VMs: Die Weltwoche

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I venture to offer a translation of the Weltwoche article for those
who do not know German. This version is unofficial and should not be
distributed beyond the list: copyright remains with Christoph Neidhart.

Philip Neal


WELTWOCHE:

The great puzzle book
Christoph Neidhart

It drove dozens of researchers to the edge of madness - the
mysterious "Voynich Manuscript".


A medieval gynaecologist's handbook? A page of the Voynich manuscript.
It smells like crayon and feels like fish paper, slightly
greasy and worn. The most mysterious manuscript in the world
is a thick bound notebook of parchment. But first the librarian brings
me two grey wedges of foam rubber to rest the book on. With it a small, 
heavy sandbag to weight the open page. Scribbled all
over with plants and nymphs, signs of the zodiac, celestial bodies
and text, it is reminiscent of medieval manuscripts. Yet it has
ruined scientific reputations; given others sleepless nights. For
350 years people have been trying to solve the Voynich puzzle. In
vain.

The manuscript is held in the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale
University. Until now no one has succeeded in deciphering its
illustrations and secret script or in saying anything definite about
its author. We do not know in which century the book was created
nor in what country. However its trail can be traced back for 400
years: the book belonged to the library of the Hapsburg Emperor
Rudolph II (1552-1612) who reigned over the Holy Roman Empire from
Prague. It was brought to America by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. The
New York antiquarian bookseller stumbled across the notebook which was to
bear his name in a Jesuit college in Frascati. However, nothing
came of the anticipated sale: Voynich could not sell the manuscript
and neither could the book dealer Hans Kraus after him. Weary,
this latest owner donated it to the Beinecke Library in 1969. It
remains there now, waiting to be seen by anybody who
can demonstrate a serious interest in it.

Its interpreters on the other hand are scattered through the entire
world: in Brazil, Venezuela, the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Japan
and Australia. Many have never even seen the manuscript and their
researches rely on photocopies and computer transcripts. They
scarcely ever meet in person and only know each other over the
internet. Gabriel Landini, a jaw pathologist in Birmingham,
has created a computer font which can display the transcription by
the Darmstadt mathematician Rene Zandbergen on the screen. From now on
anyone can load the manuscript on to a laptop, even send emails in
Voynich script, but without being able to read it.

Takeshi Takehashi of Japan has also captured the complete text
electronically for statistical evaluation. Earlier codifications
originate with, among others, the linguist Jacques Guy of Melbourne,
who has been gnawing at the Voynich for a quarter of a century. The
transcriptions display noticeable differences: in the case of many
signs it is still not agreed whether it is an A or an O or where it
begins and ends. It is as if you had to establish, in a script nobody
knows, whether two handwritten signs represent one M or two Ns, or
a W, a UN or NU - or three 1s. Worse still, we simply do not know
what sounds the signs stand for. Some of them may well merely be
ornaments marking the beginning of a word or a line.

In recent years an enormous amount of material has been assembled
and yet Voynich research is only just beginning after nearly 100 years. But 
the cryptological hobbyists and amateur decipherers never give up,
even if they have had no more success with their decryption methods
than the professionals of America's National Security Agency.

Latin alphabet, Arabic numbers

The Voynich is one of the most popular manuscripts in the library,
the curator of the Beinecke, Robert Babcock, tells me. It is mainly
requested by spare time linguistic detectives and journalists. For
forty dollars the library will supply them with a copy to continue
with at home. About twelve copies go out in a month. Today it is
mostly mathematicians and computer people who are seriously working
on it. They suppose that the solution is to be found in a numerical
analysis of the 40,000 'words' made up of 243,000 or so signs.

At first glance, many of the symbols remind me of the Latin alphabet,
others of Arabic numerals. Many look like Latin abbreviations and
some like medieval Italian codes. It is thought that we are dealing
with a set of 27 symbols. In addition there are 72 rarer letters or
variants of the symbol set. The longer I stare at a page, the more I
think I recognise individual words, maybe "alla", "Gotland" or
"gottica". And "Goth" or "God". Or "Boshe" in Cyrillic script, also
meaning "God". Many sequences are repeated regularly, including a
'cyrillic' one which looks like 'spasibo', Russian for 'thank you'.
Has Voynich fever gripped me already? I do know that the script
cannot be deciphered like that. But the eye is easily deceived.

Most of the words, or strictly speaking groups of symbols, consist
of three, four, five or eight letters. If it is not Latin, the script
could be Cyrillic, Armenian or Georgian. But who is to say they are
not groups of numbers? Or words multiply encrypted with their actual
letters doubled, transposed or omitted by a complex system?

Since nothing conclusive has been elicited from the text after all
this time, many people direct their attention to the illustrations.
Those in the first half point to a book of alchemistic recipes; the
other parts appear to contain medical, astrological and cosmological
knowledge. Bathing nymphs invite fantasies about the fountain of
youth. Naked women slip out a bathtub; thoughts of saucy goings on are never 
far away seeing that two pikes are swimming in their
midst. And all surrounded by text. Is the Voynich manuscript a mediaeval 
gynaecologist's manual?

The emperor's secret

But what are the foldouts? Are they maps? Who wrote the book? One
author or several? We do not even know that. When? In what language?
What secrets were hidden here? And why?

Inside the book, Voynich found a letter dated 1666 in which the then
rector of the University of Prague, Johannes Marcus Marci, forwarded
the manuscript to Rome, to the famous Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, a
mathematician who also dealt in language and cryptology. It appears
from the letter that the manuscript once belonged to Rudolph II of
the house of Hapsburg. The emperor had bought it for the princely sum
of 600 ducats and later lent it to the physician Jacobus Horczicky de
Tepenec to be "read", the latter having cured him of a grave illness.
Horczicky immortalised himself as Jacobus de Tepenec on the first
page of the manuscript. This can have taken place no earlier than
1608: in that year the emperor ennobled his field surgeon, granting
him the title "de Tepenec". In 1611 Rudolph abdicated and died the
following year; his treasures were plundered. Obviously, it could be
that Dr Horczicky, alias Tepenec, simply kept the book with him.

Rudolph II was absorbed by art, science and the occult, as his
contemporaries well knew. Who sold him the mysterious notebook,
or foisted it on him? Or is the whole thing a forgery, whether  prepared 
with Voynich's knowledge or deceiving him too? Should it not arouse some 
suspicion if the letter identifying the emperor as a past
owner was found, of all places, in the book itself? Wilfrid Voynich
seems to have believed in the authenticity of the manuscript: he
ascribed it to Roger Bacon, an English scholar of the 14th century,
who was always dabbling in the sciences of his day. He is
supposed to have envisaged motor boats, horseless carriages and
flying machines, and is said to have described the laws of optics
needed for the construction of the magnifying glass and the telescope. A 
mediaeval Leonardo. Did not the great da Vinci make his writings
unreadable by using mirror writing? It is a fact that Bacon once
noted that no scholar of sound understanding would write down his
insights in plaintext but use one of seven methods of encipherment.
Publish knowledge which did not suit the church's book and it could
cost you your head.

> From 1912 Voynich turned to the press and science with his Baconian
theory. American magazines and Sunday supplements were soon full of
Voynich stories, and in 1921 in a major feature, "Harper's" described  the 
book as the 'most mysterious manuscript in the
world', a characterisation which has stuck. William Newbold, a
mediaevalist from the University of Pennsylvania, decided after
exhaustive researches that it was a lab diary by Roger Bacon.
Newbold thought he discerned that each individual symbol was
constructed from several microscopically small Greek letters, and
translated parts of the manuscript. He could thus demonstrate that
Bacon had access to telescopes and microscopes. He found
references to disturbances in Oxford and a solar eclipse of 1290 -
events which lent themselves to verification. But Newbold was a victim
of his own imagination with his 'science'; his solution did not
stand up to examination. Four years after his death, the author of
the Harper's article, John Manly, showed that Newbold's microscopic
letters were actually old flaws in the ink and that it
was possible use his system to read hundreds of other messages into
the symbols.

All just fantasy?

Leo Levitov was another claimant to success. He identified the
manuscript as a heretical Christian liturgy, drawn up in a simple
standardised language, a kind of medieval Esperanto, a German-
Latin-Greek-English baby talk. However Jacques Guy, a linguist,
was easily able to show that there can be no such language. Thus
Levitov joined those who allowed themselves to be fooled by the
book.

Were they both taken in by a forgery? Might no Voynich
decipherment be possible because someone strung letters together at random 
and
doodled fantasy plants? With Voynich's knowledge, into the bargain?
This hypothesis has been dropped now that two further letters to
Athanasius Kircher have been found in which Rector Marci and one
of his friends ask the Rome scholar for support in deciphering
the book, in 1639 and 1640.

In the 1970s the Yale professor Robert Brumbaugh followed another
trail: the plant on page 33 had been identified as a sunflower by a botanist 
in 1944. Now Bacon was no longer in the frame as a
possible author. Sunflowers did not exist in Europe before Columbus
brought back the first seeds from North America in 1493.

Brumbaugh, who also pondered whether the book might be an early
example of refined encipherment techniques, made John Dee, the
English mathematician and Elizabeth I's court astrologer, the
chief suspect. Dee, commemorated as Prospero in Shakespeare's
'The Tempest', was a regular guest of emperor Rudolph II in the
years between 1584 and 1588. Dee could thus have supplied the
manuscript to the emperor - or, with an eye on the imperial
treasury, even participated in its creation.

But, Brumbaugh crows, it escaped sly old Dee that there
were no sunflowers in 13th century Europe. The sunflower on page
33 definitely looks like a sunflower. This allows us to narrow down the 
origins of the manuscript to the 16th century, a period in
which secret languages, encipherments and the occult were in vogue.

But Professor Brumbaugh of Yale missed something conclusive himself.
In the 16th century, sunflowers looked different from the cultivated
plants of today: the yellow wreath of petals was smaller in relation
to the kernel with the seeds. Their current proportions only emerged
after cultivation. The wild sunflower, by contrast, bears scarcely
any resemblance to the plant on page 33; so argues Jorge Stolfi, a
professor of mathematics and computer graphics in Brazil. Neither
does it represent any of the 50 or so other varieties of sunflower.
Which disposes of the hypothesis that the manuscript cannot have been 
created  before the 16th century: John Dee is acquitted for the time being. 
Or he was - until Dana Scott of the USA, himself a biologist, identified 51 
of the 229 plants: he restores page 33 as a sunflower, Helianthus annuus, 
albeit with a question mark.

A joke turns serious

The bottom line: this excursus into botany at least shows that we are not 
just dealing with fantasy plants; as early as page 1 the
deadly nightshade occurs, but it seems to bring us no closer to a
solution.

Latterly it is mainly mathematicians who have contributed new
information. They can show that the text does not consist of randomly
arranged symbols but an actual language. By means of statistical
techniques used in spectrography and DNA analysis, Gabriel Landini
has compared word frequency and the variance and distribution of
the symbols with the equivalent values for other books such as
the Bible or Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
According to Zipf's Law, as it is known, all languages conform to
a similar pattern of word frequency, even if the texts are
enciphered. Only multiply encrypted texts deviate from the rule:
this enables us to conclude that the Voynich is not, as was long
supposed, a case of a text enciphered over several languages.

On the other hand the word length, according to Landini, differs
from that of European languages by being shorter. Is it then a
non-European language? That would be astounding in view of the
European character of the book.

It was Jacques Guy who first raised the question whether the Voynich
could conceivably be a Chinese text. Except that the linguist,
originally from France, who taught himself Russian at the age of nine
from the book "Russian without Tears" and invented his own alphabet
at primary school, did not mean it to be taken seriously: Marco
Polo must have brought back two Chinese with him from his journey,
he joked, to have them write an encyclopaedia. Later when Stolfi,
the mathematician from Campinas in Brazil, demonstrated a high
structural similarity between the Voynich language and Chinese and
Vietnamese, the former field linguist Jacques Guy was
taken aback. He had tossed out the Marco Polo story in jest. He
now takes the hypothesis seriously and himself finds surprising
parallels, such as vocalic inflection (as in "sing-sang-sung") or
the consonant mutations (P to B, T to D) observed in Welsh. Or for
that matter in Sindarin, the language invented by Tolkien, author
of "The Lord of the Rings". What is more, Stolfi not implausibly
points to two ornaments on the first page as being the Chinese
characters for 'winter' and 'heaven'.

What fascinates grown men (and it is almost all men) about the
Voynich riddle to the extent of sacrificing years of their free
time? Many stumble on the manuscript by chance and are hooked, not
least because at first glance it appears to be readable. Luis Velez
of Venezuela calls it the 'last riddle': "how could you not be
gripped by it?" And Petr Kazil of the Netherlands compares it with
Loch Ness: it is exciting and anybody is in with a chance.

My researches are over, the problem unsolved. It will remain
unsolved, Jacques Guy thinks, unless someone uncovers a key;
some text, one of the plants or another illustration in a third
source which can be understood and which can be drawn on as a
reverse key to some of the Voynich words. Then things would start
to move swiftly. In England, Nick Pelling is culling mediaeval
and renaissance texts for relationships with the Voynich. Perhaps
a DNA examination of the vellum might also uncover new information.
Or the missing pages of the manuscript might turn up.

Just as my researches really seemed to be finished, mail from John
Stojko flutters through my door: he deciphered the Voynich manuscript
as long ago as 1978. According to him it is a Ukrainian prayerbook
which is written, like Hebrew, with consonants only. Indeed his
interpretations read, as far as I understand Ukrainian, like the
singsong of the Orthodox mass. But Stojko's transcription does not
correlate with the original convincingly. He too has read his
preconceptions into the symbols.

The other participants in the worldwide Voynich debate long ago
rejected his version; and he continues to take part in the online
discussion. Once infected, you cannot leave it alone... My time is
up, the Beinecke is closing for the day. I snap the old notebook
shut and tie its ribbons. My reverence is exhausted. What do I want with a 
book which will not give up its secret? The librarian places it in his book 
box, takes back the foam rubber wedges and asks:
'Are you coming back tomorrow?'. No.






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