Welcome to Nick Pelling's Cipher Mysteries, a blog full of curious and wonderful historical code/cipher mysteries, such as the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale Papers. It also looks sideways to other less obvious places where these appear - books, films, TV, radio, music, opera, sculpture, design, metalworking, eBay scams, etc.
Even though there are many thousands of known examples of historical ciphers, nearly all have been broken to reveal their contents, and in fact normally turn out to be just 'opinions' rather than 'secrets'.
This website is therefore about the handful of historical ciphertexts whose ciphers remain unbroken, and the mysteries (and difficulties) surrounding them. For centuries, novelists have appropriated these unbroken ciphertexts as useful plot devices: but bizarrely, the non-fiction theories surrounding such cipher mysteries are often even more fantastical than the fictional explanations.
Voynich Manuscript Posts & Pages
Many researchers in the field consider the Voynich Manuscript to be the greatest cipher mystery ever, which is why it is mentioned so often on this website (and which is why this was originally called "Voynich News").
Made up of more than 220 unreadable pages and with hundreds of drawings that seem to cunningly evade consistent interpretation on any level, the "VMs" certainly ticks all the boxes for a truly epic mystery, and has featured in at least thirty novels. Even now, nearly a century after Wilfrid Voynich claimed to have uncovered this "ugly duckling" manuscript in Northern Italy, fragmented cohorts of battling researchers furiously fight each other over its date, its likely enciphering system(s), its content, its provenance... in fact, just about every aspect of it you can think of continues to be contested.
The Voynich Manuscript has both history and mystery in large doses, but awaits the first person to come along and properly see through its deceptions and trickery. Might that be you? If all this sounds like something you'd like to know more about, here are links to some of the most useful VMs-related pages on this site.
Other Cipher Mystery Stuff
- If you landed here by accident, perhaps some entertaining general blog posts might be what you'd like: the Adrenalini Brothers cipher, a sexy enciphered Jewish limerick, Hans Carvel retold as a txt msg.
- If cipher-themed short stories interest you, there are plenty here to enjoy:-
- Finally, if you're just interested in historical cipher mysteries in general, this is the site for you! Probably the best way to get the full benefit is to subscribe by email (yes, it's completely free)- just enter your email address in the box at the top right and click on the "Subscribe" button below it. Simple! Posts are also carefully categorised, so feel free to mooch around using the Categories widget-thing on the top left.
PS: for more about this site, click here.
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 30th, 2009 - 7 comments.
Every few years, I get around to posting a list of Voynich challenges - things about the Voynich Manuscript that we would like to know or to find out.
Looking back at my 2001 list of Voynich Challenges, I seem to have been flailing around at every codicological nuance going: yes, there are hundreds of interesting angles to consider - ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 29th, 2009 - 4 comments.
Of course, the minute I post about Voynich talks, several more suddenly pop up. :-)
The 'Heaven Astrolabe' blogger (Margherita Fiorello) gave a nicely-meandering (but picture-heavy) description of wandering across Rome to see a talk on the Voynich Manuscript, held on the 23rd June 2009 at the Libreria Aseq esoteric bookshop (a bit like an upmarket Italian version of ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 28th, 2009.
As part of this year's week-long typography event at Lurs (August 2009), long-time Voynichologist François Almaleh will be giving a talk on "Le manuscrit Voynich" - but ignore the typo on the page which makes it look as if his session is something to do with HELMO (which is actually the joint name of two French graphic artists - here's a ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 27th, 2009 - 8 comments.
On the one hand, I've spent years trying to reconstruct the "inner history" of the Voynich Manuscript: while on the other, I've spent the same period trying to deconstruct the subtle fault-lines in its cipher system. History and science: the ultimate epistemological pincer attack, if you will.
In that general vein, here's a new research angle on the Voynich Manuscript's cipher to think ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 25th, 2009 - 3 comments.
Words reaches Cipher Mysteries ears (via the Italian Wikipedia Voynich page) of a new Italian Voynich-themed novel called "Codex" by Roberto Salvidio. The story begins when an unknown person sends a manuscript to Mary Radclyffe's family: from then on, she's on the run until she can decode the Voynich Manuscript. There's plenty of esotericism and a sprinkling of Leonardo in the ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 23rd, 2009 - 4 comments.
Here's a quick Voynich Manuscript palaeographic puzzle for you. A couple of months ago, I discussed Edith Sherwood's suggestion that the third letter in the piece of marginalia on f116v was a Florentine "x", as per Leonardo da Vinci's quasi-shorthand. I also proposed that the topmost line there might have read "por le bon simon s..."
Going over this again just ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 22nd, 2009.
Just to let you know that the normal summer "news drought" appears to have arrived a little early this year - apart from a couple of shiny new Voynich theories working their way through the pipeline and some long overdue book reviews to write up (most notably Christopher Harris' novel "Mappamundi"), there's really nothing much happening.
So... please don't be unduly ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 21st, 2009.
In early 2008, I became interested in the mystery surrounding the first invention of the telescope. The year was the 400th anniversary of the first Dutch telescope patent application - yet the more accounts and explanations I read (even the very best ones, such as Albert van Helden's exemplary "The Invention of the Telescope"), the less I believed any of them. For the ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 18th, 2009 - 4 comments.
One of the (frustratingly small) number of art history leads the Voynich Manuscript's author dangles before our eyes is the balneology part of Q13 ("quire 13"). Specifically, there are two bifolios that depict baths and pools, where the pictures helpfully allow us to reconstruct what the page layout originally was:
84r/84v - contains Q13's quire number (which should be at ...
Posted by nickpelling on Jun 17th, 2009 - 9 comments.
Late in 2008, Adam D. Morris emailed me to discuss his Voynich theory: that the VMs might have some connection with Hieronymus Reusner. Finally, I've got round to posting about it (sorry for the delay, Adam!)...
Adam's jumping-off point was the visual similarities between the VMs and Reusner's 1582 book ...
