Cipher Mysteries

Following a trail of breadcrumbs from my recent post on Johann Adam Schall von Bell, I'm returning to the issue of whether the VMs could ever have had a Far Eastern origin. To recap, Jacques Guy originally proposed Chinese as a kind of linguistic fou-merde joke on the Voynich research community, only to be unhappily surprised when people started ...

For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what ...

Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on "hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets", hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book "Decoding The Lost Symbol"... OK, I'm sure you've rumbled the secret already: that it's basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox's book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers ...

In "The Lost Symbol", Dan Brown takes his "symbologist" non-hero Robert Langdon on a high-speed twelve-hour tour around Washington. Broadly speaking, it's like riding pillion on a jetbike driven by a demented architectural historian screaming conspiratorial travelogue descriptions into your ears via a radio-mike. But you probably guessed that already. :-) In fact, because you all thought your other questions exactly ...

I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world's favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in "The Biggest Secret" (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice. Much as you'd expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For example, "John Dee was ...

At last, my copy of Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume's "Perpetual Motion: The history of an obsession" (which I mentioned here) has arrived, though I must admit to a certain amount of disappointment that its chapter 15 ("Perpetual Lamps") only runs from page 194 to page 199. All the same, if that is all we have, then let us pick ...