Cipher Mysteries

With 2012 - the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich's 1912 purchase of his subsequently-eponymous manuscript - inching ever closer, we will doubtless soon see a broad international wave of quick-turnaround documentary makers sniffing around its margins, snuffling for pungent historical truffles in the florilegial undergrowth of the Interweb. If, dear reader, that thumbnail profile just happens to describe you, then here's what you need: a ...

Last week  (3rd February 2011) saw the US premiere of "The Book That Can't Be Read", the long-awaited National Geographic channel airing of the recent ORF documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Though it prominently features the benign beardiness of everyone's favourite Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen, for a pleasant change the star of the show is undoubtedly the manuscript itself, with the ...

...writing a letter? In what is probably the hidden-writing news story of the year, "The UK spy agency MI6 experimented with using semen as invisible ink", under the steady hand of department head Mansfield Cumming. "Next time you're banging out a message, 007, use a pen." (As James Bond himself would say, "this stuff writes itself"). The original story is ...

It's time for a new Voynich research direction! Thanks to Benedek Lang's "Unlocked Books", I'm starting to realise that I've perhaps spent too long thinking solely about codicology of the single text, when what is often as important is the 'codicological context' - i.e. the collection of other (but presumably conceptually related in some way) texts that were bound alongside by ...

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again), so it is with great delight that I read Benedek Lang's April 2010 Cryptologia article "Why Don't We Decipher an Outdated Cipher System?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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Here's the latest on the Savoy palaeography post from a couple of days back: firstly, I donned my image analysis hat and went hunting for any sign of the missing "l"-loop. Enhancing f116v right to the edge, you can certainly just about make out a loop above the "t" of "michiton" (highlighted below), which would be consistent ...