Steve Ekwall’s Folding Key…
Though many people with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript will have vaguely heard of Steve Ekwall and his claims that, back in June 2000, an Excitant Spirit showed him how to make a “Folding Key” to help disentangle the Voynich’s knotted ciphertext, very few have any real idea what he’s talking about. In fact, I might just be the only one. And so I thought it might be good to YouTube-ify a short film explaining what Steve Ekwall was saying. (Specifically, how his “Folding Key” works).
As far as what you’re supposed to do with it… he believes that a Voynichese gallows character tells the decipherer to fold / flip the device to that state, an EVA ‘e’ character says to advance the device to the next state, while an EVA ‘ch’ glyph says to ‘flip’ the device to the opposite state (i.e. state 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 <–> state 5 / 6 / 7 / 8). Make of all that what you will!
If you want to print out your very own folding key, there’s a Folding Key PDF on my Compelling Press website: and for those who have yet to experience Steve’s original webpages, here are links to my copy of his main web-page, and to his additional “Folding KEY 101″ page (though apologies for all the dead links there!)
May 24th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
One thing I wondered about this… does Ekwall himself really believe in the “Excitant Spirit”? It’s interesting how we occasionally have flashes of inspiration without entirely knowing where they came from.
Thanks for the understandable description of the folding key… if Ekwall’s really onto something and this helps to solve the Voynich cipher, we may be faced with an even bigger mystery. It certainly strikes me as more plausible than Newbold’s micro-shorthand, or anything involving alien technology for transforming DNA with sound.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Hi Emily,
Having spoken with Steve Ekwall a number of times over the last decade, I can say that he honestly believes that he experienced something distinctly unnerving, and that he was somehow in the presence of a thing which he called an “Excitant Spirit” for no better reason than it ought to have a name. As I mentioned in the video, you can construct any number of rational explanations (a mini-stroke, an epileptic fit, a weird hacker prank, etc) to explain: but regardless, the folding key is still there at the end of it all, and without any explanation.
Even if you’ve heard just about every manner of Voynich theory going, Steve’s account is really something else entirely… genuinely mysterious.
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
May 26th, 2009 at 11:06 am
I have watched the videos a couple of times, but I still cannot see how the folding key does anything but assign an arbitrary number from 1 to 8 to each gallows character. I do know how cryptographic cipher key states work, but I can’t see how the order he puts them in has any meaning.
And I must say that I agree with Emily in that, no matter how weird this key is, it’s still more likely than alien DNA-audiotransformation!
May 26th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Hi Christopher,
My suspicion is that even though the Voynich cipher system contains a number of static elements (such as EVA qo, dy, ain, aiin, probably am, etc) that are constant across all states, most of the rest of it changes according to the state of the associated ciphering device – whether that’s a cipher wheel, an Ekwall “folding key”, or whatever.
To my eyes, then, the cipher “statefulness” in the VMs appears to be intended not to mathematically flatten the overall distribution, but rather to confound the statistics within that distribution. Imagine, for example, a simple cipher where you sequentially rotated the five vowels within a sentence, but kept all the consonants intact: “somathang luki this”. Now, this on its own is trivial: but if you put a few small cipher components like that together to create a composite cipher system, that really would be hard to crack.
What Steve Ekwall is claiming is that each of the eight states contains a 3×3 grid (though the central square is empty): and so only eight cipher letters dynamically change according to the state, while the rest remain constant. Cryptographically, this is an extraordinarily sophisticated match for what we see in the Voynich Manuscript’s language. And so I ask again: how on earth did Steve make that step?
Chapter 12 of my book (specifically p.215) suggests how the 3×3 grid might be mapped onto letter pairs: or, s, ar / om, m , am / ol, l, al. I suspect that these dynamically permute the most common consonants, while e / ee / eee / ch / sh statically represent the vowels, and with rarer consonants represented by air, aiir, am, etc.
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
May 26th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Wow, I just read p.215 (I feel like a cheater for starting at the end of the book!) and I must say that seeing that pattern which somewhat reads [2|3|4] at the top sent some shivers down MY spine as well.
Thanks for the great explanation,
Christopher.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Hi Christopher,
I’m sure you’ll like the rest of the book, too!
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….