This is the first time I’ve logged into my Voynich Portal account in 3.5 years. I couldn’t even remember my password. I’ve been fighting for democracy. All my research, hobbies, family relationships, all the things that matter to me, have been sidelined by the need to be actively engaged.
Time Lost
It was a crushing blow to set aside my research. After 13 years of basic legwork, I was making discoveries, exciting ones, and now all the emerging threads are moldering on an old hard drive that I pulled from a computer that I sold, with my paper notes gathering dust in the attic and under the bed. I feel like a small ship that lost everything in a bad storm, including the captain’s log and now, amidst an even bigger storm, I’m trying to find it all and drag it back into the boat.
Except I can’t. Not yet. There’s more work to be done on the home-front and it’s more urgent than ever.
A Token Note
I can’t pop in and out without at least posting something about the VMS. So maybe the most appropriate snippet is this… at the time I was forced to drop my Voynich research, in 2021, I was booking a trip to Europe. This is one of the more speculative parts of my research but I was itching to travel somewhere mysterious and beautiful, and I set my sights on Plitvice, the waters of the mysterious legend of the Black Queen.
I tentatively booked accommodation, selected a train pass, and was making a final decision between two air routes. I was long overdue for a vacation and wanted to see if there was a connection between the fabulous pools and falls in Plitvice and drawings in the Voynich Manuscript. I wanted to “walk the walk” and try to match up the connections on the “map” pages and “pool” pages with something real. I was forced to cancel all of it. I’m still longing to go there for both personal and academic reasons.
Summary
This is all I can post right now. I will try against all odds to drop in and get some of the more important VMS-related matters resolved (like my findings about the drawing that was located in Italy by F. Salani) but for now, duty calls.
More than five years, ago Fabrizio Salani purchased a drawing at a second-hand market in Italy that resembles a copy of a VMS plant, folio 14v. Rene Zandbergen provided a link to the drawing on the voynich.ninja forum. Unfortunately, the link is no longer active, but Salani later posted an interesting video about his discovery on youtube that is still available.
Deja Vu
When I saw the drawing, I immediately noticed something familiar, something I had noticed while cruising through plant drawings, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. From that moment on, I was intrigued by the possibility of finding the illustrator and, after an extensive survey of medieval, Renaissance, and modern plant books, I located examples that have the same idiosyncrasies as the drawing purchased by Salani.
The Long Road Forward
The only reason it was possible to find the Salani illustrator is because he substituted his own style of root for the VMS root. The VMS drawing (right) has a crab-like root, painted a dark brick-red). The Salani root is more naturalistic. He also added an extra leaf which has some distinctive properties.
At the time we were alerted to the Salani drawing, I posted a few examples of roots on the voynich.ninja forum (02/12/16). I knew they were not the same illustrator, but I had a feeling they they might be approximately the same time period. I did not restrict my search to this period of history, however, but several years of research brought me back to it, time and time again, and it turned out to be the right ballpark.
The Salani drawing is not a slavish copy of the VMS plant, but it’s faithful enough that it cannot be a coincidence. Assuming the Salani illustrator copied the VMS (or copied a copy of the VMS) and not the other way around (which seems unlikely), he apparently did not think a 100% faithful copy was needed for whatever purpose he made the copy.
Voynichese Characters
The VMS glyphs are not copied with complete accuracy either. They are mostly right, and even the way they cross the leaf has been honored, but there are some small discrepancies.
Guessing at the purpose of the copy is difficult, but my research on printing history revealed that Renaissance entrepreneurs scrambled to gather up manuscripts that they could turn into printed books. Perhaps there was a period in the life of the VMS when someone thought it might be worthy of print reproduction. If so, this may have occurred during the “dark” portion of the VMS provenance.
Another possibility is that the copy represents one of the events documented in letters about the VMS between the Jesuits who had it in their possession before Wilfrid Voynich acquired it. There is mention of a copy (the current owner apparently didn’t want to give up the whole manuscript). I will discuss this in future posts because this is only valid if the active life of the illustrator synchs up with the dates of the letters.
Summary
I will share more about this intriguing discovery in future blogs, but for now, here is a small portion of a chart I created as I was searching for the illustrator and, more importantly searching for corroborating evidence to pinpoint the dates during which he was active and who he associated with at the time.
J.K. Petersen chart documenting connections to the illustrator who apparently created the Fabrizio Salani drawing
I will post close-ups at a future date (this is a teaser since it’s not possible to explain the whole chart without close-ups that show the connections).
I have to make this quick. My time for blogging is very limited (and I have many mostly-finished blogs I need to get posted). But I thought this quirk in some medieval zodiacs might be interesting to Voynich researchers.
Mislabeled or Misunderstood
In a cruise through eBay a couple of years ago I noticed that many small sculptures, pieces of jewelry, and designs on ceramics that were based on animals were mislabeled. Foxes labeled as mice, hedgehogs labeled as boars, deer labeled as foxes. These were not occasional errors, they were common. Apparently, some people don’t recognize animals, especially if they are small.
I’ve already posted a blog on how unrealistic medieval animal drawings can be, but sometimes this is because the animal was unknown. For example, unicorns sometimes resembled a cross between a goat and a rhino. Tigers were sometimes drawn as stripy horses. Elephants were sometimes cowlike animals with long noses.
I have also seen marginal drawings of goats labeled as sheep (and sometimes vice-versa). The VMS pic where one would expect a sheep, in the slot usually assigned to Aries, does have fairly curvy horns but otherwise is quite goat-like:
Does this happen in other medieval zodiacs? Yes, sometimes. Here are some examples.
Goat-Like Aries or Misplaced Figures
In the first example, extracted from a wheel illustration, the constellation Aries is somewhat goatlike, especially considering that medieval sheep were often drawn with long tails. However, it can still be distinguished from the goat by having slightly more curved horns:
The following drawings are a bit degraded, so it’s hard to see clearly, but the goat and ram have been transposed. The drawing in Aries has long horns and a short, upturned tail (goat-like), and the one in Capricorn has shorter, curved horns and a longer down-turned tail:
In this example, the figures are out of order. The illustrator mistakenly drew Capricorn (goat) and Sagittarius (centaur) in the months for Aries (ram) and Taurus (bull).
In the next example, Aries has a goatlike beard and the traditional goat-fish has been used for Capricorn:
In this example, Aries has sheep-like wool combined with a goat-like tail and beard:
Sometimes the drawings are so similar, it’s difficult to tell the sheep from the goat. In this case the bodies are almost the same (Aries is slightly thicker, but not much). The main difference is the curl of the horns:
Summary
In general, in medieval zodiacs, Aries is depicted with curly horns and a puffy or long tail (usually pointing down), Capricorn usually has a shorter tail, sometimes upturned, with straighter horns and often a beard.
It doesn’t happen often, but Aries is sometimes drawn like a goat, and Capricorn is occasionally transposed with Aries. The VMS goat-like sheep in the Aries slot is somewhat unusual, but it’s not unprecedented, so it’s difficult to know if the deviation is lack of experience, a mistake, or a deliberate choice.
Mandrake is one of the best-known plants in medieval herbals. The root is roughly humanoid, and medieval entrepreneurs sometimes carved it to make it more overtly human. Folklore said it was dangerous to dig up the root. The plant would shriek and hearing it could kill you, so harvesters were counseled to use a dog on a leash to dig it up.
The Mandrake in Medieval Herbals
Many medieval herbals included the mandrake, from countries like Italy, France, England, Germany, Greece, the Middle East, and others.
Sometimes only one plant is shown, sometimes two versions: “masculine” and “feminine”, as in these Arabic manuscripts:
The male/female dichotomy goes back to the Dioscorides. In this early copy, the faces are not explicitly drawn, but the roots are distinctly humanoid. A dog is not included in the image, but is mentioned in the text:
Male and female Mandrake in the 7th-century Naples Dioscorides [MS Suppl. gr. 28]
The humanoid root appears in early copies of Pseudo-Apuleis with a dog, but still does not have a humanoid face:
Mandrake with a humanoid body, but no facial features. [Pseudo-Apuleius, Kassel Mandragora, c. 9c]
The anthropomorphic Mandrake was especially popular in the 12th to 15th centuries. This one, from 12th-century England, includes the dog pulling out the plant while two figures approach with hooks or spears:
A dog pulls the mandrake from the ground and two humans approach it from the left: [Source: BL Harley Ms 5294]
This 13th century example is the same basic theme, with the dog, and figures with spears, but the narrative is broken up into a series of panels:
The mandrake was supposed to be excavated with the help of a dog so the human was not harmed by the mandrake’s shrieks. [Codex Vindobinensis 93, 13 century, Wash. University]
On the facing folio, the dog has done its job and two figures poke the root with hooked spears, but it is different from most depictions of mandrake in that a second figure is under the feet of the standing mandrake. The shadow under the character on the left is very doglike.
This version is the same general idea, but the spears are replaced by more familiar tools, and the male and female versions are shown as conjoined twins:
Male and female forms of mandrake cojoined, with the dog pictured above. [Biblioteca Bologna, Gr. 3632]
The dog is not always included. Here are a number of examples that emphasize the humanoid form both sans and with the dog:
Most mandrake drawings include berries. Some have smooth leaf margins, others are serrate. In real life, the margins are ruffled and irregularly serrate.
In the 16th century, the humanoid form was gradually superseded by naturalistic representations.
Is Mandrake in the VMS?
The Voynich Manuscript has a large number of plants in the “big plant drawings” section, and yet there’s nothing that overtly resembles Mandrake. Some have suggested that f33r might be mandrake, but I think there are better identifications for 33r.
A better possibility is f25v, but the root is not humanoid, the leaves are not ruffled or serrate, and they have been carefully drawn with parallel veins, more similar to Plantago or Dracaena. The little dragon is not typical for mandrake plants and I have a few things to say about the critter in another blog.
The VMS is incomplete, so if Mandrake was included, maybe it was separated from other folios. Or… perhaps it is in the section with the small plant drawings…
Artfully Subtle
I’ve been intending for years to write about the small-plants section, but it’s a large number of plants, my notes have turned into a dauntingly huge pile, and it’s hard to find time to write it up properly. But I’m beginning to think I should mention this particular plant because I’ve believed for a long time that it is mandrake, and that it is partly mnemonic:
Is this a sideways, mnemonic version of Mandragora? [Yale Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Beinecke 408, f89r]
If you turn your head sideways, you can see the human figure, or rather a fairly naturalistic root with humanoid overtones. The head has little rootlets that look like hair, the shoulders have long root-like arms. There’s a rounded body and rootlike legs. To the left, coming out of the head, are two leaves with serrated margins. I believe the leaves are shaped to represent the heads of dogs, with ears facing right and the muzzle vaguely suggested.
Why two dog heads? Maybe the intention was to imply male and female plants without being too obvious about it.
Mandrake is toxic. Maybe the prone posture represents something that can make you ill.
If this is Mandrake, it gives us insight into the drawing style and thought processes of the VMS designer. The important elements are there, but nothing is completely traditional or overt. The figure is sideways, thus making it less noticeably humanoid. The dogs are not drawn separately, but included as a mnemonic in the leaves. It’s subtle, whimsical, clever, and irresistibly cheeky.
A few years ago I noticed something was going on with the plant names in Codex LJS 419, but I was busy with other research, so I bookmarked it for future reference. In March 2020, with most of the world in quarantine, I finally had a few minutes to leaf through the scans and realized, when I saw the peony plant, that the labels had been lightly enciphered.
A Plant Book that Spanned a Century
According to the U. Penn Schoenberg Collection Subject Details, the LJS 419Erbario was begun in the first half of the 15th century with a number of later additions. The drawings are quite good for 15th century. Some are stylized, but most are recognizable.
UPenn Schoenberg CollectionLJS 419 is a bit of a pastiche. The drawings are in at least three different styles, and the ones on the recto (the original drawings) are frequently smaller than the ones they face.
There are labels by most of the drawings, and text under some of the images in handwriting that was common to the 16th century. Thus, the text may have been added as much as a century after the drawings.
I noticed that some of the labels are incorrect. The plant below is clearly not Calendula, a plant that has had the same name for centuries. It is recognizable as Senecio, probably Senecio vulgaris:
The labels for Pulmonaria (65v) and Salvia (65r) don’t match the plant drawings either, but if you swap the labels, then they match (a detail that the Shoenberg commentator didn’t note in the annotations for each plant).
Most of the labels appear to be correct, however, and they are interesting because some of them are in cipher…
The Garbled Plant Labels
Some of the plant names are readable. Others are oddly spelled and overwritten, like this one:
The word “Latuca” is somewhat mangled. Adding a stem to each “a” makes it Lbtucb. The next word, “agrestis” has a stem through the “e” to make it “f”, and the “i” is “l”.
I wasn’t sure what was happening until I saw an odd label next to a plant that was easy to identify. That’s when I realized this was a simple cipher with some of the vowels changed.
Here is the label. It reads pepnla:
I could see this was a Peony plant not a “Pepnla” plant which, in turn, made it clear that this was a partial substitution cipher. It is sometimes called the monk’s cipher and I can see why. I have often seen it in manuscripts with ecclesiastical content, like sermons.
Notice how the “o” is “p” (I saw the same substitution in some of the earlier plant labels), and the “i” is changed to “l” (ell). That was the clue. It’s a common and simple vowel-substitution cipher that is quite easy to read once you get used to the fact that consonants are used for vowels:
The “o” is changed to “p” because it is a vowel and “p” is the closest consonant following “o”.
The “i” has been changed to “l” because it is the closest consonant following “i”. They didn’t have “j” in the Middle Ages (what looks like “j” was usually an embellished “i”) and many languages did not have “k”, so “l” (ell) would be the closest consonant following “i”.
I’m not sure why they left the first “e” and last “a” as vowels rather than substituting all the vowels. Either it was an oversight, or perhaps they thought Pepnla was enough to obscure the name.
Here’s another example that reveals the order in which things were done for this label but apparently not for all the labels:
Underneath, it looks like Spftlnb, which is a little more difficult to read without decoding it first because it is both abbreviated and enciphered. Someone wrote over it with darker ink, to create S~pe’tina, which is an abbreviation for Serpentina. It uses the same system as the others, of selecting the next-closest consonant to replace the vowel.
Note how the “u” letters in the next two words were written as “x”, which is to be expected for a consonant following “u”. Many languages did not have the letter “w”, and “u” and “v” were roughly equivalent, so “x” is a natural substitute.
Sometimes plaintext is written over the ciphertext. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Perhaps there were three hands involved, one turning it into ciphertext, someone else converting it back.
Now that it was clear that a consistent system was used, it became straightforward to decipher the last word cpstb which was not overwritten. This can be deciphered as “costa”. Costa is a medicinal plant that was common in medieval herbals.
A plant drawing that clearly depicts Asphodel also has an altered label. It looks like this:
Here the ciphered text is Afpdklk, and we can see that the “o” was written as “p” (consistent with the previous examples). The two “i” characters in Afodili (one of the common spellings at the time) were written as “k”.
So the writer apparently did know the letter “k” (“k” was not used in every language but sometimes it was used in loanwords). The phrase following the name “herba di Sbtxrnp” is only partly enciphered. It decrypts to herba di Saturna.
The next label reads Bftpnlchb, which decrypts to Betonicha, another very common plant in medieval herbals:
The next one might have been harder to read without the picture, since it is both abbreviated and enciphered, but it includes a good drawing of the plant:
The word was overwritten as Tprmftlla, which decodes to Torme’tila, with the macron standing for the missing “n” in Tormentila.
The next one reads dltamp bla’chp, so the “a” was left in its normal state. The plaintext is ditamo biancho. Note the humanist-style “h”, which has a short stem that doesn’t quite reach the baseline. This, in addition to the overall style, is one of the palaeographic clues that the labels were probably added in the later 15th century or, more likely, the 16th century:
Male and Female Plants
The following label puzzled me for a moment. Since pepnkb isn’t a plant name, it has to be the enciphered word peonia. But it doesn’t look as much like a peony as the other drawing already mentioned. It is more upright, and drawn without the seeds. Then I remembered that some medieval manuscripts included both “male” and “female” (mascula, femina) versions of peony, just as they did for Mandrake and a few other plants. Since there is a very recognizable peony drawing on the verso, I’m guessing that it represents the female and the recto represents the male plant:
The next label reads Mprssus dkbbpli, which translates to Morssus diaboli (devil’s bite), a common name for several species of Scabious.
But the drawing is not a Scabious plant. Scabious has pufflike flowers, not bell-shaped flowers. The flower in the drawing is like Campanula, but the hairy stalk and parsley-like leaves are not, so it is probably Pulsatilla, the Pasque flower, rather than Scabious. Most Pulsatilla flowers do not dangle as much as this, they tend to spread their petals, like anemones, but they do sometimes hang, depending on the species. Taken together with the flower shape, leaves, and fibrous base, it’s probably Pulsatilla:
The next label is lxnbrkb, which is described as follows in the Schoenberg annotations for this manuscript:
66: ‘Lenbrkb’ – a puzzle, though the same word is used for a different plant on 71r
It’s really not that puzzling. This decrypts quite easily as “lunaria” by using vowel-for-consonant substitution:
Compared to ciphers of today, or even of 200 years ago, this is easy to read. You don’t even have to make a chart, you just have to learn the letter that follows each vowel and you can read it as though it were normal text.
Other Interesting Details
A few of the drawings are unpainted and include color annotations, a detail that may also exist in the Voynich Mansucript:
Why someone chose such light encipherment for plant names (and only enciphered a few of them) is difficult to understand. Maybe they did it for fun. Maybe they were planning something similar for the rest of the text but never completed the task. What it tells us, however, is that even in the 16th century, these very simple ciphers were still in use, and if you combine them with abbreviations, they can sometimes be a bit more challenging to figure out if there are no drawings to make the meaning clear.
Summary
I had planned to post this blog in April, but simply forgot about it. Then today, I saw the paper of Alisa Gladyseva on Researchgate.net where she describes the peony name in this manuscript as an example of a “corrupted” plant name.
I was quite stunned that someone who writes a paper on the history of cryptography and who claims to have decoded the VMS did not recognize the monk’s cipher (which is simple and only involves partial substitution of vowels) and so I decided to post this blog so the VMS community can compare her interpretation with what is really happening in LJS 419. Here is what Gladyseva wrote in her paper:
Obviously, some names of 13 plants [in MS Aldini 211] seem to be corruptions of known names e.g. ‘Antolla’ for ‘Anthyllis’, ‘Ariola’ for ‘Oriola’. 23 plant names are strongly corrupted for e.g. ‘Metries’ for ‘Myrtus’, ‘Rigogola’ for ‘Galega’….
Manuscript Number is ‘ljs419’ Italy, of XV century is a typical of the medieval Apuleius herbal. But it has corrupted botanical names of plant on 71r folia. As well as the name of plant ‘Pepeko’ 24r, that is probably is one of the species of peony in real. | P E O N I O |. In reason, on the next folia there is another kind of peony: 24v: ‘Peonia’. –Gladyseva, Jan 2020
So, Gladyseva includes a paragraph on corrupted plant names and then cites LJS 419 as an example of corrupted plant names, but it is not! It is an example of a common and very simple medieval substitution cipher, as can be seen by the decryption examples I posted above.
Gladyseva has been claiming for some time that she has deciphered the VMS, but never shows any concrete examples of her method. How could a researcher who claims to have deciphered the Voynich Manuscript in a paper that describes the history of cryptography have missed something so simple and obvious as the monk’s cipher?
I think it’s time for her to reveal her method so the rest of the research community can see if there is sufficient evidence to support her claims.
Ancient Egyptians mastered the integration of anatomical knowledge and mythological stories into artistic symbols and figures. Artistically, the Eye is comprised of six different parts. Mythologically, each part is considered to be an individual symbol. Anatomically, each part corresponds with the center of a particular human sensorium.
Many have seen the Eye of Horus (or the Eye of Ra) as a decorative motif in jewelry. Historically, the Udjat (eye of Ra) was a talisman of protection, regeneration, and health, and was often included as a funerary item:
This Egyptian amulet, from around 800 B.C.E., combines a winged Udjat eye, a lion, and two uraei (sacred serpents), thus embodying Egyptian myths. [Source: The Met, public domain]
The lion and serpent (cobra) represent authority and the more powerful or darker aspects associated with the eye goddess, who was variously personified as the mother, daughter, or consort of the sun god.
Horus was a sky deity, depicted as a raptor. His right eye was associated with the sun and Ra, the left eye with the moon and the god Thoth. In this Udjat, from around the same time period as the one above, the wing and feet of the raptor replace the lion, and are combined with a single serpent, which may represent Seth:
Egyptian amulet with horus as a raptor, together with a serpent [Source: The Met]
The Eye symbology may predate the Egyptians, but this is murky history that I know very little about, so I will restrict my comments to Egyptian interpretation of this symbol. Some of this information was passed on to people in the Middle Ages through Greek intermediaries and merchants, but I don’t know how much was known by the 15th century.
The Myth Behind the Eye
The god of storms and disorder is known as Seth (sth). Seth vied with his relative Horus for the rule of Egypt. Seth stole or injured Horus’s eye, which was then restored by Thoth. Thus, the restored eye came to represent healing and regeneration.
Variations of the eye motif were especially popular in the millenium leading up to the Current Era and, in a specific form, came to embody other concepts as well. In addition to representing the senses, the Udjat has a mathematical meaning for each of its primary contours:
The sum total of these fractions adds up to 63/64ths. There have been many theories as to what might represent the presumed missing fraction and even the measurements themselves are disputed. [Image source: The Met]
The fractions represent powers of two.
This propensity for integrating multiple interpretations into symbols with mythical significance caught my attention because it reminded me of the Voynich Manuscript. It’s possible the VMS illustrations were drawn to embody more than one concept. If so, there is a historical precedent for this, one that that has come down to us primarily through Egyptian writings and artifacts.
And there’s more…
The right eye of Horus came to represent the sun, the left eye the moon. Which means that the blotting out of a right eye could represent a solar eclipse. Ancient myths might actually be a codification of this kind of event, with “gods” as personifications of the heavens.
Can this be more directly related to the VMS?
Nymph pointing to an eye or poking or removing it, a possible personification of a solar eclipse. [Source: Beinecke 408, Yale Rare Books and Manuscripts Library]
On Folio 80r we have an enigmatic illustration of a nymph pointing to the right eye of another nymph, or possibly stabbing or plucking it out. This is a departure from many of the more smiley and benign-looking VMS encounters. Could this unexpectedly violent interaction be a symbol for a solar eclipse?
If this seems implausible, look at the object in the nymph’s hand. The Eye of Horus is simultaneously a talisman, an embodiment of ancient stories, a celestial reference, and a representation of measures (the six pieces into which the eye broke in a battle with Seth).
If the blotting of the eye represents a solar eclipse, then perhaps the item in the hand of the nymph is a measuring caliper, a reference to the multiple uses for the Eye of Horus.
Is the eye-poking scene related to the one below It?
Like the ebb and flow of the Nile river, the battles between Seth and Horus stretched over decades, with Horus sometimes teaming up with Ra. Seth is sexually indiscriminant, makes a deal with Horus to sodomize him, and leaves behind his supposedly poisonous semen (Herman te Velde, 1967). Horus, at one point, steals Seth’s testicles (although I don’t know if this happened before or after their sexual encounter).
Could this drawing below the eye-poking scene be a sly reference to Seth’s severed testicles? Yes, I know, there are three bumps, but this is the VMS, nothing seems explicitly real.
Summary
Koen Gheuens posted a plausible interpretation for the figures at the top of this folio and the idea of the nymphs representing Seth and Horus and a possible reference to a solar eclipse does not fit well with the story of Philomela. So either the context shifts, or there is a connection that is more abstract (e.g., medieval astrology/astronomy), or it means something else.
If the Philomela story is correct, then the connection via astrology doesn’t seem very strong. Procne and Philomela were turned into birds, not stars.
Could it be a context-shift? Are there precedents for this possibility?
Morgan MS M.126 (England, c. 1470) is a series of tales that includes the story of Philomela on folio 125v. On the left, Tereus cuts out her tongue. On the right, Procne takes vengeance by feeding Tereus his child (note also the fancy containers). Above the action, the women are turned into birds:
Philomela, Procne, and Tereus. [Courtesy of Morgan Library MS M.126, England, c. 1470]
On the next folio is a different story. We go from Philomela, which is more of a morality tale, to a story of gods associated with stars. Here we see Arcas about to shoot Callisto, who Juno had transformed into a bear. When he saw what was about to happen to the bear, Juno changed Arcas into a bear, as well, and placed both of them in the sky to become Ursa Major and Minor, the Great and Little bears:
Creation of Ursa Major and Minor. [Courtesy of Morgan Library MS M.126, England, c. 1470]
Two folios later is the biblical story of Lazarus, and at the beginning of the manuscript is the story of Troy. In other words, Morgan M.126 is an eclectic collection from a number of mythical, moral, and historical sources. It is possible for stories of different genres, or with a different focus, to directly follow one another.
So perhaps there is more than one tale represented on VMS folio 80r and maybe the eye-poking scene represents a different myth from the one at the top. If it does represent a solar eclipse, then maybe it is related to cosmological or astrological imagery on other folios.
Speakers of Chechen sometimes have difficulty reading and writing their own language. Currently there are about 1.4 million Chechen speakers, mostly in the Caucasus, but also in scattered colonies in the eastern Mediterranean, western Russia, and Bavaria/Tirol. The Chechens live in the mountains, in a linguistically diverse region that includes some very old languages.
In July 2018, I posted a blog on Tischlbong, a Slavic/Bavarian blended language spoken in the village of Timau on the Bavaria/Italian border. This blog takes us further east, to the region between the Black and Caspian seas, where a surprisingly diverse group of languages, some of which are nearly extinct, are still spoken in cultures that are thousands of years old.
It was actually the Azerbijani language that attracted my attention first, for a number of reasons, but after I began to appreciate the diversity of languages in this region, I learned of some unusual aspects of Chechen and decided to look into this, as well.
Chechen and Nearby Languages
Chechen is spoken by a little more than a million people in a culturally ancient and linguistically diverse region between the Black and Caspian seas, bordering Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Russia. [Source: Google maps; Vyacheslav Argenberg, Wikipedia]
Ubykh, one of the languages in the Akbhaz-Circassian language group, became extinct in 1992. This remarkable language had 82 consonants and only two vowels (Coene, 2009).
In general, minority languages and even some of the majority languages in the northern Caucasus region did not have their own alphabets until the 19th and 20th centuries. Chechen has a longer written history than most of the minority languages. Some of the minority languages are spoken by only a few thousand people and may be gone in a generation or two.
The Avar or Azerbaijani languages are used bilingually for economic transactions by a number of people in this region. Russian is also spoken and mandated in some areas.
In some ways, the Caucasians and Basques have characteristics in common. Not in terms of their language specifics or background (although both languages are agglutinative), but in resistance to outside influences. This is largely due to cultural isolation—mountain strongholds are harder to conquer. Historically, these cultural groups retained a certain autonomy that is reflected in their languages.
More recently, however, technology, Soviet expansion, and wars have left their mark and have wiped out a sizable portion of native literature. When orthography changes, books in previous alphabets become obsolete and are destroyed. With them goes the link to ancestral history.
History and Orthography
Chechen and Ingush are related to Vainakh, a northeast Caucasian language.
Like several middle eastern and central Asian languages, Chechen exemplifies synchronic digraphia—a language written with several alphabets, usually Arabic, Cyrillic, or Latin. Historically, the Arabic alphabet was used for Chechen, but since 1862, a Cyrillic-based alphabet was the dominant script, with recurring and politically controversial attempts to convert to Latin. In 2002, the Russian language was mandated for education, which may threaten the future of numerous local languages.
Members of the Chechen diaspora who settled in Bavaria and the eastern Mediterranean sometimes use Latin characters because they are familiar, but their efforts are not standardized. The number of books published in Chechen is small and some of these were destroyed in recent wars.
Chechen literature has received very little study but is worthy of attention because of its unique poetic characteristics and the position of this region in an important crossroad between Christian and Muslim cultures.
Some Interesting Aspects of Chechen
Chechen is an agglutinative language with some interesting characteristics. Literacy levels were not historically high, so it is difficult to chart changes between current usage and older versions of the language.
Here are some general characteristics…
Numbers (in the singular) and names of the seasons usually end in a vowel. Dal is the word for God, Seli for the traditional thunderer, and Eter for the ancient underground god (the Chechens were traditionally polytheistic).
There are many words comprised of simple 2- or 3-letter syllables, and some that repeat a syllable, such as zaza (flower), or which repeat a consonant together with different vowel or vice versa, as in or qoqa (dove) or adam (person).
Letters like j tend to be at the beginnings of words.
One spelling can have different pronunciations and serve multiple purposes. To take an example cited by E. Komen, the single word деза (deza) can be interpreted as four very different concepts:
No, there is more variety in the positions of letters within Chechen words than in VMS tokens. But it demonstrates that natural languages can have orthographies in which different sounds are represented by the same shape, where vowel representation is limited, and within which the same linguistic unit can be repeated several times with different meanings for each iteration.
In page layout, text is frequently organized in columns. If the left side is even and the right side is ragged, it is “left-justified”. If it is even on both sides, it is “justified” or “double-justified”.
In contemporary page layout, lines can be padded with software algorithms that add extra space between each character to fill the columns. In the Middle Ages, padding was at the discretion of scribes, and there were numerous strategies.
Strategies for Padding
In early medieval texts and some of the Hebrew texts, the right margin is sometimes padded by stretching out the last character:
In this rambling Insular script, the right is sometimes justified by stretching the final character. [Source: Vat. Lat. 491]
Sometimes padding was created within the line by spacing out words and stretching some of the ligatures:
The common ligature “st” has been stretched and combined with word spacing to even out the right-hand margin. [Source: ÖAW Hs A 6 (earlier: a IX 21}, c. late 1200s]Individual letters and ligatures have been stretched to even out columns. In this case, the letter N is chosen, along with the common ligature “st”. [Source BNF Latin 9844]
If the scribe didn’t want to manipulate the letters or was in a hurry, one of the simplest ways to pad out a column was to add a line. In this example, wavy red lines extend the text:
Quick and simple line padding in wiggly red lines [Source: British Library Bodmer 91]
The padding Morgan B.25 is equally simple but rises higher from the baseline:
Sometimes padding was more decorative, using repetitive patterns or small drawings of animals or birds. In this example, from Royal 2 Z xviii, a two-tone angled decoration, that can be repeated as necessary, fills the column:
A similar format was used to pad the right-hand side in Pal.lat.26 except that the designs are more varied:
Decorative padding was a creative opportunity. Some rubricators or illustrators drew plants, animals, and many kinds of birds. Arundel 157 has page after page of charming examples, each one a little different:
Sometimes a simple repetitive pattern was used, with space between each iteration:
Columns are filled with a simple repetitive pattern in red [Source: BAV Borgh.312]
Sometimes the repeating pattern was shaped like a letter:
When the letters were close together, they became visually similar to a decorative pattern. This simple letter-like padding from the early medieval period was still used in the 15th century:
Paragraph-end padding in an early medieval manuscript. [Source: BL Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1]
A simple letter-like repeated v-shape was still in use centuries later, as in this 15th century manuscript, sometimes extended with dots in the middle when it was longer. [Source: Heidelberg Hs. 1012, c. 1460]
Moving the letters closer together gives them a more decorative appearance. [Source: KBR MS 11102]
Sometimes text was justified by spreading out letters or breaking words across a line. In these cases, padding wasn’t needed until the scribe reached the end of the paragraph. If the last line was very short, it wasn’t practical to insert spaces, so padding characters were added instead. In the following example, the paragraph-end has been padded with a simple pattern in alternating colors:
A simple decorative padding pattern has been dressed up with in alternating colors. [KBR Ms 14910-12]
In this example, a more decorative line was added to fill out the last line:
In this manuscript, lines are justified with spacing or word-breaks so that the columns are generally even, except for the last line, which is padded with a decorative line. [Source: Koninklijke Bibliotheek Ms Fabr. 91 4°, ]
Sometimes the last line would be padded with a stretched-out version of the word “AMEN”.
Sometimes larger spaces were added near the end of the line with the last letter capitalized, to create visual balance with the style at the beginning of the line:
In the same manuscript, padding has been inserted between sections of text within the line:
An interesting method of padding within lines, so that sections are separated, rather than adding the padding at the end of each line. [Source: KBR MS 4433-38]
In another manuscript, instead of inserting decorative characters between the words, the letters are stretched:
Lines are padded by stretching some of the characters. This not only evened out the columns, but added aesthetic breaks for the eyes. It was not the easiest technique, it took some planning, and thus was not as common as some of the methods shown earlier. [Source: BNF Latin 9844]
What about the VMS?
Medieval padding caught my attention because it sometimes beings with a shape like “a” and ends with a shape like “v”. Note how closely this pattern resembles aiv av aiiv av aiiv:
In general, padding was added at the ends of lines, but the earlier examples illustrate that there were midline padding strategies as well.
Which makes me wonder whether we should be looking at VMS aiiv in a different way. The pattern includes av, aiv, aiiv, and aiiiv and may be preceded by numerous different glyphs:
The oiv patterns are similar. They are usually at the ends of tokens and are preceded by a variety of glyphs:
However, aiv and oiv patterns are not identical in terms of line position. Even though both are usually in the token-end positions, the oiv tokens do not cluster near the ends of lines as frequently as aiv sequences. The oiv sequences are in line-position 1 about twice as often as aiv sequences:
Here is an example of these tendencies in VMS folio 28v:
Implications for the Voynich Manuscript
Could the “aiiv” group be a substitute for line-end padding and stretched-out letters? In the VMS, “aiv” patterns are not always preceded by EVA-d. Many other characters precede “aiiv” as in this example on f2v. Also, in this snippet, three of the four line-ends are aiv patterns:
In general, aiv patterns tend to be in the latter half of a line more than the first half, even in text that has not been double-justified.
However, this is a slight overall trend. There are sections in which the proportions are even, as in this snippet:
Patterns of aiv on folio 81v that are more evenly distributed across the line [Source: Yale Beinecke 408, c. early 1400s]
However, the longest “aiiiv” pattern falls near the end of the line more often than the beginning:
Here’s a full folio (37v) with aiv and oiv patterns highlighted. Once again, oiv leans more toward the beginning and aiv toward the end:
Summary
I’ve mentioned a few times that I think the emphasis on daiin may be misguided. Forget the “d” (at least for now). We should be looking at the ain patterns (which I call aiv) together with the oin patterns. The fact that they occur in the same parts of tokens, but in different parts of the line, is revealing.
In medieval texts, padding can occur within a line or at the end of a line and padding sometimes shares shapes with regular letters, especially the letters a and v. The aiiiv patterns might not be padding patterns, maybe they are word endings, modifiers, or conjunctions. But it’s something to think about. Maybe the shape was inspired by padding patterns even if the interpretation is different. Depending on what precedes the aiv sequence in the VMS, it may serve more than one purpose. But the pattern has an affinity for the ends of tokens and the latter parts of lines and its cousin oiv has a stronger affinity for the beginnings of lines, a pattern that deserves some attention.
Giovanni Fontana’s circle-line cipher is designed to be mnemonic without being too obvious about what the symbols represent. I’ve noticed this characteristic in several medieval and Renaissance ciphers, including the cipher of Hildegard von Bingen.
The Fontana Cipher
Johannes de Fontana (c. 1395–c. 1455) was a physician and engineer educated at Padua in the early 15th century. Fontana was interested in clockworks, and created entertaining devices, like clockwork-based skeletons, to showcase his engineering talent. But he is best known for Bellicorum instrumentorum (BSB Cod.icon. 242), an illustrated book of devices for warfare and sieges created in Venice in the 1420s.
The introductory page of Bellicorum instrumentorum includes a paragraph of plaintext followed by ciphertext. Here is some of the plaintext:
Lombardy and northern Italy were part of the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century. Venice managed to keep its independence through much of this period but was, of course, influenced by surrounding city-states. Italian culture is more evident in Fontana’s script than germanic culture. The final-ess (long-ess) is one of the clues. This was fairly common in Italy and much less so in Germany and France, where they preferred a B-shape or sigma-shape for final-ess. There is also a distinct lack of loops (a characteristic that was adapted by humanists all over Europe in the late 15th century and 16th century but was uncommon in Germany and France in the 15th century).
The “a” without a crossbar is another letter to note. This is a more traditional form of “a” that was uncommon in 15th-century Germany and France but used from time-to-time in Greek texts, early-medieval texts, and some of the Italian scripts. The raised “q” is unusual and Fontana did not always write it this way in earlier texts.
Below the plaintext is a block of ciphertext:
Most of the folios include a drawing, a block of plaintext, and a block of ciphertext:
The drawings are not professional-level, but they are reasonably clear and instructive, like the VMS drawings. The main difference is that the Fontana drawings show a better understanding of three-dimensional mechanics than the VMS (the weakness in three-dimensional thinking is especially apparent in the muddled way VMS human joints are drawn).
The Fontana Cipher Characters
Someone has added the following alphabet to a foreleaf of Bellicorum instrumentorum, but you don’t need it to decode this cipher. Fontana designed his cipher to be easy to read, thus making it easy to decipher:
Before I break down the alphabet, I’d like to point out another book by Fontana, called Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum (BNF NAL 635, c. 1430). Like Bellicorum, this includes a significant amount of ciphertext and some interesting rotary text mechanisms:
The manuscript describes various kinds of memory and mnemonic devices and Fontana’s interest in these subjects sheds some light on the design of his cipher.
The Rationale Behind the Fontana Cipher
Start with a basic concept—circles and tickmarks.
Line up the vowels with a circle to represent each one.
Starting with the outermost circles, add tickmarks facing west and east.
Now go to the “e” and “o” circles and add tickmarks facing north and south.
There are 5 vowels and only 4 cardinal directions, so leave the “i” as it is but you can imagine the circle being squished in from the sides until it resembles “i” (this will also help with remembering another letter). You can draw it round, you just have to think of it squished to remember it’s the letter “i”.
Now you have 5 vowels.
How can circles and tickmarks be used to create consonants while still keeping the cipher reasonably mnemonic? Quite often in medieval ciphers (including the cipher of Hildegard von Bingen), some of the cipher shapes are formed by mirroring.
In Hildegard’s lingua ignota, the r, b, and h are drawn almost in the normal way except an extra tickmark has been added to b and h. The letter “u” is normal for her time period, as well (the double-cee sometimes also stands for “a” in early-medieval texts). But the “d” and “p” have been mirrored in the horizontal direction and “y” is mirrored in the vertical direction:
Fontana used mirroring, as well, in a more methodical way than Hildegard.
Take the letters b, d, p, and q (which are morphologically similar) and mirror them in the horizontal direction.
Extend the straight strokes (otherwise the identity of the letter is a little too obvious).
Add a tickmark pointing in the direction the letter would normally face, and further place it up for b and d, down for p and q (the normal direction for the ascender or descender).
Creating a mnemonic “s” is easy. Close the loops. It can be written both vertical and horizontal and is still easy to remember because it is the only character with two loops. The “t” is also easy. Remember that the “i” is a simple loop and imagine it squished. Now add a crossbar on top and you have a mnemonic “t”. In fact, some of the other consonants, like y and z also substitute the circle for a stroke.
After a while, you run out of the simple shapes, so Fontana used a different way to remember h, k, m, and n. Instead of mirroring, these letters are based on strokes. The letter “h” has two main strokes, so the cipher character has a circle with two strokes up and right. The “k” also has two strokes up and right, but the letter “k” has a third angled stroke, so this is added as well:
The letters “m” and “n” work the same way. The “m” has three strokes, the “n” has two, and this is how many are attached to the circle. The direction doesn’t even matter since h and k are at right angles, with one stroke mimicking the ascender. The m and n are parallel and thus easy to distinguish from h and k.
This is quite clever. It might be worth repeating… since the parallel and perpendicular lines are distinguishable by their angle, the direction doesn’t matter and Fontana does sometimes vary the direction. This concept could be used to design a new cipher that was more difficult to read, by varying shapes so they appear to be different when, in fact, they are not. That was not Fontana’s intention with this cipher, but it presents some intriguing possibilities.
That’s most of the alphabet. The “f” is mirrored in the vertical direction and since all the letters are circles and lines, a circle is added in the crook.
You might think that Fontana used a Venus symbol, but the resemblance is coincidental. If you move the ascender of the “g” to the center and add a tick, in the same pattern as the other characters, it is recognizable as a “g”. If you make a mouth shape with your left hand and imagine you are holding a marble, it creates the ciphershape “c”.
At the end of the alphabet, we have x, y and z. Draw a cross for x and put a circle in the crook. This is another construction in which direction doesn’t matter. As long as it begins with a cross, you could recognize it no matter which direction it’s turned (I’m going to keep emphasizing this, since a cipher based on these concepts has flexibility that linguistic alphabets don’t). Since crosses are often substituted for X, this is easy to remember.
Draw an angled line for y and z (both of which have angled strokes) and put a circle on the side that needs a missing stroke and use an extra connector to distinguish z from y.
Postscript 22 July 2020: I forgot to insert this diagram when I originally posted the blog. It illustrates how a stroke from each of these letters is expanded into a circle to create the corresponding cipher character.
There are only two letters that are difficult to categorize, and that is “l” and “r”. Maybe readers can figure out the motivation behind them.
Overall, the cipher is systematic and mnemonic.
Summary
Many ciphers are intended to conceal and the desire for hard-to-crack systems increased in the 15th century. More sophisticated ciphers (by medieval standards) included one-to-many relationships, revolving keys, nulls, and glossaries. Numeric ciphers became more prevalent as well. Soon a whole science of cryptology began to develop, one that is still evolving today. One-to-one substitution was basically obsolete by the 16th century.
So why was Fontana’s cipher so easy to decipher and to learn? I think that’s exactly what he intended. He had an interest in mnemonic systems in general and his cipher demonstrates several memory-jogging techniques that enabled him to write entire tracts in cipher characters.
Now you can read Fontana’s books. Just remember that “u” and “v” were interchangeable in the Middle Ages. Here’s a simple word to get you started.
Also… I noticed, as I was paging through Secretum, that Fontana broke words across lines without line-continuation marks and that he did use some light abbreviation, but he included abbreviation marks, so it’s not particularly troublesome.
Self-driving vehicles are no longer science fiction. They are on public roads. A combination of sensors, hard-coded control software, and AI-related decision-making algorithms have moved the “driver’s seat” from leather and fabric to silicon chips. Control mechanisms have become invisible.
The Future of Intelligent Vehicles
Most people understand the concept of a computer-driven car, at least in a general sense. But have they thought about where this technology might lead?
I don’t mean the more obvious aspects of reading while you’re driving, controlling the car by voice commands, avoiding accidents due to human error, or worrying about GPS bugs that might land you in a dark alley or the wrong side of town. Nor am I talking about sneaking a beer because you don’t have to worry about running into a concrete barrier or oncoming car.
What I see for the future of self-driven vehicles is a biological model based on dolphins. One that goes beyond the individual vehicle.
The Cetacean Connection
Humans can connect with dolphin intelligence. We have a place in our hearts for dolphins and they are attracted to us. But dolphin communication is still mostly a mystery. They learn our languages better than we learn theirs.
In my high-school summer-job days, one of my jobs was working at an aquarium, microphone in hand, narrating the whale shows (killer whales are not really whales, they are orcas, but we called them whales). I learned many surprising facts about whales, dolphins, and sealions that I tried to convey in an engaging and educational manner. I also observed these charming and complex animals having good days and bad days.
One day, the biggest orca was feeling under the weather. He didn’t want to do the show. He went through the motions with lackluster spirit, and then he stalled when the trainer asked him to do a giant leap. He substituted a low leap—you could barely call it a leap.
The trainer gave him a second chance, but the orca offered another sluggish hump, barely breaking the surface, and the trainer became annoyed. He had studied psychology and he knew if he rewarded the orca’s behavior with a bucket of fish, the next performance might be the same or worse, so he did something I had never seen before… he turned his back and slowly, deliberately, walked away with the fish. The audience pays for the show, so this was a gamble. The trainer would have to sacrifice one show for the sake of future customers… but he was resolute. The game was over.
I was young, still in my teens. I hadn’t thought much about the ethics of aquariums, I thought only of their educational value, but what happened next was eye-opening.
When the orca saw his dinner disappearing, he charged after the trainer, frothing up the water along the edge of the pool, with his head well above water.
The trainer pointedly ignored him and kept walking. The orca then sped to the other end of the pool, turned, swished his tail to pick up speed and executed the most beautiful series of dolphin leaps I have ever seen. The trainer didn’t even look around. He turned the corner toward the supply room.
Orca executing a similar leap.
Now the orca was seriously worried, determined to get the trainer’s attention and his reward of fish. So he sped to the far end of the pool, veering around a smaller female orca and the gray dolphins, dove as deep as he could, whipped his tail to propel his immense body up to full speed and… right next to the trainer at the far end of the pool came completely out of the water in the most incredible giant leap I have ever seen. He landed with a mighty splash that poured a tsunami over the delighted audience.
The trainer didn’t even glance around. He walked into the supply room and shut the door.
The orca hovered at the edge of the pool, nose out of the water, waiting for the door to re-open, thinking he had made up for his previous lapse. He had, after all, just given the performance of his life.
The “killer whale”, more properly called an orca, similar to this one, waited for the trainer to re-emerge.
But the door didn’t re-open until it was time for the next show, an hour later.
From that point on, the orca gave his usual excellent performance. Most of the time, he enjoyed the hourly shows, but it was never the same as the adrenalin-charged series of leaps that the trainer never saw. His extra effort inspired me to learn more about orcas, and how they live in the wild, and I tried to incorporate this information into my narrative at the whale shows.
The audience seemed to enjoy the additional information in the commentary, until I started talking about dolphin sonar. Then their eyes would glaze over, so I dropped it from the narrative… but I never lost interest in the subject.
How Dolphins See
Even though we feel a kinship with these intelligent creatures, a dolphin’s world is very different from ours.
If you put a toy in a box and ask a dolphin to identify the toy, it doesn’t try to peek in the box with its eye. Instead, it sends out signals from a biological sonar to probe the contents of the box. Dolphins can tell you what’s inside by selecting a picture of the item from a set of flash cards. They can even distinguish one material from another in objects of similar shape.
Dolphins are highly social animals, sharing unique modes of communication.
This is not too hard to comprehend either, if you have a basic understanding of sound waves. It’s similar to the way bats navigate in the dark by sending out chirps that echo back to build up a ‘picture’ in their heads of their environment.
But where it gets elusive is when you consider that dolphin communication is shared. If one dolphin sends out a signal, the waves that radiate back are apprehended by all the dolphins. You can’t “secretly” probe something. It’s group-sight.
If all the dolphins signaled at the same time, it would be cacophony, with one dolphin’s signals drowning out the others. If they want to sense their world in a rational, comprehensible way, they have to coordinate those signals so they don’t all ‘talk’ at the same time.
The Concept of “Self”
This is what I was thinking when I heard that smart cars were now driving on public roads. A self-driven car is only the beginning. Inter-communicating cars—that is the future. But it’s not as easy as just adding sensors and telecommunication devices—you have to coordinate the signals in much the same way as a nervous system coordinates the different parts of a body. Then the concept of the “self-driven” vehicle becomes an anachronism, with the concept of “self” subsumed into the whole.
Maybe that’s the way VMS research is headed. Research was historically a solitary pursuit. The 1940s Study Group made a collaborative effort with the limited resources available, but there were many hurdles to medieval research in pre-Internet days.
The VMS mailing list was a good start in terms of collaboration, but the format is not as flexible as a media-ready platform. Now we have the Voynich.ninja forum, where imagery can be shared and research can be read within minutes of being posted. Nick Pelling blogged an informative article about preprint servers. Scientists are enjoying unprecedented access to information and opportunities, a blessing in a time of pandemics.
Rene Zandbergen is gradually building up a historical resource of what we know, but I’m not sure we’ve come up with the best format yet for what-we-suspect but don’t quite know—a significant challenge considering the diversity of opinions on every small detail of the VMS. I keep finding posts from a few years ago that I forgot I had written.
What might be helpful is a visual clickmap of the major areas of VMS research linked to the major threads dealing with that subject. This is not a small project. It might take the cooperation of the whole community to make it happen, but it might be a useful tool to prevent reposting of the same info that was posted years ago.
