‘Edward Kelley’ category posts - « Cipher Mysteries »


Kelley moved from being John Dee’s “scryer” to an alchemical golden knight at Rudolf II’s Imperial Court in Prague. Famously wrote a book on the Philosopher’s Stone. Probably a conman who made it good. Unless you know better?


12 posts in 2 Pages.

Review of “The Book That Can’t Be Read” Voynich documentary…

Posted by nickpelling on Feb 21st, 2011 - 19 comments.
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: ...

The 14th European Skeptics Conference – does it really exist?

Posted by nickpelling on Sep 14th, 2010 - 2 comments.
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 ...

Voynich Manuscript – the state of play…

Posted by nickpelling on Dec 4th, 2009 - 31 comments.
For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what ...

Czech Voynich theory…

Posted by nickpelling on Jul 19th, 2008.
My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Jacobus de Tepenecz, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II). It is certainly true that Rudolf's interests and obsessions ...

Edward Kelley and the Blair Witch Project…?

Posted by nickpelling on Jul 3rd, 2008.
For those of you who like the whole John Dee / Edward Kelley mythology schtick, I thought I'd mention that the Wikipedia entry on Edward Kelley points to a silly link with the Blair Witch Project. There, the witch is named "Elly Kedward", a spoonerism of his name: there's even a fake site for her (all part of ...

David Icke and the Voynich…

Posted by nickpelling on Jul 1st, 2008.
I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world's favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in "The Biggest Secret" (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice. Much as you'd expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For example, "John Dee was ...

"Verifying" the Verifier Method…

Posted by nickpelling on Jun 6th, 2008.
John Sweat's "The Anthropogene" is a nice 'lost history' blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg's seven-step "Verifier Method". As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous "VMS is a hoax" claims in 2003/2004, I thought it ...

Review of "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone"…

Posted by nickpelling on May 28th, 2008 - 1 comment.
No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I'm talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film's gigantic marketing spend?) The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, actually the ...

Review of "Enoch’s Portal"…

Posted by nickpelling on May 19th, 2008.
Another day, another Voynich novel to read: but "Enoch's Portal" by A.W.Hill is certainly one with a heady sense of ambition. The flame the author wants us readers to touch is nothing short of an occult 'Theory Of Everything': a kind of quantum alchemy, linking Cathar euthanasia with Renaissance magic all the way through to Nazi Germany, the ...

Voynich novels latest…

Posted by nickpelling on May 10th, 2008.
A couple of emails just in from Voynich novelists: it's so much nicer to hear about stuff before it happens, rather than haphazardly 6+ months later (sadly the de facto standard for the Internet). Firstly, Richard Douglas Weber writes to tell me that his Voynich novel is now very well advanced, and that (though I'm exaggerating a tad) it has a ...