Thursday 31 July 2008

Review of "Inventing The Flat Earth"...

Note: this article has now moved to review-of-inventing-the-flat-earth on Cipher Mysteries

It's a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from?

In his fascinating (if all too brief) "Inventing The Flat Earth" (1991), medieval historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces the faulty arguments and ideologies across the centuries that contributed to this nonsense. As an immediate cause, he points to a small coterie of 19th century writers (specifically William Whewell (1794-1866) and John W. Draper (1811-1882)) who decided to start an agitprop war between "religion" and "science", essentially by building opposing false idols of both "sides" and getting people angry enough about it to join in the fight.

For "religion", the caricature they constructed was one of superstition and medieval backwardness: and what (thanks to multiple careful misreadings of the sources) could be more retrogressive than the notion of the flat earth? Disregarding the fact that just about everyone at that time believed in a spherical earth, Church or not. *sigh*

Yet for retrogressivity to be of interest as something to avoid, someone had (logically) to be promoting progressivity: Russell traces this back to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and to Jules Michelet, the last of which dubbed medieval scholastics "valiant athletes of stupidity" (hugely unfairly, of course).

But Jeffrey Burton Russell goes back further still: calling the Middle Ages "the Middle Ages" is a way of implicitly saying that it sat inbetween the (glorious) Classical Era and the (glorious) Renaissance - that it was a Tweenie era, that was more than just a bit disappointing and dull. And similarly with the Dark Ages, which would appear to have been so hugely disappointing that some extreme revisionist historians are trying to excise it completely!

Ultimately, Russell points the finger at Renaissance myth-makers: it was they who essentially invented the whole "medieval = rubbish" mythology which used to annoy Lynn Thorndike so much (though perhaps he should have been angrier with Alberti & his chums than with Jacob Burckhardt), in order to justify their own glory, as if fama was a zero-sum game. What did those Renaissance brainiacs ever do for us, eh?

Rewind to 1492, and the basic history is that Columbus never had to argue against a flat earth. His main point of disagreement was with those scientifically-minded people of the time who argued (completely correctly!) that his estimate of the distance East West to the Orient was far too low, and that he and his crew would die of starvation before they reached there. And they would have done, had another continent not happened to be in the way... but that's another story.

Some may have heard of this book via the recent short article by Mano Singham (Phi Delta Kappan, 1st April 2007, available online) that was built almost entirely around a high-speed precis of Russell's book: on HASTRO-L (2nd December 2007), Michael Meo criticized Singham's presentation, but I think the inaccuracies there were in the summarizing, not in the original.

As far as the intellectual history goes, the seed of the myth/error seems to have been specifically sown by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus preface (not the one Osiander added!). There, he says:-
For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.

Copernicus was trying to play to the Church audience here, as the spherical earth was so well-believed as to be a point of faith. Yet because Lactantius' opposing view (of a flat earth) had been deemed heretical, the papacy ordered in 1616 that this passage be censored from Copernicus' book - but this order came too late for the 3rd edition of 1617, and the subsequent edition came along only in 1854.

And so the final irony here is that if De Revolutionibus had indeed (as Koestler asserted) been "The Book Nobody Read", the flat-earth myth/error might never have flowered.

Wednesday 30 July 2008

Wilkins, Lib II, Cap X "Of subterranean lamps"...

Note: this article has now moved to wilkins-lib-ii-cap-x-of-subterranean-lamps on Cipher Mysteries

Having just bought a print-on-demand copy of John Wilkins' book "Mathematical Magick: Or The Wonders That may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry", I found that it was (mostly) placed online in 2006 as part of "The Mathematical and Philosophical Works of the Right Rev. John Wilkins", (re-)published in 1802 - there's a free version on Google Books, available for free download here. If you go to page 247, you can also see his 1668 essay on a philosophical language which D'Imperio mentions in her section 9.3 "Pasigraphy: Universal and Synthetic Languages".
All the same, because I was interested in the "perpetual lamp" section of Wilkins' "Mathematical Magick", and the online text version was somewhat flawed, I thought I'd post a more usable/readable version here of Book 2 Chapter 10 (page numbers as per "Mathematical Magick"). PS: I like the animated statue story on p.237: it has a proper Indiana Jones feel to it! :-)
[p.232]
C A P. X.

Of subterraneous lamps : divers historical relations concerning their duration for many hundred years together.

Unto this kind of Chymical experiments, we may most probably reduce those perpetual lamps, which for many hundred years together have continued burning without any new supply in the sepulchres of the Ancients, and might (for ought we know) have remained so for ever. All fire, and especially flame, being of an active and stirring nature, it cannot therefore subsist without motion; whence it may seem, that this great enquiry hath been this way accomplished: And therefore it will be worth our examination to search further into the particulars that concern this experiment. Though it be not so proper to the chief purpose of this discourse, which concerns Mechanical Geometry; yet the subtility

[p.233]

and curiosity of it, may abundantly requite the impertinency.
There are sundry Authors who treat of this Subjection by the by, and in some particular passages, but none that I know of (except Fortunius Licetus) [margin: Lib. de reconaitis antiquarum Lucernis] that hath writ purposely any set and large discourse concerning it: out of whom I shall borrow many of those relations and opinions, which may most naturally conduce to the present enquiry.
For our fuller understanding of this, there are these particulars to be explained:
1. οτι, or quod sit.
2. δίοτι, / cur sit. / quomodo sit.

1. First then, for the οτι, or that there have been such lamps, it may be evident from sundry plain and undeniable testimonies: Saint Austin [margin: De Civit. Dei. l. 21 cap.6] mentions one of them in a Temple dedicated to Venus, which was always exposed to the open weather, and could never be consumed or extinguished. To him assents the judicious

[p.234]

Zanchy. Pancyrollus mentions a Lamp found in his time [margin: De deperd. Tit. 35. De operibus Dei, part 1. l. 4. c. 12.], in the sepulcher of Tullia, Cicero's daughter, which had continued there for about 1550 years, but was presently extinguished upon the admission of new air. And it is commonly related of Cedrenus, that in Justinian's time there was another burning lamp found in an old wall at Edessa [margin: Or Antioch. Licetus de Lucernis, l. 1. c. 7.], which had remained so for above 500 years, there being a crucifix placed by it, whence it should seem, that they were in use also amongst some Christians.
But more especially remarkable is that relation celebrated by so many Authors, concerning Olybius his lamp, which had continued burning for 1500 years. The story is thus: as a rustic was digging the ground by Padua, he found an Urn or earthen pot, in which there was another Urn, and in this lesser, a lamp clearly burning; on each side of it there were two other vessels, each of them full of a pure liquor; the one of gold, the other of silver. Ego chymice artis,

[p.235]

(simodo vera potest esse ars Chymia) jurare ausim elementa & materiam omnium, (saith Maturantius, who had the possession of these things after they were taken up.) On the bigger of these Urns there was this inscription:

Plutoni sacrum munus ne attingite fures.
Ignotum est vobis hoc quod in orbe latet,
Namque elementa gravi clausit digesta labore.
Vase sub hoc modico,
Maximus Olybius.
Adsit faecundo custos sibi copia cornu,
Ne tanti pretium depereat laticis.

The lesser urn was thus inscribed:

Abite hinc pessimi fures,
Vos quid vultis, vestris cum oculis emissitiis?
Abite hinc vestro cum Mercurio
Petaesato Caduceatoque,
Donum hoc maximum,
Maximus Olybius
Plutoni sacrum facit.

Whence we may probably conjecture that it was some Chymical secret,

[p.236]

by which this was contrived.
Baptista Porta [margin: Mag. Natural. l.12. c.ult.] tells us of another lamp burning in an old marble sepulcher, belonging to some of the ancient Romans, inclosed in a glass vial, found in his time, about the year 1550, in the Isle Nesis, which had been buried there before our Saviour's coming.
In the tomb of Pallas, the Arcadian who was slain by Turnus in the Trojan war, there was found another burning lamp, in the year of our Lord 1401. [margin: Chron. Martin Fort. licet. de lucern. l.1 c.11] Whence it should seem, that it had continued there for above two thousand and six hundred years: and being taken out, it did remain burning, notwithstanding either wind or water, with which some did strive to quench it ; nor could it be extinguished till they had spilt the liquor that was in it.
Ludovicus Vives tells us of another lamp, that did continue burning for 1050 years, which was found a little before his time. [margin: Not. ad August. de.Civit.Dei, l.21.c.6]
Such a lamp is likewise related to

[p.237]

be seen in the sepulchre of Francis Rosicross, as is more largely expressed in the confession of that fraternity.
There is another relation of a certain man, who upon occasion digging somewhat deep in the ground did meet with something like a door, having a wall on each hand of it; from which having cleared the earth, he forced opon this door, upon this there was discovered a fair Vault, and towards the farther side of it, the statue of a man in Armour, sitting by a table, leaning upon his left arm, and holding a scepter in his right hand, with a lamp burning before him; the floor of this Vault being so contrived, that upon the first step into it, the statue would erect itself from its leaning posture ; upon the second step it did lift up the scepter to strike, and before a man could approach near enough to take hold of the lamp, the statue did strike and break it to pieces. Such care was there taken that it might not be stolen away, or discovered.
Our learned Cambden in his description [margin: pag. 572]

[p.238]

of Yorkshire, speaking of the tomb of Constantius Chlorus, broken up in these later years, mentions such a lamp to be found within it.
There are sundry other relations to this purpose. Quod ad lucernas attinet, illae in omnibus fere monumentis inveniuntur, (saith Jutherius). In most of the ancient Monuments there is some kind of lamp, (though of the ordinary sort): But those persons who were of greatest note and wisdom, did procure such as might last without supply, for so many ages together. Pancirollus tells us, [margin: De perdit. Ti o2] that it was usual for the nobles amongst the Romans, to take special care in their last wills, that they might have a lamp in their Monuments. And to this purpose they did usually give liberty unto some of their slaves on this condition, that they should be watchful in maintaining and preserving it. From all which relations, the first particular of this enquiry, concerning the being or existence of such lamps, may sufficiently appear.

Tuesday 29 July 2008

Lynn Thorndike's papers...

Note: this article has now moved to lynn-thorndikes-papers on Cipher Mysteries

Somehow, I think it was inevitable that a determinedly analytical mind like Lynn Thorndike's would have left a well-organized archival record: and so it was that he and his successors left his extensive collection of papers to the University of Columbia, the last place he worked as a History Professor. The archival finding aid went online here only in 2004, so it seems likely that few historians have thought of using it.

All the same, it still comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that there are 60 linear feet of records in this archive ("ca. 30,000 items in 124 boxes and 1 Flatbox; some in Mapcase"). As well as containing the obvious stuff such as correspondence and numerous card files, this also includes "76 volumes of personal diaries, 1902-1963".

Thorndike's epic quest to examine, read and understand medieval scientific texts was on a scale few have attempted before or since: his multi-volume "History of Magic & Experimental Science" provides a richly textured background that I think anyone seriously looking at early modern proto-scientific mysteries (such as the Voynich Manuscript, naturally) should have gone through. And even so, how much more might there be languishing in his papers - unseen, unread, unknown to us all?

Monday 28 July 2008

The Voynich Manuscript for real people...

Note: this article has now moved to the-voynich-manuscript-for-real-people on Cipher Mysteries

It's a typical writer's puzzle: when something you read (or write) really sucks, but an even half-satisfactory alternative is nowhere to be found. That's basically how I feel about almost everything that's been written about the VMs: even though it's an amazing mystery, that also somehow highlights all the dangerous sides of knowledge, accounts always amble off in the same kind of leadenly pedestrian way. For example, I spent ages tweaking and polishing the first sentence of "The Curse":
"In 1912, when the ancient Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome was running short of funds, its managers decided to sell off some of its rare books."

Just like the (abysmal) VMs Wikipedia entry, the sterile factuality and precision here can't be faulted: but it's aiming for the head, not the heart. But mysteries have a certain kind of tactile, claustrophobic presence to them: they surround you, taunt you, tighten your chest as you sense an approaching breakthrough. You think you're hunting the target, when in fact all the clues are hunting you - the reader is the target.

In short, even though everything surrounding the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery, why do people persist in writing about it as if they are writing a description for a car auction - its size, shape, page-count, first historical mention, list of owners, number of pictures, valves, bhp, lalala? Capturing the raw factuality of a mystery in this way achieves little or nothing.

When I went to the Beinecke, I tried to read the texture of its pages with my fingers (to tell the hair side from the grain side): I smelt its cover and pages (just in case I could pick up any hint or note of the animal from which the vellum was made): I looked at its surface under a magnifying glass: I looked at special features through narrow-band optical filters, which I tilted to try to adjust the wavelength. I tried to stretch my range of perceptions of it to the point where something unusual might just pop out.

But most of all, I tried to imagine myself into the position of someone physically writing it: how the act of writing and state of mind mixed together, what was going on, what they were thinking of, how it all worked. And that was yet harder still.

At supper this evening, I told my son that the biggest mystery in the world is what other people are thinking: and really, that is perhaps at the heart of why the Voynich Manuscript is the biggest mystery ever - because we still cannot reconstruct what its author was thinking. It is this absence of rapport that opens up the possibility for mad, bad, and bizarre theories: because we can project onto the manuscript whatever feelings and thoughts we like.

Yet when authors write fiction, this empathy is typically where they start: working out how to create characters with whom the readers will be able to sustain some kind of reading relationship over the course of 200+ pages. Take that basic connection away, and you can end up with a writer's folly, an artificial construction to which the narrative or flow is awkwardly pegged.

So how would I start the book, if I were writing it right now? Perhaps with Averlino at his point of death - the moment when his strange book was finally set free.
"What master of Destiny was he, when the Fates had carried him back to this holy place he despised so: and what kind of master of Nature, when he could see his death fast approaching and yet could do nothing?"

You may not like it: but is that just because you've become too used to reading Wikipedia?

Sunday 27 July 2008

John Matthews Manly's papers...

Note: this article has now moved to john-matthews-manlys-papers on Cipher Mysteries

One of the major figures in the early 20th century history of the Voynich Manuscript was John Matthews Manly, the man who definitively debunked Newbold's strange micrographic cipher claims. During the First World War, Manly worked in the US Military Intelligence Division, and left in 1919 having attained the rank of Major. After that, he put most of his time at the University of Chicago into researching Chaucer, before dying in 1940.

Interestingly, Manly's papers are held by the University of Chicago: there's even an online guide to them, which lists a whole set of Voynich & non-Army cryptographic folders to look at, particularly in Boxes 4 and 5. One day, if I happen to get the opportunity to spend a day in Chicago, I'd love to go through these: Manly was a smart guy, so it would be fascinating to find out what was going through his mind (however indirectly).

Box: 4
Folder: 19 - Table of Latin Syllables
Folder: 20-21 - Photographs of Voynich Ms
Folder: 22 - "Key to the Library" (JMM's?)

Box: 5
Folder: 1 - Worksheets
Folder: 2 - Photographs of Mss (Including Français 24306, incomplete) and of one printed label
Folder: 3 - Three working notebooks, labelled "Bacon Cipher"
Folder: 4 - Notes on code for article; other notes on Sloane 830 ["Written in the years 1575-6, by a person whose initials appear to be M.A.B.", according to levity.com] and 414 [two collections of "chymical receipts"]
Folder: 5 - Worksheets on related ciphers: "Galen's Anatomy" [?] and "Kazwini" [presumably the 13th century Persian astronomical writer Al Kazwini]
Folder: 6 - Articles on the Voynich Roger Bacon Ms
Folder: 7-8 - Notes: ciphers in other Mss; other notes on printed sources
Folder: 9 - Notes on alchemical Mss, etc.
Folder: 10 - Notes for Bacon Cipher; "Key to Aggas"
Folder: 11 - Notes on texts in cryptography
Folder: 12 - Miscellaneous notes and worksheets
Folder: 13 - Bibliographies
Folder: 14 - Photostats of Mss: John Dee (Sloane 3188, 3189, 2599): unidentified
Folder: 15 - Notes on Vatican Latin Ms 3102 [Here's the Jordanus page on this ms, Manly reproduced f27r in his article, while Newbold's book reproduced f27r and f27v opposite p.148 and p.150]
Folder: 16 - "Notes on an Inquiry into the Validity of the Baconian Bi-Literal Cypher for the Interpretation of Certain Writings Claimed for Francis Bacon"
Folder: 17 - Comments on "Sixty Drops of Laudanum," by E.A. Poe
Folder: 18-19 - "The Bi-formed Alphabet Classifier" of the Riverbank Laboratories
Folder: 20 - Notes on Shakespeare/Bacon cipher

Box: 11
Folder: 9 "Roger Bacon and the Voynich Ms" by JMM, reprint [first page is here on JSTOR]

Saturday 26 July 2008

Pietro Andrea Mattioli...

Note: this article has now moved to pietro-andrea-mattioli on Cipher Mysteries

Google only finds about ten pages where Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) is linked with the Voynich Manuscript. Here's a short research note to fill that gap...

If you look at Mattioli's CV, you'll see plenty of echoes with other people linked to the VMs. Though a renowned herbal compiler & writer in his spare time, he was also a physician to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand II and to Emperor Maximilian II (who was, of course, Rudolph II's father), which is broadly similar to both Hajek and Sinapius.

Brumbaugh once compared Mattioli's famous 1544 herbal (the one that Hajek and Handsch translated in 1562/1563) with the VMs' herbal drawings, and concluded that the two had (I think) at most one half of one plant in common. And so it seems relatively certain there is no connection: neither one is derived from the other, nor do both emanate from a common source.

Yet even though Rene Zandbergen avers demurs in this, I am quite certain (from closely examining it at the Beinecke) that the first word of the faded marginalia at the top of f17r has been emended from "melhor" to read "mattioli". That is, a later owner (who was probably unable to read Occitan and French) misinterpreted the word as a garbled reference to Mattioli, and decided to correct it on the page.

Marcelo Dos Santos' page on f17r (in Spanish) mentions much of this. He also mentions Sean Palmer's assertion that the waterstain on f17r must have happened after the f17r marginalia were added, but before the f116v 'michitonese' marginalia: but no, sorry, I don't accept that idea at all. If you look at the following pages, you can see where the waterstain fades away: it's a localised piece of damage.

Marcelo also pulls down my suggested link with fennel for the picture on f17r (the one with a pair of "eyes" in the roots): yet he seems not to grasp that there the herbal literature of the late Middle Ages / Renaissance repeatedly connects fennel with eyes - finnochio / occhio in Italian, but similarly in Occitan and other languages. Oh well.

Friday 25 July 2008

Review of "The Book Nobody Read"...

Note: this article has now moved to review-of-the-book-nobody-read on Cipher Mysteries

In his 1959 book "The Sleepwalkers", Arthur Koestler painted a rather damning picture of Renaissance European astronomers and scientists, where the only person not sleepwalking was Kepler. As part of the process of tarring everyone else with the same soporific brush, Koestler derided Copernicus' famous "De Revolutionibus" as "The Book Nobody Read".

It's true that only a small proportion of "De Revolutionibus" is particularly interesting, with the remainder filled with bone-dry technical astronomical gubbins. But people manifestly did read it, often adding their comments (thoughts, possible errors in the text, etc) in the margins. And what might you learn about that community of readers by examining the marginalia in every extant copy?

More than 30 years ago, Owen Gingerich, one of the leading historians of astronomy, took up this challenge, and in so doing compiled an international census of all the first and second edition copies of Copernicus' book. "The Book Nobody Read" is Gingerich's personal memoir of his extraordinary (if obsessive) historiographical / bibliomanic quest to rebut Koestler's dismissive epithet. Oh: and of course, it turns out that lots of people did read De Revolutionibus.

Throughout the memoir, Gingerich's perpetually boyish enthusiasm for this prolonged pursuit shines through: yet even an ardent astro-aficionado with a codicological bent (such as, errrrm, me) must silently shudder at the extreme degree to which this sheer marginality was doggedly followed.

Probably the best sections of the book are the legal bits, where FBI personnel step into the frame, invariably on the trail (thanks to Gingerich's book measurements and lists of missing or altered pages) of various purloined copies of De Revolutionibus, along with the corresponding courtroom sequences. There are also some choice footnotes which connoisseurs of that genre will enjoy, particularly the one on p.187 about Kepler's apparent seven-and-a-half month gestation (he was sure he was conceived on his parents' wedding night!)

As a personal account, it's only superficially autobiographical: while the reader does build up an idea of the development of Copernican scholarship over the three decades covered, and a few hints at an ongoing academic spat with fellow historian Ed Rosen, Gingerich himself is largely backgrounded by the tidal wave of historiographical facts he feels compelled to share.

Yet at its heart, the book has an internal paradox: that while its structure is not unlike a polite, slightly clunky, pre-Cold War 1950s time-capsule, the thinking inside it has an tight, inclusive, late 1990s academic sensibility. Ultimately, I wanted to know whether this was a portrait of the Census, or a portrait of Gingerich himself: but it is never really clear which.

I really enjoyed "The Book Nobody Read" (and if you're a regular Voynich News reader, you'd probably enjoy its 'book detective' sleuthing just as much as I did): it reads well and is engaging throughout, so all credit to its author. Yet it takes a certain type of personality to bare not just your activities in a book, but your soul as well: and the former dominates the latter here. Ultimately, it's a biography of the Census, not of Gingerich: as a result, I think some readers may well come away from this bookish feast slightly hungry, which is a shame.

Thursday 24 July 2008

"Voynich Manuscript": two words, two lies?

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-manuscript-two-words-two-lies on Cipher Mysteries

While writing my MBA dissertation a few years ago, I spun off a short paper called "Justified True Belief: Three Words, Three Lies?", where the abstract explained its title:-
Cornelius Castoriadis once famously described the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “four words, four lies”: here, I examine each of the three words of “justified true belief” in turn to see if that too might be based on a fatally flawed discourse. In fact, “three lies” turns out to be a little strong - but the evidence strongly points to “two-and-a-half lies”. We deserve better than this!

My guess is that Castoriadis, for all his pithiness, was ripping off Voltaire, who in 1756 wrote:
This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

So now, by applying the same pattern to the Voynich Manuscript, I'm extending the chain of ripping yet further. Just so you know!

What's in a name? Wilfrid Voynich never called it "The Voynich Manuscript": right from the start, he called it "The Roger Bacon Manuscript". Which was a bit of a shame, given that it originally almost certainly had nothing to do with Roger Bacon.

However, because Voynich desperately wanted it to contain Bacon's encrypted secrets, he was convinced it had to be medieval. It was in this context that he referred to it as a "manuscript", because manuscripts are technically defined as being handwritten documents that predate the start of printing, which means 1450 or so. And so you can see that the word "Manuscript" in "Voynich Manuscript" presupposes a medieval document, or else it would have to be called "an early modern handwritten document" (which, for all its precision, is not quite so punchy). And worse, the range of dates it could sensibly have been made goes over this 1450 mark, so we have no real certainty to work from here.

As for "Voynich": in one sense it should be "Wojnicz", the book dealer's surname before he ended up in London. But we sophisticated moderns should perhaps more sensibly name it after the Jesuit Villa Mondragone (where Wilfrid Voynich found it), or Johannes Marcus Marci (who inherited it and whose letter to Kircher travelled with it all the way to New Haven), or George Baresch (arguably the first obsessive Voynich researcher to be documented), or Sinapius / de Tepenecz (whose erased signature still faintly remains on the first page), or even Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (who was said to have paid well for it).

All of this still rather panders to an implied need for naming, as if by giving it a name it somehow helps us understand its origins (it doesn't, can't, and won't). It's an itch we don't actually need to scratch: we need to learn to be more comfortable about remaining in a state of uncertainty.

My dissertation was all about knowledge and uncertainty: the work I've done since then points to my own three-word definition for knowledge - "hopefully useful lies". Calling this enigmatic object the "Voynich Manuscript" is indeed "two words, two lies" - but as long as we never forget that they are both lies, its name is a most useful tool.

Wednesday 23 July 2008

More on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku...

Note: this article has now moved to more-on-tadeas-hajek-z-hajku on Cipher Mysteries

I recently posted about Rudolph's physician before Sinapius, Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku: and wondered aloud whether he might have bought / owned / sold / annotated the Voynich Manuscript. It's a good question: the f17r marginalia seems to have been emended to read "mattioli..." (I believe it originally began "melhor"), and Hájek famously translated Mattioli's Herbal.

The first step would be to find some of Hájek's handwriting: with the help of Jan Hurych, I soon found the Manuscriptorium, which is a kind of uber-catalogue of Czech manuscripts. Searching for Hájku yielded 14 unique references, most of which are "Minucý a Pranostika" (i.e. tables and weather predictions) from different years, and which seem likely to be small printed pamphlets (and so probably of no practical use to us here).

However, there are four other documents which might have his handwriting (listed below, each with repository and shelfmark, if anyone happens to be in Prague or Zwickau and wants a challenge, as well as Jan's brief translation of the start of the title). I've asked the manuscript librarians whether Hájek himself is thought to have written any/all of these, and hopefully will get an answer relatively soon...

  • Královská kanonie premonstrátů na Strahově, Praha - Kodex Dobřenského, opus 344.
    1574 "Tabule dlauhosti Dne..." - The table of day's and night's lengths

  • Národní knihovna České republiky - 54 S 91 neúpl.
    1560 "Wayklad Proroctwij ..." - Explanation of Turkish prophecy...

  • Knihovna národního muzea v Praze - 28 E 1O
    1556 "Wypsanij s Wyznamenánijm gedné y druhé Kométy" - The description and explanation of both comets...

  • Zwickau Ratschulbibliothek - 4, 10, 39, přív.
    1580 "O některých předesslých znamenjch Nebeských" - About some heavenly signs in the past . . .
As a nice coincidence, I'm in the middle of reading Owen Gingerich's delightful bibliophilic road-trip book "The Book Nobody Read" and who should pop up on p.172 and p.178 but "Thaddeus Hagecius" (i.e. "Tadeáš Hájek" in Latin). According to a marginal note by Johannes Praetorius in the back of the Beinecke Library's copy of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus" (the historiographic subject of Gingerich's book), Paul Wittich had passed a "terse list of three errors" in the book on to Hájek. The same list of errors appears in a copy in Debrecen, and in a copy in Edinburgh.

And so Gingerich throws the idea that this particular Edinburgh copy may perhaps have been owned by Hájek up in the air. But all the same, it's only a speculation. Still, I'll ask him if he ever went looking for marginal handwriting by Hájek, you never know...

...but now I've thought of searching Google for "Thaddeus Hagecius" (*d'oh!*), I find that there is a pile of correspondence between Tycho Brahe and Hájek (and a good-sized 2002 article on it here).

And according to this Czech page, the Prague-based Society for the History of Sciences ("DVT" = dějiny věd a techniky) published in 2000 "the first volume of the Czech monographic series Works on History of Technique and Natural Sciences dedicated to significant Renaissance scholar Thaddeus Hagecius (Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku)" (it was the 500th anniversary of his death that year). It seems to be called "Práce z dějin technika a přírodních věd 1", Praha 2000, 180 str: it's not immediately obvious how you'd buy a copy, though... (I'll ask Jan Hurych).

And there's also a 2004 article about his astronomy in this German book.

That's often the way with research: find just the right key, and zero research leads suddenly turns into ten...

Tuesday 22 July 2008

Review of "The Dumas Club"...

Note: this article has now moved to review-of-the-dumas-club on Cipher Mysteries

If (like me) you enjoyed Roman Polanski's film "The Ninth Gate" (I happened to see it in a hotel room in New Haven, giving it a particular resonance for me) which I mentioned recently, you might think about reading the novel from which it sprang, Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Dumas Club".

Its main protagonist, Lucas Corso, gets described early on as a "book detective": but he is closer to the romantic archetype of a charmingly ruthless European antiquarian book-hunter for which Wilfrid Voynich and Hans Kraus both felt nostalgic. Whenever short-sighted, boyish-looking Corso takes off his glasses and puts on his "innocent rabbit" face, everyone seems to give him what he wants: perhaps Wilfrid Voynich used much the same kind of trick, who knows?

But it's not simply a cherchez-la-livre romance: there are two stories intertwined, one concerning various Spanish book-dealers' passions for Alexander Dumas' pulpy (but vastly popular) bestsellers such as "The Three Musketeers"; and the other about the three remaining copies of a mysterious 17th century printed book for summoning the Devil, written in heavily abbreviated/coded Latin and with nine Tarot-like drawings, and whose printer (Aristide Torchia) was supposedly burned at the stake for creating it.

Structurally, this reminds me a lot of the TV show "CSI" (the proper Las Vegas one), which typically fills its hour-long slot by telling two forensic detective stories (each roughly half-hour long), and leaving it as a point of suspense whether the two strands are connected or not. Lucas Corso struggles gamely to see the link, but ultimately none materialises in the way that he expects. Despite the reader's (and Corso's) sense of a buzzing conspiratorial coherency in the early few chapters, the book actually ends up more like two intertwined extended short stories (one horror, one literary) than a single majestic novel, which is a shame.

For the film adaptation, Polanski simply ditched the whole Dumas connection, and instead concentrated on the "Book of Nine Gates" half of the book - essentially, whereas he optioned "The Dumas Club", he actually filmed "The Non-Dumas Club".

Yet the first hundred pages are simply brilliant, inspiring, edgy, like peering anxiously through Montecristo cigar fug to make out the looming shape of an unknown menace. But then Perez-Reverte (quite literally) loses the plot: the writing disintegrates into a mess of intertextuality and clunky self-referentiality, with the novelist having Corso continually feel as if he is a character in a serial novel - essentially, in a remake of a Dumas novel. Whether that's true or not, having it rammed down my, errrm, eyes so many times completely broke the spell.

One glaringly missed opportunity throughout is the aspect of whether the unidentified young girl (who takes the name "Irene Adler" from a Sherlock Holmes novel) actually exists, or is merely some kind of strange hallucinatory being, conjured up by Corso himself: a kind of "Dumas Club" meets "Fight Club", if you like. Kudos to Polanski for picking up this angle more strongly in his film. Perhaps she had to physically exist in the book as a result of Perez-Reverte's (I think wrong) decision to have to have one of the characters (Boris Balkan) as the storyteller. And so in the book, Irene's ambiguity centres not on whether or not she exists outside Corso' mind, but on whether for him she acts as a force for good or evil - an angel, succubus or demon.

All in all, I have to say that I really wish Perez-Reverte had found sufficient writing courage to take the horror through to its logical conclusion, rather than pull up short at the final hurdle. Though Polanski's literary take on the novel was (perhaps necessarily) quite superficial, his filmic instinct to raise the stakes yet higher than the book worked fabulously well.

For the full literary effect, I'd recommend reading "The Three Musketeers" first, then "Twenty Years After", then "The Dumas Club", and then watching "The Ninth Gate" late at night, with the curtains drawn, and a bottle of Bols gin by your side. Enjoy!

Incidentally, looking at the book with my Voynich research hat on, it was nice to see Perez-Reverte pick up on things like "The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient... Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" (p.202), and to have Torchia trawling around Prague for the cabalistic secrets of an unknown brotherhood (p.203). The uber-convoluted magic circle in the final chapter (p.312) is quite fun, too.

Of the three magic circles in the Voynich Manuscript, it is interesting that both sun and moon ones depict people holding bottles: here's the left man from the "hidden moon" magic circle - the "S" in his face probably denotes "Septentrio" (i.e. North). I'll write more about these another day: here's a link to an earlier post I made on William Kiesel's lecture at Treadwell's. Suffice it to say that this picture might simply refer to water and hyssop, both used to purify magic circles for millennia... unless you know better?

Monday 21 July 2008

Voynich Documentary (for 2010)...

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-documentary-for-2010 on Cipher Mysteries

Well, you can't say I'm not looking ahead. News reaches my ears of a lavish Voynich documentary being made by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) "Universum" Natural History Unit and Pro Omnia Film & Video Promotion GmbH, in association with "ARTE, ZDF and the Smithsonian Network".

Now we've got past the broadcasting acronym jungle, what is its angle? It's still early days, but its producers Klaus Steindl and Andreas Sulzer seem already to have focused on the VMs' Bohemian history as being worthy of study: we'll just have to wait and see what their research harvests...

Well-known Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen is helping out in some way (hopefully they'll remember to listen to him, particularly as Voynich research is more about avoiding problems than solving them), and they promise:
"Now analysing the illustrations will give a new angle to decoding the manuscript. Wrapped around the text on almost every page there are drawings of plants, star constellations of the zodiac, bathing female figrues and structures remniscent of piping systems and microscopic views. Do these patterns hold the key? For this documentary a team of scientists takes a new interdisciplinary approach to crack the Voynich code - including the first forensic examination of the book itself."

Somehow, I get the feeling that they haven't yet read my book - oh, well. :-( But let them continue...
"A recently discovered signature is a new lead: It identifies the early 17th century scholar Jakub de Tepenec - an alchemist in attendance on Habsburg emperor Rudolph II. How was he connected to the unknown author? Did he possess some kind of secret knowledge about alchemy, magic plants and the fabled fountain of youth he tried to hide from the inquisition?"

OK, OK, even though these are supposed to be rhetorical questions, you'd have to say that "only through ownership" and "no" are both pretty good answers. And "recently" isn't usually used to mean "85 years ago", but I guess they're looking at the big picture here. Regardless, there is an incredible wealth of information from this fascinating period in the numerous Czech archives, so I wish them all the best in their search for whatever it is they're looking for.

Yet as Charles Hope cautions, archival research is best approached more as an exercise in hopeful serendipity than in one of historical problem-solving: as my friend Sergio Toresella said, "In my life I went twice in an Archivio and I haven't got a spider in a hole (as we say in Italian)." You get the idea.

Me, I think I'll stick to the Quattrocento. ;-)

Sunday 20 July 2008

Become A Voynich Manuscript Expert In Just 5 Minutes...

Note: this article has now moved to become-a-voynich-manuscript-expert-in-just-5-minutes on Cipher Mysteries

Would having "Expert on the Voynich Manuscript" on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I'll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don't want you to find out...

Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich expert. All you have to know is:
(a) That the two jargon terms for the Voynich Manuscript are "VMs" (because "Ms" or "MS" is short for "manuscript") and "Beinecke MS 408" (because it's 408th in the Beinecke Library's collection of manuscripts);
(b) That the VMs lives at Yale University in New Haven (because that's what the Beinecke Library is part of); and
(c) That the VMs is a mysterious old handwritten book that nobody can read. Not even me!
If you really want, you can also read the Wikipedia VMs page: but apart from the fact that the Voynich Manuscript was [re]discovered in Italy in 1912 by dodgy book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (hence its name), feel free to basically skip the rest.

Incidentally, if you're ever asked about anyone who has written about the VMs (Newbold, Brumbaugh, Terence McKenna, anyone really), any real Voynich expert would nod sympathetically and say "Poor old X - if only they had known what we know now". Of course, this is a big fat lie, because we still know basically sod all about the VMs.

Stage Two. You continue by actually becoming a Voynich expert. This is also easy, as long as you can get a working grasp of the following basic statements:-
  • The VMs was probably made by a right-handed European between 1250 and 1640.
    If post-1622, explain how Jacob de Tepenec's signature got on the front
    If post-1500, explain how 15th century quire numbers got on it
    If pre-1450, explain how Leonardo-style hatching ended up in some of the drawings
  • If the VMs is a language, note that its words don't function like those in real languages
    If the VMs is a cipher, note that it doesn't work like any known cipher
    If the VMs is nonsense, note that its letters appears to follow unknown rules
    If the VMs' plants are botanical, note that most don't resemble real plants
Now all you have to do is to devise your very own really, really lame signature theory. As long as it amuses you and doesn't trample on the above dull bullet-points too badly, congratulations - you're right up there with the big hitters! But how should you construct this new theory?

Actually, it's quite helpful here to project how you feel about your own work onto how you think the original author(s) felt about the VMs. For example, if you think that your own work is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written solely to convince your employers to pay your wages, then you might try devising your own variant of the basic hoax theory template (which argues that the VMs is meaningless, vacuous nonsense written by [insert name here] solely to convince Emperor Rudolph II to pay a rumoured 600 gold ducats).

But be bold in your theorising! Be creative! Perhaps think of some vaguely Renaissance figure you admire (though Leonardo's already taken, and he was left-handed anyway, d'oh!) or just happen to remember, preferably someone whose name you can consistently spell correctly. Wafer-thin historical connections to herbal medicine, astrology, astronomy, ciphers and mystery are probably bonuses here. So, Nostradamus would be a good 'un: Queen Elizabeth I not so good.

But remember, you're not trying to prove your theory is correct here (for what kind of an idiot would attempt that with such scanty evidence, 500-ish years after the event?) Rather, you're just staking your claim to the possibility that [random person X] might have been the author. And the level of proof required to achieve that is, frankly, negligible.

And hey, even if you choose the name with a pin and a biographical dictionary, if it eventually turns out that you are right, think how unbearably smug you'll be. Possibly for decades!

Finally: however bad projecting your own life onto the VMs' blank canvas may be as an historical approach (and believe me, it lies somewhere between 'rubbish' and 'pants'), it is guaranteed to give you plenty of interestingly ironical things to say about the VMs when you're asked about it at those hip higher-earner parties you'll be attending. Oh, and at your book-launch too, naturally. :-)

Saturday 19 July 2008

Czech Voynich theory...

Note: this article has now moved to czech-voynich-theory on Cipher Mysteries

My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Sinapius, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II).

It is certainly true that Rudolph's interests and obsessions acted as a powerful magnet to draw wonders from all over Europe to his court. Yet given that the claimed link with John Dee and Edward Kelley is gossamer-thin, it is no less sensible to wonder whether the VMs had been brought to Prague by someone from the town: perhaps someone well-travelled?

I mentioned Rudolph II's manuscript-collecting astronomer / astrologer / herbalist / physician Tadeás Hájek here recently (who studied in Italy), but Jan Hurych regales me with tales of several others: for one, Hájek's father (Simon Baccalareus) studied alchemy and collected manuscripts... though what happened to his library after his death is not currently known.

Jan has put together a nice page on one of his favourite Renaissance Czech travelling knights, Krystof Harant de Polzic and Bezdruzic, and his travels from Venice to Crete to Cyprus to the Holy Land to Egypt (etc). But I have to say that if a writer had picked up an intriguing cipher manuscript on their travels, it would be one of the first things they would write about: yet there is no mention. So we can probably rule Harant out, sorry Jan. :-(

But Jan brings up a rather more full-on Czech Voynich theory, courtesy of Karel Dudek's Czech webpage (though I used Google Translate, Dudek also put up his own English translation here). Dudek discusses Georg Handsch of Limuz (1529-1578), whose 1563 German translation of Matthioli's Latin herbal came out a year after Tadeás Hájek's Czech translation (it even used the same nice woodcuts!) Like Hájek, Handsch was a physician living in Prague, but whose main client was instead Ferdinand II Tyrolský (1529-1595) and his wealthy wife Filipina Welserová (1527-1580).

Dudek got his information from Leopold Selfender's "Handsch Georg von Limuz - Lebensbild a Arztes aus dem XVI.Jahrenhunderts": but after a bit of a false start (linking Handsch directly to Baresch, which I doubt would convince anyone), he proposes a possible chain of ownership from Handsch -> Welserová -> Ferdinand II Tyrolský -> Rudolph II -> Horcicky (Sinapius), before Horcicky's estate got looted in the chaos of 1618 and the manuscript somehow ended up with Baresch (with the signature erased).

OK... but why Handsch? Dudek points to the VMs' botany, and Handsch's translation of Matthioli's herbal (though I'd have to say that Hájek fits that bill even better). Dudek also discusses a book by Handsch based on his trips to visit medicinal baths and spas in 1571 called "Die Elbfischerei in Bohmen und Meissen" (eventually published in Prague in 1933), and sees parallels with the VMs' water section there.

But Dudek gets even more speculative, talking about whether Bartoloměj Welser was financed by Charles V to undertake a (possibly Lutheran?) mission to South America, and drew pictures inspired by exotic plants he saw beside the Orinoco (hey, I thought he was a Womble?)

It's a good story, but a little lacking in connection to the VMs: and doesn't really explain why we see (for example) 15th century handwriting in the quire numbers, or even the Occitan-like month names on the zodiac, etc. Perhaps we should really admit that looking for an origin for the VMs in Prague may be a little too hopeful, not dissimilar to the way 19th century German historians' looked to see if Nicholas of Cusa might secretly have been some kind of Teutonic Leonardo. Nice try... but no cigar.

Friday 18 July 2008

Aliens & Dinosaurs...

Note: this article has now moved to aliens-dinosaurs on Cipher Mysteries

My son likes to invent new toy stories formed out of other toys' favourite bits: and so you get an Alien Pirate Dinosaur Rocket Car 6000 with Laser-Powered Misher-Masher Crab Claws (and so on). Actually, I've met computer games designers who work in broadly the same way, so there's obviously some kind of pattern going on there.

But now I've found an awesome story, straight out of the Dan Burisch / Kirk Allen / John Titor alt.scifi universe, that completely trumps even this.

For several years, Victor Martinez has been running a website called serpo.org to facilitate (so the story goes) the release of classified alien-related documents from "Project SERPO", under which a team of 12 astronauts apparently flew to (and returned from) Zeta Reticuli to visit the "Eben" world. Ohhhhkayyyy...

For example, SERPO release #29 describes the fabulous alien "Yellow Book" (which displays edited highlights from the history of the universe in your mind for as long as you can watch, but then goes back to the start), which is presumably what Dan Burisch (?) thought was being depicted in the VMs' pharma section (below, with and without the blue paint):-


(I should also point out that, according to serpo.org, proponents and opponents of SERPO's existence seem mired in an endless tape-loop of bickering, while UFO boards seem possibly even more confused than normal about this.)

But none of that matters, as SERPO release #30 (that emerged only a few days ago) has a unique quality of demented genius to it that I think makes it stand head and shoulders above the rest: and so I thought I'd share. :-)

What is now claimed (quite independently of all the Zeta Reticuli alien stuff) is that a UFO was found in 1968 during a dig, buried within 150 million year-old rock strata: its diameter was 45 feet, it had two badly decayed 5-foot-tall aliens inside, and two small dinosaurs they had taken with them. There: I've used "aliens" and "dinosaurs" in the same sentence - I feel like a child again, it's a liberating experience. :-)

Martinez's anonymous source then goes on to describe the spacecraft's mysterious rock-like alien power source (but which didn't work, of course) and the mysterious "star map" they found there too (but which nobody has been able to decipher or decode). Amazing, incredible stuff: but...

...it's patently a crock. There would be no "star map" to decode: that's the kind of flawed retro detail a 70 year-old delusional would insert. In fact, I would hazard a guess that 1968 had particular significance for that person: probably the year that their disturbing mental episodes started to take overl their life. The 'alien ship' found buried in 1968 then might well symbolically represent their pre-psychosis personality, buried under layers of delusion: while the whole story is - in a very Kirk Allen kind of way - a kind of proto-therapy, a cry for help. "Rescue and understand the aliens" then becomes a shorthand for "rescue and understand me".

The point I'm trying to make is that even the oddest, maddest things have a human subtext, which we have a kind of moral duty to try to decode, however imperfectly: though psychiatrists and novelists instinctively understand this, the rest of us sometimes forget.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Spanish Voynich theory...

Note: this article has now moved to spanish-voynich-theory on Cipher Mysteries

Another day, another Voynich theory to add to the list of theories. Today's one (courtesy of Rolando Hernandez Rivero) proposes that the VMs is written in old Spanish, though with some Latin and English words thrown into the mix. Rolando also asserts that [what he calls] Hand 1 is "scatterbrained" and has many errors, while [what he calls] Hand 2 is a bit more focused. Plants and stars indicate some (unspecified) decoding feature based on the number of leaves or the number of points. The cipher "jumps" many times.

OK, I'll admit it: though I can read a little Spanish, I'm struggling here. The webpage comprises two sentences, a short 4-line one and a huge 30-line one: it's basically a sequence of thoughts, a bit like a 5-page PowerPoint presentation converted to plain text. Google Translate and FreeTranslation.com made no more sense of it than I did.

Can anyone translate or summarise this any better?

UPDATE: as the post has mysteriously dropped off the Internet in the last few days, here (courtesy of Google's cache) is what it originally said:

Este manuscrito esta cifrado con el idioma de HISPANIA, (antiguo idioma que había en España, antes del castellano, de Don Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra que tomo de los sonidos Árabes mientras dominaban en la mitad de la península Ibérica por 800 a y hasta ahora se suman mas de 4500 palabras).

También tiene latín y algunas palabras inglesas, mas no les podré adelantar mucho ni como esta cifrado porque tiene muchos modelos, hasta ahora lo que contiene, no es de mucho interés no revela mucho en comparación con la mano numero 1 a la de la mano numero 2, y si fueron dos los que contribuyeron a este manuscrito tan controversial y de tanto tiempo sin poderlo descifrar, el manuscrito tiene cosas interesantes de parte de la mano numero 2, que no releva cosas de mayor envergadura, hasta ahora lo que he descifrado no tiene mucha relevancia, solo recetas que aparenta ser de brujos y curanderos, de aquellos tiempos, recetas de plantas que existían bajo el cuidado de nomos y otras entidades o elementales, que por el temor a la inquisición la cifraron y clasificaron, para protegerla, mas estaban en manos de quienes la usaban solamente, la mano numero 1 es incongruente, regada y alocada con muchos fallos y la 2 mas centrada en su conocimiento, ambas muy difícil de descifrar, aparenta tener mas de 4 puños de letras y también es un código muy individual, saltan muchas veces de código, (imposibilita avanzar), la carta astral significa simbología de días y noches, no son meses, cubriendo 13 horas, el sol esta pintado como centro y luna a la vez, esto esta en el código privado, aun sin descifrar, (nueve), las estrellas y los dibujos son números también y guía para los códigos que encierran, hasta sus hojas y puntas de estrellas dicen la cantidad que necesitan saber, al igual que las ninfas, flores y puntas de tallos, esas palabras son trocadas como en el sistema de comunicación, nunca podrán hacer una palabra de ellas, hay varias letras que no se utilizan porque estaban catalogadas como de mala suerte o divisorias, por poner un ejemplo la b, (aparenta que existiera otro código troking y que allí si se usaran estas letras camufladas), las que señalaran el 11, numero intocable, mas si se usaba el 13 normalmente, también atrás he pintado las sombras que existen y hay un dibujo de apariencia de nomo o como se vestía Robin el de la manzana y la flecha, y ataras hay como un bosque y adelante aparecen como si fueran animales y bichos de apariencia raros, esto es por ahora para ayudar a los que están queriendo descifrar, el manuscrito voynich.


UPDATE #2: Enrique Joven (whose forthcoming Voynich novel "The Castle of the Stars" I eagerly await) reassures me that this does indeed make little or no sense at all. So now you know!

UPDATE #3: Dana Scott kindly offers up the following translation (somewhat modified to make it more closely approximate intelligibility) - however, he would gladly welcome suggestions as to what the importance/meaning of "11" and "13" are in the final section.
This manuscript is inscribed in the language of SPAIN, (an ancient tongue that existed in Spain, before Castillian, the language of Sir Michael of Cervantes and Saavedra that drew its phonetics from Arabic at a time when it covered the entire middle peninsula of the Iberian peninsula, around 800 AD, and which today has risen to more than 4500 words. It also contains Latin and some English words, what more I do not have much insight to discern. Nor do I know how this manuscript is inscribed, because it has many forms. Until now what it contains, is not of much interest. Nor does it reveal much when comparing the hand of the first scribe to that of the second scribe. And if there were two scribes who contributed to this controversial manuscript, which for such a long time has remained untranslated, the manuscript contains curious entries on the part of the second scribe, that do not reveal items of major importance. Until now that which I have deciphered does not contain much that seems of interest, only recipes that appear to be for the witches and physicians of those times, recipes of plants that existed under the care of gnomes and other entities or elements, that for the fear of the inquisition it was enciphered and classified, to protect it. What’s more, these secrets were only concealed in the hands of those who used them.

The first scribe is incongruent, rigid and imprecise with many mistakes. The second scribe is more centered in his understanding. Both hands are very difficult to decipher, apparently have more than 4 points of letters and also are very individual (unique) codifiers, which often seem to jump out many timesfrom the codex, (which makes it impossible for us to gain further insight into the manuscript).

The astral text signifies the symbology of days and nights (they are not months) covering 13 hours. The sun is painted at the center of the folio, as is the moon at times. This is in the private codex, though without decipherment, (nine). The stars and the drawings are numbers also, and a guide for the codices that enclose it. Even its leaves and the points of stars indicate the quantity that they need to know. Equally, the nymphs, the flowers, and other points of detail, are words etched in the system of communication. I could never make out a single word of them.

There are various letters that are not used because they are catalogues, such as of bad luck or spells, to put in for example the b. It appears that there exits another codex extant and that there is where it did use these camouflaged letters.

Those that were shown the 11 untouchable numbers would have more if 13 were used normally (unclear sentence; may reference different set of numbers, folios, or codexes?).

Also, in the background (where?), I find painted shadows that exist, and there is a drawing that appears to be a gnome, or how Robin dressed him of the apple and the arrow (William Tell?). In the background there is what appears to be a bosque and in the front it appears as if there were animals and vermin rare in appearance. This is what I have for now to help those who are wanting to decipher, the Voynich manuscript.

Wednesday 16 July 2008

Phaistos Disc hoax...?

Note: this article has now moved to phaistos-disc-hoax on Cipher Mysteries

The Voynich Manuscript belongs to an elite club of mysterious and as-yet-unread historical artefacts. But might this club be about to lose a member?

An article in the July-August 2008 edition of the archaeology journal Minerva (as reported by the Times) declares that the Phaistos Disc may well be a hoax. Having already debunked a number of questionable artefacts in the past, Jerome Eisenberg is well-placed to spot fakes: he now suggests that the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier did not discover it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete, so much as plant it there, to try to keep up with the stream of Cretan discoveries being made at the time by Sir Arthur Evans and Federico Halbherr.

As evidence for a hoax, Eisenberg points to the (implausibly) perfect uniformity of the "pancake" with its (implausibly) cleanly cut edge, together with the (implausible) movable-type-style stamping.

As evidence against, other people point to similarities between the Phaistos Disc and the marks on the Arkalochori Axe, as well as the subtle similarities between Phaistosese and Linear A.

It's a Gordian knot, one which only a sharpened knife can untie satisfactorily: best of all would be a non-destructive thermoluminescence test, to determine when the object was fired - and if it was fired circa 1908, that would be the end of that.

What do I think? Having been to Crete for my own close look at the Phaistos Disc in the museum (and yes, I bought a reproduction home, it's a bit touristy but what the hey), I have to say I'm far from convinced it's a hoax. What particularly intrigued me was the place where the reproduction and the original differed - around the rim. You see, if you look really closely at the rim, you can see traces of marks that appear to have been worn away - yet (as far as I know) these marks have not been transcribed or reproduced anywhere.

At the time, this seemed to me to be the topmost portion of an entire iceberg of detail. In the same way that you can often learn more from the marginalia than the text, here I suspect that you can learn more about the Phaistos Disc from its rim than from its stamped letters. What seem to be unique features may well turn out to be improvised solutions to problems specific to the particular function that the disc performed. But that's another story!

For more discussion (including comments from Jerome Eisenberg), there's a useful page here. You might also be interested to see this wonderful page full of (mostly) mad Phaistos Disc / Phaistos Disk theories, which rather puts my list of Voynich theories to shame. Oh well!

Tuesday 15 July 2008

When is something "much too much"?

Note: this article has now moved to when-is-something-much-too-much on Cipher Mysteries

Or rather, when does "too much" suddenly become "much too much"?

My old friend Gary Liddon (Hi Gaz!) used to find great amusement in finding (and sometimes purposely going out of his way to create) examples of "much too much", which he took to mean "so far 'too much' that it becomes comic (or tragic)".

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, Marke Fincher's conclusion (that the VMs' plaintext has been significantly disrupted) strongly indicates that Voynichese hasn't just been enciphered, it has been encrypted as well: to me, this all seems symptomatic of an overly-cerebral paranoia that has gone far too far, to the point of both comedy and tragedy.

Yes, the VMs is indeed much too much.

Monday 14 July 2008

Voynich News gets noticed *sigh*...

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-news-gets-noticed-sigh on Cipher Mysteries

It shouldn't really be news, but journalism lecturer Max McCoy (author of the "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone" novel) dropped a link to my review into his blog, calling (and then apologizing for having called) Voynich News "geeky". Gee, how should I retaliate? Perhaps I'll have to call him "cheeky" for quoting 75% of my review in his posting, but then apologize for doing so. :-p

Regardless, it's nice to get a response: blogging can be somewhat dispiriting, mainly from the resounding lack of feedback (this blog gets about 1 comment for every 10 posts, which is perhaps a little bit low). Publishers are more interested in the Times Literary Supplement and/or Richard & Judy, and rarely send bloggers review copies; journalists hate bloggers (basically, for undercutting them); academics seem wary of bloggers to the point of enforced mutism; while bloggers are mainly courted by other bloggers working on their PageRank.

Or maybe people are a bit scared of me, because I take in so many different types of stuff and try to make sense of them all as a whole, in an era when people enjoy the cubicle comfort of specialized knowledge.

Or perhaps I produce closed readings which people are not interested enough in to feel the urge to pass any comment on?

Or might I be the only person that finds this stuff interesting?

Sunday 13 July 2008

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (& the Voynich Ms)...?

Note: this article has now moved to tadeas-hajek-z-hajku-the-voynich-ms on Cipher Mysteries

Here's a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the "Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries" exhibition at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005, but also (mostly) reappears in the Wikipedia page. (Which came first? I don't know!)

Why flag Hájek at all? Jan Hurych once put up a page on him on his Hurontaria site, but (I thought) only as a piece of background research data. It's true that as personal physician to Maximilian I (in Vienna) and to Rudolph II (mainly in Prague), Hájek would have vetted or commented on anything alchemical, astronomical, astrological or medical entering the Imperial Court prior to 1600. But might there be more to it?


"In 1554 he studied medicine in Bologna and went to Milan the same year to listen to lectures by Girolamo Cardano, but he soon returned to Prague, where he became a professor of mathematics at the Charles University of Prague in 1555."

If (as I do) you see a Northern Italian art history link in the VMs' drawings, then Hájek's Prague-Bologna-Milan-Prague travels probably jumps out at you too: so, please go on...


"Hájek was in frequent scientific correspondence with the recognized astronomer Tycho and played an important role in persuading Rudolph II to invite Brahe (and later Kepler) to Prague. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time."

In the words of the Joker, "I like him already". But, errrrm, what about the VMs, then?

"[...]Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolph II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript. [...] Throughout his life he also published numerous astrological prognostics in Czech and that is why he was until recently viewed as an „occultist” rather than a great scientist."

I think we can safely say that, apart from the absence of any actual evidence, Hájek is a great candidate manuscript carrier to add to the Voynich story, far better than Dee and Kelley. And what would make it even more poignant is that the pair of them visited Hájek's house in Prague, which was (according to a fascinating 1999 post on levity.com by Michael Pober) "'by Bethlem', first mentioned in "A True and Faithful Relation' p. 212, Prague 1584, 15th August."

Might Hájek have owned the VMs, perhaps buying it during his time in Italy? It would be interesting to see his handwriting and marginalia commentary style, just in case there's some kind of unexpected link between that and what we see in the VMs. I've asked Jan Hurych, but he hasn't examined Hájek's handwriting: so I'll have to pursue this with the Czech libraries myself (more on that soon).

Given that Hájek translated Matthioli's famous herbal into Czech, it is certainly interesting that the marginalia at the top of f17r appears to have been miscorrected to read "mattior". I had always guessed that it was George Baresch who had done this - but perhaps it might have been Hájek instead? Something to think about, anyway...


Saturday 12 July 2008

The Ninth Gate, revisited...

Note: this article has now moved to the-ninth-gate-revisited on Cipher Mysteries

Another day, another curiously contentful blog to set me thinking: this time it's Alterati, "The Inside Scoop on The Outside Culture", and specifically a two-part article there from October 2007 entitled "The Yellow Sign: Manuscripts, Codices, and Grimoires".

In Part 1, the discussion swoops from our old friend the Codex Seraphinianus (yet again), to Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, to Newbold's claimed microscopic writing in the VMs, and then on to a powerful idea: that "a void, the right void, will spontaneously generate a stop-gap if there’s enough market pressure", i.e. given sufficient market demand to scratch an itch, people will start selling backscratchers.

"Or perhaps ideas manifest themselves - the more real an idea is the quicker it pops into existence in library-space [...]. I still think of grimoires as notes from a journey rather than road maps but I’m now also starting to think of these books as emergent properties of a weird market pressure which demands sources for belief systems": i.e. given sufficient 'market demand' for a religion, books claiming to be the sources of those religions will spontaneously appear.

Here, I suspect the Alterati blogger is thinking about the legend surrounding the Codex Gigas (because that's what he goes on to discuss), but that seems a little dubious: just about all of the Codex Gigas is mundane, if not actually dull (there's a set of hi-res scans here, the famous devil picture is on p.290, but big deal, I say). However, it's actually far closer to the truth with The Grand Grimoire, which is supposed to date to 1522 but which seems to scratch a peculiarly 19th century itch.

In Part 2, the focus shifts to Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, a film I really enjoyed but thought no more than a piece of celluloid mythmaking, a seductive summoning-up of the taste of the Devil's sulphurous kiss to titillate and amuse. However, I had no idea at all that it was based upon a book - The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Fascinating stuff! (And yes, I've already ordered myself a copy). There's also a set of the engravings from the film online.

After various idle speculations on the Lovecraftian mythos, our Alterati blogger friend wonders whether the mysterious roving figure of Corso (the book dealer / detective in The Ninth Gate / Club Dumas) is actually based on Wilfrid Voynich. Hmmm... Wilfrid Voynich, as played by Johnny Depp? It's fairly sublime (I get more of a David Suchet vibe): but perhaps I'm wrong...



I think you'll have to decide for yourself. :-)

Friday 11 July 2008

Voynich Manuscript and comics / graphic novels...

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-manuscript-and-comics-graphic-novels on Cipher Mysteries

I try to pick up on everything VMs-related out there, and I liked comics as a kid (Marvel not DC, if you're askin'): so it came as a nice surprise to find the Voynich Manuscript popping up on the edges of the comics world.

According to this page on his own website, satirical graphics novel author Steve Aylett placed the VMs "in the Juice Museum" (a location in "The Velocity Gospel", #2 in his Accomplice series), as well as "in Eddie Gamete's library in Slaughtermatic". Sadly, thanks to H.G.Wells, David Bowie, Peter Frampton, Topper Headon, and Aleister Crowley, Steve's unlikely to ever make it into the list of Five Most Famous People From Bromley: but I'm sure he'll do OK for himself all the same. :-o

Another comics blogger has the VMs on the brain, mentioning it in a nice little article on the rediscovery of a full-length print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (it mentions the funky Superman's Metropolis story, too), as well as in an article on its own.

But then again, I suppose the Codex Seraphinianus is very much like a graphic novel in its own odd way, and that's arguably not so very far from the VMs: if you can't read the text, all you have left is the pictures, right? John C commented that the Codex Seraphinianus "most closely resembles European fantasy works like those one sees from Roland Topor and various bande desinée artists": but to be honest, I'm pretty sure that Serafini was simply trying to appropriate (and undermine) the visual tropes of instruction manuals, rather than align himself with any art movement or style.

Finally (and apropos of nothing, I just thought you might like it), here - courtesy of yesbutnobutyes.com - is a classic Captain America frame, that got terribly, terribly lost in the translation to, erm, English. Enjoy!

Thursday 10 July 2008

Modern hoaxes...

Note: this article has now moved to modern-hoaxes on Cipher Mysteries

While reading up on the John Titor phenomenon (which Benjamin Kerstein based his Josef6 novel upon), I came across some other great modern hoaxes / self-deceptive phenomena I hadn't previously been aware of. I decided to briefly explore these, in case I could find parallels I could find with the Voynich Manuscript (thanks to Gordon Rugg, the notion of a "Voynich hoax" has become well entrenched in VMs commentary).

First up is The Case of Kirk Allen from the (somewhat worryingly named) Brainsturbator blog, who in turn took it from Jacques Vallee's book "Revelations". This tells the story of a research scientist who compiled a gargantuan mass (200 chapters, 82 scale maps, 61 architectural sketches, 12 genealogical tables, 306 drawings etc) of highly detailed documents that somehow told of his epic life in space - and the psychologist in Baltimore who took on his case.

It's all fascinatingly delusional stuff, particularly in the way that the psychologist had to sort himself out after having sorted out his patient. The Brainsturbator blogger intersperses the text with small images from the Codex Seraphinianus, whose own unhinged brand of otherworldiness fits the whole tale quite well.

Some have claimed that the Voynich Manuscript is this kind of an object (though meaningless), a kind of cursed intellectual science fiction where the form takes over the content, and where the writing takes over the writer (though several hundred years before Science Fiction became an actual genre, of course). But I'm not convinced: Kirk Allen's need was for a narrative object to make sense of his life. Though he wrote some sections in his own private shorthand, this was a very secondary aspect of the whole fantasy: he needed to write it in order to link all his delusions together by bringing them all to the surface, not to hide them from himself.

In fact, his whole work was a kind of 'proto-therapy', and so ultimately all that the psychiatrist Dr Lindner did was to help steer Kirk Allen towards the logical completion of his workj, at which point its fragility would be revealed and it would all fall away. Though this is what happened, it did take a looooong time.

The second example is UMMO (also from our Brainsturbator friend), a weird European UFO cult that was started as a kind of surreal practical joke by Spaniard Jose Luis Jordan Pena, pretending that Earth had visitors from the Planet UMMO. Thanks to a bit of physics trickery (mainly triboluminescence), many people were taken in by the carefully staged demonstrations of communication with these aliens.

And nobody would have been any wiser, had not one particular crazy sect called “Edelweiss” begun to brand their children with the UMMO emblem: at which point Pena decided that enough was enough, and so 'fessed up to the whole thing.

The UMMO emblem (from an Italian site)

Now this, like the John Titor phenomenon, was a well-executed hoax, and - given that it required many more people to collaborate over a period of decades to achieve its rather cheeky result - was perhaps even more special.

Was the Voynich Manuscript a hoax? From reading about these actual hoaxes, I'm particularly struck by their storytelling aspect: at each stage, you can say whatever you like, as long you give yourself enough "wriggle room" to embellish and extend in the future. In fact, you can view them as a kind of improvisational storytelling, where the hoaxer picks up the threads of the hoaxee's disbelief and actively weaves them back into the fabric.

In business school terms, this is a kind of non-formally planned strategy that is interactive, almost to the point of resembling a game: hence the parallels (I'm thinking mainly of UMMO and Dan Burisch here) that emerge with role-playing games. Whereas if you try to impose a hoaxing explanation on top of the Voynich, you pretty much have to accept that its type of game was role-played purely by the maker, without anyone else ever looking at it.

Thirdly, there is the whole Urantia Book phenomenon, which seems to be a kind of strange fake-science channeling thing. This too wove details and objections from the world into a kind of strange religious-like fabric of immense size. Could the VMs contain channelled semi-religious writings, a kind of Renaissance halfway-house between Hildegard of Bingen and the Urantia Book? Again, it doesn't seem to me to satisfy the need for a narrative explanation, which seems to me to be best (and most powerfully) described as a fabrication, where a collection of unconnected threads are iteratively woven into a single "explanatory fabric".

And so we come back to the notion of a delusional internal architecture behind the VMs, more like Kirk Allen's magnum opus: but one where the writer is apparently trying to make something difficult for himself/herself rather than something helpful. But how could that form the basis of a better explanation of the Voynich than "a cipher we cannot yet break"?

I suppose people like Rugg have made hoaxing an intellectual fashion item, a postmodern superficiality that can be cleverly namedropped at parties - oh, didn't you hear that it's meaningless? Yet to make this leap of faithlessness, you have to abandon any pretence at trying to read the history of the object, and discard any idea of reconstructing the psychology (or indeed the psychopathy) patiently assembling a complex thing for its own rational reasons. But Rugg's hoax account seems like a shallow, unidimensional tack to take: sorry, but humans are complex entities, and nothing human is ever that simple.

Wednesday 9 July 2008

The "John Titor" phenomenon...

Note: this article has now moved to the-john-titor-phenomenon on Cipher Mysteries

I recently mentioned an online Voynich-mentioning novel by Benjamin Kerstein called Josef6 (which you can read here), pointing out various parallels with the Dan Burisch story.

I've since had a nice email from Benjamin, who mentions that he was more directly inspired by a real Internet story, known as the John Titor phenomenon. This concerned someone posting to a time travel website between November 2000 and end-March 2001, claiming to be a time-traveller coming back in time from 2036. There's a well-known Unix date issue in 2038 (not entirely dissimilar to the whole Y2K nonsense), and "Titor" claimed to have come back to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer to debug some code.

But who was this "John Titor"? The punchline here is that an Italian TV documentary ("Voyager - Ai confini della conoscenza") from 19th May 2008 pointed the finger at computer expert John Rick Haber, brother of Larry Haber - the owner of all commercial rights concerning John Titor, and the only person who claims to have confirmed Titor's existence.

Now that's what I call a proper hoax. :-)

Tuesday 8 July 2008

The Voynich Manuscript - Who Cares?

Note: this article has now moved to the-voynich-manuscript-who-cares on Cipher Mysteries

I've been debating giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript at Treadwell's, but I keep coming back to the same problem - what angle should I take?

For me, while its content is occulted ("hidden"), it's not really an occult object per se. (Well, apart from the magic circles, and they were pretty mainstream natural magic circa 1450). And it's neither religious, nor sacrilegious, nor nonsensical, nor a conspiracy, nor a hoax.

In short, if some well-meaning rationalist has stripped away the terror, the fantasies, the heresies, the necromancy, the madness and the delusion, would anyone want to hear about that which remains - an object that is just ordinary (albeit extraordinarily well disguised)?

And similarly: in the whole process of re-writing my book, the hardest chapter to tackle has been (and continues to be) the very first chapter: yet in the first edition, this was the easiest (probably because it was mainly a high-speed roll-call of the VMs' post-1600 history).

These days, I'm reluctant to waste any of my readers' time on any of the could-be might-be nonsense that most VMs writers (such as Kennedy and Churchill, D'Imperio to a large degree, and the Wikipedia entry almost entirely) tend to fill their entire works with. Rather, my interest lies in the dogged hunt for the-thing-that-the-VMs-is, whatever it turns out to be - and that's the quest I want to take my readers on, too.

And so in the revised first edition, Chapter 1 will have almost no pussyfooting provenance, but will instead launch straight into the very specific art history evidence that places the VMs at a certain place and time - Northern Italy circa 1450.

And so in many ways, I'd like to run my talk just about the art history of the VMs (like a try-out of Chapter One) - but in other ways, perhaps I should talk about the VMs' curious cultural channelers (such as Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna, Colin Wilson, David Icke, and so on) whose streams/dreams sometimes tend to hog this blog.

I can't do both at the same time - but which should I do? What do you think?

Monday 7 July 2008

Did any Voynich pages go missing?

Note: this article has now moved to did-any-voynich-pages-go-missing on Cipher Mysteries

When the Voynich Manuscript misdecipherer William Romaine Newbold died, his friend & colleague Roland Grubb Kent decided to bring all his late friend's notes together into a book: this was published in 1928 by the University of Philadelphia Press under the title "The Cipher of Roger Bacon". If you'd like your own copy, Kessinger sell a modern print-on-demand reproduction of it, with quite reasonable quality pictures (apart from the awful picture of Newbold right at the start).

And it was from Newbold's and Kent's book that the story of the modern missing pages sprang.

You see, there's an innocuous-looking table in page 45's footnote 2 that describes the physical make-up of the manuscript: in particular, it lists the first (what we would now call the "Herbal") section ("Part I. Botanical, ff. 1-11, 13-66") as having 65 folios ("leaves"), with 125 drawings and 5 text-only pages.

However, the manuscript as now owned by the Beinecke only has 59 leaves: Rene Zandbergen's page on this lists folios 12, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, and 64 as missing. Might folios 59 to 64 (at the centre of a quire) have gone missing in the 20th century, sometime between Newbold examining them and being given to the Beinecke by Hans Kraus? If so, might Newbold have had any reproductions of them?

While researching my book, en route to New Haven I stayed with some old friends near Philadelphia: and so used the opportunity to drop by the University of Pennsylvania's archives, which I happened to know held several boxes of Newbold's records. At last, I thought, I would be able to see if these missing pages might be there.

The good news was that the set of photostats Wilfrid Voynich had given Newbold were still there: yet the reproduction of the Herbal section contained precisely the same pages as we see nowadays - the same pages that are missing now were missing then.

So what actually happened? Simply, I'm reasonably sure that the table on page 45 was miscopied from an intermediate handwritten count, and that Newbold or Kent (whichever of the two) just got it wrong. The missing folios were long gone, decades (probably centuries) before Wilfrid Voynich bought it in 1912.

I suspect that the folio numbers were added between 1580 and 1600, around the time that the manuscript was rebound into its current order and repainted (probably to gain a higher price): and that many (if not all) of the missing pages-as-numbered were sent by George Baresch to Athanasius Kircher, as per the correspondence.

Perhaps Kircher's collection of cipher notes will turn up one day (which would be very nice), and will turn out to contain many/all of these missing pages: but perhaps it is safer to assume that somewhere along the way, some well-meaning Jesuit administrator destroyed them - after all, something you can't read surely has no value?