Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

Once upon a time (in 1518), a Venetian called Giovanni Agostino Pantheo put himself into hot water by writing a work on alchemy (the Ars Transmutationis Metallicae). Yet essentially unrepentant, he went on to publish (in 1530) a further book on alchemy called the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam: this was largely a reprise of his 1518 book but dressed in additional historical garb for an ...

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  ...

Was the "Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus" really written by John Dee? I first saw this several years back, when I stumbled upon Joseph Peterson's transcription of it on the Esoteric Archives website. The link with Dee seemed (and still seems) to me to be spurious: even though he is mentioned right at the start of the text, for ...

A quick pop-cultural aside: the song "Eternal Flame" was written by hugely successful American songwriter Billy Steinberg with Tom Kelly and Susanna Hoffs (of The Bangles). The inspiration for the song came from an eternal flame seen by Bangles' bass-player Michael Steele burning at Gracelands in Elvis Presley's memory, as well as from one at a Palm ...

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about the "Hero's Journey", his condensation of mythology into the single ur-story (often referred to as the "monomyth")beneath it all. In recent decades, Campbell's work was popularized by Chris Vogler in his book "The Writer's Journey", that distilled the original 17 stages to a 12-stage / 3-act writing template. All of which makes the recent ...

It's a nice historical detective story, one kicked off by John Dee, Frances Yates' favourite Elizabethan 'magus' (though I personally suspect Dee's 'magic' was probably less 'magickal' than it might appear), when he claimed to have told an angel that his "great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga". Dee lost ...

One very early cipher involved replacing the vowels with dots. In his "Codes and Ciphers" (1939/1949) p.15, Alexander d'Agapeyeff asserts that this was a "Benedictine tradition", in that the Benedictine order of monks (of which Trithemius was later an Abbot) had long used it as a cipher. The first direct mention we have of it was in a ninth century ...

Just mooching around the web looking for Trithemius-related stuff (as you do), I saw a reference to Renaissance "telescopes, microscopes and bezicles" in the first (free) page of Polygraphia and the Renaissance sign: The case of Trithemius, from the Springer journal Neophilologus. I had never heard of "bezicles", so decided to have a sniff around, see what I ...