Cipher Mysteries

A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I've called them "The Blitz Ciphers", but they're probably much older than the 1940s... They were handed down to ...

I've just watched the National Geographic / Naked Science documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, courtesy of a Stateside friend (thanks!). Regular Cipher Mysteries readers will already know how my review of it is supposed to go - 'that, despite a few inaccuracies, it was great to see the Voynich Manuscript being brought to a popular audience'. But actually, the whole thing made me utterly furious: ...

London, UK, 11 Nov 2010. In a surprising twist worthy of Voldemort himself, A-list children's author and philanthropist J.K.Rowling has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the popular Internet cipher mystery meme "The Voynich Manuscript". She now says it all was a 1990 publicity stunt for an early release of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", which was - much like Norwegian band's a-ha's 1985 hit single ...

A nice email arrives from Anne Reeves of The John Dee of Mortlake Society: there's an AGM scheduled for Tuesday 19th October 2010 at 8pm at St Mary's in Mortlake (£5 for non-members, but includes a glass of wine), though you can turn up to chat from 7pm. According to the JDoMS's newsletter, their guest speaker will be ...

The next European Skeptics Conference starts in Budapest in a few days' time (17th-19th September 2010), and features Klaus Schmeh giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript. Though Klaus has invested a lot of effort into building up a hardline skeptical position on VMs theories (basically, that more or less everything written on it is either pseudoscience or pseudohistory), I personally don't ...

(I'll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don't have star ratings & I'm not one to hide what I'm thinking, so this connection shouldn't ...

For the most part, constructing plausible explanations for the drawings in the Voynich Manuscript is a fairly straightforward exercise. Even its apparently-weird botany could well be subtly rational (for example, if plants on opposite pages swapped their roots over in the original binding, in a kind of visual anagram), as could the astronomy, the astrology, and the water / balneology quires (if all ...

Honestly,I do try to look at things that are entirely unconnected with cipher mysteries. But somehow (I really don't know how) they keep creeping in regardless. For example, last night I settled down to watch "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" on DVD with my son on loan from the library (the DVD that is, however hooked on books Alex may be). ...

Rene Zandbergen recently stumbled upon a circular drawing in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France's MS Coislin 338, and wondered whether it might be "a possible precedent for a Voynich astronomical illustration, where the original MS is Greek", just as for two other Greek manuscripts (Codex Taurinensis C VII 15 and MS Vat Gr. 1291) ...

When Wilfrid Voynich bought his (now eponymous) manuscript in 1912, it was accompanied by a 1665 letter from Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher. In that, Marci noted three things that Raphael Mnishovsky (King Ferdinand III's Czech language tutor) had told him about the strange artefact:- "that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolf" "that [Rudolf II] presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought ...