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.
