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

Note: this article has now moved to become-a-voynich-manuscript-expert-in-just-5-minutes on Cipher Mysteries

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 Voynich Manuscript - Who Cares?

Note: this article has now moved to the-voynich-manuscript-who-cares on Cipher Mysteries

I've been debating giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript at Treadwell's, but I keep coming back to the same problem - what angle should I take?

For me, while its content is occulted ("hidden"), it's not really an occult object per se. (Well, apart from the magic circles, and they were pretty mainstream natural magic circa 1450). And it's neither religious, nor sacrilegious, nor nonsensical, nor a conspiracy, nor a hoax.

In short, if some well-meaning rationalist has stripped away the terror, the fantasies, the heresies, the necromancy, the madness and the delusion, would anyone want to hear about that which remains - an object that is just ordinary (albeit extraordinarily well disguised)?

And similarly: in the whole process of re-writing my book, the hardest chapter to tackle has been (and continues to be) the very first chapter: yet in the first edition, this was the easiest (probably because it was mainly a high-speed roll-call of the VMs' post-1600 history).

These days, I'm reluctant to waste any of my readers' time on any of the could-be might-be nonsense that most VMs writers (such as Kennedy and Churchill, D'Imperio to a large degree, and the Wikipedia entry almost entirely) tend to fill their entire works with. Rather, my interest lies in the dogged hunt for the-thing-that-the-VMs-is, whatever it turns out to be - and that's the quest I want to take my readers on, too.

And so in the revised first edition, Chapter 1 will have almost no pussyfooting provenance, but will instead launch straight into the very specific art history evidence that places the VMs at a certain place and time - Northern Italy circa 1450.

And so in many ways, I'd like to run my talk just about the art history of the VMs (like a try-out of Chapter One) - but in other ways, perhaps I should talk about the VMs' curious cultural channelers (such as Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna, Colin Wilson, David Icke, and so on) whose streams/dreams sometimes tend to hog this blog.

I can't do both at the same time - but which should I do? What do you think?

Dan Burisch & the Voynich Manuscript...

Have you ever lifted up a stone in the woods and found something icky you really wished you hadn't seen?

Or, in our modern 'armchair explorer' days, have you ever clicked confidently onto a website where, errrm, oh deary me, oh no, that's not, you can't... (you get the basic idea)?

Unfortunately, the point of being a blogger (or indeed any kind of writer) is that you document the odd things you see so that other people can decide whether to seek them out for themselves (rare) or to avoid them like the plague (far more common). Which means that bloggers have a vaguely journalistic obligation to follow any given story right through to its logical endpoint, wherever that may happen to be.

Now, even though once upon a time I worked on an "X-Files" computer game, I freely admit that I don't actully know much about UFO lore. The closest thing on my bookshelf is Nick Cook's thought-provoking "The Hunt For Zero Point", but that's more about odd terrestrial flying objects than alien ones per se. Which, as will become rapidly clear, made the story of Dan Burisch and his claimed decipherment of the Voynich Manuscript even more 'out there' to me than most things I tend to run into.

On the surface, it's all straightforward enough. Burisch thinks the VMs is by Roger Bacon, who apparently wrote it in a kind of disguised / dyslexic Hebrew lettering. The text direction, as you'd expect from Hebrew, runs right-to-left (though, oddly enough, Burisch needed a mirror to read it). Line 17 of f35v has a Voynichese EVA fragment "daiin.dain.chkaly.choly", the last three words of which are transcribed halfway down the page here (presumably by Burisch?) as "dain mkaly(e) moly(e)", deciphered right-to-left as "elom el akim niad" - "everlasting God will establish knowledge". Of course, add the missing "daiin" back in and it should probably read "everlasting God will establish knowledge knowledge": but that's normal for this kind of claimed VMs decipherment.

As an aside, Googling for "elom" returns links to (1) "the personification of the moon among southern Hebrews", and (2) "Eloms were short, stocky, bipedal sentients, with a thick pelt of oily, dark fur, native to the frigid and mineral-rich desert planet of Elom" on the Elom entry in the Wookieepedia, an online Star Wars wiki. Further down in Google's search results, the (real) Wikipedia entry also notes that Elom is "a tribal ewe name meaning "god loves me" or "loved by god"". It is hard not to get the feeling from this that someone is either (a) being somewhat impressionistic with their supposed translation, or (b) having a Star Wars-themed laugh at the expense of UFOlogists. [In the following, I presume (a) to be true, but sadly there's no obvious reason to discount (b) at all.]

Burisch's claimed decryption reprises, just as you can find countless times in the museum of failed Voynich solutions, a large number of by-now-oh-so-familiar motifs of pathological enigmatology: selective transcription, Roger Bacon, mirror writing, disguised Hebrew, confusing and repetitive text, selective dyslexia, arbitrary anagramming, religious / liturgical / Gnostic plaintexts, arbitrary / optimistic / free-form translations, etc. So far, nothing hugely unexpected, then.

But dig a little deeper and things quickly gets bizarre, even by the historical standards of Voynichianity. Burisch claims to have been given the key to solving the VMs by "#3-15", the keyname of an alien ("J-Rod"?) visitor/prisoner held at Area 51 by Majestic, the secret organization for whom Burisch allegedly worked. The remainder of the decryption was placed in "File 21" (held in Europe somewhere?), and described Burisch's future discoveries (about 'Looking Glass'? Man-made stargates? The "Ganesh" particle?) that he has not as yet made. The whole Burisch affair revolves around conspiratorial claims of time-travelling aliens meddling with human affairs and how 4 billion people may well die (in 2012?) as a result of the immense explosion of a manmade stargate, or possibly of the natural stargate on "Frenchman's Mountain" where some Voynich lettering can allegedly be found carved in the stone.

Now, I'm in no way qualified to judge on this kind of end-times stuff (after all, who is?). But purely as far as Burisch's claims about the Voynich Manuscript go, I have to say that I'm quite sure they're a load of nonsense. The VMs is a historical artefact that was demonstrably constructed more than a century after Roger Bacon's death, the word patterns don't match Hebrew (or any other known language), the left-right direction of writing doesn't match Hebrew, the strongly-structured letter patterns within words don't show any signs of dyslexic-style anagram transposition, and I would predict there is an overwhelming (>99.9%) probability that the Hebrew-style pattern that was found on part of one line on f35v could not be found duplicated in more than 0.05% of the Voynichese corpus as a whole - and in any case, such fragments would very likely not make syntactical or semantical sense as a meaningful sentence. Right now I'm not even hugely convinced that the four words "elom el akim niad" can be contorted to mean what they are claimed to mean.

I'm all for novelists' appropriating the VMs for their books (though it's actually a far harder trick to carry off than most seem to realise): but when this kind of "kooks and spooks" looking-glass world tries to claim the VMs as one of its own, it's hard to find a point of mutual accommodation. Sure, the VMs was mysterious enough 30 years ago for Terence McKenna to be intrigued by it: but we've come a long way since then, and it's now merely an historical curio right on the cusp of mainstream thought.

Perhaps if the decrypted contents of "File 21" come out into the open, we'll all fall back in stunned amazement (before fleeing as far away from any of the stargates as we can). But until that day... sorry, but I'll have to admit to not being a believer.

UPDATE: More on Dan Burisch & the VMs

Some Voynich outsiders...

As a handy (but inevitably bad) generalization, there are two kinds of Voynich researchers out there: (a) social ones (who do it in a crowd) and (b) anti-social ones (who do it alone). Broadly speaking, I'm now a (b) having first done a six-year stretch as an (a): but some people (like my old friend GC, who's like my Voynichological twin brother, though without the goatee... hmmm...) manage to stay (b) with occasional flashes of (a), despite all the provocation they (inevitably?) receive online.

But when you add things like blogs to the mix, this cosy categorization starts to fall apart. Because I blog about what I'm thinking about, does that make me a kind of passive-aggressive (a), or perhaps a falsely socialized (b)? Are blogs actually social, or merely a kind of unconscious, self-aggrandizing auto-journalism? Answers on an e-postcard (to someone else), please.

Regardless, plenty of people put out their Voynich-related outsider viewpoints in varied ways: here are some you may have missed (but which my seine net picked up). Be grateful I only kept the good stuff! :-)

(1) Richard Santa Coloma has posted up a set of long-ish posts by GC here: intriguingly, GC (who for years has winced at the thought of anything apart from a 16th century origin, largely because of Leonell Strong's decryption / Askham attribution) is now mellowing towards the 15th century (though quite how the two centuries blend together is still a little wobbly).

Incidentally, the possibility (as proposed by Richard Santa Coloma) of Cornelius Drebbel-era (i.e. circa 1600) authorship for the Voynich remains interesting, though hard to square with the manuscript's 15th century art history. But perhaps the truth will turn out to be far more magnificent. Telescope histories (such as this excellent one from the Galileo Project) will tell you that the glass in Venice produced around 1450 was being ground by Florentines (and others) into both convex and concave lenses for spectacles / bericles, and so anyone with access to both could have made telescopes and microscopes. Yet the first properly documented examples of each instrument appear 140+ years later. What is curious is that, according to the Galileo Project:

• "In the literature of white magic, so popular in the sixteenth century, there are several tantalizing references to devices that would allow one to see one's enemies or count coins from a great distance. But these allusions were cast in obscure language and were accompanied by fantastic claims; the telescope, when it came, was a very humble and simple device." (http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/instruments/telescope.html para 4)

Could it be that various individuals invented and reinvented the microscope and telescope multiple times in that century-and-a-half gap? If you view the Voynich Manuscript's quires 19 and 17 (in that order), you will see what looks for all the world like a lab notebook detailing the development of a sequence of microscopes (and possibly telescopes), seguing into speculative optical instruments. If only Richard Santa Coloma "dropped the Drebbel", he might find a far more amazing story waiting to be uncovered...

(2) Sean B. Palmer has posted some interesting pages here (on "Michitonese") and here (on the zodiac month names), though in both cases chasing behind work I had done six or so months previously. A nice resource he uses which I wasn't aware of: the Xerox XRCE Language Guesser. You feed it 5 sentences of text, and it compares them with 47 languages (though doubtless a longer list in the commercial version) to determine the closest match. Kewl! (i.e. 'fascinating technology but not actually very useful').

(3) One of the quintessential twentieth century outsiders was Terence McKenna: though I can't walk in his footsteps (largely because I'm allergic to mushrooms), it is hard not to feel some kind of admiration for his endless tilting against those powerful windmills who continue to blow us around. There's an audio archive of his work here, with a long (but often terribly wrong, I'm sorry to say) discussion of the Voynich Manuscript from 1983 here...

In it, he namechecks Mary D'Imperio's "Elegant Enigma" ("this is what your tax dollars are being used for"), and notes that the VMs' internal structuring probably indicates meaningful content However, McKenna understands that it's not a Trithemius-derived code or cipher and suggests it should be compared by computer with the work of John Dee (which Leonell Strong also flagged), even though he's very much into Dee-Kelley hoax hypotheses. Modern cryptographers may well be blind to the particular "weird quirky way" in which it was encoded/enciphered, he says: alternatively, "a chemical attack should be mounted" on the manuscript's plants. Oh, and it's "aaaaahbviously sixteenth century". Around 20 minutes in, lots of Yatesian stuff gets namechecked [if you like that kind of thing]. At the time, McKenna was "advising a group of people in Santa Cruz" (almost certainly via Ralph Abraham, I guess) in their research into the VMs, "one of the great oddities of human thought".

The problem with McKenna's Voynichological heritage is his subsequent endorsement of Leo Levitov's problematic 1987 Cathar decryption (about 24mins in, read from McKenna's "Archaic Revival"), which now looks rather foolish. Oh well! By the way, the mp3 ends with about 10 minutes of frog croaking, which may or may not be meaningful (you choose). :-)