John Dee's "Tuba Veneris"...

Note: this article has now moved to john-dees-tuba-veneris on Cipher Mysteries

Was the "Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus" really written by John Dee? I first saw this several years back, when I stumbled upon Joseph Peterson's transcription of it on the Esoteric Archives website.

The link with Dee seemed (and still seems) to me to be spurious: even though he is mentioned right at the start of the text, for me the language, the drawings, the style, the thinking, in fact all of it fails to please as a match. But then again, the earliest copy (held by our old friend the Warburg Institute, MS FBH 51) is apparently 16th century, so would have been written while Dee was still alive. It's a nice little mystery, I thought, though one which at the time I assumed few had any interest in.

However, I recently found a paper online by occasional Voynich mailing list member Teresa Burns published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (No. 12, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2007), called "The Little Book of Black Venus and the Three-Fold Transformationof Hermetic Astrology". This fascinating little piece takes the reader on a journey around Dee's conceptual world and how it might link in with the Tuba Veneris, all the way to a suggested link with the "Familists", the Family of Love, and from there to an underground Dark Goddess movement.

There's also an Appendix by Phil Legard, which provides a different (but resonantly similar) angle. Nicely, he discusses whether the invocations might be Trithemian-style steganography (Legard thinks not, but it's good that this has been explored).

In the same issue, Terri and Nancy Burns also put forward a parallel translation of the Tuba Veneris - this is probably the place most people coming to it for the first time should start.

The next issue's follow-up piece (by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns) is also online, called "The Little Book of Black Venus – Part Two Olympic Spirits, the Cult of the Dark Goddess, and the Seal of Ameth". This tries to link the Tuba Veneris with Dee's early book-buying expedition in Italy, and (though not so successfully, I have to say) with the benendanti of Northern Italy, which you may possibly have heard of in connection with Carlo Ginzburg's fascinating book "The Night Battles".

Finally, there's a beautiful hand-crafted modern edition of the Tuba Veneris mentioned here (apparently based on the same set of articles) though its price of $189 may possibly be just a tad more than many people would spend on books in a year.

My opinion? Having absorbed all these articles, I'm now far more comfortable than I was before with the notion that the Tuba Veneris might well actually be by John Dee - it is dated 1580, which was before the whole Edward Kelley / angelic conversation farrago started kicking off, and placed in London. Yet I'm not taken by the Dark Goddess connection: though I appreciate the possibility, that's a whole step further than I can take (for the moment, at least). Ultimately, I suspect that the Tuba Veneris will turn out to be in a very loose Trithemian-style steganographic cipher, perhaps for carrying a Familist message around Europe.

Hmmm... perhaps (pace Koestler & Owen Gingerich) someone will end up writing a book on it called "The Spell Nobody Cast"? Just a thought...

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.