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

["Francois Almaleh" <francois.almaleh@xxxxxxx>]

I'm right with you
Francois
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Seth Morabito" <sethm@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 8:28 PM
Subject: Re: The Hoax Theory (was: VMs: Codex Seraphinianus...?)


> 
> 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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