More Dan Burisch Voynichification...

Note: this article has now moved to more-dan-burisch-voynichification on Cipher Mysteries

It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.

Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone trying to understand Burisch's claim, by asserting things such as "The Voynich Manuscript may provide clues to the shape and function of items found in the YSC cells, spooled material". No, you're absolutely right: it means nothing to me either.

Other discussion boards have whole bunches of people saying Dan Burisch is a fraud, though with occasional rambling posters popping up to defend him:-

From the website ‘world mysteries’ concerning the Voynich document we read in an except from Dr. Levitov: "There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; the innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.” The fate of the the Cathars resembles that of the Knights Templar, does not the dualism of the former also receive a modicum of redemption in the restoration of the latter?With Dr. Burisch’s background in microbiology, the Voynich ‘botanical illustrations’ were child’s play, and the astrological designations had already been previously noted as corresponding to the Milky Way Galaxy, and by conversion of linear transformations into ‘diagrammatic notation,’ the determinant of the matrix was solved. ‘As above so below’ was not, in this case, a spiritual derivative, it was simply and starkly a ‘spacial’ one.

Ohhhh dear: if a novelist tried to get away with froth like this, he/she would get taken apart. There is no Milky Way link, there is no microbiology, there is no Cathar link, there is no Templar link, there is no matrix (spatial or otherwise), there is no religion, no gnosis, no dualism. The Voynich Manuscript being summoned up here is an imaginary one, a heretical MacGuffin for a potboiler that never quite got written.

In many ways, I get a sense from all this of a deeply tragic situation, of a bright (but disturbed) person grasping at anything they can find on the glittering, shallow surface of Net knowledge that might just explain (however temporarily) their personal pain, the loss they feel: but it never does, and their pain never goes away.

I have no idea if that person is Dan Burisch or someone else: and in most of the important ways, it really doesn't matter. John Manly was right in detail but not in scope: more than simply a blank cryptographic screen to project ideas and emptions upon, the VMs is actually like a magnet for unhappy PhDs, a sandpit for them to play out their make-believe stories of intellectual redemption. By doing this, they can "rescue" someone from historical oblivion whose frustrated life-experience somehow chimes with theirs: all of which amounts to a kind of intellectual displacement activity directed at the past when they should be putting the effort into their own lives in the present to save themselves - but perhaps that's too emotionally hard for them to do.

Perhaps I'm no less guilty (with my reconstructed story of Antonio Averlino "Filarete") as Levitov, or Rugg, or any of the other 20+ Voynich theories out there. I don't feel unhappy: but I can at least see that maybe I was hoping for redemption in some other way. In my defence, all I can say is that I at least tried my best to let the manuscript do the talking... and hope that this will in the end prove to be enough to move the history forward. Isn't that as good as it gets?

As a (frankly slightly spooky) postnote on the whole Dan Burisch affair, there's an online novel (with a bit of a Voynich thing going on) posted to a blog that you might well find fascinating. It's called "Josef6" by Benjamin Kerstein, and deals with a claimed time-traveller from the future posting messages to an online community, and all the cultish madness that follows on.

The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics
-- those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. The
frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating
talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century.

Sounds familiar, Burisch fans? Though it's not strictly a Voynich novel per se, I really quite enjoyed it (and even donated $5 to the author via PayPal for posting it up). Recommended! :-)

Review of "Enoch's Portal"...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two alternative histories vying for the mainstream...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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