Cipher Mysteries

I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an "easy in". Just saying "code" conjures up... Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really) Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of 'The Secret') A central McGuffin that is ...

The Internet is a strange thing, a virtual photographer's jacket crammed with countless pockets of enthusiasts. For example, you beautiful cipher mysteries fans circulate within one bijou (but nicely-appointed) pocket, while the massed legions of Slashdot fans have a Tardis-style hyperzoom lens pocket all of their own. But... what would happen if these two worlds collided? A chance to find out came in December 2009, when ...

Edith Sherwood very kindly left an interesting comment on my "Voynich Manuscript - the State of Play" post, which I thought was far too good to leave dangling in a mere margin. She wrote:- If you read the 14C dating of the Vinland Map by the U of Arizona, you will find that they calculate the ...

It's been an interesting day: Edith Sherwood's Voynich website got Slashdotted - given that Cipher Mysteries picked up 4900 visitors from that tsunami of geeky clicks, edithsherwood.com itself must have had (say) 30000 or more. And then (just now), ORF released a teaser press release for next week's "DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL" documentary to their (German-language) website. So, the ...

Here's a quick Voynich Manuscript palaeographic puzzle for you. A couple of months ago, I discussed Edith Sherwood's suggestion that the third letter in the piece of marginalia on f116v was a Florentine "x", as per Leonardo da Vinci's quasi-shorthand. I also proposed that the topmost line there might have read "por le bon simon s..." Going over this again just ...

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 ...

A new day brings a new Google Adwords campaign from Edith Sherwood (Edith, please just email me instead, it'll get the word out far quicker), though this time not promoting another angle on her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-Manuscript hypothesis... but rather a transposition cipher Voynichese hypothesis. Specifically, she proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may ...

Edith Sherwood recently flagged the "sun-face" at the middle of f68v1 as being a representation of Apollo, and that this "could indicate an association with Roman mythology". Certainly, the face is tilted slightly upward and is linked with the sun, both features you might (naively, iconologically) expect to point to Apollo. If only Voynich research was that simple! Let's start ...

Edith Sherwood, everyone's favourite Leonardo-wrote-the-Voynich-so-he-did theorist, has posted up an extensive (and fascinating) new article focusing mainly on the depictions of the sun, moon and stars in the Voynich Manuscript: the starting point of her journey is the striking similarity between suns and moons in the VMs' "astronomical" Quire 9 and a sun/moon pair on a particular Afro-Portuguese ivory horn (#101) carved between 1495 ...

A few years ago, people Googling for "Voynich" started to see a sponsored "AdWord" link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com. Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was left-handed, and the VMs ...