“I’ll give it to you to suck, FINISH HIM.” (yes, really)…

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When people suggest that the repetitions in the Voynich Manuscript might have arisen because of a delusional paranoid author, I do wonder if they have ever seen anything by angry, mad, disbarred lawyer Francis E. Dec Esquire? Here’s one of his staggering puppet communist Frankenstein computer gangster god rant letters performed by a voice actor courtesy of YouTube. Well worth watching right to the end, I’d say! 🙂

Really, could anyone square this kind of content with the calm, controlled, rational penmanship of the VMs? I don’t think so, sorry!

The secret history of Voynich chicken scratches…

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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 different view on how it ‘worked’ or ‘functioned’ as an object – and so I keep on gently digging away at the marginalia and codicological clues, to see what subtle stories they have to tell us, what secret histories are betrayed by their presence.

Of course, to many (if not most) Voynich researchers this is just too arcane a way of looking at what (to their eyes) is simply a cryptological or linguistic conundrum. Each to their own, eh? But all the same, here’s a new angle to think about…

In a previous post, I discussed the so-called “chicken scratch” marginalia on f66v and f86v3, with a codicological aside that…

[…]if you reorder Q8 (Quire #8) to place the astronomical (non-herbal) pages at the back, and also follow Glen Claston’s suggestion by inserting the nine-rosette quire between (the reordered) Q8 and Q9, what you unexpectedly find is that the f66v and f86v3 chicken scratches move extremely close together. If this is correct, it would imply that the doodles were added very early on in the life of the VMs, probably earlier even than the fifteenth-century hand quire numbering (and hence probably early-to-mid 15th century).

However, I think this chain of reasoning can be extended just a little further. Why do these chicken scratch marks only occur on these two pages and nowhere else? I suspect that the most likely reason is that the two pages were not only (as I noted) “extremely close” to each other but also – at the moment that the chicken scratches were accidentally added to the manuscript opened out on someone’s (Simon Sint’s?) writing desk – were probably on two pages facing each other.

Yet the paradox here is about how this ever could have been, given that both marginalia are on verso pages.

Now, for normal two-panel bifolios, the assignment of “r” (recto) and “v” (verso) is unproblematic – the recto side is always the page nearest the front of the book, while the verso side is the page nearest the back. However, if you instead look at wider-than-two-panel bifolios and consider rebinding the panels along different edges, pages can change their orientation (facingness) and hence can change between verso and recto.

So, because f66v is part of a normal two-panel bifolio, for it to have originally been a recto page requires that it was on a wider bifolio that was trimmed down to two panels and then rebound… and there’s no obvious reason to think anything  like that happened. Hence, I think we can reasonably infer that if the two chicken scratch pages did originally sit side-by-side, f66v was on the left hand side of the pair.

Looking at f86v3, however, we see that it is on the back of the Voynich’s infamous “nine-rosette” drawing, which comprises a large 3 x 2 set of panels that fold out. Moreover, Voynich researcher Glen Claston has proposed that at some point in its history, this quire (Quire 14) sustained significant damage along its original binding crease (green, below) and so was rebound along a different fold (blue, below).

rosette-folding

And guess what? If you were to bind Quire 14 along the green line, make the big horizontal fold first (as it is now), and keep the blue fold internal (i.e. exactly the way it is now), the page which would sit right at the front of Q14 is (you’re way ahead of me) f86v3. And because f86v3 also has the Q14 quire mark (near the bottom right), this would give yet more support to the idea that the VMs was reordered and rebound before the quire numbers were added. Also, you can see the raggedy edge of the damaged binding on the left-hand side of f86v3:-

Voynich Manuscript f86v3 - 600x808

Now: I should add that a fair while back Glen Claston alluded to having three separate pieces of evidence that supported his claim that Q14 was originally folded and rebound along the green line, and it may well be that this whole chicken scratch argument was one of them. Well, I for one don’t mind playing catch-up with such a sharp brain as his. But hey, I got there in the end! 🙂

One nicety then becomes whether Q14 was bound into this position, or whether the whole codex was no more than an unbound set of gatherings in its early existence: but if the crease suffered significant damage (as seems apparent) when Q14 was removed from the codex, it must have been bound into position before being removed, surely?

All the same, there is one further problem to consider: if both sets of chicken scratches were added when the manuscript was open at a single page, then something must have happened to Q8 before then – because the f66v chicken scratches are on the back page of Q8 in its final order, not its original order.

This points to a number of hypothetical codicological timelines to evaluate, such as:-

Scenario #1

  • The manuscript is assembled. The two bifolios of Q8 are (relative to their current orientation) inside out and back to front, with f58v on the back page. Q14 is inserted immediately afterwards (but with the primary fold along the blue line). Q9 immediately follows (also with the primary fold different what we see now).
  • Q8 is reversed, leaving f66v on the back of the quire (next to f86v3)
  • The manuscript is bound with Q8 reversed
  • The chicken scratches are added
  • Q14 is removed (damaging the binding) and rebound with the other outside quires. Q9 is also rebound to be less “flappy”.
  • Quire numbers are added

    •  

Scenario #2

  • The manuscript is assembled. The two bifolios of Q8 are (relative to their current orientation) inside out and back to front, with f58v on the back page. Q14 is inserted immediately afterwards (but with the primary fold along the blue line). Q9 immediately follows (also with the primary fold different what we see now).
  • Q14 is removed and accidentally reinserted into the middle of Q8, placing f66v next to f86v3.
  • The manuscript is bound in this order
  • The chicken scratches are added
  • Q8 is reversed, leaving f66v on the back of the quire
  • Q14 is removed (damaging the binding) and rebound with the other outside quires. Q9 is also rebound to be less “flappy”.
  • Quire numbers are added

Personally, I’m rather more convinced by the first scenario (mainly because it seems a slightly simpler sequence) – but you may well have your own opinion. Still, at least it’s an issue that could be codicologically tested (by checking sewing stations, contact transfers etc). The secret history of chicken scratches! 🙂

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Popular Historians…

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You may well recognize some of the following seven habits (though not in your own work, of course)…

  1. 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!
  2. Construct the cover and the final chapter of your soon-to-be-bestselling book before doing any actual research. Sinking such a high level of personal investment into your project should inspire you all the more to dig up a sufficiently impressive mass of wobbly evidence to support that doesn’t refute your basic claim.
  3. Always remember that The End Justifies The Means… or rather that Your Book’s Conclusion Should Be Sufficiently Head-Turning That It Obviously Justifies Assembling Such A Shabby Dossier Of So-Called Evidence To Kind-Of Support It. (Publishers seem to like this kind of determination.)
  4. Always think “Lose/Lose“. That is, if you cannot get around a single key piece of evidence (or indeed a single determined opponent) that is widely accepted as being solid, find ways to undermine the applicability or reliability of that evidence / person. You lose the problem, others lose the certainty – easy!
  5. Never try to understand historical figures in context – people always do things for selfish / hidden agendas, and so can only sensibly be grasped as part of a conspiracy on one level or another. The only person in history without an agenda (not even for selling such a pup) is you! Oh, and if you repeat this mad mantra enough times in a row, you will start to believe it!
  6. Look to other nonsensical books in broadly the same historical timeframe for examples of badly drawn arguments and aggressively misinterpreted non-evidence that you can adapt to your own needs. And don’t forget von Daniken, he’s the master!
  7. Once you’ve published your broadly-workable argument (however questionable), move swiftly on to the next big book without so much as a glance over your shoulder. For example, once you’ve claimed that the Chinese navy sailed through a tiny dry canal to reach Europe, move onto how it was that the Chinese navy discovered America long before Columbus (if not the Vikings, etc). In fact, might it have been Chinese settlers who killed the Vikings? Wow, now you’re really getting the hang of this, well done!

Hmmm… is it merely a coincidence that this seems to echo how the ‘dodgy dossier‘ on Iraq’s WMD was apparently constructed, with (as some believe) poor old Dr David Kelly on the receiving end of Habit #4’s “Lose/Lose”?

Review of Latayne C. Scott’s “Latter-Day Cipher”…

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Now here’s something that doesn’t pop up every day: ex-Mormon cipher fiction. In “Latter-Day Cipher“, Latayne C. Scott has crafted quite an interesting piece of work, combining the US police procedural genre (where in this case the main protagonist is a female journalist parachuted in from outside) with a kind of veil-lifting piece on the inner workings of the Mormon Church. It’s populated by a cast of characters so tortured by their own doubts about the, let’s say, veridicality of the gospels, history, and practices of the Church of Latter Day Saints (‘LDS’) that they behave in extreme ways (thus driving the plot), with some of them leading double lives.

The “cipher” of the book’s title doesn’t refer to our old favourite the Anthon Transcript: rather, the notes left with the (near-inevitable) series of dead bodies are written in the Deseret Alphabet, a late 19th century phonetic alphabet constructed at the University of Deseret (which morphed into the University of Utah – “Deseret” is a term supposedly used in the Book of Mormon to denote “honeybee”, and in fact Utah’s state symbol is still a beehive) to help immigrants learn English quickly and reliably. The real thing looks like this (from 1868, courtesy of Wikipedia), which begins “W-u-n / ah-v / thee / w-u-r-s-t…”)

Sample Deseret text from 1868

Given that this is a phonetic alphabet, and only one of the Deseret Alphabet notes in “Latter-Day Cipher” is written in a slightly encrypted way (I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say that it’s phonetic Spanish), Scott’s book isn’t really historical cipher fiction per se. But all the same, she’s clearly achieved her writing aims, and her story moves along briskly. She paints pictures of the troubled internal dynamics of people wobbling either side of the edge of the Mormon doctrinal line, interleaving its contradictory paradoxes (polygamy, racial purity, blood atonement, etc) with a ticking bomb and lines from Tennyson and T.S.Eliot.

With all these different themes running through it, you may well ask, is “Latter-Day Cipher” any good? Well, yes it is, actually. It would probably help if you knew a (very) little about the whole Mormon thing beforehand, but I do so enjoy getting to read nicely-written novels that aren’t all testosterone, flashy editing and world-renowned Harvard academics solving historical ciphers at gunpoint. Enjoy!

PS: in the great pantheon of literary attacks on the LDS, this is no more than a fly bouncing off an almost entirely indifferent whale, and I somehow doubt that it will manage to steer a single person away from the LDS’ comforting weltanschauung bosom. Still, wouldn’t it be awesome if South Park was right, and God is a Buddhist presiding over a Mormon-only heaven? Ummm… probably! 🙂

Review of Brett King’s “The Radix”…

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I hate to admit it, but Brett King’s new book “The Radix” has very nearly pushed me over the edge as far as Voynich-themed novels go. OK, if you like your cipher mystery fiction spiced up with implausibly steel-chinned Secret Government Agency action heroes with PhD-level history credentials and who the US President just happens to owe a favour (basically Cotton Malone or Daniel Knox on overdrive), then maybe you’d like it. M-a-y-b-e. But if not, I strongly suspect you won’t, sorry.

It’s completely true that Dan Brown’s books leave me wanting to shoot the fumblingly-drawn main protagonists by the end of Chapter One, all the secondary characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publisher by the end of Chapter Three (given that I see Dan as closer to Gavin Menzies than to Machiavelli, I’d rather cut his hands off than shoot him): and compared to that particular cultural nadir, I’m delighted to say that The Radix is at least reasonably well written. But all the same, I can’t think of a single book where I so badly wanted the bad guys – in this instance, Renaissance conspiracy fans, the evil Borgias’ evil descendants (did I mention they were evil?) – to kick John Brynstone (King’s hero)’s unbelievably buff butt down the road to Hell so very quickly (specifically, by page 17).

But then I thought, hold on a mo’… could it be that “The Radix” is actually some kind of postmodern-ish reversal-of-expectations gag – by which I mean, did King consciously make the protagonist so unlikeable, so implausible, and so unsexy because he wanted the bad guys to be, ummm, the good guys? Historically, it’s true that (for example) Lucrezia Borgia has been demonized for so long that even now it’s desperately hard for historians (even Sarah Bradford in her 2004 biography of Lucrezia, which I’m still halfway through) to untie every Borgia-damning knot that partisan writers have tied over the centuries: so could it be that King’s novel is merely Part I of some bizarre rehabilitatory Borgia anti-history?

Achhhhh… try as I might, I can’t really believe that King has a uber-revisionist angle in mind, given that his “Radix” is so close in spirit to a comic-book escapade (and not one of dear Alan Moore’s sardonic club-sandwich plots, with a beard-hair delight in each multi-layered bite) crossed with an airport novella, with John Brynstone so utterly 2d that his action sequences practically jerk from static box to static box. All of which makes it perfect for a Jason Statham vehicle for 2011, then? Alas, yes – which alone is probably a damn good reason why the film-of-the-book shouldn’t be made. Despite King’s agent’s best attempts, let’s all just hope divine justice prevails, shall we?

Though “The Radix” has doubtless been pitched at the cipher mystery beach brigade, my worthless personal opinion is that Cipher Mysteries readers looking for 2010 summer holiday fiction should instead plump for Enrique Joven’s completely antithetical “The Book of God and Physics: a Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, which manages to tell its own Voynich-themed story with nary a jutting jaw or a laws-of-physics-defying stunt. Of course, please feel free to read both and tell me if I’m just plain wrong – comment below, I don’t mind. 🙂

Polanski’s “The Ghostwriter”…

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When you have a hobby as intricate and time-consuming as cipher mysteries, once in a while it’s rather nice to get away from it. And so for a bit of low-key escapism, I settled down the other day to watch Roman Polanski’s recent film “The Ghostwriter” (based on Robert Harris’ novel). This stars Ewan McGregor as a ghostwriter drafted in to a remote island somewhere off New Old Haven to tidy up the memoirs of a recently-retired (and rather stressed) British Prime Minister. The film’s conceit is that the ghostwriter of the title preceded McGregor, who in fact does a rather dippy job of rehashing his work, only realising too late the dark secrets found (and hidden in plain sight) by that first ghostwriter.

Which, of course, means…  aaaaaaargh! Polanski’s last reel turns “The Ghostwriter” into a cipher mysteries film! Be warned – there is no escape from cipher mysteries these days, they’re everywhere! =:-o

Voynich pub meet – Summer 2010…

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It’s coming up to that time of year when I invite UK Voynicheros [*] of all creeds (hoax, language, cipher, glossolalia, etc) to converge upon an historic London pub one Sunday afternoon for a not-at-all-formal chat about all things cipher-mystery-related over a couple of drinks, and perhaps to borrow or return some books from / to my own overstocked VMs / cipher library.

So, out goes the shout to (in no particular order) Philip Neal, Barbara Barrett, Marke Fincher, Tony Mann, Bunny, John Kozak, Peter Howard Mason, Keith Body, Gerry Kennedy, Jeff Haley, and indeed to anyone else who might like to come along – please email me to let me know what dates you prefer. Also, if you’re an overseas Voynichero who (it just so happens) plans to be in London around the end of August / early September 2010, email me your dates too and I’ll try to fit it around them.

As always, looking forward to it! 🙂

[*] Just so you know…

  • “Voynich researchers” – deluded souls whose methodological rigour is of little use against this cryptological Everest
  • “Voynichians” – people immersed in the VMs world for so long they probably have their own private pronunciation for EVA
  • “Voynicheros” – those who don’t take the Voynich quest hugely seriously, perhaps even preferring travelling to arriving. 🙂

Chaocipher updates…

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Like hourly buses on a wet winter morning, here’s a pair of Chaocipher pages that arrived at my stop one after the other, both discussing how to break John Byrne’s Exhibit 1, and both strongly recommended reading for those interested in the Chaocipher.

First to arrive was Carl Scheffler’s page on Exhibit 1 (but you might perhaps want to read his introductory page on the Chaocipher first, complete with nice coloured disk diagrams). By looking for long sequences of repeated symbols, he managed to reduce the staggeringly-large search space down to a mere ~457,000 permutations to check: in fact, he further managed to reduce the space to only 444 permutations, which would probably be achievable even without the aid of computers. Furthermore, once he had discovered the initial ring state, Carl went on to reverse engineer the keyphrase used to set the disks up (‘THINKTHINK’, with the sequence of letters applied to the disks with the pattern LLRLLRLRRLR). He has a further page planned on Exhibit 4 – I’ll let you know when he posts this.

Subsequently, Moshe Rubin’s near-definitive update on Exhibit 1 turned up. As usual, Moshe’s 12-page PDF manages to answer more or less every question you find yourself asking along the way (though admittedly he doesn’t yet know to whom Byrne’s enciphered “CORDIALTHANKSTOLO” was referring). From this, you can also see that Byrne used ‘Q’ and ‘W’ for ‘,’ and ‘.’ (plus ‘Z’ for ‘end-of-line’), hence the plaintext begins “ALLGOODQQUICKBROWNFOXESJUMPOVERLAZYDOGTOSAVETHEIRPARTYW“.

Incidentally, though the idea of encoding punctuation as rarely-used letters is a well-known cipher trick, I find the historical question of when this mechanism was first used particularly intriguing. This is because I’ve long wondered whether the “am” letterpair frequently found at Voynich line-ends might also encipher a rare letter (such as ‘X’). True, there are some Milanese ciphers with letters for scribal abbreviations and contractions (the 1450 cipher for Tristano Sforza enciphers ‘-9’, while the 1455 cipher for Ludovico Petronio Senen has a cipher for ‘subscriptio’), but these seem to belong to a quite different family. I can’t see this in Kahn or al-Qalqashandi, so… what was the earliest cipher to replace punctuation with rarely used letters?

The Voynich silly season is upon us (which is a shame)…

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Rather than spam your (no doubt already dangerously close-to-overfilled) inboxes with a stream of inane posts about edgy Japanese musicians producing conceptual albums inspired by the VMs’ illustrations (e.g. …

Limited edition Merzbow (Masami Akita) pressed on lime green vinyl, a work inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript, in a bootleg style cover.

…), Cipher Mysteries will be gently snoozing through most of this year’s silly season, and I cordially suggest you do the same!

You know, it really is about time the Next Big Thing happened in the VMs world (and I don’t mean the radiocarbon and ink papers finally being published in a proper journal). Why hasn’t some tenacious Yale art history student picked up on the codicological mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia and done a proper spectroscopic analysis of them? Why hasn’t anyone really gone looking for a mid-15th century abbot (for who else would have their own scriptorium, producing documents for him to sign?) not too far from Savoy and called something not too far from “Simon Sint…”? The closest I’ve found so far is Abbé Simon du Bosc (who died in 1418, but was an abbot in Northern France), but probably isn’t much of a match… oh well! =:-o

Edith Rickert, revisited…

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The century since Wilfrid Voynich unearthed his now-eponymous manuscript has seen many groups of codebreakers take a tilt at its cryptographic windmills. The most famous of these was William Friedman’s “First Study Group” of WWII cryptologists: but I’ve recently become interested in finding out to what degree WWI codebreakers tried to get in on the act. Those were the halcyon days of what modern crypto people now call (perhaps with a touch of disdain) “non-machine ciphers”, and so we shallow computer-centric moderns might have plenty to learn from what they had to say (if they left any notes for us to find, which we don’t currently know).

Did the Voynich manuscript, then, have a Zeroth Study Group circa 1920? John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert were part of the same American First World War codebreaking team, and certainly had far more than a passing familiarity with the VMs (Rickert briefly corresponded with WMV, for example). However, their attention subsequently turned to producing critical edition of Chaucer’s work, a challenge which was to occupy them both for many years.

Not that much has been written about Edith Rickert: when I blogged about her before, I found only a few online sources (such as this one) to work from. However, a very nice 2009 paper by William Snell just turned up on the Net – A Woman Medievalist Much Maligned: A Note in Defense of Edith Rickert (1871–1938) – which seems to meet this lack well.

Probably the most telling comment on Manly’s relationship with Rickert was this:-

…Manly’s remarks written in April 1934 to David H. Stevens, the English teacher at Chicago who worked on the cipher team with them during the First World War, two years before Rickert’s final heart attack: “Miss Rickert is working twenty-five hours a day, as usual, and is on the verge of a breakdown, but she won’t break. She never does.” (Qtd. in Ramsey 1994: 77)

But then she did, alas. 🙁