Voynich theory roundup…

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Even though the Internet would appear to be full of Voynich theories, Tardis-like there’s always room for just a few more: so here are some recent ones for you to feast upon. Today’s mission, should you choose to accept it, is simply to try to categorise them: satirical, apparently deranged, serious, April Foolery, brilliant, channeled, etc.

  1. Well-known Internet palaeographer (and Australian donkey-owning grandmother) Dianne Tillotson has a theory that the VMs was written by one Leonard of Quim.
  2. Online Shakespearean theorist Franz Gnaedinger has raised Richard SantaColoma’s theory to dizzying new heights: he believes the VMs “was written and drawn by Francis Bacon in 1622, as a private sequel to the highly successful Nova Atlantis, written in a pseudo-Polynesian idiom allowing page-filling automatic writing, and drawn in a deliberate retro-style honoring Francis Bacon’s ancestor Roger Bacon. The text is gibberish but makes allusions.“
  3. Sergey K suggests (by email) a new chronology for the Voynich Manuscripts, based on some dates apparently marked in blue paint in the SW rosette: “1441 dates of the making of the Voynich MS. 1574  JOHN DEE has bought the Voynich MS. 1597 (in this place my monitor very dirty) August. The Year and month when Edward Kelley  has finished the painter (colouring) of the book and run out from the prison.“Ros1574
  4. Chy Po, who has been studying the VMs for many decades, believes that “The sketches are Red Herrings & have nothing to do with the text, however they tell a tale of their own cautioning people not to be misled“, while the text is in “a Secret almost extinct language, perhaps impossible to crack as it is a variation of a One Time Pad.” However, “the name of this language is known to very few who guard it jealously, but even is was made public it would be of no help without those exact pages of the Pad which obviously cannot exist still.  I have strong suspicions that it is a copy of an handwritten book called “v**z H******g’ very few copies of which exist to be passed on to the next worthy disciple, if no one is deemed to be worthy then that particular copy is destroyed.“

Here, the satirical is clearly (1) [Leonard of Quim is an Ankh-Morpork character], the April Foolery is (3) [thanks for that, Sergey], while (2) bravely outdoes his virtual mentor Rich SantaColoma by a whole order of magnitude. As for Chy Po, perhaps the answer to the VMs, when it eventually arrives, will indeed fit this kind of “concealed secret language” template, who knows? But as to whether the book in question is called “vuoz Habsburg” (or whatever), you’ll have to work out for yourself.

Really, who would be me? Some days, I have to admit that not even I would be me.

New d’Agapeyeff cipher site…

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Not much to say about Tiago Rodrigues’ new d’Agapeyeff cipher site, except that he summarises the existing cipher analyses pretty well and adds a few of his own thoughts (such as splitting the search space into two 7×14 blocks to try to make it significantly more manageable). Apart from wanting him to change his outbound links from the Voynich News blogger site to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress site, I’d say he’s done a good job of putting together a pretty good starting point. 🙂

(Incidentally, my three d’Agapeyeff pages are here, here, and here.)

Go Oilers…

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So there I was in my first awesome week working at the B: my room mate Lynina kept saying that I was so ‘Legally Blonde’, and I was like “but do I have a dog? No? Well, I don’t think so”. And then she just kept on about the East Coast / West Coast thing, and I’m like “so now I’m Tupac? Well, duh.” But working in the cube is just so cool that it, like, transcends all that stuff in an totally I.M.Pei way. And when I say that, Lynina just rolls her eyes and I say “what? what?” and she lifts up her Renaissance News and Notes so I can’t see her face and we both laugh until we cry and then we both have to do our makeup again.

Actually, I always do well at interviews because, you know, I bought those totally serious-looking frames (even though I don’t need glasses at all, don’t tell anyone) and I think really hard of that guy who said “never make the interviewer laugh, but never let them forget you either” so I frown and try to conjure up the most like wild high cultural stuff I can until their head is spinning. Works for me, anyhow.

So anyway, I’m like four days (nearly a whole week, if you’re counting) into the job, and I’ve done the induction and the cleaning and the coffee round, and it’s my turn on the desk, and there’s a buzz from the guard upstairs and only The Maddest Mad Guy Ever turns up. You know, the one at the top left of the Do Not Let These People See The VMs montage pinned to the drawer that holds the snakes and the magnifiers, ringed in like red felt pen and stuff. But I’m new there and I don’t know this yet, so I’m like “Sure you can see MS 408, sir. Do you have a particular research question you’re trying to answer?”

At this point I notice he’s shaking, and I’m thinking he’s got some kind of palsy but actually it’s because he can’t believe he might actually be able to get to see the manuscript, what with it being digitized so that the curators can Just Say No To Mad Guys Like Him. So I say, you know, making light conversation, Sir, what kind of Oil is your hat made of? And he stops dead, looks at me as though I’ve just torched his favourite pet, and replies “what?”

So I say, when I was inducted here they told me that people who ask for MS 408 often wear some kind of rare oil-based hat, all the while I’m looking at his cap which, like, just happens to be for the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. He says  “there’s nothing under the cap” in this totally intense way, and I’m thinking of Forbes Smiley and say can I check your cap, sir, and he says what exactly are you looking for and I say it’s this really rare oil, Tynph Oil or something, that we mustn’t let near our manuscripts.

And so he half-lifts up a corner of his cap and there’s just this balding head thing underneath (pretty gross, he must have been like fifty or something), and I’m thinking about people cutting out maps with concealed blades and someone said that there was this weird map-like fold-out page in MS 408, so I say can I see inside your cap?

He’s shaking even worse now and lifts up his head and there’s this flash of crinkly metallic light under there and I’m thinking it’s a blade, it’s a blade, omigod it’s a blade, so I reach down into the drawer for a miniature LED flashlight to look closer at it but when I turn back he’s gone – disappeared, running up the stairs. And that’s when I notice his red-ringed face on the top left of the whole Do Not Let These People page and I feel really stupid, for the first time since like 3rd grade or something, when I got my own name wrong in a test. OK, so I was just a kid and my mom had remarried, and I felt under pressure to carry on maxing my grades: but all the same.

Like, I can’t believe I actually nearly completely let a blogger handle MS 408? So how totally bad is that?

Of bedknobs and grimoires…

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Honestly,I do try to look at things that are entirely unconnected with cipher mysteries. But somehow (I really don’t know how) they keep creeping in regardless.

For example, last night I settled down to watch “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” on DVD with my son on loan from the library (the DVD that is, however hooked on books Alex may be). Big mistake. The central part of the film has Miss Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) scouring Portobello Road bookstalls to try to find the missing half of a grimoire for the secret of the Star of Astoroth (the film-makers meant “Astaroth”, of course, though it’s not clear whether this mistake was also in Mary Norton’s books from which the film was evolved [by replacing time travel with Nazis]). Bibliophily, demonology, magic, codicology: already we’re in prime cipher mysteries territory. 🙂

astoroth-screenshot

What is written on the Star is revealed to be “Treguna, Mekoides, Trecorum Satis Dee” – these are the words of the ancient “substitutiary locomotion” spell to make inanimate objects jump about (and fight against Nazis). But what do they mean? Well… Satis is obviously Latin for sufficient (which you may recognise from the Renault Vel Satis – curiously, even though it seems they were trying to allude to ‘satisfactory velocity’, vel actually means ‘(inclusive) or’ in Latin [which is presumably why logicians use ‘v’ for or]); while Dee is obviously a direct homage to our cipher mysteries chum John Dee. Trecorum seems to be some kind of dizzy half-child of trigarum [‘team of three’] and decorum: but Treguna and Mekoides seem just to be a bit of grimoirish fun. Let me know if I’ve missed anything. 🙂

Finally, perhaps the spookiest vaguely-linked item of the day has to be Angela Lansbury’s workout video, “Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves”. According to mbot’s comment here, this includes “many chair-based exercises as well as a portion where Angela speaks to us while taking a bubble bath surrounded by candles. It’s kind of amazing.” I don’t know about you, but I feel fitter just thinking about it.

Two more Voynich novels…

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Two more Voynich novels (both by debutant novelists) for our Big Fat List, one from late last year and one just about to come out…

First up there’s Harold W. Allen’s (2009) “The Renaissance Manuscript: A Novel Concerning the Origin and Meaning of the Voynich Manuscript“, which I have to say seems to be competing against Kennedy & Churchill’s “The Voynich Manuscript: The unsolved riddle of an extraordinary book which has defied interpretation for centuries” for some unknown maximally prolixitous book title award. It’s as if the 20th century never happened… Anyhow, Allen’s book is (presumably self-)published by “Yoyodyne Press”: though you may (as I did) possibly recall Yoyodyne from the example given in the Gnu General Public License (“Ty Coon, President of Vice… Yoyodyne Inc“), until recently I didn’t know that it was originally the made-up name of a giant Californian defence (sorry, “defense”) contractor in Thomas Pynchon’s (1963) novel “V”. Just so you know too.

Oh, and I forgot to precis Allen’s plot: a smalltown medieval history professor, his ex-girlfriend, and a Chicago inner-city teacher collectively attempt to work out who killed the professor’s best friend by tracing the origins of the Voynich Manuscript back to Babylonia and the Garden of Eden armed only with some puzzling pornographic emails, while being chased by a bunch of (presumably black-clad) three-letter-agencies and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. As they say in Lahndahn, wudja Adam an’ Eve it? Review in due course (though I’m not necessarily expecting anything too Pynchonesque, but perhaps I’ll be surprised).

And finally, there’s Author Brett King and his historical mystery rollercoaster novel “The Radix”, due for release on 27th April 2010. Appreciative quotes from big-hitters James Rollins, Steve Berry and Jeffery Deaver, good quality cover photography and a solid-looking website, so it’s definitely supposed to look substantial. Its plotline runs:-

For centuries, the Radix existed in rumor and secrecy. Saints whispered its legend. Alchemists craved its power. Armies fought and died to possess it. Five hundred years ago, it vanished from the earth. History’s greatest mystery, lost to the ages.

And now (to nobody’s surprise) the Radix is back, a root hotly pursued by questing “government agent John Brynstone” (who presumably has a flame-haired partner called Jane Fyre? Hmmm… maybe not.), probably driven by his own personal demons to uncover the no doubt cataclysmically powerful ancient secret hidden in the VMs. Again, we shall see if Brett King’s story overcomes all this airport novel baggage

Barbara Barrett’s VMs Fortean Times article…

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At long last, Barbara Barrett’s Fortean Times article, “Voynich Under the Microscope“, has been published – and (for now, at least) it seems to be freely available on the web, which is very nice – read it quickly and buy a copy of FT anyway. 🙂

Ostensibly, it’s an update following the ORF TV documentary’s radiocarbon dating and microscopic analysis: but actually, Barbara seizes the opportunity to right a whole bunch of perceived Voynichological wrongs. For instance, she dismisses the whole “humanist hand” notion as a palaeographical misconception stemming from a 1976 comment by Rodney Dennis (a Harvard librarian) that has somehow hardened into a mistaken orthodoxy. She also dismisses all late-15th century theories (she’s doubtless far too polite to say *cough* “Leonardo”) based on the radiocarbon dating range, though whether she also intended to include 1465 (*cough* “Averlino”) I’m not sure – radiocarbon is good stuff, but is it really that good?

She has a little bit of a dig at unnamed bloggers’ casting doubts on the whole “written on fresh vellum” thing, keeping things fallaciously open in order to maintain otherwise untenable dating hypotheses. Well… I at least am still waiting for the data to turn up before I jump. As an exercise in historical reasoning, all the varied kinds of evidence we get have to dovetail with each other: and in this case, the evidence train may have left the station, but it most definitely has not yet arrived at its destination. The VMs’ patina formation, calcination, vellum gelatinization, etc – these are things I would really love to read about, but will that paper ever get written? Barbara seems to imply that she suspects it won’t, caught in a kind of research ownership turf war… but can that really be true? If true, what an abysmal waste! 🙁

Enjoy! 🙂

PS: though I liked Barbara’s mixed metaphor of “deflating a sacred cow”, it did also make me wonder what manner of holy flatus it was inflated with in the first place…

Upcoming cipher talk in Jersey…

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Just a quick heads-up (thanks to Paul F!) to any Cipher Mysteries readers planning to be in Jersey in May 2010, because there’s a cipher talk planned for then which you might well rather enjoy:-

Dr Mark Baldwin has made a detailed study of the Enigma machine, the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, and U-boats and has built up a unique collection of slides which illustrate the main features of those important facts of the Second World War. The show is divided into two parts. It is followed by an opportunity for questions, then a hands-on demonstration of one of the very few surviving Enigma machines.

Spin those rubber wheels! 🙂

Voynichese ololol (lol!)

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Don’t worry, this will be the last Voynichese trivia post for a good few days (I’ve had enough myself). 🙂

If you remove all the spaces (both genuine-looking ones and space-insertion-cipher-like ones) in Voynichese, a slightly different set of patterns emerge (this is one of Marke Fincher’s favourite tricks). I thought I’d have another quick look at multiple repetitions of various verbose pairs in this space-less transcription…

Here are the raw instance counts, and their relative percentages of the unrepeated instance counts:-

  • qo = 5168, qoqo = 9 [0.17%], qoqoqo = 0 [0%]
  • ot = 2679, otot = 3 [0.11%], ototot = 0 [0%]
  • ok = 2961, okok = 7 [0.24%], okokok = 0 [0%]
  • op = 407, opop = 0[0%], opopop = 0 [0%]
  • of = 122, ofof = 0 [0%], ofofof = 0 [0%]
  • ol = 5238, olol = 186 [3.55%], ololol = 13 [0.25%]
  • al = 2885, alal = 60 [2.08%], alalal = 1 [0.035%]
  • or = 2619, oror = 87 [3.32%], ororor = 1 [0.038%]
  • ar = 2815, arar = 161 [5.72%], ararar = 7 [0.25%]

Yes, it’s a load of dull statistics to make your brain ache. But what jumps out at my eyes from this is that the ol/al/or/ar verbose pairs appear repeated many times more than the other high-frequency pairs (such as ot and ok: note these counts are with all the qo pairs removed first). From this, I conclude that qo/ot/ok/op/of all have one kind of statistical behaviour, while ol/al/or/ar have another statistical behaviour entirely.

Specifically, my guess is that the pairs in the first set appear in doubles roughly once every 500 instances (and never three times in a row) simply as a result of scribal copying errors, and that this gives us a rough idea of how frequent copying mistakes probably are in the VMs. My other guess is that ol/al/or/ar are genuinely meant to be in the ciphertext both twice and three times in a row (I somehow doubt the scribe could miscopy a pair three times in a row), and that these are quite probably Roman numerals in the plaintext.

Discuss!

The evolution of Voynichese…?

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Even though René Z likes to tut-tut Voynich speculation (and usually with good reason, it has to be said), there’s something about the maturity and cohesion of Voynichese as a system that makes me quite sure that, unlike Athena, it did not suddenly spring forth fully-grown (and, indeed, fully-armed) from its parent’s forehead. I further infer that the author probably made a major personal investment in the Voynichese system over a long period of time – and given that it has held its secrets safe for over half a millennium, perhaps the author’s likely pride in his/her accomplishment was reasonably justified. That is, perhaps just as with Trithemius’ cryptography mere decades later, the system itself was no less a secret than its contents. 😉

Moreover, the notion that the system was accreted over time might well explain much of the fluency of the script design and the assurance of the document execution (though this much has been noted many times before). In “The Curse of the Voynich“, I made various attempts to turn the clock back to the pre-history of Voynichese, i.e. to use the letter-shapes themselves as a basis for speculating how they evolved and ended up in their final form. Of course, without Marty McFly’s Delorean (or Tom Riddle’s diary, for that matter), tempus will always fugit leaving historians clutching at long-blown-away straws: but perhaps there are some clues here that can help us peer through the fog of time…

My starting point here is that I believe the conceptual roots of the Voynichese cipher system lie not in tricksy Renaissance stateful ciphers, but in far simpler stateless ciphers and steganography, all of which were standard fare for the Quattrocento. Hence, I predict that the “ar” / “al” / “or” / “ol” 2×2 grid of verbose pairs (which I discussed in yesterday’s post) was part of an earlier (much simpler) verbose cipher that was designed to disguise the kind of repeated letters found in Roman numerals (i.e. III / XXX / CCC / MMM): and that what we see now evolved out of that earlier stateless system. It is certainly possible that the looped “l” character was originally designed to steganographically hide an “x”:-

VoynichRomanNumerals

However, this wouldn’t be much of an improvement, so you’d then need to add in hacks such as space insertion ciphers to disguise the verbose patterns: and you’d perhaps then need to add yet another system to handle small numbers (such as the a[i][i][i]r system shown above). And then you’d perhaps need to add in a second (Arabic number, aiiiv?) system… but that’s another story. All in all, this is the kind of cipher evolution I’m talking about: and what makes it speculative is that we only have the end-result of the evolution.

Now… what I’m actually wondering about at the moment is whether anyone has looked through examples of 15th century ciphertexts and cipher ledgers to see if there are any examples of people constructing verbose-pair cipherbets specifically to allow themselves to hide Roman numerals in enciphered texts. While the precise details of the execution may well be quite different, it could be that if we can find examples of the idea in action, we might be able to start tracing some kind of additional behind-the-scenes intellectual history vector for it – where it came from, what kind of person used it, who those people were connected to, etc. I have a few ideas for how to do this, which I’ll (hopefully) try out soon, see if they lead anywhere…

Is Voynichese stateless or stateful?

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If you combine the thoughts I posted yesterday (suggesting that the “o[r]aiiv” word in the top line of f67r1 might encipher “luna”) with the “or oro ror” sequence on line #2 of f15v (which would appear to be a verbosely enciphered Roman numeral, probably “CCCC”), the two would superficially seem to be incompatible. How can the Voynichese “or“-pair encipher both “L” and “C” simultaneously?

Discarding wilfully ambiguous cipher systems (such as Brumbaugh’s “convert everything to a digit and then back to a letter), the answer would be a stateful cipher system, by which I mean a cipher system which reuses the same output letters according to which one of a set of internal states it occupies. Voynich theorists typically predict that the gallows would be the main state-switching mechanism (though Steve Ekwall also asserts that “c” / “cc” / “ch” change the internal state as well – this is what all his “folding and flipping” claims specifically relate to).

Arguably the first known stateful cipher was proposed in Alberti’s De Cifris in 1467: this was a cipher disk pair where the rotor disk rotated relative to the stator disk according to an arrangement between encipherer and decipherer (typically every few words).

Now, to modern cryptographic eyes, the whole point of per-character stateful ciphers (such as Vigenère etc) is to destroy both the numerical statistics as well as the linguistic structure of the ciphertext, as they provide two layers of information that can be used to help break that text. However, this does not seem to have been the case with Alberti’s cipher, while it certainly does not seem to be the case with Voynichese, where there is apparently both visual and statistical evidence of word structure.

Yet Voynichese uses only an alphabet-sized set of characters in its cipherbet, so does not seem to be relying on a secondary codebook at all (even Alberti’s cipher disk used a secondary codebook), so one of the few ways in which it can obfuscate its output over so many pages of ciphertext is via some form of primary statefulness.

However, there seems to be no direct evidence that Voynichese uses only statefulness: rather, it gives the impression of retaining some kind of high-level linguistic structure from the plaintext, but perhaps with letter patterns disrupted within that.

To me, the likelihood is that Voynichese evolved out of what was initially a purely stateless verbose cipher, one where (for instance) “or”, “ol”, “ar” and “al” enciphered the repeated letters in Roman numerals: M C X I. The encipherer probably then hacked his/her own system (with tricks such as the space-insertion cipher we apparently see on f15v) to hide too-obvious repetitions. However, I suspect that an Arabic digit steganography hack was later grafted into the system (the a[i][i][i]v family), probably removing the need for the “I”: and that when the time came round to creating the VMs, some kind of additional stateful disruption might well have been added to this system, whereby the or/ol/ar/al pairs swapped around depending on the state… well, that’s as far as I’ve got, anyway.

Historically, the problem is that there is no evidence of any stateful cipher system prior to Rome in 1465 (when Alberti began researching his book), which doesn’t obviously seem to square with the radiocarbon dating. All the same, it’s not the first time that different forms of dating have yielded slightly different values for the same artefact, all grist for our historical mills… 🙂