Ethel Voynich at 95!

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Ethel Voynich’s story (1864 – 1960) is quite fascinating: while the young Ethel (‘Lily’) Boole was studying music in Berlin, she became inspired by Stepniak’s revolutionary writings. As a result, she became closely involved with Russian dissidents living in London, and in 1893 married the very charming Wilfrid Voynich. Voynich himself often travelled around as part of the League of Book Carriers, smuggling revolutionary books into Tsarist Russia (because of course Marx, Lenin, etc were all in London at the time), and doubtless Ethel did much the same for the cause.

Music and revolutionary fervour aside, Ethel’s third major passion was writing: somewhat amazingly, her novel “The Gadfly” (“Ovod“) ended up selling 2,500,000 copies in Russia without her really knowing of its success (it was even filmed twice, in 1928 and 1955). Oddly, it had long been believed in Russia that she was dead: so when it was discovered that she was alive and living in New York, some star-struck artists from the Bolshoi (Susanna Zvyagina and Yaraslav Sekh) called by her apartment in 1959 to give her flowers etc.

Splendidly, some British Pathe film footage was taken of this meeting, which has now been placed online: though less than a minute’s worth, here it is in all its silent glory. (Incidentally, if you pause the film about 25 seconds in, I suspect that the woman on the right may well be Anne Nill.) Enjoy!

Ethel Lilian Voynich is 95!

Edith Sherwood on the Vinland Map dating…

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Edith Sherwood very kindly left an interesting comment on my “Voynich Manuscript – the State of Play” post, which I thought was far too good to leave dangling in a mere margin. She wrote:-

If you read the 14C dating of the Vinland Map by the U of Arizona, you will find that they calculate the SD of individual results from the scatter of separate runs from that average, or from the counting statistical error, which ever was larger. They report their Average fraction of modern F value together with a SD for each measurement:

  • 0.9588 ± 0.014
  • 0.9507 ± 0.0035
  • 0.9353 ± 0.006
  • 0.9412 ± 0.003
  • 0.9310 ± 0.008

F (weighted average) = 0.9434 ± 0.0033, or a 2SD range of 0.9368 – 0.9500

Radiocarbon age = 467 ± 27 BP.

You will note that 4 of the 5 F values that were used to compute the mean, from which the final age of the parchment was calculated, lie outside this 2SD range!

The U of A states: The error is a standard deviation deduced from the scatter of the five individual measurements from their mean value.

According to the Wikipedia radiocarbon article:
‘Radiocarbon dating laboratories generally report an uncertainty for each date. Traditionally this included only the statistical counting uncertainty. However, some laboratories supplied an “error multiplier” that could be multiplied by the uncertainty to account for other sources of error in the measuring process.’

The U of A quotes this Wikipedia article on their web site.

It appears that the U of Arizona used only the statistical counting error to computing the SD for the Vinland Map. They may have treated their measurements on the Voynich Manuscript the same way. As their SD represents only their counting error and not the overall error associated with the totality of the data, a realistic SD could be substantially larger.

A SD for the Vinland map that is a reasonable fit to all their data is:

F (weighted average) = 0.9434 ± 0.011 ( the SD computed from the 5 F values).

Or a radiocarbon age = 467 ± 90 BP instead of 467 ± 27 BP.

I appreciate that the U of A adjust their errors in processing the samples from their 13C/12C measurements, but this approach does not appear to be adequate. It would be nice if they had supplied their results with an “error multiplier”. They are performing a complex series of operations on minute samples that may be easily contaminated.

I suggest that this modified interpretation of the U of A’s results for the Vinland Map be confirmed because a similar analysis for the Voynich Manuscript might yield a SD significantly larger than they quote. I would also suggest that your bloggers read the results obtained for 14C dating by the U of A for samples of parchment of known age from Florence. These results are given at the very end of their article, after the references. You and your bloggers should have something concrete to discuss.

So… what do I think?

The reason that this is provocative is that if Edith’s statistical reasoning is right, then there would a substantial widening of the date range, far more (because of the turbulence in the calibration curve’s coverage of the late fifteenth century and sixteenth century) than merely the (90/27) = 3.3333x widening suggested by the numbers.

All the same, I’d say that what the U of A researchers did with the Vinland Map wasn’t so much statistical sampling (for which the errors would indeed accumulate if not actually multiply) but cross-procedural calibration – by which I mean they experimentally tried out different treatment/processing regimes on what was essentially the same sample. That is, they seem to have been using the test as a means not only to date the Vinland Map but also as an opportunity to validate that their own brand of processing and radiocarbon dating could ever be a pragmatically useful means to date similar objects.

However, pretty much as Edith points out with their calibrating-the-calibration appendix, the central problem with relying solely on radiocarbon results to date any one-off object remains: that it is subject to contamination or systematic uncertainties which may (as in Table 2’s sample #4) move it far out of the proposed date ranges, even when it falls (as the VM and the VMs apparently do) in one of the less wiggly ranges on the calibration curve. Had the Vinland Map actually been made 50 years later, it would have been a particularly problematic poster (session) child: luckily for them, though, the pin landed in a spot not too far from the date suggested by the history.

By comparison, the Voynich Manuscript presents a quite different sampling challenge. Its four samples were taken from a document which (a) was probably written in several phases over a period of time (as implied by the subtle evolution in the handwriting and cipher system), and (b) subsequently had its bifolios reordered, whether deliberately by the author (as Glen Claston believes) or  by someone unable to make sense of it (as I believe). This provides an historical superstructure within which the statistical reasoning would need to be performed: even though Rene Zandbergen tends to disagree with me over this, my position is that unless you have demonstrably special sampling circumstances, the statistical reasoning involved in radiocarbon dating is not independent of the historical reasoning… the two logical structures interact. I’m a logician by training (many years ago), so I try to stay alert to the limits of any given logical system – and I think dating the VMs sits astride that fuzzy edge.

For the Vinland Map, I suspect that the real answer lies inbetween the two: that while 467 ± 27 BP may well be slightly too optimistic (relative to the amount of experience the U of A had with this kind of test at that time), 467 ± 90 BP is probably far too pessimistic – they used multiple processes specifically to try to reduce the overall error, not to increase it. For the Voynich Manuscript, though, I really can’t say: a lot of radiocarbon has flowed under their bridge since the Vinland Map test was carried out, so the U of A’s processual expertise has doubtless increased significantly – yet I suspect it isn’t as straightforward a sampling problem as some might think. We shall see (hopefully soon!)… =:-o

The balneological Panteo…

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A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona (1902), this balneological Panteo was “an author of various works in Latin, and a friend of all the learned men of his day“. His book begins:-

Annotationes Ioannis Antonii Panthei Veronensis ex trium dierum confabulationibus ad Andream Bandam iurisconsultum: […] in quo quidem opere eruditus lector multa cognoscet: quae hactenus a doctis viris desiderata sunt. De thermis Caldarianis: quae in agro sunt Veronensi…

There are a fair few copies around: for example, in addition to its other textual artefacts 🙂 , the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds one. Back in 1998, Christies sold one for £1,495, but a cheaper option is to get a microfilm copy (from NYU’s Reel #491). 

Panteo’s original manuscript has been dated to 1488, and is held in Verona as MS 2072 (about a page down):-

Giovanni Antonio Panteo, De thermis Calarianis; Andrea Banda, Sylva Caldariana suo Pantheo. Manoscritto cartaceo, ultimo decennio del secolo XV; mm.300 x 200; ff.150; scrittura corsiva e littera antiqua, inchiostri bruno e rosa; iniziali miniate decorate, tre grandi disegni a penna colorati; legatura recente in cuoio. Ms. 2072

The description given there says that this is a humanistic manuscript, and that it contains three large coloured diagrams “of great interest for the attention and documentary realism with which they represented the characters, landscapes and architectural details: the unknown artist was probably aware of the stories of Saint Orsola that just in those years (between 1490 and 1495) Carpaccio painted in Venice.” However, it’s not clear if those three drawings were reproduced in the Venetian book version: or if they were, how well they transferred across.

Of course, the reason this is relevant to Cipher Mysteries is because of the baths depicted in the Voynich Manuscript: for if the vellum radiocarbon date (1404-1438) is a reliable indicator of when the VMs was written down, then we should arguably be looking closely at 15th century texts on balneology to try to place these into their historical context. This is because the 15th century saw the medicinal cult of the hot springs’ rise to prominence, as well as its fall – by 1500, people believed (according to Arnold Klebs’ book, which I discussed here) that spas and baths were the source of syphilis, causing interest in them to rapidly wane.

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that balneological historians tend not to look very hard at this period: far more effort seems to have been invested on stemmatic analysis of the many manuscripts of The Baths of Pozzuoli than on compiling synthetic accounts of the development arc of balneology in the 15th century. Please let me know of any books that buck this apparent trend!

Anyway, what is interesting is that there is actually a recent monograph on this balneological Panteo: “Prime ricerche su Giovanni Antonio Panteo” (2003 or 2006?) by Guglielmo Bottari, published in Messina by the Centro interdipartimentale di studi umanistici, ISBN 8887541272. 185 p., [2] c. di tav. : ill. ; 22 cm. Not many out there, but 40 euros buys you a copy here. Perhaps that might have more to say about this matter, and possibly even a copy of the coloured drawings in MS 2072 (which would be nice). 🙂

* * * * * *

Update: Paul Ferguson very kindly (and swiftly) passed on a link to a low-resolution scan of an illustration from Panteo’s manuscript featuring debating humanists, baths, and swallowtail merlons – thanks very much for that! 🙂

panteo-illustration

The Birth of the Illuminati…

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OK, even though there’s a whole lot of Voynich-related stuff backed up here, I felt I really had to pass on this link to an excellent page on the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy before I do anything else.

Though I already knew a little bit about nutty Adam Weishaupt and his Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (with all its speculative Freemasonesque ceremonies and faux classical code names for initiates), what I didn’t know before reading this is why anybody ever thought the Illuminati were smart enough to dress themselves, let alone control the destinies of nations. So really, where did that all come from? How did the Illuminati make the leap from effete pseudo-Masons to political puppetmasters?

Of course, the answer is that they never did: rather, the perception that they did sprang from a well-respected Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy called John Robison. His sensational (1797) book “Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe” proposed that the big, unanswerable madnesses of the day (mainly the French Revolution, but plenty of other stuff besides) had all been deliberately orchestrated by a shadowy international cabal – the Illuminati. History was bunk: conspiracy was all: read all about it, then get over it. Thus The National Enquirer was born (in spirit, at least).

Yet behind the scenes, the real story playing out here was that since 1785 Robison had suffered from “a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin“, which “seemed to emanate from behind his testicles“: and so he dosed himself up heavily on opium, making him “vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia“. Good job he didn’t have the option of taking ecstasy, otherwise we’d all now think the French Revolution was some kind of over-enthusiastic love-in. 😉

Even so, the excitement over his whole account might well have waned just as quickly as it had waxed, had it not been for the multi-language publication soon afterwards of Jesuit Abbé Augustin de Barruel’s huge “Memoires pour Servir a l’Histoire de Jacobinisme”. Even more than Robison’s paranoid opus majus, Barruel’s slab-like book was like a relentless encyclopaedia of Illuminati denunciations: the French Revolution had been ‘foreseen, premeditated, plotted, planned, resolved; everything that happened was the result of the deepest wickedness, because everything was prepared and managed by men who alone held the threads of long-settled conspiracies’. Basically, Dan Brown on acid. 🙂

Actually, Barruel was furious at the way the Revolution had unceremoniously chucked the Jesuits out of France: and so the blackest irony of the whole story is that to channel this anger, he co-opted the form and substance of all the anti-Jesuit propaganda of the previous two centuries to slander the Illuminati (where Weishaupt himself was a former Jesuit)… thus the slandered became the slanderer.

In the end, the whole story boils down to a set of conspiracy Top Trumps cards to play with how you like: to me, the unavoidable conclusion is that Weishaupt, Robison and Barruel were all wildly delusional in different ways – but the bizarre Illuminati mythology meme that emerged from them only came about because their respective political, pharmacological and religious delusions somehow overlapped and intertwined, and in doing so took on a composite mad life of its own. Really, you couldn’t make it up, eh Dan? 🙂

“The Voynich Code” movie…

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EXT. Shadow of a European castle. A balding bloke in dark glasses is laying on a gold-plated deckchair next to a gold-plated swimming pool. Behind him, workmen on ladders painstakingly paint gold leaf over the castle’s swallow-tail merlons. A gold-plated mobile trills.

NIC CAGE (picking up phone)
Manny, I’m busy.

AGENT
Hey, Nicky – looked at the proposal yet?

NIC CAGE
You gotta be kidding me – $6m and four points above the line, all for some book nobody can read?

AGENT
It’s “Da Voy-nitch”, Nicky. A real life Da Vinci Code – no joke! Right now it’s a hot cake, everybody wants a slice of it.

CAGE
But I don’t get it: how does this fit my whole “Joe Schmo” schtick?

AGENT
Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s what I get my 15% for. Just look at your fax machine…

 CAGE pulls page after page of unreadable text from his gold-plated fax machine.

CAGE
Hey, I can’t read a thing – this doesn’t make any sense…

AGENT
So…

CAGE
You mean… I get to make up basically all my lines and nobody cares?

AGENT
Like, bingo. An unreadable script for an unreadable book. Genius high concept. Spielberg loves it. We all love it.

CAGE
Right… and my character’s back story is… what?

AGENT
You play international bookseller and revolutionary man of mystery ‘Wilfrid Voynich’ …

CAGE
So do I finally get to be married to Helena Bonham Carter this time?

AGENT
Do NOT call her “Johnny Depp’s sloppy seconds”, or I’ll haveta call the u-n-i-o-n. But yes, she’s Lily Boole.

CAGE
Boole is cool. Roger Ebert will love it, again. Are there lots of…

AGENT
…implausible action sequences that add nothing to the plot? Check.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, Wilfrid Voynich is charming, devoted to his wife, yet strangely unsure of his own sexuality.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, you get to fight against the drone armies of the Conspiracy, both for gold and for glory.

CAGE
I don’t know… can they go to five points? I’m getting a good feeling about this…

More APOD spin-off comments…

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The APOD third-time-lucky Voynich page has (just as you’d expect) been reblogged and retweeted near-endlessly, even on the What Does The Prayer Really Say blog, which describes itself as “Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues – by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf“, and has a Catholic priest smiley in the header:  o{]:¬)  Quality-wise, I have to admit that this tramples all over my (similarly-vaguely-autobiographical) ‘surprised balding bloke’ smiley, so score one for God here. =:-o

Interestingly, Fr. Z’s version of the APOD page has a few more pertinent comments than the original APOD page, including one (indirectly) from commenter Brother Charles’ mother who just happens to work at the Beinecke:-

That’s one of our most notorious holdings. We used to have a form letter to answer inquiries about it. Now I suppose it’s a form e-mail. I believe that the best guess is that the manuscript is an herbal with pharmaceutical recipes, etc. All kinds of people, some of them pretty far out, are trying to ‘crack the code.’

Also, Denis Crnkovic (who was once asked to see if the VMs was written in Glagolithic – apparently “it is not“) remarked that “My conjecture (totally unproved) is that it is a “secret writing” codex from around the Prague area used to further the scientific experiments and conclusions of the Prague alchemists.” Well… this would arguably be the #1 Voynich hypothesis, were it not for what seems to be the set of Occitan month-name labels on the zodiac emblems. But a damn good try, anyway. 🙂

As a final aside for the day, here’s a link to a set of urban myths about the Beinecke Library, courtesy of the Yale Daily News. Enjoy!

Voynich Manuscript APOD, yet again…

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The APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) for 31st January 2010 was the Voynich Manuscript’s page f67r1… yet again. By which I mean it was first featured there in 2002, and then again in 2005, and now here it is for the third time round. Before very long, the 2010 discussion page had accumulated a hundred comments and several thousand views: and didn’t it all just annoy the heck out of me.

The overwhelming majority of comments that have been left there are basically the kind of superficial semi-snarky stuff that gee-whiz bloggers who stumble upon the VMs tend to fire and forget: you know… from a twin universe / a board game / you need 3d glasses to read it / language of the birds / solar eclipse / solar calendar / compass rose / herbal written in an “obscure form of Gaelic” / autistic author / mirrored text / language of the Cathars / “lunar phase mandala related to alchemy” / written ” by a snoutband of suspicious blood” / early sci-fi author / Macedonian “after-oak” / the 24 cardinal directions of Fenshui (and so forth). Basically, a load of ingenious and observant people reinventing a century’s worth of dud wheels, all of them simultaneously square and punctured. Sorry to go all curmudgeonly on you, but how is this in any way a positive assistance to the whole VMs research debate?

The only genuinely thoughtful commenter was Neal Brodsky, who wrote: “The text appears to have been set down in a 15th century western European cursive script. The language itself has elements in common with medieval Germanic languages. It would be difficult and perhaps a bit bold to substantiate any further claims about the nature of this MS.” Which is fair enough, but does make it look as though the taxi dropped him off at completely the wrong party. 🙁

I just don’t know: in the same way that Egyptologists honestly don’t need yet another conceptual theory on the Pyramids in order to advance, I can’t honestly say that Voynich researchers need any more off-the-cuff femto-theories gaily geysered up by shooting-from-the-hip clicksperts. In my opinion, what we need now is to construct proper, tightly-focused (yet eminently do-able!) research questions that stand a reasonable chance of advancing our knowledge by being answered, such as:-

  • What precisely was the original order of the Voynich Manuscript’s pages? [and how to go about working this out?]
  • What was the ‘alpha’ [original] state of those pages where we can apparently see layering? [and why were the layers added?]
  • How did Voynichese evolve during the manuscript’s construction [and what does that tell us about Voynichese?]
  • What did the now-unreadable marginalia originally say? [and what happened to them to make them unreadable?]
  • Where was the Voynich Manuscript between 1450 and 1600? [and who owned it?]

All of which is to say that I think the time has long since passed for Voynich research to leave puberty behind, i.e. that it should stop trawling historical byways for half-cocked answers, but instead put its collective efforts towards developing workable questions. OK, maybe that’s not a PR-friendly vote-catcher of a manifesto to nail to the church door, but at least it’s an honest statement of principle, make of it what you will. 🙂

The Final Blow

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Excitement surged loudly through Imperial College’s Great Hall as the announcer belatedly bellowed those four terrifying words, signifying what for one side would be the beginning of the end: “Sssseconds out, Rrrrround One!”

Danny grabbed Charles Hope’s arm: “Am I going to be able to do this?”, he asked. “Do you really think I’ve learnt enough to last five rounds… against him?”

“Relax“, said the Professor languidly as he stepped out through the ropes, “Iconologists are a pushover – they’re all talk. Your informed historical cynicism should win every time.”

“That ‘should‘ word again”, thought Danny with more than a flicker of fear. “Why couldn’t he use something stronger, at a time when I really need moral certainty?”

He rose slowly, trying not to look intimidated by the leviathan bulging menacingly out of the far corner. Sure, Raza Reema was ‘only’ a student iconologist at the Courtauld Institute – but, let’s face it, the guy had an extra stone, two inches of reach and a whole extra post-doc year on Danny. Raza’s second, the formidable Joscelyn Godwin, flicked Danny a hostile glance as he eased himself out of the ring – yes, this was going to be every bit as tough as the TLS preview had predicted.

Yet for over three years, Danny had trained hard for this by grinding his way along each open shelf of the Warburg Institute, exhaustively dredging every book and photo for scraps that might prove decisive tonight – ironically using Aby Warburg’s creation to try to defeat its own research programme. With Hope as his mentor, wimpy post-grad Danny had bloomed into a research golem, equal parts fighting machine and rabbinical debating monster. Under the glare of the Channel 4 cameras, with the funding of the two institutions balancing precariously on the outcome, now was no time to be entertaining doubts.

Rather, it was time to fight – to kill or be killed.

And so the two boxers lurched defiantly towards the centre of the ring, the bell and the crowd’s roar ringing in their ears.

“Iconology is a joke“, snapped Danny as he jabbed quickly at Raza’s ribs, “and you know what? The joke’s on you.”

“Cynicism is a losing path“, retorted Raza flashing shots close to Danny’s face, “that’s more about supposed intellectual safety than bravery. And lamers such as you are neither safe nor brave.”

Danny snapped his head back as a fast cross punch came close to his nose. For an instant, he paused: he thought he could smell something strange and pungent – Paco Rabanne? Juicy Fruit? Myrrh? No time to wonder, as he launched himself back to the fray.

“Speculation without evidence is wasted research funding“, Danny barked grimly through his gumshield, circling lightly around the ring, “and you’ve wasted your life on a dream.”

“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” pingponged Raza, feinting to the left. “But funnily enough, you and your crew are pretty short of persuasive evidence too.” Uncoiling quickly, he unwound a powerful right hook that skidded off Danny’s ear.

“For someone so convinced by their thesis, you’re taking a notably nihilistic position“, sneered Danny, tucking himself down inside Raza’s defences to snatch a fast body blow, rocking him on his heels. He smiled to himself as he glimpsed Professor Hope in the corner nodding in obvious appreciation. “Are we really debating in an evidential vacuum?”

Raza pulled back, slowing the tempo right down. “You know there’s evidence”, he sneered, “it’s more a matter of what evidence you choose to believe. Authoritas, eh?”

The bell sounded and the two fighters decamped to their respective corners. “You need to start landing more body blows on the guy“, urged Professor Hope, rubbing Danny’s shoulders briskly with a Mnemosyne-emblemmed towel. “He’s got the reach, but you’ve got the research focus – time to take the fight right to him.” Danny narrowed his sweat-filled eyes across the ring: though Professor Godwin was fingering his bow-tie agitatedly, Raza seemed unmoved, as grimly powerful as ever.

“Rrrrround Two!” shrieked the announcer, the two professors vacated their corners, and the contest started once more.

“Splendor Solis“, Danny called out as he surged forward with a string of jabs towards his opponent’s chest, “is merely eye candy for the soul, feel-good alchemy for the rich: a Renaissance God’s way of telling you you have too much money and too little sense.”

Raza stumbled, taken aback by the force of Danny’s full-frontal attack on his 2007 paper. His mind darted through his extensive bibliography reaching for an obvious refutation, but it all came far too late as Danny ploughed in with a tight one-two to Raza’s solar plexus and chin, sending the Courtauld man backwards onto the canvas and up again for a standing count.

Out of the corner of his eye, Danny could Professor Hope gesticulating to him with his hands, as though he were kneading some kind of symbolic dough. Dough? Meaning money? But surely it was time to finish Raza off?

Immediately the referee signalled for them to resume, Danny hurled himself forward at his opponent, trying to capitalize on his momentary advantage. “What’s the matter?“, he taunted. “The Rosicrucians got your tongue?”

“Cheap trick, Warburg kiddy“, blocked Raza, quickly clubbing Danny’s leading shoulder – the sheer force from the straight blow sent him reeling backwards to the ropes, the shock wave rattling right through to his knees. All at once, he felt his will to win this contest waver, even though four years’ research funding for the Warburg was at stake on its outcome. Has there ever been a fairer way to allocate resources?

However, a steel-edged glance from Professor Hope was enough to push him back to his full height. He then realized his mentor had just now been signalling him to slow the pace down, and not to get too excited – of course, he should have known that Hope wouldn’t try to communicate symbolically, particularly in an arena like this.

The two fighters now stood just beyond an arms’ length from each other, slowly pedalling around, regrouping their thoughts, angling to finding their key technical points of differences.

“So… do you accept that Cesare Ripa made up his emblems“, Danny jabbed quickly, trying to tuck himself beneath Raza’s long reach, “and hence that Panofsky built his iconological castles on sand?”

“I’m cool with that“, scowled Raza as he dropped back a step, firing off a whistling blow close to Danny’s head, “but are you OK with the idea of Lorenzo de’ Medici being a uber-revivalist, a politicking Platonist insider?”

“Uh huh“, Danny nodded darkly, stepping sideways around Raza, “so… what exactly is the difference between us? Do you accept that your Splendor Solis paper was perhaps an over-positivistic iconological presentation of a medieval conceit?”

“Well…“, Raza pondered, also slowing down in the ring, “three years on, I would take a very much more nuanced view of it. My funding specified that I had to construct an iconological case, but it really wasn’t easy.”

Danny suddenly stopped in his tracks, dropping his guard. “So they set you up for this whole thing?”, he said in disbelief. “They locked down your PhD subject, even seconded Joscelyn Godwin in… just because you had ripped abs and could punch for their money?”

“Basically, yes. And what about you?”, queried Raza, similarly dropping his gloves to his sides. “I heard that in your first year at the Warburg you were ‘pagan this’, ‘Edgar Wind that’. How did they get you to switch sides so comprehensively?”

“Yeah…“, replied Danny, “even though all that stuff ‘felt right’, I just couldn’t construct an historical case to support it, and in the end felt I had to drop it. As always, the truth lies in the cracks between.” By now, the packed crowd was starting to boo at the lack of action, and even the referee was edging over to see what was wrong. “Anyway, what aftershave does Professor Godwin wear?”

“Aftershave?“, said Raza in surprise. “Ummm… Paco Rabanne, I think. Why’s that?”

“Actually, I think I smelt some on your gloves“, said Danny.

“Really? On my gloves?” said Raza, reaching down to sniff them.

It was at that precise moment that Danny’s devastatingly strong uppercut hit Raza square beneath his chin, knocking him clean out cold.

“Job done!“, shouted Danny in triumph, as the referee and Charles Hope held up his arms.

“I told you iconologists are a pushover“, said the Professor sideways.

“Yeah, they’ll believe anything you tell ’em“, said Danny, “Anything at all!”

* * * * *

[PS: all names, places, and institutions in this story are utterly fictitious, even when they’re plainly not.]

Review: Erich von Däniken’s “History Is Wrong”…

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It’s a real-life Jurassic Park scenario: for decades, all most people have heard of Erich von Däniken is the occasional fossilized soundbite (such as “Chariots of the Gods“). But now, like a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex cloned from dinosaur DNA, von Däniken is back with a new (2009) book called “History Is Wrong” – it lives, it liiiives!

…OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The von Däniken that emerges from its pages is, let’s say, far less bodacious than the one of old – though his most famous subjects of interests (Nazca lines, metal library, Book of Enoch, Father Crespi, etc) all get wheeled out, you don’t have to read too far in to notice that his delivery has changed from ‘strident’ to (frankly) ‘rather whinging’.

Actually, for the most part “History Is Wrong” focuses less on why historians have got ancient history wrong than on why contemporary historians have got von Däniken wrong –  to be precise, its full title should be “History Is Wrong… About Me!”

Hence, he goes to some lengths to paint a picture of how (particularly in the case of the underground metal library) his sources switched their stories to make him look like a fool; how subeditors and translators altered the slant of his text to make him look like a showman; how journalists (specifically German ones) serially misrepresented his claims to make him look like a conman; and, finally, how everything he wrote back then still remains basically true today. Even if everyone else thinks it’s nonsense.

So, I think the key question this book poses for the reader is whether history is right about von Däniken – is he (or is he not) a foolish showman/conman?

I’ll answer this by looking at how von Däniken looks at the VMs (which is, of course, this blog’s specialist subject). He opens the book by describing how he asked a hundred people if they had heard of the Voynich Manuscript – only one person had (yup, 1% or 2% would be about right). He then quickly recounts its history (getting some bits right, other bits wrong) with a few minor digressions, before leaping sideways on page 21 to Father Crespi, Plato, terraforming, Adam’s book, Berossus’ Babyloniaca, the Avesta, Enoch (for more than 30 pages!), IT = “Information Trickery”, Plato again… until finally (on page 81!) he loops back to the Voynich Manuscript again (but then only very briefly).

From my perspective, I don’t think you can say that von Däniken offers anything useful or insightful about the VMs that hasn’t been rolled out a thousand times before – for example, though he discusses “89” and “4”, he does this in only a fairly superficial way. The only interesting Voynich ‘authority’ EvD cites here is “German linguist Erhard Landsmann” (p.85), who (rather impressively, it has to be said) concludes in his own Voynich paper that “A prophet is thus a pumpkin shaped spacecraft” (p.6). [Note: his name is actually “Landmann”.]

Purely based on EvD’s treatment of the VMs, I can only really conclude that:-

  • von Däniken doesn’t read his sources as carefully or as deeply as he thinks he does.
  • He actively seeks out fragmentary correlations across time and space, which he then misrepresents as compelling evidence of causal connection between the two.
  • He doesn’t really know how to do history: his interest is in peering past mere facts to the shared web of doubt that he believes supports them all, that offers us glimpses of the “gods-as-astronauts” meta-narrative behind historical reality.

In short, his book is no different to the mass of non-working, unmethodical Voynich theories out there already, with the only exception being that he doesn’t even get as far as suggesting an answer. Even for von Däniken, that would be just too whacko a thing to do. 😉

And yet… because his book is in many ways an autobiography, the main thing that emerges from it is actually EvD himself: a charming and driven man, yet a victim in equal parts of his own optimistic enthusiasm and other people’s bullshit. Really, if you had a meal with him circa 2010, I think he would actually be delightful company. Sure, he became madly rich from his books (and goodness knows that few authors manage that these days): but maybe History will indeed turn out to have been (a little, just a little) Wrong About Him – that for all the readers taken in by all his non-history, I suspect that perhaps he conned himself ten times more.