages." In a footnote, Thorndike notes that Valentinelli (1872) "has shown that this was the De Simplicibus of Benedetto Rinio, with pictures of the plants by the Venetian painter, Andrea Amadio. The MS is now S. Marco VI, 59 (Valentinelli, XIII, 10)." All the same, we really don't yet have enough to work with in the present case.

Where did Alberto's belongings go after his death? Sergio Toresella tells me that Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) wrote: "I understand that this Alberti was an humanist that wrote a lot of comedies and poetry but I do not know were his belongings went after his death." So at least I'm not the first to ask!

But all is not lost: the Biblioteca Angelo Mai in Bergamo has a good collection of his letters and notes, and many manuscripts from his personal library (and so with his initials and coat of arms added to them). The library's bibliographical description of its various humanistic documents taken from Kristeller's Iter Italicum and Iter Supplementum is here. But, as Sergio points out, none looks particularly promising, with the possibly exception of MA 184-186 folio 8v "Ex experimentis et secretis magistri Guelmi" (though this too seems fairly unlikely).

There are some books on Alberto's work. For instance, a 20th century academic called Giovanni Giraldi seems to have spent his life editing and publishing papers on him in obscure journals, many of which are reproduced in his 1967 book "Opera poetica, philosophica, rhetorica, theologica" (Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini): although none appears to be for sale online (boo), WorldCat lists 5 or 6 copies, one in the Warburg Institute (hooray!)

For Alberto's life, there is "Giovanni Michele Alberto Carrara" by Ercole Vittorio Ferrario and Gian Camillo Donadi (1964), for which WorldCat lists just one copy (boo)... in the Wellcome Institute Library in London, just around the corner from the British Library (phew!). I've been meaning to go there for a while, partly to take a picture of its necromantic painting depicting John Dee (but that's another story).

Interestingly, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana makes a log of everyone who examines each of its manuscripts available on its website. Of the ten people listed for MS Ashburnham 198, there is someone from the Warburg Institute (in Hamburg!) in 1930, Patrick McGurk from the Warburg (in London) in 1953, Federici Vescalini Graziella in 1987, John Monfasani in 1995, and Ulrich Pfisterer in 1998, though I don't yet know if Ulrich (who has written papers on Filarete) was or is aware of the mention on f78r: I'll ask him, see what he says...

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, there's always the tiny possibility that multispectral imaging of its very first page might just (if Alberto just happened to end up owning it) reveal a faint contact transfer from Alberto's coat of arms and initials. But I'm more interested in seeing if the incipit is anywhere to be found: that would be far more useful for trying to break its cipher.

All of which may not seem like much to get hugely excited about, but it is a step forward (though admittedly only at the glacial pace normal for Voynich research). *sigh*

Voynich Lonely Hearts...

Yes, some people are now advertising for Voynich widows: online dating site OKCupid currently has six members (3 m, 1 f, 2 bi) who list the Voynich Manuscript as one of their interests (though how they can find any time for other interests beats me).

Of course, I should point out that to be well-matched as a partner for a Voynichologist, you'd need to be comfortable with long periods of --errrm-- "benign neglect" (for example, evenings and weekends), and to understand that the itinerary of shared/family holidays will very often end up being finessed to accommodate historical / cultural sites of Voynichological interest (New Haven (of course), Philadelphia, New York, Rome, Milan, etc), or to drop by academic libraries which just happen to hold the only remaining copy of <insert obscure bookname here>.

Just so you know - forewarned is forearmed! (But eight-armed is octopoidal). :-)

Tuesday 6 May 2008

Erich von Daniken & the VMs...

For those of us who suspected that Erich von Daniken had been silently abducted by aliens at some point in the last couple of decades (but without bothering to look up his Wikipedia entry to find out that this was [probably] not true), a new von Daniken book may come as a bit of a surprise.

Released in German in September 2007, "Falsch Informiert!" promises the reader a thoughtful reappraisal (and a combative intellectual defence against countless assaults) of von Daniken's claims from all those years ago, such as Father Crespi's "Metal Library" and the Nasca lines and... oh, you get the general idea. (Personally, I'd be more interested to read Stan Hall's (2007) book "Tayos Gold: The Archives of Atlantis", but there you go.)

As ever, von Daniken's roving eye remains alert for anomalous objects that might just have been placed into an inappropriate historical stratum by careless alien visitors: the Piri Reis map (debunking courtesy of the ever-reliable Map Room blog), the splendid Antikythera Mechanism, and so forth. Both of which seem perfectly sane artefacts to me, with no huge (or even small) need to introduce extraterrestrial visitations to explain their basic existence.

But wait: in "Falsch Informiert!", von Daniken has also picked up on the Voynich Manuscript as an object apparently inserted out of the correct historical sequence. Now, while I don't believe that the VMs requires a deus ex machina (a chariot-driving deus, in Daniken's case) to explain its very-probably-Quattrocento art history, I do think it will be interesting to see what our Swiss chum has to say about it.

As you'd expect, his account may well turn out to be nonsense: but even so, it will very likely be well-argued and well-read nonsense. Which, compared to a lot of the Voynich babble out there, should at least be a bit of fun to read. Just remember not to inhale. :-)

Monday 5 May 2008

Adolfo Stromboli (who he?)...

Another day, another claimed Voynich decryption, this time by an archaeologist called Adolfo Stromboli. Though retired from active digging duty, he now claims to spend his time in his climate controlled house in West Virginia solving the Voynich Manuscript.

Stromboli has put a nice little puzzle on the right of his page for fans of pigpen ciphers, marred only by the fact that he misspelt the first word in the plaintext (the penultimate letter is the wrong vowel)... oh well.

Ominously, some Javascript windows pop up at the start, claiming to scan your identity or something similar...

But have no fear, it's all just a piece of harmless fun, almost certainly concocted by a Worcester Polytechnic Institute student at the WPI Mystery Club. Though the WPI's claim to fame for Worcester is (according to Wikipedia) wrong: it is probably the second (not third) largest city in New England (after Boston). My two personal favourite Worcester factettes: (1) its original Pakachoag name was 'Quinsigamond' (why ever did they want to change that?), and (2) the town was home to modern hero Harvey Ball, the 1963 inventor of the smiley face. :-)

Saturday 3 May 2008

Shirley Maclaine? Surely not!

Proof that the VMs meme has entered a whole new era comes from a quite unexpected source: a 2007 thread about the VMs' positive energy in an online forum for Shirley Maclaine's online community.

I suspect that, not so long ago, the VMs would not have been described by the same crowd as at all "beautiful". This is basically what I mean when I say that the VMs is becoming more "mainstream": it's not that it is changing, but rather that as people's tastes are evolving, so the whole Voynichian vibe is becoming more accessible. As always, make of it what you will...