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.

Secret Histories and "The Lie Agreed Upon"...

Here's a nice two-page article (here and here) by Timothy Doyle from the BookThink site on the role 'Secret History' plays in SciFi fantasy literature: it's titled "The Lie Agreed Upon" because that was how Napoleon famously characterised history. (Though he actually used the words "A fable agreed upon", which [according to Wikipedia] he probably took from Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Mélanges de Littérature (1804), while the basic phrase is also widely attributed to Voltaire).

Anyway... Doyle's theme is that in a secret history novel, all the surface details of historical fact remain basically the same, but the reader is invited to peek behind the curtain at all the political and technical machinations and intrigue that keep that lie propped up. As opposed to an 'alternate history' novel, where both surface and undercurrents diverge from the historical record.

It's a nice piece, which leaps deftly from SF to The X-Files, to the Da Vinci Code, to the many parallels with the Voynich Manuscript (basically because most VMs theories seem to start from a secret history or a similar novelistic premise), to Neal Stephenson's wonderful Cryptonomicon, to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (and a couple of works of his I didn't know), to Tim Powers, and so forth: Lev Grossman's Codex even gets a honourable mention in the also-rans list at the end. All of which are riffs probably familiar to most Voynich News readers.

My favourite sentence from the article is this:-

"What is really interesting about Secret Histories is the shifts in historical meaning that occur, much like the optical illusion where a slight shift in perspective suddenly changes the beautiful girl into an ugly witch."

I think Doyle comes splendidly close here to capturing the essence of Voynich theories: each seek to violate and redirect the currents beneath the historical record, with the theorist all the while using the keen magicry of the illusionist to silently cover up the implicit shift in meaning. Naturally, theory proponents see themselves as 'unliars', truth-tellers: but all (possibly bar one) are closer to novelists than they would like to admit. Ultimately, shouldn't we agree with Napoleon/de Fontenelle/Voltaire that history is little more than a story we agree to accept? (...or is that a story in itself?)