Cipher Mysteries

In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my "The Curse of the Voynich" Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]'s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of ...

Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things ...

Following my recent post on modern per-degree astrology, Rene Zandbergen very kindly left a comment here pointing to online scans of a 15th century German translation of some of Pietro d'Abano's works on astrology. While idly flicking through that, I noticed (starting on folio 132r) a short book by Johannes Hartlieb on 'Namenmantik' (onomancy, using names to tell fortunes). ...

A new day dawns, bringing with it a nice email from Augusto Buonafalce in response to my post on Leonardo da Vinci's 'x'-like abbreviation for 'ver' (as recently mentioned by Edith Sherwood). Augusto points out that if you remove ...

Poor old Roald Dahl, remembered more or less entirely for his plucky parentless pawpers propelled into beastly circumstances (but who somehow come good in the end). Apart from bookish Dahl completists patiently working their way through the library shelf to find hidden gems to read to their son/daughter (errrm... like me), whoever would end up reading Dahl's "Esio Trot"? It's a nice (if slightly mawkish, ...

I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough ...

Spurred on by a blog comment left this morning, I wondered whether the Dorabella cipher might actually (because of the symmetry of its cipherbet shapes) be some kind of rotating pigpen cipher, where you rotate each of the positions around after each letter. This would be a bit like a "poor man's Alberti cipher disk"... just ...

I'm getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google's hits are for ghastly sites listing "Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries" or "10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes". Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I'm not getting "Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips" and ...

Essentially, a ciphertext is a piece of text where the individual letters have been transformed according to a rule system - substitution cipher rules replace the shape of the letters (as if you had just changed the font), while transposition cipher rules manipulate the order of the letters. THIS IS A CIPHER ---> UIKT KT B DKQIFS  ...

Here's another post inspired by the book I'm currently reading, Joscelyn Godwin's "The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance". Whereas 15th century Renaissance art was largely orderly, linear, a lot of Mannerist late 16th-century art is disorganized, curvilinear, riotous - this has led to the label of antirinascimento, the "Anti-Renaissance". But to someone like Godwin with both feet in the iconological trenches, this speaks ...