Re: The Hoax Theory (was: VMs: Codex Seraphinianus...?)

[Seth Morabito <sethm@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday, July 13, 2003, at 09:37 AM, Nick Pelling wrote:
> > So is the hoax/nonsense theory unprovable?
>
> For the VMS, hoax/nonsense-theorists face (as you describe) a quite 
> different kind of challenge - they'd need to reproduce the methodology 
> by which the VMS was generated... but that's good, as they wouldn't be 
> hung up on details like "meaning" or "sentence structure", and so 
> their lack of baggage might (perversely) give them a better chance of 
> solving it than the rest of us. :-)


I've been a proponent of the theory that the VMs is a hoax for some 
time.  I've reached that conclusion mainly by applying Occam's Razor to 
the problem, but sadly I have no hope of being able to prove it.  It is 
very difficult to prove a negative.

I cannot prove conclusively that there was no elephant in my bedroom 
last Thursday night.  I can apply Occam's Razor and feel pretty certain 
about it, however.

The VMs is a more complex problem.  Ciphers are known to exist from the 
period.  It is complexly illustrated with images both consistent with 
contemporary manuscripts, and at the same time tantalizingly different. 
 Its provenance (which I must stress we have very strong evidence for, 
but certainly no "proof") has it in the hands of Emperor Rudolph II of 
Bohemia, a royal connection enhancing the mystery all the more.

The physical evidence certainly seems to point to a 16th century 
manuscript.  If we assume that the Marci letter is both real and 
correct, then Emperor Rudolph paid a very dear sum of money for the 
manuscript indeed.  Circumstantial evidence possibly suggests that John 
Dee was the seller, but we cannot know that for sure, and it's a very 
tenuous connection at best.  Although there is really no physical 
evidence for a Roger Bacon connection, the manuscript was purported to 
be his work in the Marci letter as well.  Roger Bacon already had a 
cult of personality in the 16th century, and his name would have 
attached further value to the manuscript.

All this points to "Hoax" to me, a 16th century hoax.  The seller 
manufactures a manuscript, manages to obtain an  audience with Rudolph 
II, convinces him that the manuscript is an undecipherable herbal and 
astronomical manuscript written by Roger Bacon, and walks away with a 
purse full of money.  It seems so straight forward that it's a terrible 
let-down.  It would be much more interesting to think that the 
manuscript was genuinely an unbroken cipher, which is why I'm all the 
more suspicious.  We want to believe, probably as much as Rudolph II 
did.

As for hard evidence that the text is meaningless, I have, sadly, no 
way of proving it.  We can try something that might yield some more 
weight to the theory, however.  We could run statistical analyses on 
material known to be nonsense, then compare the results to those 
achieved by running the same analyses on the VMs.  Not just any 
nonsense will do, however, it must be nonsense made by a human, not a 
computer, because if a human is trying to make meaningless random text, 
he will never truly make meaningless random text.  There will always be 
some pattern or signature, lots of word endings alike or lots of repeat 
words, subconsciously slipped in because people are just so bad at 
creating anything truly random.

I get a pretty strong gut feeling when looking at the text of the VMs, 
which I must admit is an awfully weak thing to go on.  When I was a 
student, I doodled a lot, like anyone else.  But instead of drawing 
pictures, I invented languages and scripts and doodled with those.  
Pages and pages of meaningless script must have come out of my pen 
during the boring parts of lectures, or during lunch, or while 
studying.  Looking back at it, they has some striking resemblances to 
the VMs, though of course not in terms of the look of the script.  
Mainly, I notice that there are repeated word endings and repeated 
character patterns that remind me quite a bit of the VMs.  I cannot 
present this as hard evidence, of course, merely an anecdote that you 
can take or leave as you wish.  I certainly wouldn't trust myself to 
come up with more of the same script, for fear that I would 
subconsciously "Voynich it up" to support my own ideas.

-Seth

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