Cipher Mysteries

Just a quick reminder that the next Voynich pub meet is set for 4pm this very Sunday (i.e. 5th September 2010) at the Prospect of Whitby, 57 Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SH. Though plenty of Voynicheros are hoping to come along, as always we'll just have to see who manages to get there on the day... Incidentally, if for some random reason - you ...

Many historians and palaeographers have concluded that the interleaved '+' signs added to the Voynich Manuscript's back page indicate that the containing text is some kind of spell, incantation, chant, charm, curse, pious utterance, etc. Well, it's completely true that '+' was used in all of the preceding forms to indicate that the (non-silent) reader should physically trace out the sign of the cross at ...

I've waited a decade to find anything good on the Rohonc Codex (and don't get me started on Wikipedia yet again), so it is with great delight that I read Benedek Lang's April 2010 Cryptologia article "Why Don't We Decipher an Outdated Cipher System? The Codex of Rohonc" that he kindly mentioned in a comment on this site a few days ago. Despite ...

A recurring motif running through my own Voynich research is trying to grasp what happened to the manuscript over time. If you examine it carefully, you'll find plenty of good reasons to think that its original ('alpha') state was significantly different to its final ('omega') state. My strong hunch is that if we were able to reconstruct how the manuscript looked in its original state, we would take a very ...

You may well recognize some of the following seven habits (though not in your own work, of course)... Proactively ferret out all the tenuously-related marginal evidence you can which doesn't quite contradict your book's eye-catching historical headline (i.e. "Nostradamus - Leonardo's grandson?", etc). That'll do nicely for Chapters 3 to 10! Construct the cover and the final chapter of your soon-to-be-bestselling book before doing any actual research. Sinking ...

As a Voynich Manuscript marginalia cognoscente, I'm always alert for new angles on the various incidental marks apparently added by its later owners. So, when Tim Tattrie left a comment about the "chicken scratch" marginalia on my recent Voynich-frontiers-circa-2010 post, I thought it was probably time to revisit them here. Tim's query was whether anyone had pursued the initials scribbled ...

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand... * * * * * * The Brazilian girl's plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely ...

As I mentioned here recently, I've been trying to grasp the structure of the humanist community of astronomers / mathematicians orbiting around Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome... but so far haven't found any definitively useful books on the subject. Thony Christie has a nice article here, and there's a book on 15th century Viennese ...

Though Professor David A. King is best known, academically speaking, for his detailed study of astrolabes, I first ran across him via his epic (2001) tome "The Ciphers of the Monks" (summarised here): there, what happened was that one particular 14th century astrolabe from Picardy had some markings in an unusual number system first devised by Cistercian monks, and - ...

For a decade, I've wondered whether any of the Voynich Manuscript's circular drawings depict astronomical instruments - for before satnav there was celnav ("celestial navigation"). Here's a brief guide to three key instrument types from the VMs' timeframe, and my current thoughts on the enigmatic circular diagram on f57v... * * * * * * * A key navigational problem of the 15th ...