‘Philip Neal’ category posts - « Cipher Mysteries »



Letters hidden in Voynich plants…

Posted by nickpelling on Feb 27th, 2010 - 16 comments.
For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs' confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I've done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it's now interesting to hear that René ...

Voynich Summer Camp IM, transcript of session #2…

Posted by nickpelling on Sep 29th, 2009.
As promised (though a little later than planned), here's the transcript of the second IM session I ran at the 2009 Voynich Summer Camp in Budapest. Not quite as meaty as the first IM session, but some OK stuff in there all the same. Enjoy! [11:56:09] NP: Okeydokey, ready when you are [11:56:18] vc: Okedykokedy [11:56:27] NP: :) [11:56:35] vc: We are. [11:56:35] NP: I ...

“The True Path of Alchemy” is *not* the VMs…

Posted by nickpelling on Aug 30th, 2009.
A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that "The True Path of Alchemy" is not the VMs (confirming Rene's suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny ...

Voynich Scrabble…?

Posted by nickpelling on Mar 9th, 2009 - 18 comments.
I recently bumped into a "Random Freebie" from blogger "Miss Black Pepper": apropos of nothing much, she posted up a Voynich Manuscript Scrabble Tile Set, composed of nice little images clipped from the Voynich Manuscript (which she happens to rather like). Of course, this set me wondering what a real Voynich Scrabble would look like. You see, the most appalling thing ...

Central London history / mystery book meet…?

Posted by nickpelling on Nov 15th, 2008 - 2 comments.
Here's a quicky idea... I have (possibly literally) a ton of books in my library, most of which seems to revolve around early modern / Renaissance history, telescopes, ciphers, and themes touching on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript. And somehow the mound keeps on growing, week on week. Even though I love them all, I can appreciate that (actually) this is a bit of ...

Philip Neal strikes again…

Posted by nickpelling on Oct 22nd, 2008 - 4 comments.
Not content with having given us fantastic English translations of all the key 17th century VMs-related documents, my old friend Philip Neal has found a new VMs-related letter. Sensibly, he was looking in the Kircher correspondence archives when he found a new letter by Godefridus Kinner to Kircher [recto and ...

"Das Voynich Blog" (reading German can be easy sometimes)

Posted by nickpelling on Nov 25th, 2007.
Here's a link to Elias Schwerdtfeger's very interesting "Das Voynich Blog". Elias has worked really hard behind the scenes to find ways of visualising the statistics expressing what "old hand" Voynichologists (such as, say, Philip Neal & I) see when we look at the Voynich - you know, the highly bonded, multi-level internal structure that exists at the stroke, character, ...