John Matthews Manly's papers...

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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]

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

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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. :-)

The Ninth Gate, revisited...

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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. :-)

Did any Voynich pages go missing?

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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?

David Icke and the Voynich...

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I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world's favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in "The Biggest Secret" (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice.

Much as you'd expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For example, "John Dee was the Queen’s astrologer, a Rosicrucian Grand Master, a black magician, and a secret agent for the new intelligence network": he and Edward Kelley were talking not with angels but "reptilians". Oh, and Rudolph II was "of the reptilian Habsburg dynasty, another occultist."

Hmmm: I feel another semantically irregular verb coming on:-

• I am a visionary, a singularity within a vortex of eternal chaos
• You (singular) are badly compromised, but might be redeemed if you buy my book
• He/she is reptilian. Oh, and did I mention he/she is reptilian?
• We are freedom fighters against the infinite evil of The Brotherhood
• You (plural) are corrupted by prolonged exposure to reptilian media lies and hype
• They are part of a reptilian dynasty/network/conspiracy that spans the ages

Once you get the hang of how it works, Icke's stuff almost writes itself. What is he going to say about the Voynich Manuscript? Easy: just take the most superficial reading you can (Newbold's snail, etc), reptilify it, and summarize it thus:-

"This manuscript is just one example of the level of knowledge the
Brotherhood were working with hundreds of years ago while their other wing, the
religions, were keeping the masses in the most basic ignorance."

And now someone has posted on David Icke's online forum, claiming to be a senior member of the Illuminati (though to me it reads more like a publisher PR hack having a bit of fun at Icke-fandom's expense):-

"Let me just say to you that we tried twice in the past to show a coded glimpse of the nature of our great secret. You have probably heard of the most mysterious manuscript in the world – the Voynich manuscript. No one has ever been able to decode it. The men who wrote it were members of the Illuminati and they were captured and killed before they could release the key to decoding it. The Arthurian legends were our other main attempt to enter popular consciousness and reveal our true purpose. They succeeded to an extent, but our enemies were able to confuse our message by releasing alternative versions of the legends. So, now we are trying again."

Yeah, rrrright.

Bizarrely, the title of the (probably as-yet-unfinished) book being puffed ("The Soul Camera") is the same name as an odd camera that has just been released in Japan by Sonaco, that apparently photographs your "aura" in some way. As always, the world is far stranger than conspiracy theorists think - but in a completely different way.

Voynich word of the day: pareidolia

One thing I've noticed about people with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript is that they often have logophilia (a love of words), particularly manifesting itself as a passion for etymology (the histories [both real and imagined] coiled up inside words), for the consonance and dissonance of word and letter patterns, and for the child-like joy of finding the perfect word - a key to fit the lock of the world. Perhaps Voynich research somehow manages to tick all these boxes?

Anyway, here's your perfect Voynich word for today: pareidolia, which I would describe as being the delusional antipattern the human mind is tempted to succumb to when it sees something astonishing in basically the wrong place - such as Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun, Jesus Christ in a tortilla (1978), or the 2007 "monkey tree phenomenon" in Singapore.

People flock to see these (particularly religious pareidolia), and collectors even buy & sell them on eBay. The Internet has some fantastic collections of pareidolia photographs (and bizarre stories), such as on the Skeptic's Dictionary site, The Folklorist site, and this Pope Tart site (yes, really).

In the context of this blog, I think it is quite clear that most visual interpretations of the Voynich Manuscript (and I'm particularly thinking about its curiously-structured herbal pages here) are "pareidolic", manifesting the basic human need to find meaning in whatever it looks at.

And so if you look long enough (hours? weeks? years?) at anything, the danger is that you'll start to mis-see meaning in it. The paradox here is that long-term researchers (such as myself) surely become unable to tell whether they are extremely expert or extremely deluded, if not indeed both at the same time. Are they deluded as to their expertise, or experts in their delusion?

This whole thing can also be viewed as one of "semantically irregular verbs":-

• I am an expert
• You (singular) are a bit confused
• He/she is deluded
• We agree to differ
• You (plural) have somewhat lost the plot
• They are completely bonkers

On the bright side, there's an even more unnerving mental phenomenon called apophenia, which is where you see patterns in palpably random data (at which point I normally insert a reference to Mark Romanek's 1978 film "Static", which of course I wish I had made). Contemporary writers (like Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, Alan Moore, etc bleedin' etc) enjoy apophenia as a motif, perhaps because it is based on a peculiarly kind of desperate desire to find meaning anywhere in the world, where even pareidolic places aren't quite implausible enough.

In this sense, then, I think Newbold's quest to find meaning within the random craquelure of the Voynichese quillstrokes is something closer to apophenia than to pareidolia. Other Voynich theories based at the level of stroke decomposition (like the gloriously over-detailed one from Ursula Papke that used to be at ms408.com, and where the "meaning" is read off from each stroke of the letter) may well also be apophenic.

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.