I’ve been persuaded by the lovely people at the London Fortean Society to give a talk next month (25th February 2016, Bell pub in Petticoat Lane The Pipeline, 94 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EZ, 7.30pm for an 8pm start, £4/£2 concs) on the weird (and occasionally wonderful) Voynich Manuscript.

If you haven’t been to an LFS event before, they start about 8pm with a “Fortmanteau” (a Fortean news round-up), followed by the main speaker for most of an hour. Then, after a 20-minute break, there’s a Q&A, finishing at 10-ish, optionally followed by a drink and a chat at the bar. As normal, I’m expecting to be assailed with questions on just about every cipher mystery going: which should be excellent fun. If any Cipher Mysteries readers plan to come along, please let me know!

If you don’t already know about Charles Fort, then shame on you! (Only kidding!) Fort liked to collect reports of phenomena that the science of his day couldn’t account for, which he edited and published in 1919 as The Book of the Damned: as a result, “Fortean” has become a useful adjective to hang onto anomalous data which sit uncomfortably with the so-called wisdom of the day. Hence “The Fortean Times”.

Is the Voynich Manuscript Fortean? For many people, it is: they would argue that scientific and historical investigations have so far revealed little of genuine interest or certainty, and that all the while it remains unreadable / uncrackable it is an anomalous artefact.

Yet for historians, this “Fortean Voynich” notion is perhaps something of a misdirection: there are plenty of old objects the smartest historians out there can as yet make no sense of – but does that necessarily mean that they are anomalous? Instead, might they simply be under-studied?

For the moment, though, perhaps there is truth enough in both camps: and that, as Charles Fort said, there is “…nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while“. 🙂

I hope to see some of you there: and here’s the blurb I put forward for the LFS’s next flyer:

The Blurb

The 500-year-old Voynich Manuscript is renowned as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”, as well as “the Everest of historical code-breaking”. With 200+ pages of unfathomable text, strange circular diagrams, and numerous drawings of impossible plants and tiny naked women, some consider it beguiling: others think it totally mad.

But the harder we strive to find explanations for the Voynich’s countless oddities, it seems the less we know. Is it insanely brilliant, or brilliantly insane? Even after a century of study, nobody can be sure. The only category it truly fits is Charles Fort’s “Damned Data” – phenomena for which science cannot comfortably account.

As a result, there is a plethora of Voynich theories, across a reassuringly Fortean panorama that ranges from conspiracies to lost South American civilizations to time-travelling aliens. Might one of them be right? Or are we doomed to spin round in circles, forever unable to make sense of this most intellectually cursed of artefacts?

Nick Pelling, a Voynich Manuscript researcher for more than a decade, will guide us through its wobbly history, unknown science and mad theories, and will happily answer any question we have on unsolved historical ciphers.

16 thoughts on “Nick Pelling Fortean Voynich talk in London, 25th February 2016

  1. bdid1dr on January 11, 2016 at 5:07 pm said:

    Good morning Mr. Blurber !
    Surely, you will be mentioning some latest discoveries, translations, and citations?
    Surely, we’ve been able to put the EVA into storage (for future codiologists to chew upon?
    I’m hoping that some of your long-time investigators (Rene Zandbergen, for one) will be attending or participating in the dialogues?
    I’m hoping you will be bringing to the meeting some of the illustrated specimens and their discussions. One of the most mysterious is the tomatillo (husk tomato) also known as physalis ixocarpus).
    And then there is the largest foldout folio which illustration is telling the danger of eating the wrong mushroom “Alcohol Inky”, which causes liver failure, hallucinations, and death — . There are references to the ‘god’ Ceyx and “goddess’ Alcyone. Also mention of Alcyone being the protectress of sailors on stormy seas.
    I’m also hoping you will be giving us a ‘report’ on the event — soon !
    bdid1dr

  2. Anton Alipov on January 12, 2016 at 8:02 pm said:

    Will a webcast be available?

  3. Anton: I’d guess not, though I’ll ask if I can perhaps capture the audio for a later podcast.

  4. Anton Alipov on January 13, 2016 at 12:37 pm said:

    Thank you in advance!

  5. bdid1dr on January 24, 2016 at 11:30 pm said:

    Nick, I have nowhere else to go with a particularly aggravating article which appeared in Smithsonian’s magazine issue of November 2015 (Volume 46, Number 7): ‘The Devil’s Tongue’ : Supposedly new info in re the Salem Witchcraft Trials: The True Motives of the Star Witness at the Center of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 — Remain one America’s Greatest Secrets”
    Bah! Humbug! Some forty years ago various scientists and grain growers proved what was causing hallucinations and nightmares: ergot – ergotamine – which infested the crop of rye grain — and which apparently was not affected by the heat of ovens or stoves while porridge and bread was being prepared.
    I am posting this ‘rant’ on your pages only because my memory serves me in that Salem Colony was originally British? The other item of interest is that one of my friends’ several times- great -grandmother was put on trial in Salem.
    I hope you can find some relevance to one or another of your various “Mystery” Blogs. (So much for Smithsonian and “Secrets of American History) heh!

    In another vein of discussion:
    One group of our earliest colonists tried to begin a silkworm/silk industry.
    Maybe something about ‘papellony’ — as far as it relates to the silkworm and its voracious eating of the mulberry leaves?
    You’ll also find discussion about the silkworm and butterfly/moth in Fray Sahagun’s magnificent “Florentine” Mss. Can you tell it has been a slow day for me? Not quite bouncing off the walls — just giving my Venetian-blinds a thorough dusting!

  6. Thomas F.Spande on February 4, 2016 at 8:43 pm said:

    Dear B. Ergot poisoning is just one of many explanations for the Salem Witchcraft Trials. There seems a cottage industry in churning out books on this subject but the one I liked most seems no longer available online: “When the Devil Came to Massachussets” (author’s name has slipped my mind) and this posits in the preface that the matter boiled down to land claims. The Mass Bay colony was not where the original charter specified (i.e. VA) but the pilgrims,, seasick, got blown off course and landed near what is now Plymouth MA. Good enough they thought. The colony was created when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector of England, etc. and having beheaded King Charles II, had issued land warrants. Whether these would hold up when the new Kind Wm took the throne was uppermost in the minds of the puritans of the colony. Many feared they would loose their land. So
    attempts were made to grab neighbor’s lands and calling them witches or warlocks served the bill. I think the trials (really much bigger in Ipswitch and Andover than tiny Salem village (not even Salem proper). Attached is an abstract of an Oxford book on this miserable episode in Am history. Cheers, Tom

    Oxford University Press Inc, United States, 2014. Hardback. Book Condition: New. 236 x 165 mm. Language: English Brand New Book. Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers-mainly young women-suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down those responsible for the demonic work. The resulting Salem Witch Trials, culminating in the execution of 19 villagers, persists as one of the most mysterious and fascinating events in American history. Historians have speculated on a web of possible causes for the witchcraft that stated in Salem and spread across the region-religious crisis, ergot poisoning, an encephalitis outbreak, frontier war hysteria-but most agree that there was no single factor. Rather, as Emerson Baker illustrates in this seminal new work, Salem was a perfect storm : a unique convergence of conditions and events that produced something extraordinary throughout New England in 1692 and the following years, and which has haunted us ever since. Baker shows how a range of factors in the Bay colony in the 1690s, including a new charter and government, a lethal frontier war, and religious and political conflicts, set the stage for the dramatic events in Salem. Engaging a range of perspectives, he looks at the key players in the outbreak-the accused witches and the people they allegedly bewitched, as well as the judges and government officials who prosecuted them-and wrestles with questions about why the Salem tragedy unfolded as it did, and why it has become an enduring legacy. Salem in 1692 was a critical moment for the fading Puritan government of Massachusetts Bay, whose attempts to suppress the story of the trials and erase them from memory only fueled the popular imagination. Baker argues that the trials marked a turning point in colonial history from Puritan communalism to Yankee independence, from faith in collective conscience to skepticism toward moral governance. A brilliantly told tale, A Storm of Witchcraft also puts

  7. bdid1dr on February 9, 2016 at 5:24 pm said:

    Hey again, ThomS!
    I’m hoping Nick will look at this recent commentary of ours as being fodder for his upcoming Fortean-Voynich talk (on the 26th of this month). I’m hoping he will get ‘back to us’ with lots of discussion material (food for thought?).
    beady-eyed wonder (er)
    🙂

  8. Is it necessary to buy a ticket in advance, or can people pay at the door? Also according to the Fortean London Society blog, your talk now has a new venue: The Pipeline, 94 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EZ.

  9. Donald: I believe you have to buy in advance, because tickets are selling like hot cakes. Errr… at an international hot cake festival. Where everyone loves hot caskes. And there’s only one small hot cake stand. 🙂 [*]

    I’ll post a reminder about the change of venue in a few days, just to make sure that the LFS don’t move the talk a second time to the Royal Albert Hall or somewhere. 😉

    [*] Some of this may possibly be slightly exaggerated.

  10. Unlike most West End attractions, the ticket site adds a mere 20p for the privilege of booking in advance: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/346899

  11. Ooops, I meant “40p (20p concessions)”, sorry. 😐

  12. Nick (and ThomS) — Oh, I wish I could fly (not necessarily on a broomstick) ! Thanx for the follow-up (to the Salem Witchcraft Trials) Do you recall what methods were used to obtain ‘confessions’? Nick, I’ll be reading every word of your post-event re-cap.
    G’night!
    bd

  13. Thomas F.Spande on February 27, 2016 at 9:32 pm said:

    Hi again B., I do recall a few details on the Witchcraft trials. It seems to have started with a house servant (probably indentured) from the Caribbean who entertained some children of the clergyman she served with tales of “voodoo” and the kids went overboard with these tales, spreading them about in Salem village (Not Salem proper which was a huge port where 1/10 th the national GDP came through and N. Hawthorne was a surveyor of cargoes and wrote “The Scarlet Letter” in his spare time). Anyway tiny Salem village was the epicenter of an unfolding hysteria that particularly affected young teen-aged girls. In those days, many a household was headed by a young wife of 13 yrs or so (no one called them child brides at the time; life was short and procreation was the name of the game). Anyway the girls were probably gripped by anxiety over their future: spinster? or a wife with huge family?

    Originally divines like Cotton Mather and his son encouraged the purging of their flocks of deviltry but toward the end of the witch-hunts, the jails were bursting (particularly in Andover, MA where 100 or so unfortunates waited trials that had become spectator sports and they began to appeal to reason and for getting back to work. Land grabs were also a part of the equation. Men could be accused of being warlocks and also in league with the devil and I recall that a retired preacher was hunted down in his retirement in Maine (then a part of Mass Bay colony) and dragged down to Salem, tried by the usual method of placing a huge plank across the chest, to which stones were piled until the prisoner could come up with some accomplices or expired. The preacher refused to squeal and suffocated. Most of the accused who were found guilty were hanged, I believe. I don’t recall any trials by fire (like Joan of Arc) being used. Firewood was too precious! Although Cotton Mather, who was also a “hanging judge” sort of encouraged the witchhunts at the start, he totally reversed his position and argued forcefully that the hunts were really serving as a tool of the devil and should be ended. That’s it from my memory bank. Cheers, Tom

  14. bdid1dr on March 20, 2016 at 9:33 pm said:

    ” selling like hot caskets?” “selling like hot casks?” “cakes right out of the oven ?”

    Gotcha, O meticulous One ! I’m planning on having ‘hot cakes” one of these colder, wet, rainy OR snowy days. Much too late for your Fortean talk. I hope you had a lot of fun!

    Have you yet been able to find a copy of Elizebeth Friedman’s book (or her photo album/gallery?

  15. bdid1dr on March 20, 2016 at 9:41 pm said:

    T’was fascinating. Joyner did a beautiful photo essay of Elisebeth’s involvement in codiology, and some discussion in re Fabyan (Riverbank?)
    Cheers!
    bd

  16. bdid1dr on March 22, 2016 at 5:44 pm said:

    In re a book published, reputedly, by the title “Divine Fire” (Elizebeth Friedman’s diary and love poems) I once again refer you the first seven pages of a discussion of their biography (PDF format) offered by W.D. Joyner:

    http://www.wdjjoyner.com/papers/elizebeth-friedman-Early-crypto-work4.pdf

    Pages six and seven are love poems: page 6, last paragraph ends “You are perfectly beautiful! ” Page 7 begins: This was the private nickname William Friedman often used for Elizebeth: his “divine fire.” For crytographers, it was an exciting time to be alive. This ‘fire’ between them never died.

    End of my excerpt (which may not come up as a full url) bdid1dr

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