Top 10 Voynich Manuscript theories, decoded...

Note: this article has now moved to top-10-voynich-manuscript-theories-decoded on Cipher Mysteries

Symmetrical and repetitive prey behaviour is the key tool exploited by hunter gatherers: and so it goes with Voynich Manuscript websites. Once you've seen the same damaged pattern a few times, the shared wonky rationale behind it is usually fairly transparent.

And so here is a suggested critical reader for those fruity (but decidedly wobbly) jellies we all love to dip our fingers in: Voynich theories. Make of them all what you will...

(1) Any theory involving time travel or aliens
Subtext: "My theory has so many holes in, it would need two series of Doctor Who to fix them all."

(2) Any theory involving Jesuits
Subtext: "I prefer reading 18th century fiction to 20th century non-fiction."

(3) Any theory involving China
Subtext: "What do you mean, Jacques Guy wasn't being serious?"

(4) Any theory involving the New World
Subtext: "I've got the hots for that Brazilian woman. What do you mean, she's not female?"

(5) Any theory where the VMs is written in lightly disguised Hebrew
Subtext: "I wish I had read the Bible when I was young, instead of taking so many drugs."

(6) Any theory where the VMs is written in a mixture of European languages
Subtext: "I put so much time into learning those languages, they have to be useful soon, right?"

(7) Any theory where the VMs contains alchemical or heretical secrets
Subtext: "Lynn Thorndike's books are far too heavy for my weak arms to lift."

(8) Any theory where the VMs describes telescopes, microscopes, or computers
Subtext: "I can rewrite the technological history of the world howsoever I please; and anyone who objects is just a moany old loser."

(9) Any theory where the VMs is a hoax, channeled writing, glossolalia, etc
Subtext: "I can say anything I like about the VMs, and there's absolutely nothing you idiot historians can do about it, ner ner ner."

And finally...

(10) Any theory where the VMs was written by an architect
Subtext: "I see everything in the VMs as rational and ordered, however irrational and disordered everyone else may think it is. Perhaps I should lighten up."

PS: because the torrent of VMs-related news has dwindled to a thin trickle over recent weeks, I'm taking the rest of August off - see you again in September! ;-)

Voynich and PhD people...

I recently stumbled upon an active Voynich researcher I'd never heard of: Angela Catalina Ghionea (note that, even though Internet Explorer throws up lots of warnings for her website, it's basically OK), who is a teaching assistant and 3rd year PhD student in the History Department at Purdue University.

She's is "currently focused on the most mysterious manuscript in the world, The 'Voynich Manuscript' ", and is preparing an article called "Understanding the Voynich Manuscript. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants". Her recent presentations at various conferences include:-

• "Voynich Manuscript and its Genuine Alphabet" (12 April, HGSA 2008 Conference, Purdue)
• "Understanding the "Voynich", the Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World. American Shamanism and Exotic Plants" (29 March at the OAH 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, Hilton Hotel)
• "Contributions to Voynich Manuscript's Mystery" (24 March 2008, MARS Conference, Purdue)
• "Voynich Manuscript is not a Hoax. Uncovering New Evidence" (Purdue, 29 January 2008)

All of which I hope to see very soon (and to review here). But this set me wondering: how many other people with PhD's have looked at the Voynich? I drew up a quick list (let me know if there are more), but there are plenty of familiar faces...

• William Romaine Newbold
• John Manly (love the cigar story!)
• Leonell Strong (love that facial hair / collar combination)
• Derek de Solla Price
• Jim Reeds
• Jacques Guy
• Gabriel Landini
• Jorge Stolfi
• Gordon Rugg
• Edith Sherwood

Though according to Dr C. S. Lewis Barrie PhD, the Voynich Manuscript is a medieval blog, which is why it makes no sense. Ah, bless.

Unreadable Chinese, revisited...

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of which is another story entirely...