From : Berj N. Ensanian <>
Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 14, 2007 2:52 PM
To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Greg Stachowski wrote Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:16:16 +0100 (CET):
" There is really nothing else in the northern naked-eye sky which looks like that; that is a tight grouping of 7 (well, 6-8 depending on eyesight) stars. "
And needless to say, the mathematical structure of the PM-curve is unaffected completely by the identification of the seven-stars-cluster in f68r3 as being Pleiades or whatever.
The important psychological thing is facing the mathematical reality of the PM-curve and what that means for solving the Voynich mystery. Either refute the mathematical nature of the curve with the same painstaking detail that has been devoted to it in this thread, or face it, face the reality of the curve, and develop the lead from it. Ignoring the curve is another psychological option of course, that I've commented on elsewhere.
Most likely the f68r3 cluster is the Pleiades, and the seventy-six of f68r3 and the seventy-six of Hooke's January, 1665 Micrographia Pleiades Schem. 38 are a lead, a solid lead, that takes no more than counting up to 76 a couple of times to start into, and go from there.
We have a date: January, 1665. Either it is a real date or it isn't. If it is, then 600 ducats and so on are bogus history.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 14, 2007 5:40 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Nick Pelling wrote Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:06:09 +0000:
" The PM curve is an interesting idea (it does seem likely that some kind of template was used to draw it), but I don't really believe that on its own it could properly justify the confidence in a single
date apparent here, particularly when it goes against basic historical evidence. "
Nick
Since you agree that it seems likely that the PM-curve was plotted with a template, then hopefully you will see that a serious inquiry into the mystery of the Voynich manuscript ABSOLUTELY DEMANDS a detailed examination of the curve: mine began with the launch of this thread. It is not yet complete, but I have punctually reported to the list my findings, the basic minimums of which are:
1.) the curve is a transformed elliptic trajectory etc.
2.) the mind behind the curve is a formidable mathematician
3. the mind behind the curve is an astronomer
4.) given conventional mathematical astronomy history, then the most likely flourishing of this author is the later part of the 17th century
5.) Robert Hooke is a person-of-interest, especially because of the 76 and 76
" Isn't that why we're all here? "
I do not believe that "all here" want to know the reality. I think you however are struggling with it, and I sympathize with that, having gone through it myself - just ask Greg.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 14, 2007 7:25 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Kbody wrote Sun, 14 Jan 2007 17:57:20 EST:
" I can only see the curve as a freehand line. An artistic flourish. Do you consider that the star maps are any more realistic than the plants, maps, and human figures? "
Keith, Keith, Keith
WE ALL saw the curve as a freehand line until the first week this last December!
Nobody bothered taking a really close look at it before, apparently. I finally did, saw immediately that it was a plotted curve, and then put it on crosshairs, and saw immediately that it was mathematically serious - it takes a long-experienced mathematical eye to do that, and I have it. The technical stuff in this thread is only relatively "simple", if that. It's serious stuff, not elementary.
The sequence went like this:
I saw many moons ago on Jeff Haley's website that he had a high opinion of Robert Teague's work. Since I had a high opinion of Jeff Haley, actually considering Jeff all along my only competitor in really understanding that a truly mathematical mind was behind the Voynich manuscript, I said to myself: if Jeff thinks that highly of Robert's efforts, then I better sit up when I'm reading Robert's posts.
And so I noticed quickly that Robert was persistently pounding away at astro f68r3 trying to get quantified data out of that page. And on top of that, Greg Stachowski, an astronomer, was not dismissing Robert's work as trivial, though certainly remaining critical, as of course necessary. I began offlist correspondence months ago with Robert and studied his ideas and saw why Jeff took Robert's ideas seriously, and saw why Greg did not outright dismiss the conceptions of Robert's attacks on f68r3. And Robert's attacks involved Teague numbers - I studied them and thought they had promise. And then I began using Teague numbers also in my own attacks.
The Teague numbers applied to the star-page f58r 3x3 matrix work I was doing led to the thread concerned with that, and somehow in that thread a debate started up involving also Greg and Larry Roux, and it was their comments that suddenly triggered in my mid the realization that the PM-curve on f68r3 did not have that fatness in the middle that I expect from an ordinary calligraphic freehand scripting. I dropped everything - you can find the exact moment in a post in the archives, and I went to work on the curve.
So there you can see the main cast of characters whose fault it is that we are having this Voynich PM-curve crisis.
To your question: I already answered it in some detail in the so-far two posts in this thread on Robert Hooke - since developing the lead from the PM-curve led via 76 and 76 directly to Hooke, and since I've started studying Hooke's life and work, the VMS pages have suddenly become dramatically less enigmatic, though no less interesting. I had of course almost a year ago firmly come to believe that the f6r "plant" is a serious mathematical expression of prime numbers theory.
I urge you Keith to just have a look at some of the women in Robert Hooke's life. [17] If Robert Hooke was the one, then it is of some interest that he trained his young niece Grace in algebra and French etc. inbetween bedding her. Hooke's one long-term woman relationship was with a Nell Young, originally his housekeeper, bedmate etc. I don't know yet if she was literate, but it seems likely she would be at least partly after so much devotion to one of history's greatest scientists.
Berj
[17] http://freespace.virgin.net/ric.martin/vectis/hookeweb/start.htm
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 15, 2007 1:37 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Dear Robert
I have said clearly, more than once, that Robert Hooke is a person of interest. And he is. Logically.
I have not said, nor argued, that Robert Hooke IS the author of MS 408.
And I have made it clear, again and again and again, that THE ONE IMPORTANT POINT in this entire thread is:
THE MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURE OF THE PM-CURVE AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERY OF MS 408.
Everything else is peripheral to the mathematical character of the PM-curve. I have described it here in this thread, as I have analyzed it to the best of my ability, and I have provided every aid I can think of, and will continue so, so that others who want to confront the PM-curve head-on can check my analysis, and on equal, or higher footing to my analysis, agree with it or disagree with it.
The mathematical character of the PM-curve will not go away - either it is satisfactorily explained, even as a total "accident", or else it will, to borrow a term, nag, nag and become a psychological nightmare for those of us who really do want to know the actual truth about the mystery, nag until it is finally satisfactorily explained.
I don't give a ... what the date is, AS LONG AS IT IS REALITY!
And the first reality is:
THE MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURE OF THE PM-CURVE !
It must be faced.
Berj
From: "Robert Teague" Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: <vms-list@voynich.net>
Subject: Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:38:44 -0500
It's 12:20 AM and my sleep cycle is disrupted, so this may ..............
**********************************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net Sent : Monday, January 15, 2007 11:02 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net Subject : RE: RE : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Hello Jean
And Fourier's name is attached to a branch of a long line of mathematical philosophy, addressing such matters as the "beginning" and the "end", that often are forgotten in the solution of practical problems.
But, we are here not, at least I am not, concerned with mathematically melting the PM-curve, and any other curve, into vague mysticisms. The curve was plotted - why? And what was the intent of that plot? Logically, a serious investigation of that, obviously a lot more work than is necessary for posting mere emotions and peripheral opinions, will shed some light on the mystery of the VMS.
The emotional reactions to the PM-curve make it plain to even the most non-mathematical follower of these discussions that some sort of central nerve has been hit with the PM-curve.
The curve is there on f68r3 - it must be disposed of. It's reality must be faced - accepted or rejected by methods equal to, or better than its defining characteristic: a plotted curve on an old piece of parchment.
A plotted curve on an old piece of parchment!
And those who are truly interested in unravelling the mystery of MS 408 will use the PM-curve disposal, accepted or rejected, as a lead to penetrate deeper into the mystery.
I did not put that curve onto the f68r3 parchment! But now that I know about it, I will not be among those who run from it.
I want to know the reality, even if it shatters my own precious illusions.
Berj
From: jean-yves artero Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: vms-list@voynich.net
Subject: RE : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 09:05:47 +0100 (CET)
Dear Robert Berj and anyone,
Some thousands of years ago, Pythagoras told: "Everything is number".
If true all structures are able to be proven as mathematical in essence. Jean
************************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 15, 2007 11:38 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net Subject : RE: VMs: Inability to post
GC wrote Monday, January 15, 2007 3:19 AM:
" I've long been a Robert Hooke fan. He didn't write the VMS, but his history has long been undersold against that of Isaac Newton. Hooke was a tragic sight and a lecher, but he wasn't a liar, thief and tyrant like Newton. Putting these two minds side by side, I have always felt that Robert Hooke was the greater intellect of the two. I'm of the opinion that Newton's position in history is more revisionist than fact, but that's the way history gets written, and once it's printed in school books, it's very difficult to change. "
Hello GC
As Hawking said, Newton was not a pleasant man. I'm still undecided on who was the more profound intellect: Hooke or Newton. For me that problem is real because of the apparent possibility that Newton actively worked to destroy Hooke's papers after Hooke died. As for Hooke's diary, it reads to me a like a shadow diary, like one that he would not have cared if it was ever discovered. Since you've undoubtedly read it, and know its symbols, you must have by now wondered if that's old Robert in there in the 4 o'clock barrel of the Pisces panel :-)
I have no firm conclusion on who authored the VMS, but as I've detailed in the PM-curve thread, studying Robert Hooke as a person-of-interest has lessened the enigmatic aspects of many of the VMS illustrations for me, the strong spirals for instance, as in f56r and f46v. Not to mention fluid conducting tubes, and on and on. Hooke is an absolutely excellent mental reference frame for viewing the VMS.
Well, you state flatly that Hooke did not write the VMS, and you seem to have at least one other flat opinion with you on that.
But I've done more than just opine - I've already devoted two posts in the PM-curve thread to explaining why Hooke is a person-of-interest. I claim no more.
Berj
*****************************************
From : Greg Stachowski <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 15, 2007 9:13 PM To : VMS List <vms-list@voynich.net>
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
This discussion has become very animated, at times verging on what might be termed a 'flame war', so I'm going to weigh in as what I hope is the voice of reason. There are good points being made, but also points being missed or confused, and these I hope to clear up.
First of all, the PM-curve itself. Why is the PM-curve interesting?
1. In the context of the astro section it seems to be unique. It is thus an anomaly, and anomalies are often telling.
2. It is labelled, which means that the author chose to draw it and chose to draw it in that particular way. Why? We don't know, but we can try to guess. Robert suggested that it represents the Moon occulting the Pleiades. This seems reasonable. However, why draw it in that particular way? Why not as a straight line, or an arrow? One might dismiss it as pure artistry, unless, of course, one realizes that the apparent path of the Moon across the sky is just such a sinusoid. This is not a large effect, not one that most people know about or would notice. So, still a coincidence? Perhaps, but now the coincidences are starting to mount up.
Now, either the PM-curve is mere artistry, or it is not. If it is, then no more can be said and we can go home; if it isn't, and I think I have explained why there are reasons to suspect it might not be, then we should analyse it to see if there is still more to it. Now let's look at what Berj has done. Here the fighting has been thickest, as it were, partly, I think, because of confusion.
1. To analyse anything in depth, we need a representation we can study. Berj, in digitizing and modelling the curve as a mathematical expression, has done just that. Don't confuse the model with the meaning, they are not the same; indeed I don't believe that Berj has ever said tha his mathematical representation of the curve is the same that the author used. (As an aside, Berj has described his methods exhaustively on-list, anybody can read them in the archives. he has also made an honest attempt at quantifying the uncertainties and errors; again, this is documented.)
2. Having extracted the curve and expressed it mathematically, we can analyse it further. We have already learned that (a) it is not symmetrical (b) it is not, despite appearances, a pure sinusoid. That is already something new, even if all it does is exclude other hypotheses.
Now, this is the first stage of what Berj has done, and it is separate from any later attempts at matching a person or meaning to the curve. Please don't confuse these two issues.
Moving on, we can use the representation to look for possible sources of the PM-curve. Let's conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that Berj, analysing the PM-curve, was able to show convincingly that the coefficients required to represent it matched those required to represent the Moon's apparent motion as known at the time of Newton (Newton himself proposed such a series). Would that not be interesting? Would that not be groundbreaking? Is then, that analysis not worth doing? Yet that analysis would be impossible without the earlier steps of digitisation and modelling. Now, so far, the analyses have shown no such thing; but these are early days, and all the possibilities have not been exhausted.
Concurrently, Berj has been looking for people who, in the time frame (including the 16th century), might have had the technical expertise to intentionally draw such a curve. His analyses suggest to him the possiblility of a later date for the VMS than is commonly accepted (consider the reference to Newton above), and he has thus included on his list people from that extended timeframe, like Hooke. However, and here he has perhaps not been clear enough on-list, his "Persons-Of-Interest" include people from earlier times, consistent with the standard model of the VMS. I'm sure that in due course he will present many more of them for our consideration.
Until these analyses are complete, let's leave the dating out of this. Yes, the Marci letters and the Tepenecz signature are powerful, but they are not absolute: Marci's letter is from 1666 and is not unambiguous, and there is always the possibility that it refers to a different MS altogether; Tepenecz's signature was apparently erased, or might have been faked. These are slim possiblities which I don't purport to endorse, but there is so much uncertainty about the VMS that I think we should explore any half-reasonable proposition until we see where it goes.
Finally, I think Berj is doing good work, and in general more throughly and consistently than many ideas which have been presented here before. That is not to say I agree with all he says, and I'm sure he can testify to getting quite blunt criticism from me on- and off-list (comments on Hooke coming soon, Berj!). At the very least, though, we will at the end have eliminated many posibilities. This in itself is worth doing.
G.
********************************
From : Berj N. Ensanian
Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 16, 2007 6:48 PM
To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: f68r1 & 2
J HALEY wrote Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:31:01 -0000:
" The last point to be made about these two pages is the density of the stars being represented between the two 'planets' on each one. "
Perhaps the two diagrams represent two different telesopic-power views of the same center sky-coordinate. The "planets" have always struck me more as commentary inserted into the fields.
Berj
***********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, January 17, 2007 11:24 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net Subject : RE: VMs: The VMS plants as imaginary J HALEY wrote Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:27:22 -0000:
" The balneological section is the most troubling in this regard. ........ If some of the shapes drawn in the VMS are compared with solidified larva flows then the match is very good. "
These are yet more reasons, besides, for example, his working with Francis Lodowick / Lodwick on a universal language and shorthand and Chinese, why I invite looking into the life and works of Robert Hooke.
Berj
**************************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, January 17, 2007 10:56 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net Subject : RE: VMs: re:Inability to Post
Hello GC
As far as I can tell I have been getting your posts in the correct sequence.
Well of course I also was brought up to worship Newton. As I said earlier somewhere, I'm currently undecided on who was the more profound intellect, Hooke or Newton, because apparently Newton destroyed Hooke's papers etc. after Hooke's death, and also the disappearance of Hooke's portrait seems to be Newton's responsibility. Some of Hooke's diaries, right around when he was working with Lodwick, are missing.
This all becomes vastly more interesting upon the possibility of Hooke being behind the world's most mysterious manuscript. I know you don't like that, but I am speaking of the possibility.
Berj
From: "Kristen" Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: <vms-list@voynich.net>
Subject: VMs: re:Inability to Post Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:39:22 -0700
I couldn't find the post to respond to, or who it came from, but this is what I said in my original post:
Berj, I've long been a Robert Hooke fan. He didn't write the VMS, but ......
*************************************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <>
Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, January 17, 2007 10:04 PM
To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: possible POI Robert Hooke, part 3
Dear this-thread-friendly folks,
The 158 kb version of the PM-curve on crosshairs picture is now on the web. [18]
In the meantime as the analysis of the curve, and the exploration of the possible meaning and consequences continues, I note a couple of items here.
The other night I had a really crazy thought as I was imagining: what if Robert Hooke really is the guy behind it all?
I let my imagination run wild for a moment, and pondered: since apparently Hooke was the one who discovered double-stars, in the Pleiades, is it remotely conceivable that he thought of double-stars as mutually orbiting binaries, and then wrote an elliptic equation that wound up as the PM-curve on Voynich f68r3?
Not being an astronomer, it seemed too crazy an idea I thought. Something though nudged me to communicate this thought, with a heavy disclaimer right in the email subject line, to a certain astronomer I am very fortunate to know. Fully expecting him to tell me I was nuts, I was surprised to get back from him that the idea is not outright crazy.
And so we continue to try to understand how and why that curve got onto f68r3. And the who-done-it?
Then I noticed something else in connection with the connections between Voynich botanical illustrations and Robert Hooke illustrations. Have a look at a couple of those plant roots that look like tubes stuck into a stump, like in Voynich f16v, f27v, f36r, f39r, f93v, etc. and compare with the items labeled A - H in Schem. 4 of Hooke's Micrographia, illustrating his capillary action experiments. [13]
Pretty interesting botanical physics thought, isn't it?
I had another thought when I was looking over Francis Lodowick's artificial language, Hooke having been very much involved with Lodwick about that for a time. Robert Hooke was ever concerned about his eye-sight - rather logical for an experimentalist, and astronomer. It occurred to me as I was looking at The Lord's Prayer written in Lodwick's alphabet, that it is very hard on the eyes. [19]
So I thought maybe Robert Hooke just invented a beautiful flowing alphabet and script for it. Beautiful and flowing, like the script of the Nine Rosettes Manuscript. I noticed that there are some similarities. For example, some of the Lodwick constructions resemble a mirrored GC-119 or GC-87. I checked the vms-list archives, and GC seems to be the only one to have paid any attention to Lodwick's work, but I couldn't figure out what GC had ultimately concluded about it all.
Oh well, it is all speculation. But it sure is interesting I think.
Berj / KI3U
[18] http://www.geocities.com/bzygote/
My thanks to my ancient friend Dennis / N3ZCK for doing this for me.
[19] http://pinyin.info/news/2006/17th-century-proposal-for-a-universal-alphabet/
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http://www.talk-history.com/forum/robert-hooke-pm-t3316.html 19 JAN 2007 02:44 GMT Berj / KI3U
Robert Hooke, the PM-curve, and the world's most mysterious manuscript.
Even so should it turn out that the great English polymath and scientist, Robert Hooke, 1635 - 1703, is not the primordial author of the Voynich Manuscript (VMS), studying his life and works are nevertheless an absolutely excellent way to build a mental reference frame for thinking about the many puzzles of the world's most mysterious manuscript. [1]
And those puzzles now suddenly include the anomalous Pleiades-moon curve (PM-curve). Combing the centuries-spanning "back then" network of the educated elite, for potential possible suspects for the author of the enigmatic manuscript, Robert Hooke is turning out to be a goldmine of connections to the manuscript's multi-various idiosyncracies.
Robert Hooke was the man, who to his own later regret, gave to Isaac Newton, among other things, the idea for the inverse-square law of gravitation. Hooke ranks as one of the greatest scientists of all time. He led a complicated and tortuous life. [2]
How did the the 17th century Hooke so suddenly (less than a week before this writing) become a major person-of-interest, POI, among possible suspects for the author behind the Voynich manuscript?
It all revolves around a lightning major breakthrough in the study of the VMS: the discovery of the so-called "PM-curve". This is a wave-like line, rather innocent in appearance at a casual glance, that is found in one of the astronomical illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. On December 4, 2006, a month and a half ago, it was discovered that this at-first-glance free-hand-calligraphy flourish-like curve, is actually a carefully mathematically plotted curve that apparently represents an oscillating elliptic trajectory, in other words a complicated orbit of something, perhaps a comet, or mutually orbiting binary stars.
This discovery finally, and for the first time, gave Voynich research something concrete concerning whoever authored the manuscript. We now know that the author of the world's most mysterious manuscript must at least be:
1.) a formidable mathematician
2.) very likely an astronomer
The mathematical physics sophistication of the plotted curve is such that it is very likely it was done in the context of late 17th century mathematical science. Thus the PM-curve's discovery shattered, at least in the minds of some serious long-time VMS researchers, the previously long-held notions of the history of the Voynich manuscript: the manuscript is apparently not nearly as old as previously thought, typically 15th century. This is a traumatic event in Voynich study!
The mathematical-astronomy PM-curve is anomalously precise in the setting of a strange book that heretofore has given the impression that its astronomical section is merely late medieval astrology. And so now it appears that a major part of the strategy that its author employed to make the entire work cryptic, was to give his / her manuscript the appearance of an old work, a naive old work. [3]
The PM-curve is a wave-like curve that is situated between the moon and the seven sisters Pleiades star cluster in the page f68r3 astronomical diagram panel of the mysterious book. [4] Close examination of it makes it clear that it is a mathematically graphed curve, plotted with a template of some kind like a French curve, that was adjusted during the plotting. The curve is clearly not a single-stroke-flourish calligraphy.
In-depth mathematical analysis of the curve makes it clear that it describes ellipses with oscillating eccentricity. Being that the curve is in an astronomical illustration, it is naturally therefore most likely that the elliptic message concerns astronomy, therefore already placing the curve's date no earlier than 1609, when Kepler revolutionized human thought with his laws of planetary motion.
Conceivably, someone earlier than Kepler could have figured out that ellipses, rather than perfect circles, are the common stable orbits, and then authored the cryptic Voynich manuscript to tell about it. However, the mathematical sophistication of the PM-curve would make it quite difficult to reconcile anything other than a solid placement of the PM-curve in the second half of the 17th century.
Robert Hooke, a life-long astronomer, becomes a person-of-interest because in f68r3 the PM-curve's left end ends in the Pleaides cluster at a star that is special: it has a heavy dot in its middle. Hooke is the discoverer of double-stars: in the Pleiades cluster! Moreover, the f68r3 diagram shows exactly seventy-six stars, and in Robert Hooke's classic book, Micrographia, published January, 1665, Hooke illustrated his telescopic view of the Pleiades, as he resolved them with his telescope, better than anyone before him, to a total of seventy-six stars!
Thus January, 1665, is suddenly an indicated time point for the enigmatic manuscript, and it is a date that greatly upsets almost all previous seriously held notions of the Voynich manuscript's vintage.
And from there on, it becomes more and more interesting looking into the life and works of Robert Hooke, and comparing connections with the impressions of the Voynich manuscript: that the author, whoever it was, prepared the VMS, or its original, as a legacy for a restricted audience, for the purpose of establishing a complete philosophy that unifies thought across the spectrum, from purely mystical to purely scientific-mathematical, and from the microscopic to the telescopic, and from the inanimate to the animate, mineral, animal, and plant. [5,6]
All these very recent developments have been taking place, blow by blow, in the online forum that is the central one for advanced serious Voynich research: the Voynich manuscript mailing list and forum. [7]
Discussions have been heated, commensurate with the traumatic impact of the PM-curve on standard Voynich history, and by no means is there unanimous agreement on anything regarding the PM-curve, although there is little, if anything serious in the matter of challenging it as a carefully plotted curve - the crux of the entire affair. Ultimately, the issue must be decided by astronomers. Among the qualified Voynich manuscript students there is an astronomer who is already taking the PM-curve very seriously. The technical issues are not at all elementary - they involve considerable mathematical astronomy and physics. However, you can follow quite a bit of the developments anyway if you are not mathematically trained, by just skimming those portions. [8]
The PM-curve has indeed touched a raw nerve in the world of Voynich manuscript research - this is a very exciting time in the history of the mystery of the book of the nine rosettes, and a perfect time to join the quest for a solution, or just watch the action as it progresses.
The PM-curve is a solid key that invites us to finally enter the mysterious castle of the nine rosettes - through its astronomy door. Once inside, we will find the ways to the other parts of the mystery castle. And who can imagine what sorts of wonders we will there discover, when perhaps a mind as great as Robert Hooke might be the wizard behind it all? But whoever that wizard is, we have now found his signature: the PM-curve.
Berj / KI3U
[1] for background information see talk-history forum post: How to begin probing the mystery of The Nine Rosettes / Voynich Manuscript, 25 OCT 2006 04:47 GMT http://www.talk-history.com/forum/be...ery-t2343.html
[2] an excellent introduction to Robert Hooke and his context is the 1996 lecture by Alan Chapman, England's Leonardo: Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and the art of experiment in Restoration England, available online here:
http://home.clara.net/rod.beavon/leonardo.htm
[3] for background information on the suspicious standard history of the Voynich manuscript see the talk-history forum post: Ground Zero of Voynich Archeology, 22 OCT 2006 04:12 GMT
http://www.talk-history.com/forum/gr...ich-t2319.html
[4] you can view a 158 kb image of the magnified PM-curve, taken from the high-resolution .sid image, and placed onto mathematical crosshairs, here at this url: http://www.geocities.com/bzygote/
You can have a look at the entire page f68r3 Voynich illustration by going to the website of the Yale Beinecke Library, where the actual manuscript is kept cataloged as MS 408, and viewing the f68r picture in the slideshow of the book's pages. You will see a foldout of three astronomical panels: the right-most panel is f68r3. The PM-curve runs radially, at about 10 o'clock, between the moon in the center of the circular diagram, and the seven sisters Pleiades stars toward the moon's upper left. For serious investigation of this curve you must download and view the high-resolution .sid image (ZOOM image): http://webtext.library.yale.edu/bein...1600.ms408.htm
[5] here is an excellent introduction to Robert Hooke, online: http://home.clara.net/rod.beavon/leonardo.htm
[6] Hooke's Micrographia is online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15491...-h/15491-h.htm
[7] The online headquarters of the vms-list is here: http://www.voynich.net/
Note that althought the vms-list is the supreme court of serious Voynich research, it too, like other online lists, is visited by pretenders.
[8] Nearly all the material relating to the PM-curve and also Robert Hooke, is conveniently in one vms-list thread, albeit a big one with multiple branches, but all having the same core for a thread subject title: "Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve", beginning with the first post on December 22, 2006. This vms-list thread, still on-going, is archived. The online searchable archives of the vms-list is here: http://voynich.ms/
If there is a problem with retrieving vms-list archive material dating after 10 OCT 2006, then try the following; it is a slower download sometimes, and the various branches of the PM-curve thread are somewhat scattered, but they are all available here: http://www.gameszoo.org/voynichmonke...mre=28#m6 740
Journalism-style posts in the PM-curve analysis thread are the following: http://www.gameszoo.org/voynichmonke...umre=5#m67 81
These include comments by many persons: http://www.gameszoo.org/voynichmonke...umre=5#m68 17
http://www.gameszoo.org/voynichmonke...umre=5#m70 58
Last edited by Berj / KI3U : Today at 03:51. Reason: add links
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, January 18, 2007 11:34 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: possible POI's from the 16th century
Now of course Robert Hooke is not the only possible person-of-interest as to who authored the PM-curve. The network-of-interest, NOI, within which the POI are presumably to be looked for, is wide-ranging indeed, and includes figures like Theodore Haak (1605 - 1690), and the Hartlib Circle. The POI's need not necessarily be persons who themselves would have been competent enough to do the PM-curve, but for one reason or another might ring a bell anyway that leads to whoever did the calculating of the curve, and the designing of f68r3.
Earlier in this thread, in one of its branches, was mentioned Greg's identification of Georg Hartman (1489 - 1564). So we are still casting a wide net across the centuries, although it really is difficult for me to see the PM-curve earlier than the last half of the 17th century. And the 76 and 76 plus all the other items mentioned so far in connection with Hooke, have him at the top of my own POI list. Nevetheless, below is the 32-strong sub-list of POI's I had made for POI's born in the 16th century. It of course includes Thomas Harriott as per Jeff's attractive efforts.
POI List: persons of possible 9RMS / PM-curve interest, born in 16th century:
1.) Franciscus Barocius; Born: 9 Aug 1537 in Candia (now Iráklion), Crete; Died: 23 Nov 1604 in Venice, Italy
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Barocius.html
2.) Jean Beaugrand; Born: about 1590 in Paris, France; Died: 22 Dec 1640 in Paris, France
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Beaugrand.html
3.) Rafael Bombelli; Born: Jan 1526 in Bologna, Italy; Died: 1572 in (probably) Rome, Italy
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Bombelli.html
4.) Tycho Brahe; Born: 14 Dec 1546 in Knutstorp, Skane, Denmark (now Svalöv, Sweden; Died: 24 Oct 1601 in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Brahe.html
5.) Henry Briggs; Born: Feb 1561 in Warleywood, Yorkshire, England;
Died: 26 Jan 1630 in Oxford, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Briggs.html
6.) Jost Bürgi; Born: 28 Feb 1552 in Lichtensteig, Switzerland;
Died: 31 Jan 1632 in Kassel, Hesse-Kassel (now Germany)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Burgi.html
7.) Girolamo Cardano; Born: 24 Sept 1501 in Pavia, Duchy of Milan (now Italy); Died: 21 Sept 1576 in Rome (now Italy)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Cardan.html
8.) Christopher Clavius; Born: 25 March 1538 in Bamberg (now in Germany); Died: 2 Feb 1612 in Rome (now in Italy)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Clavius.html
9.) Egnatio Pellegrino Rainaldi Danti; Born: April 1536 in Perugia, Italy; Died: 19 Oct 1586 in Alatri, Italy
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Danti.html
10.) John Dee; Born: 13 July 1527 in Tower Ward, London, England;
Died: 26 March 1609 in Mortlake, London, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Dee.html
11.) René Descartes; Born: 31 March 1596 in La Haye (now Descartes),Touraine, France; Died: 11 Feb 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Descartes.html
12.) Thomas Digges; Born: 1546 in Wotton (near Canterbury), Kent, England; Died: 24 Aug 1595 in London, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Digges.html
13.) Johann Faulhaber; Born: 5 May 1580 in Ulm, Germany; Died: 1635 in Ulm, Germany
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Faulhaber.html
14.) Lodovico Ferrari; Born: 2 Feb 1522 in Bologna, Papal States (now Italy); Died: 5 Oct 1565 in Bologna, Papal States (now Italy)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Ferrari.html
15.) Thomas Fincke; Born: 6 Jan 1561 in Flensburg, Denmark (now Germany); Died: 24 April 1656 in Copenhagen, Denmark
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fincke.html
16.) Regnier Gemma Frisius; Born: 8 Dec 1508 in Dokkum, Friesland, The Netherlands; Died: 25 May 1555 in Louvain, Brabant (now Belgium)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Gemma_Frisius.html
17.) Pierre Hérigone; Born: 1580 in France; Died: 1643 in Paris, France
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Herigone.html
18.) Johannes Kepler; Born: 27 Dec 1571 in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, Holy Roman Empire (now Germany); Died: 15 Nov 1630 in Regensburg (now in Germany)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kepler.html
19.) Gerardus Mercator; Born: 5 March 1512 in Rupelmonde, Flanders (now Belgium); Died: 2 Dec 1594 in Duisburg, Duchy of Cleves (now Germany)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Mercator_Gerardus.html
20.) Guidobaldo Marchese del Monte; Born: 11 Jan 1545 in Pesaro, Italy;
Died: 6 Jan 1607 in Montebaroccio, Italy
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Monte.html
21.) John Napier; Born: 1550 in Merchiston Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland;
Died: 4 April 1617 in Edinburgh, Scotland
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Napier.html
22.) William Oughtred; Born: 5 March 1574 in Eton, Buckinghamshire, England; Died: 30 June 1660 in Albury, Surrey, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Oughtred.html
23.) Bartholomeo Pitiscus; Born: 24 Aug 1561 in Grünberg, Silesia (now Zielona, Poland); Died: 2 July 1613 in Heidelberg, Germany
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Pitiscus.html
24.) Giambattista Della Porta; Born: 1 Nov 1535 in Vico Equense (near Naples), Italy; Died: 4 Feb 1615 in Naples, Italy
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Porta.html
25.) Robert Recorde; Born: 1510 in Tenby, Wales; Died: 1558 in London, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Recorde.html
26.) Georg Joachim von Lauchen Rheticus; Born: 16 Feb 1514 in Feldkirch, Austria; Died: 4 Dec 1574 in Kassa, Hungary (now Kosice)
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Rheticus.html
27.) Matteo Ricci; Born: 6 Oct 1552 in Macerata, Papal States (now Italy); Died: 11 May 1610 in Peking, China
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Ricci_Matteo.html
28.) Adriaan van Roomen; Born: 29 Sept 1561 in Louvain, Belgium;
Died: 4 May 1615 in Mainz, Germany
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Roomen.html
29.) Sir Henry Savile; Born: 30 Nov 1549 in Bradley (near Halifax), Yorkshire, England; Died: 19 Feb 1622 in Eton, Berkshire, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Savile.html
30.) Thomas Harriot; Born: 1560 in Oxford, England; Died: 2 July 1621 in London, England
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Harriot.html
31.) Luca Valerio; Born: 1552 in Naples, Italy; Died: 17 Jan 1618 in Rome, Italy
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Valerio.html
32.) François Viète; Born: 1540 in Fontenay-le-Comte, Poitou (now Vendée), France; Died: 13 Dec 1603 in Paris, France
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Viete.html
I made the list during a flurry of PM-curve work, too hurried unfortunately to make notes on why I chose each name. But it should be obvious to seasoned Voynich students once a biography of interest is gone into.
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, January 20, 2007 6:57 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: List of 16th century comets
Here is a list of 16th century comets, with the briefest notes, that might be handy for Voynich astronomical pages work. I compiled the list of twenty-seven entries from information available on the internet, between 25 DEC 2006 and today. Inclusion in the list means that at least somebody, somewhere, sometime stated "comet of 15xx". Where there are consecutive years, the two comets may be the same one crossing into a new year.
Table 1 Comet of:
1500: April - June daylight comet; "il Signore Astone"
1506: Durrer & Hilber; illustrated in a broadside
1519: bright, seen by Aztec Montezuma II
1523: mentioned in the margin of a/the Parma incunable
1525: the "alleged" comet of 1525
1528: described by French surgeon Ambroise Pare: "... so horrible, so terrible, some died of fear ... the color of blood ... an arm holding a sword ...hideous human faces with hair and beards awry."
1531: later = Halley
1532: daylight in Europe; visible 115 days in China; observed by Peter Apian
1533: observed by Copernicus & Apian
1539:
1556: Great Comet of 1556, scared Pope and everybody; Holy Roman Emporer Charles V scared into giving up his throne; very long tail, and nucleus diameter half that of moon; observed by Fabricius; conjectured by some to be same as comets of 975 & 1264; erroneously expected to return 1844-48
1557: major astro conception: Tycho places it beyond the moon
1559:
1569: Arago notes there is an inscription about this comet on a stone wall in Brasnov, Romania
1572: lit the night sky for two years; associated with 24 AUG 1572 St. Bartholomew's massacre in Paris; obsreved by Tycho, Paracelsus, John Dee
1577: Great Comet of 1577; Tycho refutes Aristotle's notions of comets
1578-79: Maestlin thinks it might instead be 1577-78
1579: Tycho
1580: Francis Shakelton; Hamlet; Elisabeth & Dee; Maestlin
1581:
1582:
1585: dissolution of the idea of solid celestial spheres; Cristoph Rothmann writes to Tycho about it
1587: Great Comet of 1587
1590: Tycho
1593: observed by Basil Hall in Valparaiso; identified same as comet of 1821; conjectured same as comet of 1689
1596: Tycho
1598: explained to the public by Galileo
The next is Comet of 1605.
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 21, 2007 3:21 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: 17th century NOI notes, part 1
The exploration of the 17th c. network-of-interest having indications of concerns that are projected in the Voynich manuscript, seems to more and more show Robert Hooke as a major node, no matter how geographically far from London we track the network. We find the usual of course that pertains everywhere in history, intellectuals working on interesting things while immersed in the political intrigues of their powerful contacts. In the second half of the 17th century, it is pretty clear that one of the most interesting places on Earth for an intellectual to be, is Robert Hooke's regular experimental science lectures at the Royal Society meetings. Can you image after each of those demonstration lectures how natural it would be for a thinker with an idea itching in his mind to gravitate toward Hooke and have conversation with him?
Chapman wrote " Unlike them, he was not a 'Gentleman, ... ". Well that of course gave Hooke so much a wider spectrum of humanity to gather input and ideas from, I would think. He could one moment slum it in a common bar somewhere and maybe, say, get a scientific insight into how wine and water affect light rays differently, and the next day demonstrate the latest advanced science of the day to the gentlemanly elite.
And so, as developed in earlier portions of this thread, Robert Hooke, F.R.S., 1635-1703, currently remains, I think reasonably, the POI #1 for the
CRYSTAL-CLEAR,
UNTAMPERED-WITH-AND-UNAMBIGUOUS,
INTENDED-TO-BE-RECOGNIZED-FOR-WHAT-IT-IS-IN-THE-FIRST-PLACE,
ONLY-BY-A-VERY-RESTRICTED-READERSHIP,
PM-curve.
Here following are some of my admittedly hurried notes during my exploration of the NOI as it is ongoing at the moment, and of course need lots of following up, and building up of actual references. So please think of the below as just a step above a list of searching keywords. Needless to say, a keyword that may baffle a VMS study newcomer, will instantly strike a chord with the veteran student of the mysterious mansucript. My personal favorite is the starfish lead - I've long wondered how that got into some of the VMS illustrations.
Table 15, brief preliminary 17th century NOI notes
Francis Bacon philosophy & Freemasons <> Samuel Hartlib's Circle <> Invisible College <> Rosicrucians <> Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside <> Royal Society (1660) <> Republic of Codes (Leibniz)
(note: find Bullhead Tavern sign & compare with VMS Taurus)
Samuel Hartlib (1600-1662): The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, and the Temple; correspondent of Robert Boyle, F.R.S.; apparently published Lodwick's "Common Writing" on universal language and alphabet.
Hartlib Circle in America: wondrous starfish (c.f. VMS f69r etc.) and other American data sent back to England Hartlib Circle.
Gottfried Leibniz, 1646-1716, lawyer, librarian, philosopher, political intriguer, Newton adversary, and mathematical phenomenon, aimed to reduce all reasoning and discovery to a combination of basic elements such as numbers, letters, sounds and colours, seeks Hooke's support on same.
Samuel Pepys, M.P., F.R.S., 1633-1703, Hartlib's neighbor, universal contacts man, wine lover and unfaithful-to-wife woman-chaser, stones-in-urinary-tract-sufferer and stone-removal-surgery-survivor, bibliophile, colleague of Admiral William Penn; shorthand and cipher diary 1660-1669 a primary source for the English Restoration period; helps establish Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital, good friend of Robert Hooke and attends his lectures and is electrified by Hooke's Micrographia book.
Francis Lodwick, F.R.S., 1619-1694, (connection to spy Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731?, sometime wine merchant, wrote Robinson Crusoe ~ Selkirk); pioneer of philosophical / universal language / alphabet - works on it with Hooke.
Bathsua Makin, 1600-1675?, a 17th c. English feminist-writer mini-version of Christine de Pizan, sister-in-law of Royal Society member mathematician-linguist-diplomat-vicar John Pell; therefore a possible intellectual link between Makin and Hooke via Pell & Royal Society.
More on Hooke:
Robert Hooke, F.R.S., 1635-1703, probable alcoholic and hypochondriac, Newton adversary, discoverer of biological cells and Pleiades double-stars, moon elliptic orbit work; major contributor to understanding of lung respiration, friend of mentor physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675) who with doctors Petty & Bathurst was famous for resurrecting hanged victim Anne Green in 1650; appointed Curator of Experiments of The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, 1662; persuaded friend Robert Knox to publish in 1681 book on Knox's Ceylon experiences and wrote Preface (flora and fauna, elephants a big deal in that book - VMS f55v elephant root etc.), later with Knox botanical seeds and astronomy observations.
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 21, 2007 6:09 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Kbody wrote Sunday, January 21, 2007 5:11 PM:
" I believe that had Hooke or Newton seen this VMs, they would have laughed it off. "
Hello Keith
Well of course I disagree. In my mind any really deep thinker will at first ever glance at the f85 / f86 nine rosettes foldout realize immediately that a very powerful, very imaginative mind is projecting itself, and moreover that that mind wants to convey a complex message, a grand philosophical one.
And that is why I have been calling Beinecke MS 408: The Nine Rosettes Manuscript, or 9RMS. And have been saying that that foldout is the book's climax etc. It is the characteristic of the book.
And that is one reason why the "Marci letter" that "Count" Voynich said he so conveniently found in the book, is totally suspect in my mind.
Think about it in this way for a moment: imagine that the Marci letter is discovered somewhere totally unconnected with Voynich and MS 408, say in a dusty corner of a library somewhere. And you are the librarian that discovers it. You blow off the dust, and you read it, reminding yourself to later look into whether or not it is a fake.
The letter talks about a book. What kind of book? Would you get even the slightest mental image from that letter's description of the book, of its climax? Would you send such a book to somebody like Kircher, who is busy with who knows what, and receiving books and packages and correspondence from all over the world in many different languages, without at least giving Kircher the absolute minimum characteristic description of the book, so that Kircher would know he got exactly that, and not some substitute or mixup?
Now in another current thread on this list where the Marci letter was referred to, the writer, who I respect tremendously for having produced the best yet, by far, and indispensible transcription of the MS 408 text, writes:
" I haven't seen any evidence that the Marci letter is a fake, so there seems to be little reason to doubt that "someone" identified the manuscript as belonging to Tepenec within a contemporary time frame that is supported by the Marci letter, and that Rudolph probably did pay 600 gold ducats for the manuscript at some point. "
I haven't seen any evidence that the Marci letter is NOT a fake, but that's not the important point. The important point is that the writer writes "for the manuscript at some point."
And THE POINT I am making here is that, regardless, the "the manuscript" is "a manuscript" and there is not the slightest shred of evidence, not the slightest, that "a manuscript" and MS 408 are the same.
Fortunately for the astronomical investigation of MS 408, the Marci letter and the f1r "signature" problem are irrelevant.
The PM-curve is there, in our face. Behind it is a mathematician, and very likely also an astronomer. I don't care what the date is, and I don't care who the author is. As long it is reality. At this point the reality points to late 17th century, as best as I can see. The judgment on it is in the hands of the astronomers, of which there is already one, and there will be more eventually.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 22, 2007 1:26 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: possible POI Robert Hooke, part 4
Here is something that might reach the level of interesting "curiosity": In an early Royal Society letter (date uncertain) in Robert Hooke's own hand, his scripting of the common English word "and" has a striking resemblance to the common Voynich word GC-am :
http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/rs/pilot/transcriptions/EL.B1.61_fs1.html
It is as if: English alphabet letter "d" = Voynich GC-N
English alphabet letter "n" = Voynich GC-I
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 22, 2007 10:32 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Hello Tony
True enough, in today's virtual-internet-world it is tough for me to be absolutely certain. Broken links are especially troublesome when I'm trying to track down a reference. For example, I thought it would be easy to do a few mouse clicks and find a list of Athanasius Kircher's 760 or so correspondents, to check if there were direct letters between him and Robert Hooke - they had many common and precise interests, and I'm pondering the far-out question if Kircher influenced the VMS directly. But, I could not track down such a list - could be I just overlooked something, or the Kircher students have not got such a list up on the net yet in an easily recognized link.
On whether or not it is Hooke's own hand - I thought yes because it is signed "Rob. Hooke." and next to that signature there is no note indicating that it is someone else's reproduction - something I would expect, if that were the case, from the Royal Society.
Berj
From: Tony Mann Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net
To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:38:24 +0000
Berj N. Ensanian wrote:
The PM-Curve: possible POI Robert Hooke, part 4
" Here is something that might reach the level of interesting "curiosity": .................. "
Berj, are you certain this is Hooke's own hand? The website describes it as a copy. Not that it particularly matters: there's plenty of examples of Hooke's handwriting available to us, for example in his diary, pages of which are widely reproduced.
Tony
University of Greenwich, a charity and company limited by guarantee, registered in England (reg no. 986729). Registered Office: Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, Greenwich SE10 9LS.
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 22, 2007 10:45 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
I still think the VMS was mostly scripted by a woman according to instructions from a master design, or even master document - what I've called the mcp.
Another thing I'm un-inhibitedly wondering is if "Hooke" is reflected in the Voynich text as per: GC-kooy
or some such variation.
Berj
From: "Marke Fincher" Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: <vms-list@voynich.net>
Subject: RE: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:01:00 -0000
Interesting also the variations in how he writes his 'd's with the shape and length of the upright of the 'd'. He seems to like drawing it back over the preceeding letters especially when the 'd' is word-final. But maybe this was common writing practice for the time? Or is this an expression of individual style? It does seem reminiscent to the way EVA-n is written (that Nick has proposed might encode some information). But in this letter from Hooke (as with the VMS) the writing seems fast free and flowing....with very little detectable sign of any precise positioning of end points that could encode secret information. Interesting though... Marke
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net [mailto:owner-vms-list@voynich.net] On Behalf Of Berj N. Ensanian
Sent: 22 January 2007 06:26 To: vms-list@voynich.net
Subject: Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: possible POI Robert Hooke, part 4 ....................
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Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:38:09 -0500 From: "Berj N. Ensanian" <>
To: greg.stachowski@ Subject: T-O
Greg On the upper-right f85 / f86 T-O, there is something odd about it I've noticed for a long time but never posted on. From small magnifications on up to some level, say x2 or so, I've always had the impression that in that T-O is a profile portrait of a man with long hair. He is facing to the left, and the outline of the front of his profile face is defined by the vertically running textword in the upper half of the circle. As the magnification increases the portrait loses more and more realism and becomes ridiculous looking as far as a portrait goes. The entire T-O group is emphasized by its complex linking to the northeast rosette below it, and that rosette's connections with the north rosette. Don't have any more ideas at the moment. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 22, 2007 10:59 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Tony Mann wrote Monday, January 22, 2007 7:14 PM:
" I know Inwood's book reproduces a page and I'm sure I've seen others, probably in the other recent biographies. I could scan one and email it to you off list, but I won't have a chance to do it till the end of the week. "
That would be excellent - thanks!
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:33 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: possible POI Robert Hooke, part 5
More on the Royal Society EL/B1/61.01 document of Hooke's answering Beal(e).
The .pdf titled "The return of the Hooke Folio" alluded to by Tony Mann earlier is invaluable for these considerations, and is an easy download: http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/rs/hooke.html
Comparing its pictures with EL/B1/61.01 there is certainly to be seen a big difference in the way "H" in "Hooke" is written, between the "Rob. Hooke" signature at bottom right in EL/B1/61.01, and elsewhere. I can't quite yet figure out if the EL/B1/61.01 body text is by Oldenburg, or a society scribe, but it seems clear that more than one person writes "and" ~ GC-am and also from Hooke's faint pencil hand in the .pdf picture it sure looks like he writes "d" ~ GC-N
This .pdf really illuminates the bad blood between Oldenburg and Hooke, and Hooke's mistrust of his associates. It also illuminates some serious shortcomings in Royal Society protocols. There is bound to be more interesting Hooke material to discover.
One can get goosebumps comparing the "and" ~ GC-am between these Royal Society documents and the Voynich manuscript.
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 23, 2007 11:54 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: 17th century NOI notes, part 2
In the recent posts in this thread the PM-curve analysis has, unforseen, spawned a non-mathematical-astronomy exploration into the handwriting aspects of the Voynich text script. Good.
The VMS script famously has in the past been discussed, pro and con, in terms of the so-called "humanist hand", and the vms-list archives are full of material on that subject. The handwriting style in the VMS we of course hope will give some clue as to the manuscript's origins.
In my mind now, the handwriting to be found in the network-of-interest that includes as one of its major, if not the central node, the liasons associated with the rise of the Royal Society in England in the 17th century, is at least as interesting as anything "humanist hand" ever was in Voynich study.
This is exactly the kind of investigation where someone, who is very interested in the PM-curve developments, and would like to participate and make contributions, but is not trained in the necessary physics, mathematics, and astronomy, can nevertheless dig into the thick of it. Because, it could be the serendipidy of coming across a 17th c. handwritten letter, by someone plugged into the NOI, even if only as a peripheral person, that provides us with the next useful clue about how, where, when, and by whose hand the ink got onto the parchment of the Nine Rosettes Manuscript.
I note, in the following table, some quick observations of similarities, between Voynich / 9RMS script symbols, and handwritten symbols seen in some of the 17th c. handwritten documents images, for example journals of Robert Boyle, that are accessible from the AHRC Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL). [20]
Table 16
Preliminary observations of similarities between "9RMS hand" and "17th c. NOI hand" English alphabet group, 9RMS group in GC transcription alphabet [21]
a, GC-a
and, GC-am
d, GC-N
n, GC-I
o, GC-o
s, GC-8
th, GC-h
the, GC-h
The Genealogical Society of Finland has online some immediately useful material on old handwriting styles. [22]
Berj / KI3U
[20] http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/
[21] The two main transcription alphabets today in Voynich work are EVA and GC. The GC alphabet ("Keyboard and Font Assignments"), as well as Glen Claston's complete transcript of the VMS, are available here:
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~galethog/Voynich/
Note that the absolute identity of a GC alphabet symbol is its ASCII code; for example the conveniently identified Voynich text symbol GC-k is absolutely identified via ASCII as GC-107.
[22] http://www.genealogia.fi/faq/faq031e.htm
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, January 25, 2007 5:06 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: 17th century NOI notes, part 3
Earlier today I received from Tony Mann off-list an image of Robert Hooke's hand, taken from Inwood's book. [23]
The image is just good enough so that the scripting similarity, "and" ~ GC-am , is certainly evident, and not only that, I see some new things of interest.
First, I want to note that the "and" ~ GC-am observation is a direct result of decisions, controversial ones in VMS transcription history [24], that Glen Claston made when he devised his Voynich transcription alphabet, and then went ahead and transcribed the entire VMS.
GC decided that in some cases, what appeared to be a string of separate symbols in the Voynich text, should instead be regarded together as one text "glyph". And so he assigned to such a group a SINGLE transcription alphabet symbol. However, he constructed his alphabet so that, if you disagreed with his glyphs, you could always resolve them back down into a group of symbols per your choice, for example you could write:
GC-m = GC-iiN or GC-m = GC-IN
You can see what Glen did with a glance at his alphabet, and a few glances at Voynich text. His transcript of the entire Voynich text, voyn_101.txt, of course reflects his glyphs analytic view. [21]
Because I am so used to working with GC's idea of GC-m, rather than the "more obvious but conceivably naive" GC-iiN, I noticed the "and" ~ GC-am similarity immediately when I first saw the Royal Society EL/B1/61.01 document. So I have GC to thank for that new and important lead.
The reason it is an important lead is that the comfortable dating of the f68r3 PM-curve points to no earlier than the late 17th c., and now suddenly with the "and" ~ GC-am we see that in the very NOI where we are logically looking for the author of the PM-curve, some of the POI in this NOI are habitually showing in their handwriting a style that has similarities with the handwriting style in the Voynich manuscript. So we are freed of shackles back to Latin abbreviations scripting in earlier centuries, while at the same time receiving reinforcement of the tentative dating of the PM-curve. [25]
Back to the image of the document I received earlier today from Tony. It reproduces part of a page from Hooke's technical diary of January 1, 1676. The script is small and tight, indicates the expected Greek alphabet knowledge, includes inline an optics diagram, and he does not waste any paper. The very bold and strong rendering of the date reflects, in my view, Hooke's attitude toward precision, and of course scientific priority.
His hand shows that his "d" not only resembles the Voynich GC-N, but at least in one instance, when Hooke writes "explained", the "d" in that word seems to resemble the similar GC-y.
On the penultimate line where he writes about the Rudolphine Tables (ephemeris, Tycho, Kepler, etc.) his Rudoplh(e) shows a respectable gallows letter, GC-h , that may stand for "th" as already discussed earlier in this thread, or possibly "ph" - I am not sure, as a better resolution and more Hooke handwriting examples are needed. With better resolution and more Hooke and other NOI script samples we may find more interesting items, for example GC-s and GC-e.
But let us update the Table 16, which is not to be presumed a cipher-key, but rather as a preliminary guide for comparing handwriting characteristics in the VMS with NOI handwriting characteristics.
Table 16-A
Preliminary observations of similarities between "9RMS hand" and "17th c. NOI hand" English alphabet group, 9RMS group in GC transcription alphabet [21]
a, GC-a
and, GC-am
d, GC-N
d, GC-y
n, GC-I
o, GC-o
ph, GC-h
phe, GC-h
s, GC-8
th, GC-h
the, GC-h
The PM-Curve: 17th century NOI notes, part 4
Lets update Table 15:
Table 15-A, brief preliminary 17th century NOI notes, updates to Table 15:
Francis Bacon philosophy & Freemasons <> Mersenne's Circle <> Samuel Hartlib's Circle <> Invisible College <> Rosicrucians <> Bull Head Tavern in Cheapside <> Royal Society (1660) <> Republic of Codes (Leibniz)
Jeremiah Horrocks / Horrox (? 1619-1641); boy-wonder Father of scientific English Astronomy; mystery of his sudden death and disappearance of many of his papers and rescue of some papers (ref. William Crabtree, William Gascoigne, Christopher Townley) - key Venus transit remnants of Horrocks papers first published by Hevelius, F.R.S., in 1662.
Elias Ashmole, F.R.S., (1617-1692 ); antiquarian / collector / hoarder of rare and unusual items, comes into possession of the incomparable Tradescant botanical and mineral collection; astrologer, alchemist, Freemason - halfe Moone Taverne in Cheapside, possible Rosicrucian, publishes alchemy under "annagram" pseudonym James Hasholle :); Commissioner of Surinam; work on heraldry, genealogy, Order of the Garter, Mercury, Signe Gemini; acquired some of John Dee's previously unknown spiritual diaries; 1677 Ashmolean Museum > Oxford U., Middle Temple fire 1679; hierarchical vision of the world.
Abbot Antonio Conti; key player in Leibniz - Newton calculus controversy, possible operative / agent / bagman for Venetian commercial and political interests.
Some women of the scientific revolution [26]:
Lady Ranelagh (1615-1691); Boyle's sister, major scientific revolution salon operator, friend of Hooke and Wren, her son tutored by Oldenburg, F.R.S.
Queen Christina of Sweden (1629-1689); general sexual identity questions {note VMS hermaphrodite: the topmost figure in f72r1 (middle panel of Beinecke f71v, .sid image needed to see well)}; sets Descartes straight on an issue concerning Plato; abdicates throne; Catholic convert, alchemist, patroness of academies including her Palazzo Riario in Rome; observes Comet of 1664 with Cassini; leaves France upon executing a traitor in her inner circle.
Elizabeth Hevelius (1647-1693); regarded as first? woman research scientist, carries on husband's work after his death; rumor she cheated on him with Halley.
I have in my research considered the ladies section of the NOI to come as near to us in time as the 19th c. with Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) and Mary Somerville (1780-1872), but generally I think Elizabeth Blackwell (?b. 1700) and her "A Curious Herbal", 1737-1739, suggests a good working lower time limit for trying to date the PM-curve.
The real mystery with the PM-curve, as we have noted before, is: what is such an anomalously precise piece of astronomical mathematical physics doing on a page of a book that, at first glance anyway, gives the impressions of dating from late medieval, or early Renaissance times? At this point it seems to me, the simplest answer to this question may be found down a trail that Mary D'Imperio pointed to in her indispensible book: the Rosicrucians. This makes even more sense if we allow that once the Rosicrucian movement was launched and became a sensation of sorts across Europe, it may have stimulated independent "Rosicrucian" groups and documents, independent from Francis Bacon or whoever was behind the original, and other players like John Dee.
And so roughly, we can conceive of two possibilities for the Nine Rosettes Manuscript / 9RMS:
1.) The 9RMS derives from its master mcp document as a latest update of older Rosicrucian (or for that matter just older esoteric) literature, updated in the case of the PM-curve in the late 17th century, or even early 18th century. This allows the possibility of rescuing the traditional notions of Voynich manuscript history.
2.) The 9RMS in its entirety is no earlier than the late 17th century, but was intentionally fabricated to appear to have ancestor document components of much greater age. This works as a possibility regardless of Rosicrucianism involvement in the design on the manuscript.
As noted before, one of the most beautiful illustrations in the Nine Rosettes Manuscript is, I think, the cosmological / astronomical f68v2, [15], wherein botany and astronomy seem to be fused. And we recall that Robert Hooke once identified a star constellation, still lost, "The English Rose". [16].
Now, it is pointless to argue that the flower of f68v2 is not a botanically acccurate rose: what botany in the VMS is such? Rather, on seeing this beautiful illustration, we surely can receive the impression of a deeply spiritual rose pinned to the very center of a cross of stars. And this illustration is accompnaied by the whirlpool galaxy illustration on one side, and on the other by the woman-headed hair=sunrays illustration, that being another of the most beautiful pictures in the book. And it is all very feminine in its projection, it seems to me. And in some sense, Rosicrucianism is a more feminine version of Freemasonry. I think a document like Beinecke MS 408 not only could arise from the network-of-interest which was responsible for the rise of the Royal Society in the second half of the 17th century, but now that I have looked deeper into this NOI, I can ponder this:
if something like the Nine Rosettes Manuscript did not exist, then why not?
It now seems to me that it would be more odd if the 9RMS did not exist, than the oddity of its existence.
Is it not logical that some of the women in the NOI would be doing creative things that would come to the attention of their men, and then some resources would be allocated for a secret book with a considerable feminine influence?
Berj / KI3U
[23] We will obtain details on the Inwood book; perhaps there is enough information therefrom to estimate the dimensions of Hooke's hand.
[24] One reason this all is controversial is that it directly affects supposed Voynich text "word lengths".
[25] GC, according to his own hypotheses of the VMS origins, likely does not like this date range, preferring instead early 16th century. But during our off-list debates many moons ago I did, in so many words, predict that the creative insights in his transcription alphabet would be crucial in making breakthroughs in the mystery. The insights reflected in the constuction of the GC alphabet are what give it its analytic power in MS 408 work.
[26] mostly taken from "Ladies in the Scientific Revolution" by Sir Alan Cook, F.R.S., 1997:
www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/index/3D7F1F7WURP9HB6E.pdf
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, January 27, 2007 2:22 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: I am in Prague *NOW* - what to do? (De Tepenecz)
Hello Jan
One thing that I want to say is that Horczicky's calligraphy hand is rather impressive.
Now, in your latest B12 page:
http://hurontaria.baf.cz/CVM/b12.htm
I do agree completely when you write:
" Conclusion: We could not confirm the "signature" in the VM was written with the same hand that wrote the signatures 1 and 2 (i.e. Horczicky's hand). ... "
Your B12 page is the strongest exhibition yet that I have seen, all on one web page, of the f1r "signature" problem. And if I remember right, you yourself have described the f1r "signature" = Tepenec(e) identification as "wishful thinking".
Except that both problems start with Wilfrid Voynich, and both problems directly affect the history of the Voynich manuscript, the f1r signature problem is independent of another problem, namely the Marci letter problem, which for me has these parts:
a.) is the Marci letter genuine?
b.) is the Marci letter a copy of an original that was sent, or is it the original that was never sent, or is it the original that was sent with Beinecke MS 408 and therefore belongs with the book, as Voynich claimed he found it?
b.) is the book being discussed in the Marci letter = Beinecke MS 408 ?
For me, c.) is much more the problematic, as I've un-inhibitedly posted upon: the description of the book, in the Marci letter, fails to give any indication of MS 408's most glaring character - the nine rosettes.
And, if you ask yourself: suppose Voynich was a con-man? From that perspective, the Marci letter can easily be seen to project a meta-motive of its originator: plant into the mind of the reader of the letter the idea that once upon a time the book was recognized by experts (Rudolf et al) as an extremely valuable book. And by implication then, it should be regarded as even more valuable in 1911 or 1912 and thereafter, upon its rediscovery after being long lost.
What is so troubling, is that the con scenario makes sense of a lot of problems, whereas the face-value scenario of the Marci letter creates problems and forces leaps of faith. So far.
But anyway, I have also posted, at least a couple of times, that I'm willing to bend back to the standard history of the VMS, or at least some of it, as that history was received from Wilfrid, if some really good convincing evidence can be demonstrated. And in my latest PM-curve post I even give, as one of two possible scenarios, a scenario that can reconcile the anomalous PM-curve with much of the troublesome standard VMS history. As long it is reality, I don't care what it all comes out to.
Greg Stachowski and I, as one of our little offlist explorations, have been approaching this possible reconciliation via what seems the most natural direction: Athanasius Kircher. We both tend to believe that he had something to do with Beinecke MS 408. One possibility is that he indeed possessed it, and then made notes in it, perhaps all of the writing on f116v.
Berj
From: Jan Hurych <> Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net
To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: RE: VMs: I am in Prague *NOW* - what to do? (De Tepenecz)
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 10:11:17 -0800 (PST)
Hi Berj,
the original posting at http://hurontaria.baf.cz/CVM/b9.htm
shows the page smaller but at the top is the signature in approximately 1 to 1 scale, as it was xeroxed from the original official document by the archive officer. Since it has some embellishments at the end and the beginning, the whole signature would not be of the same length as that of the new found one.
I did not do any measurement comparison, since I was looking merely for the specific tell-tale indicators that would confirm or deny the identity of the hand.
As for the new found siganture, I have no idea of the scale, I just used cut-out letters from the picture displayed by Peter on Net. For comparison purposes, I had to enlarge our cut-outs slightly, but I believe that Peter's picture was also an enlargement to start with.
Jan
"Berj N. Ensanian" <> wrote:
Jan Hurych wrote Sat, 27 Jan 2007 06:53:10 -0800 (PST):
" There is no doubt in my mind they were made by the same hand and the proof is at
http://hurontaria.baf.cz/CVM/b12.htm "
What are the dimensions, in centimeters or millimeters, of all these signatures that are being compared?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, January 27, 2007 5:49 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Nick Pelling writes: " Although faint, the signature on f1r genuinely exists: "
Can you demonstrate that there is a "signature" on the bottom of page f1r?
Never mind for the moment whose "signature" it is - I don't care if Noah signed aboard the Ark after one of his sheep died.
Demonstrate that the marks on the bottom of page f1r, the marks that look like together they might constitute a word, the marks that were discovered by Wilfrid Voynich after he spilled, "accidentally, acid onto page f1r, together constitute a type of word known as a personal "signature". A "signature" by anybody, from Noah to Wilfrid himself.
If you can demonstrate just that, then you will have made a valuable contribution to VMS work, in my opinion. I've been looking for that demonstration since 1999, and I still have not seen it.
I'll tell you what I think just as my today's guess of the moment: if indeed those marks on the bottom of f1r are a real word, the word is in the Spanish language, or by a Spanish person writing Latin. And I have the luxury of abandoning my guess for another different one tomorrow morning, because I have no really solid evidence for just what those marks that look like a word on the bottom of f1r really are.
Berj
From: Nick Pelling Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: vms-list@voynich.net
Subject: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...? Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 21:25:02 +0000
Hi everyone,
Although faint, the signature on f1r genuinely exists: so any account of the VMs' history is duty-bound to take it into account. I see three significant scenarios to evaluate:-
(1) it is genuinely Sinapius' signature (or someone on behalf of Sinapius)
(2) it was faked by someone after Sinapius, but then erased before Marci
(3) it was faked by WMV, who then spent years looking for confirmation of what he had faked
(1) seems perfectly plausible (but in need of further research), (2) seems implausible (who? why?), while (3) only seems supportable if you first presume that WMV was quite mad, which doesn't seem to be suggested by any other evidence I am aware of.
Am I missing something really obvious?
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, January 27, 2007 11:30 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Rafal T. Prinke wrote Saturday, January 27, 2007 7:38 PM: " ... so I would assume it was never erased, just faded away and then after having been treated with chemical became temporarily visible, just to disappear for good. "
Hello Rafal Well this is what I mean when I say I've been searching for a demonstration that the writing at the bottom of f1r is a "signature" ever since I got sucked into this inescapable Voynich black hole by Landini's artwork in 1999. I haven't seen Voynich's 1921 picture of what he said is a signature on f1r. But why can't I see that alleged signature, upon which so much Voynich manuscript history depends, today?
How many someone-said-so conditions must be accepted in defense of the idea that there is a signature, let alone an identifyable signature, on the bottom of f1r, rather than, say, an un-identified signature, or unidentified or identified word, or just scribal practice scribbles? This "signature" is variously described, in different spellings, as being seen in infra-red, ultra-violet, and under-exposed plate. I certainly can't see it, in any spelling, in the .sid image no matter how much image processing I try. And here is the crux of my thinking on this: if I had never heard of the Voynich manuscript and its legends, and someone put the bottom part of the f1r image before me, and asked me what I thought was going on there, I'd probably conclude there might be a word or some words there, but I have a real hard time believing I would confidently conclude Tepenecz or a variation of that. Is it the position of those who say there is a signature of Tepenece on f1r, that at some point in the past that signature's existence was unequivocally demonstrated, but for this or that reason the demonstration is no longer possible today? That is not a priori an unacceptable proposition, provided it is believable that in the past the existence of the signature really was unequivocally demonstrated.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 28, 2007 2:19 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: I am in Prague *NOW* - what to do? (De Tepenecz)
Hello Jan
" There is little else we know that can connect any other person directly to it and with the same confidence. "
The "it" is the f1r parchment - it is by no means necessarily also the VMS information that this struggle is all about. We know that parchment was re-used - it was scraped free of previous writing, and so on. I've picked up old books with signatures in them, and made notes of my own in the books. The long-dead author of the book, or the old signator therein, have nothing necessarily to do with the information I wrote in "his" book.
" .... If - let me stress that "if", since it is now only the speculation - somebody needed a historical figure to provide the link to the chain Bacon - Dee - Rudolph II - Mr.X. - Baresch - Marci, That would provide a nice and almost complete provenance. ... "
Well, lets think about this: if it was so easy in the 1960's for the pedestrian Pierre Plantard and his accomplices to slip phony Prieuré de Sion / Priory of Sion documents into the Bibliothèque nationale de France, then imagine what a wordly educated and experienced polished antiquarian like Wilfrid Voynich could do before World War I, if he had a powerful enough motive. I do think that part of the psychology that resists taking a really good hard sharp look at Voynich, is the subconscious or unconscious desire to avoid unpleasant discoveries about his famous and admired wife Ethel; because, it is rather hard to avoid the conclusion that she very well knew what her husband was up to. And even kept his game going after he died. I am here not passing final judgment on Ethel in the matter of MS 408, but commenting on a point of psychology.
" And what's more: the key word "Tepenec" is practically unharmed, I had no problem to see it by simple toying with contrast, and intensity of the Beinecke scan. "
That I have not been able to do, as mentioned in the other thread, and I really have tried. I really have.
" However, if the letter was a fraud, the forger would probably simulate the true handwriting to avoid suspicion. "
I would really like to see some samples of Miss Nill's handwriting. I would like to see a picture of her. I've searched for these, and asked others offlist, but so far nothing.
" All that said, there is no apparent logical reason for Voynich to do it, he would risk his reputation. "
I think it quite possible that he was routinely risking his reputation Jan, and was apparently so confident and charming that he got away with it: the kind of guy you almost don't mind being conned by because he is so interesting to be connected with: sells dreams to those who are looking for them. I've seen at least one guy like that operate, at close range - they are masters, artists, in their own right. Some time not long ago I posted on the 1930 eulogy of Voynich at the McGill University Medical Library Association. Those fellows greatly admired him, but you can tell from Dr. Archibald Malloch's statements, that Voynich could pull the proverbial rabbit out of his hat. I put my impressions this way: Voynich could come across ancient manuscripts with no more trouble than you and I come across trash on a city sidewalk. Coming up with a convenient letter, and spinning a story like the VMS legend, would be nothing at all major for Voynich, if he was like the con man that I saw operate at close range.
" Wilfrid had also the history of conspirator if I am not mistaken. Could such joke be beyond his integrity? "
I doubt very much that any of the intelligent and educated people in MS 408 history, including Voynich, would use the ms for a joke: one look at the script and you know it is unique, and then there are the nine rosettes, and therefore you know that something serious is involved with the ms. If you try to make a joke of it, then you are really risking your own reputation I would think.
" You probably know the story he was conned by his tricky colleague and "solved" the sample which was only the utter gibberish. Marci probably knew that and he carefully warned Kircher about the stories surrounding the VM. "
Yes I know the story, but can't recall now if it happened before or after the Marci letter date of 1665/6.
Anyway, but then why does Marci devote two-thirds of his letter to openly baiting Kircher to solve the problem, while devoting the remaining one-third to establishing the book's tremendous value of 600 pieces of gold?
Berj
**********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 28, 2007 2:07 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Evolution
Marke wrote Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:16:56 -0000: " Can I ask you, is the 'PM-curve' the only feature of the VMs that you think has been constructed in accordance to a precise geometry? Or are there others? Cos I have to admit that I don't get it myself. Precision seems to be wholly lacking and not required as far as most of the VMs is concerned; the text wanders merrily up and down without a care and most of the drawings seem to have been created with a similar speed and attitude. Just about the only places where there is an evident concern with neatness are the circular diagrams which have been drawn with the aid of a compass....and that doesn't really qualify as scientific or technical drawing. "
Hello Marke As Greg put it best, the PM-curve is anomalous in its context. Now, I'm smart enough to realize that if I'm going to point attention to the PM-curve in this forum, then I had better be ahead of everyone else, if possible, in trying to debunk it. And of course I've been doing that, and am still doing that, posting some results now and then, and communicating and bouncing more results off Greg off-list. The bottom line so far is that the PM-curve is real: it is an intentionally plotted curve, with some rather high level of mathematical, and likely also astronomical thinking behind it, thought that seems most comfortably placed in the late 17th century. And every last technical detail necessary to check my work, either to confirm it, or debunk it, is all right within one still developing list thread: the PM-curve analysis thread. Recently Marianna Ridderstad motivated me, via her list communications, to become more than casually interested in the whirlpool galaxy illustration, f68v3. And I took a look at those spiral curves to see if, like the PM-curve, some of them may have been mathematically plotted. I communicated my initial impressions about that on-list: some of the sprial lines possibly may be candidates for digitization transcription and spiral curve analysis. Needless to say that is an awful lot of tedious work, as I know full well from the still ongoing PM-curve work. Now, the cryptographers here are searching for a coding scheme that is a precisely reversible transformation between original plaintext and the Voynich text. The idea of mathematical precision is so taken for granted by the cryptographers that it is hardly ever mentioned as such. So, when the PM-curve suddenly appears, it may seen remarkable that it could reflect a precision transformation, just because it is expressed not in text symbols, but as a curve. Berj
*********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 28, 2007 5:25 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: I am in Prague *NOW* - what to do? (De Tepenecz)
Hello Jan You wrote Sunday, January 28, 2007 10:49 AM:
" The word "Tepenec" is clearly visible at http://hurontaria.baf.cz/CVM/b10.htm "
As I said before, I have done a lot of image processing of the bottom portion of page f1r, over the years. I did some more again just before writing this email. I am not able to find something there that convinces me I am viewing a word, let alone a word that is a signature, let alone "Tepenec". For one thing, the entire area of the bottom of f1r should be image processed and analyzed, not just, say the ~ 15 millimeters that covers the alleged "T" to the alleged "p" in Tepenec. All the marks should be analyzed together, not just a subset of them taken, to argue it is "Tepenec". Do the marks around the allged "Tepenec" support the interpretation, or go against it? The alledged "T" looks to me to be part of a much larger group of four arcs, the group mostly cropped out of your picture, that are approximately concentric. Possibly a Roman numeral "V" is formed by the two topmost arcs, where you have it as "T". The alleged "p" looks to me as part of a scribble that somewhat resembles a swastika symbol, but only accidentally: in other words, perhaps scribe's pen practice. Jan, it makes not the slightest difference to me, other than an insistence upon reality, what is on the bottom of f1r, for the simple reason that since last December I have been concerned with, what appears to me, is the single most solid lead in the Beinecke MS 408 mystery: the PM-curve. And therefore, if I thought that I could detect a signature on f1r, from anyone's demonstration, I would say so: signature or no signature, anybody's signature, does not affect the reality of the PM-curve. Demonstrate a signature on f1r to me, and I'll be only too happy to acknowledge it.
And now I will pose to you, and the list, what is the single strongest conclusion I have ever reached in my own image processing experiments on the bottom of page f1r:
If we take the alleged "Tepenec" as a location reference system, then the alleged "n" is not an "n", but rather the alleged "n" is similar, very similar in my eyes, to a symbol that appears in the f116v text, in the first (topmost), and third lines. This symbol somewhat resembles a Voynich-text-symbol GC-e rotated ninety degrees clockwise. On the third line it appears three times, to the left of a following "+" cross. Now, on the assumption that Athanasius Kircher is indeed involved with MS 408, at least with some of its parchment, if not the normal 9RMS information, then on account of Kircher's possible Voynich connections with Prague, I think it would indeed be interesting if it could be demonstrated that somewhere on the bottom of f1r, or any other page for that matter, is written a plausible "Praha" or spelled as it was written "back then". Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 28, 2007 9:16 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Evolution
and.marke wrote Sunday, January 28, 2007: " The most convincing thing has to be an image of this sort, with what you think is the 'true' function superimposed over the top so we can gauge the fit visually. People will more readily believe their eyes than a bunch of correlation figures. "
What kind of "People" ? It is now just 56 days since the birth of the highly technical new PM-curve research field in Voynich manuscript studies, brought about more or less accidentally by a handful of this list's members. It is not, not for me anyway, a time to be distracted with making it a priority, to produce popular material on the PM-curve for the non-technical reader. The work I'm doing on the PM-curve, I am reporting to this list in the proper format, a format that addresses those people who have the technical skills to understand it; and with the hope that from among them some will be motivated to check the work in detail, and then contribute to further understanding of the PM-curve anomaly. That kind of person is not going to make up his or her mind one way or the other about the PM-curve and its meaning just by "readily believe their eyes" from a glance at the PM-curve on crosshairs picture, or any other such picture provided by me. However, if you have followed the f68r3 PM-curve analysis thread, then you have seen that whenever practical, I take the interested non-technical reader into account with easy-to-understand commentary, and even journalist-style material. Although graphic overlays are just one of the comparison techniques I am using, at this point I have done well over a thousand graph overlay comparisons - it takes only a few seconds for each one, once the equations have been programmed, to change the parameters, or even change the equations, and then have the plots on the screen. The technical person who is motivated, can do the same just as easily with available off-the-shelf programs, or do as I do, and write their own programs, or even do as I do, and do some old-fashioned hand plotting. At this time I have no intention of putting up on the web a picture of the PM-curve adorned with anything other than the crosshairs, and thereby risk going even further from that simple invitation-to-study step in the direction of planting in the viewer's mind suggestions about the curve and its meaning. You saw what happened here on-list a couple of weeks ago just as the general list became really aware of the PM-curve's implications: a major nerve was pinched, a clear indication that something extraordinary had disturbed routine Voynichville consciousness. I put a little old curve on crosshairs and hold it up, and in parts of Voynichville for a while you'd think I was Van Helsing among the vampires. Not many kilometers from where I am at the moment, is a farm with horses and asses. When I drive by there and glance over at them, there is a moment when the angle is just right and I think I can see the PM-curve on their profiles. To put up PM-curve overlay comparisons on the web for just "People", at this point in time, just invites more Silly nonsense comments.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, January 28, 2007 10:18 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Hello Dana
I am impressed - you may have finally done it and lit the Audion.
On Tepenec anyway - the Jacobi needs a lot, lot more work I think. The work must be reproducable by others. The exact step-by-step procedure must be given. I don't have Adobe Photoshop, but I'm sure other interested list members do. Also, the demonstration pictures must, in my opinion, include a larger area around the writing, so that it is clearly seen that the words Jacobi Tepenec are free of peripheral artifacts that mitigate against their interpretation.
The goal of the demonstration, in my opinion, should be to produce pictures that make it possible to analyze if "Jacobi Tepenec" was written as a unit, rather than was constructed from pre-existing marks on the parchment. In other words, determine it is really a signature, no matter who signed it, and not a fake signature made by modifying, and adding to, pre-existing marks on the parchment.
I estimate that the complete "Jacobi Tepenec" spans ~ 7.6 cm.
Berj
From: "Dana Scott" <> Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: <vms-list@voynich.net>
Subject: Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...? Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:35:44 -0700
Hello Berj,
I have used Adobe Photoshop to attempt to coax out the "Jacobi Tepenec" "signature" at the bottom of f1r as best I can. I hope this helps clarify what has been "seen" concerning this "signature".
http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm<http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm>
Kind Regards,
Dana Scott
Great Grand Nephew of Lee DeForest
----- Original Message -----
From: Berj N. Ensanian <> To: vms-list@voynich.net<mailto:vms-list@voynich.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 9:30 PM Subject: Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 29, 2007 10:13 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: I am in Prague *NOW* - what to do? (De Tepenecz)
Jan Hurych wrote Mon, 29 Jan 2007 06:00:43 -0800 (PST):
" I cannot do better with my softwer, especially from Beinecke scan. Apparently more and sofisticated processing is needed. "
Hell Jan
By now you probably have seen Dana Scott's work from overnight, and my comments to him. Once Dana publishes his step-by-step all-pixels-processed-equally procedure, starting with a referenced Beinecke source image, and others with his same software tools can duplicate his spectacular result, then I'd say the legend of the f1r "signature" has finally been demonstrated to be accurate. It remains to analyze if it is a real signature, or a fake, as well as try to deduce other leads: archivist? and so on. Dana's image should be compared with Voynich's 1921 photo - when that becomes available. I still wonder if these words at the bottom of f1r originate with a Spanish or Portuguese hand - if the Jacobi part can be better resolved we will know more. Kircher had Portuguese aspects to his life. And I still wonder about any connection with these f1r words and the writing on f116v.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 29, 2007 4:20 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Greg Stachowski wrote Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:19:48 +0100 (CET):
" It's a pity that we don't know which chemicals were used, perhaps we might be able to assess the level of damage. Perhaps this information is somehwere in WMV's papers? "
Is it just my imagination, or is the "Jacobus" part in the 1921-Voynich Plate 2, unusually strong compared with its appearance in Dana's image?
http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, January 29, 2007 7:22 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Another thing: The last Voynich text-word on f1r is GC-81am
On the 1921 Voynich Plate 2 there is almost nothing of that word to be seen.
Yet in today's Beinecke images it is the strongest word of the entire bottom paragraph.
That suggests that either the word re-appeared via a slow chemical change by itself after the Plate 2 image was taken, or it was re-instated by someone.
I think it is Stolfi who has done the most work on analyzing the touch-up hypothesis. If by image subtraction technique we can conclude with high confidence that the last word on f1r was indeed re-instated / touched-up, then we have a reference word for all of Stolfi's analysis.
For a reference for the gray-scale normalizations I would think that if the red-colored symbols were in Plate 2, they might be used, but lacking those, how about the parchment itself, a relatively clean spot high up in the plate 2 image?
Berj
From: "Berj N. Ensanian" Reply-To: vms-list@voynich.net To: vms-list@voynich.net
Subject: Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...? Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:55:02 -0500
Greg wrote Monday, January 29, 2007 5:03 PM:
" It does seem to be, despite the poor quality of the image. Unfortunately we don't know either which chemicals were used or indeed what the lighting and emulsion technology used to make the image were -- the spectral characteristics of both may well have been very different from what was used to produce the Beinecke SIDs, thus giving an apparently better image. "
I have an idea:
1.) Suppose a .sid image of f1r is cropped that matches the Voynich Plate 2.
2.) The .sid crop is processsed according to Dana's analysis process.
3.) Then this resulting .sid is converted to gray-scale.
4.) The gray .sid and the Plate 2 images are normalized as to gray-scale.
5.) The difference image is calculated. A suitable grid-scale is super-imposed on all images for exact comparisons.
The order of the above may need to be thought through carefully, but should be interesting seeing the difference image, no?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:51 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: The mysterious Miss Nill
In this Who-done-it? of the Nine Rosettes Manuscript I've long been curious about the one major actor in the story who seems the most mysterious, on account of so little information available about her: Miss Anne Margaret Nill, indispensable associate / companion / adopted daughter? of Wilfrid and Ethel Voynich.
Prior to Dana Scott posting two pictures of her on his website a day or so ago:
http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm
I had no idea what she looked like, but my preconceived visualization of her turned out to be eerily close. Before, the information I could obtain about her was in little pieces scattered here and there, like Albert Howard Carter's 1946 report on his inspection of the Voynich Manuscript, where he was accompanied by Miss Nill.
The mystery only deepens upon seeing the portrait photograph of her that Dana just put up.
Dana also put up a second photo, showing Miss Nill standing, facing the seated Ethel Voynich. As a first approximation, a subjective one, of the body language of Ethel in that photograph, she is communicating a command gesture with her right hand and index finger to either or both Miss Nill and the presumed other person(s) in the room, presumably the photographer.
But here I want to make some observation on Miss Nill from her portrait.
First, a completely subjective observation, and therefore one that I will not explain: in my opinion, the person in the portrait of Miss Anne M. Nill is an EXTREMELY intelligent person.
A further subjective observation is that, at least at the time, of the portrait, she was not a loose goose, happy-go-lucky type.
Now an objective, I believe, observation, the one which deepens the mystery of Miss Nill: to me, the portrait photograph appears doctored.
Have a look, on the right side, at the left side of her head. From where the neck meets the shoulder, right on up to the hairline, the profile line is straight vertical, and proceeds as a sharp straight line with tissue on both sides. At first I thought it was just a scissors crop pasted onto a blank white background, but that is plainly not the case: there is unmistakably something odd about the construction of the head on that side.
Now back to subjective reactions: I get the impression that the head and face are a composite created from the juxtaposition of primarily two sources: a woman, and a boy. Back in those pre-computer days there were lots of photography trick techniques, and during my high school days I practiced them myself. So in my mind, my subjective reaction here is not at all a matter of could it be done, because I know it can, but rather, I am asking myself: am I correctly interpreting this odd image of Miss Ann Nill, or am I completely nuts here?
I'm curious about the pendant that Miss Nill is wearing. Unfortunately the image is not clear enough to be sure, but the pendant's construction, as well as the symbol on it, are reminiscent of Voynich text symbols, possibly GC-8 and GC-W.
Berj
***********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:18 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Dana Scott wrote Tuesday, January 30, 2007 1:46 AM:
" A few comments about the portrait photo. This picture came to me as a copy of an article on Ms. Nill provided by the Library of Buffalo, N.Y., which was where she lived in her youth, as best I can tell. ...."
Hello Dana
Circumstances have forced me to spend a lot of time in BUF these days, so if you can give me a couple of leads offlist, I might be able to do some legwork in the BUF area.
I revisit what I said earlier in another thread: I think it is necessary that we give the exact procedures and references for what we publish onlist, so that reproducability and checking can be done, and especially so that false or dubious legends do not get started, at least from this forum. I know that there is a real legitimate problem with this for advanced researchers: important new material can suddenly multiply into a huge pile that needs thorough organizing, and there is the attraction to hoarding critical discovered information so that the last bit of data can be squeezed out of it, before others have a shot at it. I myself am guilty of that now and then. I think a partial remedy is the offlist research partnerships.
" While there may be certain minor distortions which I might have introduced, her facial feature are mostly untouched. "
Then therefore, if it can be established with high confidence that the strangeness of the construction of the head of the person depicted in the Anne Nill portrait photo, is due to doctoring, then it goes without saying that it is an important piece of information - Nill is a major controller of the Voynich artifact during its early turbulent modern history.
" She did seem to like very much corresponding with Peterson. "
Peterson ought to be revisited - his material is in the Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia. Some time ago last year I courteously wrote to one of the earliest members of this list, and requested help in obtaining a copy, of the copies of the Peterson transcript of the Voynich ms, with Peterson's annotations, that the early list members worked with. I received no reply.
" There are some additional annecdotes about her which I can post, if there is interest. "
Of course I am 100% interested.
Have you tried, with your techniques, removing the eye-glasses from the face in the Nill portrait?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:49 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: New Voynich site (was Re: VMs: Voynich questions)
Patryk Laurent wrote Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:02:33 -0500:
" Wouldn't the oldest list members be the ones most likely to *not* want a change in the medium of discussion? It would seem you would have a strong bias in your sample. =) Not that there's anything wrong with that... "
Hello Patryk
r
I was thinking generally: I have a high regard for experience and tradition. Also, I think similar proposals to GC's had been considered in the past by the oldtimers - would be good to know their updated views.
As for the discussion - I think GC makes it clear that he does not envision the primary and most important public discussions to leave this list. Possibly his proposal will allow a shunting of Voynich commercialism tendencies to have a venue near the active research arena, while not confusing it directly. It would concern me, I would be disappointed, if a few years down the road this list became characterized by pitchmen selling Voynich T-shirts and other Voynichiana, and generally creating an atmosphere of a UFO-lecture-circuit. The Voynich manuscript has obvious high potential for that I think, and that has not escaped the notice of some individuals.
73
Berj
*********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 3:04 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Hello Greg Good that we are thinking similarly.
" Probably the way to do this is to colour-adjust the SIDs before greyscaling them. A simpler way would be to just take the blue channel of the SID, which is a closer approximation to the photostat response; this will, however, lose the information in the red and green channels. "
Yes I was starting to guess along those lines after I posted my previous comments on all this.
" Worse, this effect is particularly bad near the bottom margin which is the area we are interested in. The effect is such that even if 'Tepenec' is aligned reasonably well then 'Jacobi' (or whatever it is) misaligns badly. What is needed is to use a map of reference points common to both images (recognizeable text points, holes in the vellum) to morph one image into the other. This one is more difficult, and also can't easily be done in Photoshop or similar programs. "
This brings me directly to my fundamental reasoning about all this: we stand a chance to make some fruitful progress even without being able to cross all the t's and dot all the i's in the science. For, if just by looking at the 1921 Plate as it is, and today's Beinecke f1r, and Dana's processed image, I can notice potential major clues, then I have come into possession of IDEAS, ideas that might well be taken down the road of precision in the sense of seventy-six = seventy-six, and hit new paydirt.
A distortion-correcting morphing transform is as you say not an easy, certainly not a quick, piece of work to accomplish. But, the eye and mind might well visualize the morphing end-result from the input images, and get ideas.
At the moment I see two major items on f1r to look into:
1.) The apparent difference in strength between "Jacobi" or "Jacobus" relative to "Tepenec", between the 1921 Voynich Plate 2, and Dana's processed image that I believe starts with today's Beinecke MS 408 f1r .sid as its source image, and processes all pixels equally.
2.) The absence of the last word, GC-81am, in the 1921 picture, and its bold appearance in today's Beinecke image, and as the strongest inked word at that, in this troublesome bottom area of page f1r.
The resolution of these two items obviously have, at least potentially, MAJOR implications for unraveling the mystery of the VMS. In the case of item 2.) one could say metaphorically that in 1921 there is zero, and today, for some reason, there is 76.
Stolfi's "Evidence of text retouching on f1r", Posted 2004-07-15, updated 2004-07-22, is online here:
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/EXPORT/projects/voynich/04-07-15-retouching/
[Stolfi uses EVA, instead of the newer GC terminology.] As far as I can tell he does not discuss the last f1r word, GC-81am, and without having seen Plate 2 one could not be expected to guess that word's sudden new peculiarity. But in any case, this investigation by Stolfi, covering as it does, suspicious retouching on other pages besides f1r, and showing some amazing things in the Voynich pages, and also going into detail on Gabriel Landini's "ink separation technique", is an invaluable blast from the past for items 1.) and 2.) investigation.
There is another thought I mentioned yesterday or so in one of these threads: how could Wilfrid, with all his savvy, possibly believe that MS 408 was authored by Roger Bacon in the 13th century?
This has become even more puzzling with the, for me, increasing estimate of the raw intelligence in the Wilfrid-Ethel-Anne trio. The more one looks into these people, the more one gets the impression that they were definitely very high voltage minds. I could see one brilliant thinker by himself / herself going off into la-la land maybe and getting fixated onto a Roger Bacon theory. But an entire cooperating trio?
Possible of course, but puzzling! So I had a wild thought during one of my unleash-the-imagination moments: is it conceivable that the WEA trio knew very well that Roger Bacon was improbable, but for some reason, they had a motive to start a Roger Bacon Mirabilis scientific revolution cult, one that preceeded Francis Bacon's scientific revolution as to its pedigree, and could then be developed for more new oddball manuscript "discoveries" and what not, all for some very important purpose, say a political one?
There is a big difference between ordinary "hoax" and political propaganda. "Just a thought" as they say.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:00 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...?
Greg Stachowski wrote Tuesday, January 30, 2007 7:35 PM: " Looking at Dana's image of the 1921 paper again, side-by-side with the SID, I see there's more missing than just the last word: a whole diagonal band of lost text on the right hand side. "
Tatsaechtlich!
Not only that, there seems to me something not quite right with one of the parchment wormholes between the two pictures: from the second (and last) "e" in the "Tepenec", go straight down - that wormhole.
Wouldn't wormholes be among the more comparable features between widely different image processes?
Now this is really going out on a limb, but do you remember months back when I posted a provocative question on the possibility that Voynich had a second or more copies of the mystery manuscript? I had to ask that question because of some inconsistencies in the old descriptions of it, the 1946 description by Albert Howard Carter for example, against what we know Beinecke MS 408 is like. If I remember right, he was among other things a paleographer for the U.S. Army (intelligence?).
" Actually, I wonder where the original image is? The printed image in the article must have been reproduced from something -- what happened to that original? Voynich's papers? Printer's archives? Where is it? Can it be found? "
This suggests prioritizing a list of most-wanted items - perfect thing to devote a webpage to in GC's proposed virtual Voynichland. A newcomer could see something on the list, be in a position to easily look for it, and get lucky and just like that make a significant contribution to the understanding of this mystery. I believe in Beginner's Luck.
On such a list I would definitely place handwriting exemplars of Miss Nill.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 10:13 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: A simple theory of f1r
[ I forgot to add 5.) so here it is again }
In the thread: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...? there has been discussion about some obvious and highly significant differences between the 1921 photo supplied by Voynich [1], and today's images provided by the Yale Beinecke library [2], depicting the bottom part of Voynich Manuscript page f1r. That bottom part of f1r is ground zero for the alleged "signature" of "Jacobi Tepenec". The bottom of f1r is now of independent importance because of issues like the touch-up hypothesis - see the list archives. Let me see if I can sketch a simple theory for the differences between the depictions, a theory that minimizes assumptions and presumed motives.
1.) It is desired to demonstrate a signature on the bottom of f1r.
2.) The f1r parchment is variously worked toward that end.
3.) During different stages of the working, photographs of f1r are taken.
4.) The different photographs, each showing a desired feature at its best, are combined into a composite photo that shows all desired features at their best simultaneously - this is the 1921 Plate 2.
5.) The damaged / erased portions of f1r due to the working, are restored on the original parchment.
Berj / KI3U
[1] Plate 2 in Wilfrid Voynich's "A Preliminary Sketch Of The History Of The Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript", transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1921; see Dana Scott's website for an image of Plate 2:
http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm
[2] http://webtext.library.yale.edu/beinflat/pre1600.ms408.htm
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, January 30, 2007 10:39 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Re: Re: Re: New Voynich site - poll
CWLee wrote Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:25:38 -0800: " I also hope there is a backup system that does not depend on any one person or organization being around and doing what it promised years earlier. "
You are right. And the ultimate solution I think is Yale's Beinecke stepping up to assume its pre-ordained responsiblity of hosting. Perhaps GC is thinking that what he wants to build will get the Beinecke to act. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, January 31, 2007 9:49 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: Re: New Voynich site - poll
Greg Stachowski wrote Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:35:39 +0100 (CET): The important thing is to have one central site .... "
One thing that I question is the "Wiki" proposals for this site. As I understand it, and as I see it, anybody can put up material in Wikipedia without revealing their identity. Wikipedia has proven useful in various ways, but you can't use it as an absolute reference in serious work. The check-it chain ends at: anonymous. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:08 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
The Lone Ranger Mask in the portrait photograph of Miss Anne M. Nill
To follow up on my suspicions of doctoring in the photo of Anne Nill [1], founded upon my old high school days experiments with creative effects in photographic plates (Graflex camera), I did some brightness, contrast, and gamma adjustments on the photo.
Proceeding on the assumption that the photo is indeed doctored, it appears to me from these experiments that a major doctoring can be described as a kind of Lone Ranger Mask portion of the face. In other words, a large part of the face, around the eyes, comes from a different source photograph than the rest of the head, or else it is the same photo, but that has been worked on in that part of the face.
The outline of this Lone Ranger Mask is as follows:
On the right side (left side of face), a straight line descends from the hairline just left of the vertical line described earlier in this thread. This edge of the mask crosses the eye-glasses frame ear-anchor, and then a bit above the horizontal defined by the nostrils, it curves toward, and proceeds toward the nostrils.
The mask curves under the nostrils, rises upward sharply for a small distance, and then proceeds leftward, somewhat below the lower round rim of the (actual) right lens-frame, then rises sharply vertically upward at a point that appears to be a meeting, as if another doctoring area is being met there, and as it proceeds upward it apparently slightly crops the left edge (rightmost in the actual eyeglasses) of the lens-frame, then meets the hairline, and again turns sharply and proceeds horizontally across the forehead, well above the lens-frame rims, to meet the starting point of the outline in the hair on the other (left actual face-side).
In the picture, the right-of-nose, lower horizontal edge of the mask, is of greater height dimension than the left-of-nose, that is, it is lower to the nostrils. But, there may be more areas of doctoring adjacent to the mask.
The exact procedure I used for seeing this, is:
1.) download the [1] picture from Dana's website.
2.) load the picture into Microsoft Photo Editor 3.01
3.) set:
Brightness = 76
Contrast = 60
Gamma = 0.83
4.) save the image as 1AMNillLMR.bmp
Greg - I'll email this image to you offlist: perhaps you can get a chance to subtract, multiply, or add it, or an even better adjustment, with the source from Dana's website, and get more clarity about what is going on in this photograph.
So, who is the person behind the mask? Wilfrid Voynich, Ethel Voynich, or Anne from another of her pictures? Or someone else?
Note: I do not want to un-necessarily create a new Voynich legend here, and hope some critical examination by others is forthcoming. But if you've done photo tricks with the old-fashioned methods, then you know that the above 1AMNillLMR.bmp is worth considering from the altered-photo point of view, the techniques are easily done by the experienced practitioner, and in some cases have the potential for being even more difficult to unravel than altered pictures of computer-age digital originals.
Berj / KI3U
[1] The source photograph of Anne Margaret Nill, photo.1.GIF, for the experiments, is taken from Dana Scott's website, but it is downloaded as a 296,198 bytes .bmp format image, and not a .GIF: http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 1, 2007 3:17 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Blinking the Anne Nill photograph against itself with the eyeglasses removed.
The reference photograph for this experiment is ANill.bmp [1]
I prepared a copy of this .bmp identical in all respects, except that I removed the eyeglasses from the face: ANillxgl.bmp 296,198 bytes
I took the utmost care in removing the eyeglasses so as not to encroach on the perceived-by-me "Lone Ranger Mask" area / edge. I removed the glasses by pasting over them little image-rectangles taken from the immediately adjacent parts of the photo. [2]
If you load these two pictures into IrfanView, or another suitable imaging program, and blink them - rapidly switch back and forth between them, in perfect alignment with each other, then you can see what I am pointing out in this thread as the oddity of the "Lone Ranger Mask of Miss Anne Nill".
Apparently the "mask" is more left-right symmetric than I had previously seen.
There is patently high strangeness in this photograph, not only in the geometry of the left side of the actual head, but also in the face. With this blinking approach, it is not even necessary to adjust brightness, contrast, and gamma. The easiest explanation for this strangeness, for me, remains that the portrait is constructed, with emphasis of the construction devoted to the eyes. I have tried to think of explanations involving foldings in the journal paper that the photo was taken from, but the explanations all come to contradictions. I think this portrait photo is not what it presents itself to be to the casual observer. But why? I've read of conjectures that Miss Nill was originally an agent assigned to spying on the Voyniches. If indeed this photograph is doctored, then how does this knowledge affect attitudes toward the Voynich manuscript's history?
Berj / KI3U
[1] The source photograph of Anne Margaret Nill, photo.1.GIF, for the experiments, is taken from Dana Scott's website, but it is downloaded not as a .GIF, but instead as a 296,198 bytes .bmp format image, ANill.bmp and it is left intact with no image processing whatsoever:
http://www.voynich.us/photo.htm
[2] Prior to posting this, I emailed the pictures, ready for blinking, to a few list members off-list.
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Friday, February 2, 2007 11:55 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: Wilfrid Voynich and Anglus
Here, for the archives, is some more data on "Anglus" and Wilfrid Voynich.
In the vms-list archives back on 27 DEC 2000, Claus Anders posted on the subject:
On the word length distribution: Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz
Stolfi then replied, and mentioned Johannes de Sacrobosco Anglus.
Apparently since then, there has come online [1] this:
" The late Wilfrid M. Voynich was apparently the first to note an imprint of Fitzer's in which. he called himself ' Anglus'. See Malloch, A., William Harvey, ... "
The word Anglus is not especially provocative by itself, but I thought that an apparent direct connection with Wilfrid Voynich might be worth noting in the archives, so that in archives searches on "Anglus" this data also comes up.
Berj / KI3U
[1] http://library.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/s4-XXIV/3-4/142.pdf
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Friday, February 2, 2007 1:13 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: Voynich, Newbold, Kent, VMS, Austrian Castle
Another item I cannot find anywhere mentioned and discussed in the archives is Roland Kent reporting in Chapter V of the 1928 Newbold book [1], that Voynich told Newbold that he (Voynich) had discovered the (Voynich) manuscript in Austria. If I remember right, elsewhere Voynich said he discovered the enigmatic manuscript in a castle, therefore: discovered in a Castle in Austria.
It would be nice to have on-list, and then in the archives, a post devoted to Voynich's private statements about the manuscript: what he told to whom, and when and where (context) he told it.
As an aside, I am always interested in how the one indispensible book in Voynich manuscript research [2], Mary D'Imperio's book, came into being: I see it as one of the most-difficult-to-write books ever written, and she produced, in my opinion, a masterpiece.
D'Imperio built upon Tiltman's notes we know. I think I see also a heavy influence in D'Imperio's book from the 1928 Newbold book that Roland Kent actually put together.
Berj / KI3U
[1] Newbold, William Romaine. 1928. The Cipher of Roger Bacon. Edited by with foreword and notes by Prof. Roland Grubb Kent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
[2] The Voynich Manuscript - An Elegant Enigma, by M.E. D'Imperio, Aegean Park Press, c. 1976-80, ISBN 0-89412-038-7
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Friday, February 2, 2007 7:33 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Barrels or dress?
John Reynolds wrote Friday, February 2, 2007 5:49 PM:
" If you look closely, at the third jpg, the one of the pretty Meitei girl (from India), and if you read the accompanying text in the fourth link concerning the traditional craft of weaving that girls and women perform in that culture, it becomes clear that the pretty girl is standing BEHIND the cylindrical pot or basket, and holding a dress, which she apparently has been working on, HORIZONTALLY outward, over the top of the cylindrical basket, toward the camera. "
Hello John
Aha! Well you know what I was thinking when I replied to mesinik: can he come up with such an image that is some centuries old? Upon the thought that such an image might have reached Europe, to be seen by the VMS designer. Leave no stone unturned I was thinking. I also liked his croco-fish, although I just doubt that one for the VMS.
" ... Personally, I have always harbored a secret suspicion that the naked ladies in barrels were followers of Diogenes the Cynic (1) .... The painting is, of course, Victorian; however, it certainly points to a much older tradition.) "
I like that he is holding a document, while sitting in the barrel. I tend to agree more often than not, that the barrels have something to do with wine. Incredibly, Kepler too was concerned with wine barrels! On Victorian: I too have been looking for leads closer to us in time, than whatever the "back then" time of the Voynich manuscript is. This to me only makes sense since it can take centuries for a change, say a style of some kind, to dispappear completely everywhere, long after its heyday. And so along with that I was rummaging around the College of Physicians of Philadelphia: wondering why, of all places on Earth, Voynich chose that place, surrounded as it is with all that old money, to debut the mysterious manuscript in 1921. He was in good with the medical library up at McGill also, we know.
Anyway, I came across this:
" The Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia is pleased to announce the availability, through its website (www.collphyphil.org), of two fully searchable 18th-century Pennsylvania manuscripts:
(1) A bilingual (German and English) formulary, the Medicina Pensylvania of George de Benneville, a French Huguenot physician,
(2) Remediorum Specimina, the record of the practice and recipes of Abraham Wagner, a Schwenckfelder practitioner from Silesia.
The manuscripts can be dated roughly to the period 1740 to 1780. Both drew on numerous 18th-century continental European and English sources--explicitly in the case of the Wagner manuscript and unacknowledged in the Medicina Pensylvania--and both offer copious and often highly technical recipes from the armamentarium of chemical and botanical substances that were in general use at the end of the early modern period. ... "
The links start here: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=147967
http://www.collphyphil.org/library_digital.htm
and the actual mss are here, with a beautiful color plate of Medicina Pensylvania:
http://contentdm.collphyphil.org/formularies/ which takes you to the individual page images here:
http://205.247.101.31:2005/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/cppmss&CISOPTR=803&REC=1
Man kann das Deutsch ganz einfach lesen. Note the interesting hand, and in particular in the astra pages:
deb[pg170]DxAstral066-eng
deb[pg171]DxAstral066-ger
deb[pg172]DxAstral067-eng
deb[pg173]DxAstral067-ger
some of the letters, like "P", are so close to the Voynich gallows letters, that in going through the ms pages you almost think that any moment you're going to see a complete Voynich word. It's all beautiful. I guess this thread was destined to be such, starting with mesinik's pretty picture :) On another front, I've been following up on some Miss Nill leads that Dana sent me last night. She's the proverbial needle in the haystack!
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 3, 2007 1:15 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Nill and Panofsky; Nill, Dr. Strong, and Francis Bacon
That Erwin Panofsky was involved in early Vonich manuscript work, and corresponded with Miss Nill, enters the archives in 1994. Last night Dana Scott sent me some leads to work in the effort to find out more about Miss Nill. Pursuing one of those, led to another possible mystery, or else just someone's typo error. We know of Miss Nill as Anne Margaret Nill. In 2006 the Smithsonian Archives of American Art put online (or updated?):
A Finding Aid to the Erwin Panofsky Papers, 1904-1990 (bulk dates 1920-1968), in the Archives of American Art, by Catherine S. Gaines http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/findingaids/panoerwi.htm
As you can see, there is only one Nill, in Box 9, Reel 2118, and the name is given as: Nill, Anna M.
I emailed the Smithsonian and asked them if they are absolutely certain it is Anna and not Anne.
One other curiosity that seemed innocuous when I first read it almost a year ago, but is now suddenly perhaps of some note, since the PM-curve has made Francis Bacon's scientific revolution the era of interest.
Recall that Dr. Leonell C. Strong of Yale was bitterly frustrated in his attempts to gain access to a copy of the Voynich manuscript so that he could work on deciphering it. A lot of Strong's correspondence is available for download at GC's website [1].
In a March 14, 1945 letter to the Voynich researcher botanist Fr. Hugh O'Neill, Strong writes:
" Miss Nill inferred that I thought Francis Bacon was the author of the manuscript. Where she got this idea I am at a loss to know. It is my honest opinion that the manuscript was actually written before Francis Bacon was born. "
Now, both Miss Nill and Dr. Strong are much too educated on the matter to mix up Francis Bacon with Roger Bacon, the 13th c. monk who Wilfrid Voynich tried his best to advance as the author of the mysterious ms.
So, I too wonder how Miss Nill got that idea, fifteen years after the death of Wilfrid. I wonder if Miss Nill was inadvertently letting it slip that she was thinking of Francis as more realistic for the VMS author, than Roger.
Berj / KI3U
[1] http://internet.cybermesa.com/~galethog/Voynich/
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 3, 2007 10:57 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Dana Scott wrote Sat, 3 Feb 2007 00:21:19 -0700:
" Here we see that Anne M. Nill list her residence as 148 Tuscarora Rd., Buffalo, N.Y.
http://main2.amu.edu.pl/~rafalp/WWW/HERM/VMS/ellis/n23.gif<http://main2.amu.edu.pl/~rafalp/WWW/HERM/VMS/ellis/n23.gif "
Good moring Dana
I had vaguely caught on to the existence of that one-week cruise but had not yet located the document - thanks, and also thanks to Rafal. Looks like the universal trickster was at it again: writing a respectable GC-h over the "12th" on Anne's birthday line :)
Note the company that Miss Nill is rubbing elbows with: if those folks are related to the Macher names, then Miss Nill is already cruising in very high company at age 29. I wish I could see more of this document - I wonder about the 5,6,7 listing.
There is a problem with Belle's age vs birthday: 1923 - 58 = 1865
But aren't there always problems with ladies' ages :)
The ship, Majestic, must be looked into. I wonder what its radio traffic was during the cruise - the logs should exist somewhere.
I've tentatively concluded that the eyes in the Nill Lone Ranger portrait are NOT those of Ethel, even though both are dark eyes. But this is only tentative. It's problematic of course because there may well have been lenses in front of the eyes. The eyes too might be constructed, rather than be straightforward photo images.
Anyway, I'm interested in finding out descriptions of Wilfrid's and Anne's eyes, and Ethel too. At this stage I think, the designer of those eyes is the most intelligent person in the entire modern part of the mystery: If I had to guess at this very-little-data stage, I would guess: Wilfrid.
Is there are information out there on the possibility that Wilfrid's left hand was withered in any way - a problem with the little finger? Note the great control over the lighting in this photo of him:
http://freehost16.websamba.com/punto_encuentro_ovni/Images/uploads/voinich2.jpg
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 3, 2007 1:10 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: Skeletons in every Voynich darkroom
Well.
It seems that every time we we open another closet door in another dusty ghost mansion in Voynichville, we find yet more skeletons :)
Forgive my sense of humor on this, but lately the Wilfrid Voynich original virtual reality factory has been popping up seemingly at every turn.
In my last post in the thread dealing with the Lone Ranger Mask of Miss Anne Nill [1], I pointed to Wilfrid's online picture:
http://freehost16.websamba.com/punto_encuentro_ovni/Images/uploads/voinich2.jpg
and I asked if there was any information about his left hand possibly being withered. I noted the great control over the lighting in that photo. Looking at that photo again just a moment ago, I see that it too has unmistakable signs of alterations.
I don't know who did it, perhaps it was done by someone long after Wilfrid was dead and has no great relevance to the particular mysteries we are interested in, but have a look, and note the two sharp, fairly horizontal lines that cut across the photo, one that defines the top part of the hat Wilfrid is holding with his left hand, and the other defining the top of his left knee.
There is more in that picture that is odd. And also in the picture of Ethel and Miss Nill together, the picture that is briefly mentioned in the other list thread.
I'm wondering what is the point of all this, and who is really behind each example. My first guess, for an overall unity, is that Wilfrid did find a real mysterious manuscript, the reflection of which we have today as Beinecke MS 408, and he realized immediately that he could leverage it into a cult of some kind, a cult that could become very attractive to folks whose job it is to spin major political propaganda on a global ideological scale. Those are much bigger stakes to play for, than just scholarly and practical concerns with cryptography.
I think, of interest is that in the Lone Ranger Mask picture of Anne Nill, the construction is such that the major design elements will be recognized by the unconscious and subconscious mind of the observer, subliminally if you like, while the casually conscious mind will not be aware that ideas are being planted into the mind.
It is all very interesting for sure. We'll see how it goes.
Berj / KI3U
[1] a current vms-list thread: The mysterious Miss Nill
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 3, 2007 9:43 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Hello GC
You wrote Saturday, February 3, 2007 7:23 PM: " There seems to exist only one possibility as to how Miss Nill got the idea that Strong was pursuing Francis Bacon as the author. If you recall, a Col. Bittner was Strong's brother-in-law, and worked in the War Office in proximity to Col. William Friedman. .......... Bittner knew all this, had contact with Friedman on the VMS matter on behalf of Strong, and there are indications that he relayed a lot of this information to Friedman during their conversations. "
I've wondered about Bittner a lot. But from Stong's letters I don't get the impression that he has considered the possibility that his brother-in-law is, in effect, a traitor. In any case, your explanation is strong :)
" I can't speak for Friedman's motives in this, but his actions did in fact bring Strong's research to a stand still. ...... Strong mentioned that if the "machines" were so good (a reference to Friedman's study groups) they would have figured it out by now, and he wasn't about to give them the information that would allow them succeed and take away from the fun he would have of deciphering it by hand. ..... I often wonder if Friedman really attempted to stop Strong cold in his tracks, or if for Friedman, this was "just a Tuesday". "
Whatever it was, it seems to be the origin of the still ongoing dis-cordiality, at least as I see it, between Yale University and that portion of Uncle Tonoose's troops who are more than casually involved with the Voynich manuscript. I think in 1960 Kraus made the wise decision in setting up the balance that makes an eventual burying of the hatchets and smoking of the peace pipe possible - he donated the manuscript to Yale. Brumbaugh could just walk across campus to see it.
We need to know a lot more of the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the manuscript's 20th century history: there is obviously something major there to be discovered when you realize that up into the 1960's there were still only half a dozen copies in the entire world, of a manuscript that had the reputation of being the "world's most mysterious manuscript" since the 1930's. Something with that scenario just does not add up to 76 = 76 and there must be many more major things to be discovered. Perhaps Strong and Friedman would have fared better if WW2 was already over when Strong approached Friedman.
I'm going to see if I can locate a copy of the actual 1921 College of Physicians journal and see how that Lone Ranger picture of Miss Nill appears, and if I can then fathom an explanation for it other than altering. Finding the original plate from which the printers worked - theoretically the College's archive would have the 1921 Journal's master-copy.
Lots of puzzles in Voynichville GC. Like that growing Imperial Mammoth in the room: the disfunctionality of the offical list archives for material posted after 10 OCT 2006.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 3, 2007 11:22 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: test
list test
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 3, 2007 8:26 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Anne's Niece
Dana Scott wrote Sat, 3 Feb 2007 17:18:58 -0700: " It looks like Helen Nill's maiden name is Costanza (her brother being Craig Costanza). I forgot to include that Anne M. Nill is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery & Garden in Buffalo.
http://www.forest-lawn.com/ 1411 Delaware Avenue Buffalo, NY 14209 phone: (716) 885-1600 fax: (716) 881-6482 I sent an eMail to Forest Lawn requesting Anne's gravesite location. Anne Seilheimer is also expected to be buried at Forest Lawn. Anne M. Nill's birth year was estimated by Jean, so I would go with the Ellis Island records for her proper birthdate. "
I have a rough idea of where the huge Forest Lawn Cemetary in Buffalo is. I should be able to visit Anne's grave and bring back a digipix of it - will have to wait until the weather makes sense, otherwise I'm in the general area often enough these days. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 4, 2007 2:52 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
see [1]
The several names of "Miss Nill"
Earlier in this thread I mention the problem of "Anna" versus "Anne" with respect to the Panofsky papers. I'll report promptly to the list when I get feedback on that. Now, I just followed up on another vague ringing bell in my mind in this matter of Miss Nill's name, and I went back to check the Yale Beinecke website for MS 408 [2]. Sure enough, we add to the pot that is marked "one more mystery, or else yet one more typo error". The Beinecke has it as "Anne M. Nills" and twice as "A. Nills". So, with the theoretical "Miss Anne Margaret Nill" we currently have the problems:
Anna versus Anne Nills versus Nill
In the other current list thread, [3], we still have the problem of conflicting years of birth for Miss Nill / Nills.
Berj / KI3U
[1] erratum for the previous post in this thread. In " I think in 1960 Kraus made the wise decision in setting up the balance that makes an eventual burying of the hatchets and smoking of the peace pipe possible - he donated the manuscript to Yale. Brumbaugh could just walk across campus to see it. " the date is 1969, not 1960.
[2] http://webtext.library.yale.edu/beinflat/pre1600.ms408.htm
[3] vms-list thread: VMs: Anne's Niece
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 4, 2007 6:54 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: GC-k as the linguistic unit "de"
CQ LINGUISTS DE KI3U K
In a recent thread [1] I had a conversation with John Reynolds where I brought up a remarkable bilingual handwritten 18th c. manuscript by the French Huguenot physician, George de Benneville: Medicina Pensylvania. [2]
My interest in this ms is some striking similarities in its scripting style and the text in the Nine Rosettes Manuscript (Voynich ms); for example, I note similarities between some executions of "P" in this Medicina, and Voynich gallows letters, GC-g or GC-j. I do not yet know for sure if the hand in Medicina Pensylvania is de Benneville's, or of a copyist.
There is possibly a Voynich-relevant linguistics angle with Medicina Pensylvania.
Linguistics isn't really my game, and in any case when it comes to commentary on languages in general, I find myself most drawn to what Gurdjieff has to say about it. However, I think, there is perhaps a worthwhile little experimental attraction offered by Medicina Pensylvania, for those who investigate the VMS text with linguistic analysis. And I feel I should point it out, just in case those with linguistics interests and skills have not looked over Medicina Pensylvania, in the spirit of leave no stone unturned, leave no little island unexplored in this grand mystery voyage.
In Medicina Pensylvania we find given this equivalence: GC-k = the French "de"
This occurs in both the english, and the german title pages: deb[pg002]Title-eng
deb[pg003]Title-ger
where on the bottom someone has noted that the GC-k similar symbol in the "George de Benneville" is to be taken as "de".
No, the symbols scripted in the Medicina Pensylvania title pages are not perfect matches for typical GC-k exemplars in the Voynich text, but especially the one on the english title page is unmistakable as a candidate for a really nice GC-k, the Voynich trademark symmetric double-looped "gallows" text letter.
So, I wonder if the linguists can do anything interesting with this.
Some time ago I had posted on a clear example of a GC-k, connected in a group with other symbols, in the manuscript: CUL MS GG.5.35 [3]
That lead was dismissed as a "red herring" by one list person, but, notwithstanding, I am still getting interesting ideas on the Voynich text from it.
Berj / KI3U
[1] vms-list post: RE: VMs: Barrels or dress?; Friday, February 2, 2007 7:33 PM
[2] http://205.247.101.31:2005/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/cppmss&CISOPTR=803&REC=1
see [1] for more links describing this manuscript; I do not know the significance of the spelling "Pensylvania" with just a single "n".
[3] vms-list thread: VMs: GC-k and intruding gallows in 11th c. ms ; Wednesday, November 8, 2006 8:00 PM
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 4, 2007 7:21 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Greg Stachowski wrote Mon, 5 Feb 2007 00:57:11 +0100 (CET):
" Given that we now have (via Jean Howland and Anne Seilheimer) concrete details for AMN, I think we can safely assume that the Nills variation is just clerical error. As for Anne/Anna, this may be clerical error again, or AMN herself using various forms. Anna would be the more 'German' form, which she might have used with her relatives of German descent, for example. Similarly, I use 'Greg'/'Gregory' with my English friends, and the Polish 'Grzegorz' with my Polish friends and family. "
Hello Greg
Agreed. But I'm also keeping an eye on the "statistics" of the oddities of AMN: if these are just clerical errors, then Miss AMN sure seems to cause a lot of them.
Also, is it concrete? Did Dana hear Jean specifically say that the AMN they were speaking about, was the AMN of the Voynich ms?
Now, what are we going to make of it, if it turns out that Beinecke has letters unmistakably signed "Nills" ?
If the Panofsky papers have letters unmistakably signed "Anna" then your German explanation is a very good bet I think - since it looks likely that our Miss AMN was raised by German speaking parents, it's natural to assume AMN knew some German, and would use it in appropriate settings. Denke ich.
More intriguing is the possibility that Miss AMN had a code arrangement with her correspondents, where she could signal to them certain information, depending on how she signed. No?
That Lone Ranger Mask of Miss Anne Margaret Nill is definitely there, at least in Dana's copy of the portrait photo, nicely curving under the nose in the portrait. It's just a question of how it got to be, and what relevance it has.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 4, 2007 8:20 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Revolutionaries and Spies (Was: Anne's Niece)
Greg Stachowski wrote Sunday, February 4, 2007 7:26 PM: " The rich and powerful have always been attracted to the rare and valuable; those of the 20th Century just as surely as Emperor Rudolf. Thus WMV's book dealings, combined with his movement in emigre circles, would have given him access to those people should he have wanted it. " Yes, WMV = the perfect middle man for many high adventures
" That said, one has to remember that by the time AMN comes into the equation in the 1920s the world had changed, drastically. "
This brings up something I've been wondering about since doing the blinking with the Lone Ranger Mask pictures of Miss Nill: do you notice how much younger she appears without the eye-glasses?
Somewhere in Voynichville is a rumor of her being involved with Wilfrid Voynich before or, by WWI, say 1914 - that makes her about 20 years old then. In the 1921 Lone Ranger portrait, normally she would be about 27. But without the glasses, the girl looks pretty close to 20 if you ignore the effect of the mask-eyes, it seems to me. In other words, what I'm getting at is, on the assumption that the Lone Ranger Mask is indeed because of photo doctoring, can the glasses-on and glasses-off versions of the photo contribute anything to the question of just when Miss Nill began working for Wilfrid Voynich. I suppose that even if it was a doctored photo, it might have been one of Anne at 20 that she had handy, even though she did not work for WMV at age 20.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 5, 2007 1:30 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Anne M. Nill census
Pam Wilson wrote Mon, 5 Feb 2007 11:09:26 -0700: " Nill, Emilia dau July 1895 4 S New York "
So now is it Emma versus Emilia ?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 5, 2007 2:43 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: Lobko to Kircher: logs, numbers, GC-c etc.
Here is some data toward the long pondered possibility that at least portions of the Voynich "text" are numbers, as in table of numbers. Among Athanasius Kitrcher's papers is a 2 NOV 1647 letter from Joannes Caramuel Lobko [1].
In this letter Lobko gives a table of correspondences between natural numbers (in Hindu-Arabic numerals), logarithms, and octaves. [2]
The octaves proceed upon repititions of a symbol that is identical to GC-c.
The part of the letter containing the table is APUG 556 232r: http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=1044
Berj / KI3U
[1] http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0351-5796(197812)9%3A2%3C219%3AJK'MIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
[2] note: one must be careful with the early history of logarithms, and sort out what is equivalent to today's notions of logarithms.
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 5, 2007 5:51 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Forest Lawn Cemetery
Greg wrote Mon, 5 Feb 2007 23:33:49 +0100 (CET): " It's like the mystery of the VMS infects anything it touches. "
Sure is. It's positively quantum mechanical: the quantum mechanical "Mis Nill" - the more precisely you try to pin down her name, the less precisely you know the physical being that the name is attached to.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 5, 2007 6:27 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Quick tests, compressability
Peter Bloem wrote Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:48:49 +0100: " I used EVA (Takahashi I think, I took the file from an older project). "
I have an idea as a suggestion. Aside from the assumptions problems, it might be interesting to do your calculations on different transcriptions of the same exact Voynich text blocks - Takahashi, voyn_101.txt etc. and see what the results are for Voynich versus Voynich. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 5, 2007 6:38 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Lobko to Kircher: logs, numbers, GC-c etc.
Jan Hurych wrote Mon, 5 Feb 2007 14:51:18 -0800 (PST): " by Lobko you apparently mean Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Caramuel_y_Lobkowitz "
Hello Jan
Yes I had glanced at that. I took the spelling of the name from his signature on the actual letter - I think I got it right.
Btw, I like your important dates list: http://rhea.tci.uni-hannover.de/hurontaria/1999/C996a.htm#bits
It is crisp, and very handy. I hope you continue to update it as important new information is discovered. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 5, 2007 10:58 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: GC-k as the linguistic unit "de"
" Forty-two hours after he had been declared dead, de Benneville awoke in his coffin. " [1]
I throw a party for the linguists, and still none of them have shown up. They must all still be in their coffins waiting for the clock to strike midnight ;) In the meantime I thought I'd better get some de Benneville data posted before it all disappears into the ocean of dis-organization that my notes are.
de Benneville and his wonderful Medicina Pensylvania do take us straight to where the PM-curve NOI [2] has a major traditions-suspect: the Rosicrucians. The following is as brief as possible, and arrives at what I think are the three key questions to investigate, upon the assumption: that Medicina Pensylvania possibly leads back to the cauldron out of which came our Nine Rosettes Manuscript. Some biographical excerpts from [1] :
" George de Benneville (July 26, 1703-March 19, 1793), a physician, was a universalist evangelist in Europe and an early advocate of the doctrine of universal salvation in the American colonies. "
" On being released from prison de Benneville moved to Germany. Over the next 18 years, c.1723-41, he made preaching tours throughout Germany and Holland. He was particularly associated with a celibate community of Pietists in Berleberg, Wittgenstein. Religious radicals--Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Philadelphians, and Rosicrucians -- fled to the tolerant precincts of Wittgenstein. "
" It is not known when, or exactly where, de Benneville studied medicine. It is likely that he was trained in Germany or the Netherlands. He started treated patients no later than 1739. "
" After assisting many Schwenkfelders and other religious refugees to escape from Europe, in 1741 de Benneville followed the wave of German immigration to Pennsylvania. "
" While with Sauer, de Benneville helped prepare the Sauer Bible, the first German language Bible printed in America, 1743. "
" On friendly terms with local Native American tribes, de Benneville borrowed from them many herbal remedies for treating diseases and tried to understand their languages and symbols. Because he believed all symbols of the same truth equally valid, he could converse across cultures and religions. "
" After Jean Bertolet died in 1757, the de Benneville family moved to Bristol Township, near Philadelphia, where de Benneville continued his practice of medicine and operated an apothecary shop. He treated the wounded at the Battle of Germantown in 1777. "
' De Benneville prepared a notebook for his son, George Jr., "The Pennsylvania Physician" (1770). After 140 pages by de Benneville, there are case notes by the son, including notes on the medical treatment of George Washington. This is kept at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. '
For an analysis of the Medicina itself, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has online a paper. [3]
From which we learn:
" De Benneville himself left an array of religious and alchemical writings in addition to the Medicina Pensylvania, a report on a conversion experience during his youth, but no published medical texts or observations other than the Medicina Pensylvania. "
" It is important to note that de Benneville was not a singular practitioner of chemiatric medicine with alchemical interests in North America (Müller-Jahnke, 1988). More likely, he was part of a small elite network .... "
" The Medicina Pensylvania or The Pensylvania Physician is a 187-folio document numbered in duplicate pages to p. 147-8, written in English on the versos or left hand side of the folios and in German on the right hand side. The left side of the cover page is inscribed: By a French Author. (signed) G. de B. Senior and dated by another hand as circa 1770. The remaining 39 pages are in English and atributable to his sons and successors in his practice. "
" Despite the author's French Huguenot origin, none of the text is in French, although Latin is used in a trilingual introductory inventory of plant, animal and mineral substances. "
" ..., but even earlier, in 1953 a previous reader, a Dr. Douglas McFarlan, whose was equally puzzled by the early 18th century lack of proper editorial progression. "
" The framework here reflects one major tenor of this heterogeneous manuscript and would seem to be an attempt to combine Paracelsian and post-Paracelsian definitions of original substances, set in a frame of cosmic correspondences. "
" What is notable in our context is de Benneville's careful omission of all references to classical and humanist authority - ... "
" The number of drugs identified as "Tinctures," for example Tincture of Black Hellebore, is a striking characteristic of the de Benneville formulary and support the remedies listed later on. "
" The final pages of the formulary include remaining diverse preparations and methods of delivering drugs, including suppositories, pessaries, injections, water baths, vapor baths, and a surgical procedure known as the Sataceum, in which an incision is made in the skin of the neck and fitted with a wick to keep it from healing and by which "humors" can be drawn out of the head. "
" ... it is clear that they and thus the Medicina Pensylvania drew upon the wide range of European 17th and early 18th century formularies. "
" This raises a new set of questions of language and pharmaceutical preferences. "
" ... there is a heavy overload of Paracelsian and other chymiatric baggage ... "
" Although the manuscript as now extant is uniform in script and apparently was prepared by a professional scribe, including check marks and occasional strange misspellings, ... "
This thread's over-arching premise, based both on the scripting, and the design and construction of the Medicina, is that de Benneville, his ms, and the mansucript's scribe, may be later echoes of the origin of the Voynich manuscript. To this point then, I think the key questions are:
1.) Who is the Medicina Pensylvania scribe? How did he / she acquire that hand - was it through correspondence with contacts in Wittgenstein?
2.) Is Wittgenstein a good place in general to explore for 9RMS clues?
3.) Do the peculiarities of the Medicina's textual construction reflect echoes of a universal language, in particular one with Rosicrucian overtones?
Finally, as a Pennsylvanian I am ever keenly conscious of the great William Penn, who wrote his name Penn, with two n's. Also, when Penn first wrote Pennsylvania's first constitution around 1681, he spelled it: Pennsilvania.
Within context then, I ponder if de Benneville might have hidden a title within the title of Medicina Pensylvania:
The physician / healing power of the forest of the pen / of the forest of script.
The healing power of the forest of script - I think this idea summarizes why I see interesting similarities, similarities worth investigating, between Medicina Pensylvania and the script of Beinecke MS 408.
Berj / KI3U
[1] a detailed biography of George de Benneville, with references, is online here:
http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/georgedebenneville.html
[2] vms-list thread: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve; Friday, December 22, 2006 3:03 PM
[3] About the Medicina Pensylvania and George de Benneville; from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia:
http://contentdm.collphyphil.org/de_benneville/about_debenneville.pdf or its html version:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:-u7cfltSXjgJ:contentdm.collphyphil.org/de_benneville/about_debenneville.pdf+%22George+de+Benneville%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=12&gl=us
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 6, 2007 1:09 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Voynich Boxes at Beinecke
Dana Scott wrote Tuesday, February 6, 2007 2:17 AM: " My notes were meant for me to read. My writing may be difficult to read. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me to interpret. "
Hello Dana
I truly appreciate you making your SEP 2005 notes available - thank you very much! There is much there to be gleaned - for example, it looks like the two priests, Petersen and O'Neill, may have had some "lively" private debates about the manuscript's date. I have a question on page 3 of your notes: this is the page that starts at the top with "4. PRIVATE OFFICE" and must be rotated 90 degrees ccw to read normally much of its material. At top left, in the margin, to the left of the lines bearing "PHILADELPHIA" and "CHARLES DUFFY MANAGER", there is a glyph that somewhat resembles pince-nez eyeglasses. Can you tell me what that is all about? A similar glyph occurs often in the de Benneville Medicina Pensylvania [1] See for example: deb[pg017]MatMed-01
http://205.247.101.31:2005/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/cppmss&CISOPTR=803&REC=1
Berj
[1] vms-list thread: VMs: GC-k as the linguistic unit "de"; Sunday, February 4, 2007 6:54 PM
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 6, 2007 4:13 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Voynich Boxes at Beinecke
DANA SCOTT wrote Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:15:24 -0700: " Marci's letter is in Box 1 all by itself. What caught my eye in the letter were the 3 or 4 seal marks. Some of these marks from where the letter was removed can be seen inside the cover binding. "
Dana, can you give us an estimate on the dimensions of the Marci letter, as well as any comments regarding its script / hand, PAPER, and ink, compared with the known Marci letters in the PUG archives, for example APUG 557 / 092r :
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=1479
Berj
**********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 6, 2007 7:58 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: GC-k as the linguistic unit "de"
" Pen Sylan-ia... Interesting! A forest of script. I never would have thought of it! "
Hello Dennis Thanks for showing up and saving this party from being a bust :)
Actually the thought is rather automatic for this member of the tribe of Brother Onas - at least back when I was a youngster, if you were born a Pennsylvanian, you were well indoctrinated about the gentle Founder.
On the Medicina of de Benneville I am quite serious and enthusiastic - I think it stands a very good chance of showing echoes back from whatever and where-ever our mystery came from. Better than any other ms this close to us in time that I have seen. Curious that it resides in the same place where Wilfrid chose to have the formal VMS debut, with Newbold, in 1921. There must be more script around from that scribe - find out who it was, and I bet a pizza we have a hot new trail. Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, February 7, 2007 1:04 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Voynich Boxes at Beinecke
' 12 and 1 to 2 eighths inches long 7 and 13/16 inches wide with a half inch wide flap on the left approximately 9" long '
Hello Dana
Thanks - very interesting.
Earlier Robert had emailed to me offlist the picture that I had seen: it is a "Courtesy of Wilfrid M. Voynich" plate, and it has the appearance of a color photo, although I'm not sure it actually is, and in any case there is no color reference.
I know from D'Imperio that there is some 1968 Tiltman information from which it is possible to deduce dimensions, but if I have it somewhere, I have no idea at the moment where.
But lets take your figure for the height of the letter as 12 and 3/16 inches == 30.95625 cm
Using that as a scale reference, I obtain roughly 3.4 cm for the maximum span of the signature "Joannes Marcus Marci" in this VMS-history critical, 1665 or 1666, discovered-by-Voynich-in-the-VMS, Marci's last letter to Kircher. I hope I measured right - it was quick. I ruled a 3.4 cm line, prepared myself to write small, and ran out of space with: Joannes Marcus M
There is the theory that scribes wrote Marci's last two letters to Kircher - Marci's failing eyesight and so on. Here's a 1659 letter to Kircher signed "J. Marcus Marci": http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=1438
I wish we knew its size. I wish we knew something about the paper these letters are written on, at least comparitively.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, February 7, 2007 1:44 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: Skeletons in every Voynich darkroom
Jakub Jiøíèek wrote Wednesday, February 7, 2007 11:32 AM: " The photograph seems to have been folded, which explains the straight line at Wilfrid's knee. I cannot find the other horizontal line. "
Hello Jakub
Don't forget that folding / creasing is an old trick in old-fashioned film photography photo-altering techniques: after doing the altering, you can hide the fact some more by creasing or folding the print.
I will work on repairing my computer so to successfully download higher resolution images of this picture. Until then I can only comment subjectively on it. In the meantime the best image I have of it shows, certainly when magnified x4 and x8, along with a little mild image processing, that the hat appears to have been brushed.
I'm still wondering if there is a record somewhere stating that Wilfrid Voynich's left hand was withered.
I think everyone can see that the picture is lighter below the crease than above it. And if the fold was such so as to bring the upper and lower image halves together, then that difference in shading is a curiosity.
Again, at this stage my comments are speculative and qualitative, but if you magnify the picture to x8 and follow an imaginary line defined by the knee to the left and right edges of the picture, you may possibly see some pixels that seem to change abruptly in tone, as if a shear had occurred. Same with the imaginary line defined by the top edge of the hat.
Now in the link for this picture that you gave, Beinecke says it is a studio portrait by F. Hollyer. On the picture is a name - possibly "Muffet" ?
It could well be that in our investigations there is no particular relevant mystery interest for any oddities in this picture: it could just be a studio portrait that was touched up, as many studio portraits were, without any directing by Wilfrid Voynich himself, and that is a good explanation. And this exercise will then have served primarily to satisfy the leave-no-stone-unturned maxim.
But, the more PRECISION we can bring into our investigations, the better will be our progress in solving the overall mystery. Let me give an example:
I have online a 158 kb jpeg version of the PM-curve on crosshairs at: http://www.geocities.com/bzygote/
The image shows the curve, magnified, with crosshairs superimposed, and the surrounding area cleared of other drawing elements that actually appear in the Voynich manuscript astronomical-section page f68r3 Pleiades - moon panel.
The caption for the crosshairs image, I burned right into the image at lower right: it gives the necessary information so that someone who wants to find out EXACTLY how that picture came into existence, RIGHT DOWN TO ITS LAST PIXEL, can indeed find out, and if desired, check, by following the exact procedures I published.
Now, currently because of what I have called the growing Imperial Mammoth in the room, that no-one seems to want to talk about, namely the disfunctionality of the normally publicly searchable vast vms-list archives, for searches for material posted on-list after 10 OCT 2006, a pathetic! situation for this venerable forum, an interested investigator seeking to track down the story on the PM-curve on crosshairs picture will have some difficulty: in fact, she / he must join the vms-list, post inquiries, and be sent, offlist by me, the massive, and in places highly mathematical vms-list thread:
VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve which had its launch-post on Friday, December 22, 2006 3:03 PM
But, despite the difficulty caused these days by the Imperial Mammoth, the chain of precision is still intact.
Who benefits from the growing Imperial Mammoth in the room? The Mammoth is for example currently permitting imprecise notions of certain old controversial suggestions about page f1r, to continue being propagated outside this forum.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 8, 2007 6:00 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Regarding the "Nill, Anna M." in Box 9, Reel 2118, of the Erwin Panofsky Papers:
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/findingaids/panoerwi.htm
I received this afternoon a friendly reply email to my earlier mentioned query, from archivist Catherine S. Gaines.
Miss Gaines looked at the Nill letter, and the first name is: Anne
The Smithsonian Archives of American Art will correct the error in the list at the above website as soon as they are able. I have not yet heard back from the Beinecke on my query about "Nills" at:
http://webtext.library.yale.edu/beinflat/pre1600.ms408.htm
Berj
*******************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 8, 2007 11:37 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: Skeletons in every Voynich darkroom
Is Wilfrid Voynich telegraphing some symbols in his cigarette-cane-hat portrait?
Maybe.
There does seem to be something interesting, as we will see, but if it was conscious telegraphing by Voynich, or accident, I cannot yet decide. If the peculiarities are indeed symbols, they just may be related to his famous mysterious manuscript. In any case, we note the peculiarities.
At this webpage: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=CNO
the Beinecke makes available images, call number MS 408D, of several photographs that are in its Voynich Manuscripts materials holdings. The Beinecke does not identify the person in the picture # Beinecke_DL: 1062132 as Wilfrid Voynich, but as best I know, this picture is of Wilfrid Voynich. I launched this thread upon a low resolution version of this picture.
We download for examination the high-resolution version of this picture:
1062132.sid 24 bit true RGB WxH = 796x445 2,520,011 bytes
Experimental procedure:
1.) Load the 1062132.sid into MS Internet Explorer 6.0 equipped with the LizardTech ExpressView Browser plug-in (MrSID) release 08-2006 for viewing it; set the Image Properties to
Current Scene: Level = -1.00 Center = 4500,6523 save this sub-image as: 1cane4voy.bmp = 1,062,714 bytes
It is a zoom-in on the top part of Voynich's cane. The top of the cane consists of a dome and sleeve that fit over the shank of the cane.
Beneath the dome, on the shank, appears a marking that looks like a "4".
The long-stemmed "4" appears rather well. The right end of its horizontal stroke vanishes into the white light reflection-band that runs along the cane. The bottom of its descender seems to hook to the right, into the glare.
Above the "4", on the dome, is something vaguely resembling a "9" with its upper loop having a corner, rather than being rounded.
2.) Load 1cane4voy.bmp into Microsoft Photo Editor 3.01 set colors:
RED Brightness = 13; Contrast = 100; Gamma = 9.70
GREEN Brightness = 50; Contrast = 56; Gamma = 0.24
BLUE Brightness = 11; Contrast = 64; Gamma = 2.19 save this image as: 2cane4voy.bmp = 1,062,714 bytes
The "4" now shows very well. So does the "9".
3.) Using IrfanView to blink 1cane4voy.bmp against 2cane4voy.bmp my impression is that the "4" appears to be a mark that is actually on the cane, and not just an artifact of the photography and imaging. The "9" I am not so sure about.
The "4" may have gotten onto the cane accidentally via scratches or smudges of course, but one does get the impression that it was scribed.
4.) Is there a GC-4o such that the "o" is obscured in the white light glare?
I experimented randomly with image processing: a few settings do result in the speckling in the glare region, to the right of the horizontal stroke of the "4", taking on a slight circular organization, and such that the size and placement would indeed make, overall, for a good exemplar of the Voynich ms text-symbols group GC-4o. But the processing seems too heavy, and the result too thin, starting as it does from no "o" visible, to lend much credence toward something as provocative as a GC-4o on Voynich's cane.
If the "4" does have more of itself in the glare, the overall symbol, if that is what it is, might even be a GC-k gallows. Wouldn't that be something? I suppose the chances of locating that cane today are Nil.
I'll report on the lines I thought I saw in the low resolution version of this picture, that I mentioned in the launch of this thread, after I've had a chance to examine the corresponding areas in the .sid image.
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Friday, February 9, 2007 4:57 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: Skeletons in every Voynich darkroom
5.) Continuing with the 1062132.sid experiments, I extracted from that image another sub-image:
Image Properties
Current Scene Level = 0.00
Dimensions = 796x445
Center = 1858,3802 save as: 1wmvcchhatlin.bmp = 1,062,714 bytes
This is a zoom-in on the top of the hat, and includes quite a bit of the pants.
6.) Load into MS Photo Editor 3.01 and set:
RED Brightness = 0; Contrast = 0; Gamma = 0
GREEN Brightness = 18; Contrast = 18; Gamma = 1.47
BLUE Brightness = 26; Contrast = 95; Gamma = 0.51 save as: 2wmvcchhatlin.bmp = 1,062,714 bytes
Now the line that I originally thought I saw in the low resolution version of the picture, running along the top edge of the hat and extending beyond it, can indeed be seen, at least to the left of the hat. It appears somewhat like a very light smear of varying thickness. Where on the left it crosses the edge of the pants, at X,Y: ~(174,153), there are the pixels I had noticed as being of abrupt color change, as if a tear or shear had occurred there.
Blinking 1wmvcchhatlin.bmp and 2wmvcchhatlin.bmp against each other with IrfanView, my guess is that the line originated during the making of the photo negative or print, possibly from fluid running or some wiping.
The curiosity remains that it aligns so well with the top edge of the hat. All in all this line does not seem interesting from the point of view of our mystery. It did however lead to the very interesting knob marks on Voynich's cane.
7.) It is not uncommon that a reproduction of a photo has been left-right reversed. Using IrfanView to "flip" horizontally the 2cane4voy.bmp image, the "4" on the sleeve beneath the dome of the knob on Voynich's cane can easily pass as a nice "f". As to the "9" or if you like "6", it still is quite uncertain it seems to me.
The marks on the cane may not have any bearing at all upon the VMS mystery directly as symbols, but it is possible that they may help in the future identify Voynich's cane and therewith bring us more information about Wilfrid Voynich and his doings. So at this stage we have some more possible data in the bank: the possible marks on Voynich's cane.
It would be so nice to have a .sid image, with color reference and dimensions reference, of the critical Marci letter !!!
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 10, 2007 10:06 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Voynich Boxes at Beinecke
Greg Stachowski wrote Sat, 10 Feb 2007 13:25:20 +0100 (CET):
" At least in the Philadelphia Digital Archive link that Berj posted, this seems to be an ampersand. "
Good morning Greg
I hasten to add that I think there are strong indications in the Medicina Pensylvania of parallel meanings. The pince-nez glyph ~ ampersand looks straightforward enough, but as soon as I saw it also in Dana's notes, I wondered if it too might have a hidden meaning. The Philadelphia College's own analysis points out the "occasional strange misspellings", and in a list conversation about the Medicina with Dennis I pointed out my interpretation of "Pensylvania" with reference to Brother Onas [1].
Berj
[1] vms-list thread: VMs: VMs: GC-k as the linguistic unit "de"; Sunday, February 4, 2007 6:54 PM
*********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 10, 2007 4:01 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
The PM-Curve: possible POI Robert Hooke, part 6
Now, with the PM-curve, on account of its mathematical physics sophistication, being most comfortably placed in time no earlier than the late 17th century, with what all that implies for the origin of Beinecke MS 408, we have been looking into that time range, extending some into the 18th century, for clues that might develop into interesting connections with our mysterious Nine Rosettes Manuscript (9RMS), a.k.a Voynich MS.
Among the things we are looking at that require no astronomy mathematical physics training, is the handwriting styles found in the network-of-interest, NOI, to compare with the printed-letters handwriting in the VMS. And we have definitely discovered some interesting things, some already noted in this Grand Canyon-like thread. Most recently we've come across the tremendous curiosity of the 18th century Medicina Pensylvania of George de Benneville, a most intriguing person who did spend time in the Wittgenstein district of Germany when Rosicrucians were gathering there [27].
Another thing I'd like to point attention to here is the signature of Robert Hooke's father, John Hooke, an image of which is reproduced online here:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ric.martin/vectis/hookeweb/tree.htm
Lets compare the "Johanno" as I read it, with the Voynich text "word": GC-4ohaM
that is found on these two Voynich pages:
Voynich botanical page f29r.6 : last word in line 6 of page f29r
Voynich star-page f104v.18 : second word in line 18 of page f104v
It is, I think, just an interesting thing to notice that there is a striking similarity between GC-4o and the "Jo" in John Hooke's hand; of course that similarity applies to many GC-4o examples in the 9RMS, and not just the two exemplars we focus on here. That is to say, the handwriting style similarity:
GC-4o ~ English "Jo"
was "in the ink" of English writers during our time of interest. There is also some similarity between GC-haM and the English "hanno", taking into consideration handprinting in the VMS versus handwriting.
Berj / KI3U
[27] vms-list thread: VMs: GC-k as the linguistic unit "de"; Sunday, February 4, 2007 6:54 PM
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Saturday, February 10, 2007 8:19 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Analysis of the f68r3 Pleiades - moon curve
Keith wrote Saturday, February 10, 2007 5:16 PM
" There is also a lot of contemporary astrology/astronomy, which rather shows up how crude our illustrations are. ..... In the past, I have considered the VMs text to be northern Italian in origin, but I am seeing more germanic influence now. "
Hello Keith Thanks for those good links.
Well I think crude depends on point of view. From the mathematical point of view of prime number theory, the illustration on Voynich page f6r is extraodinarily sophisticated, in my opinion.
More to the subject of this particular thread, the mathematical sophistication and precision of the oscillating-elliptic-trajectory PM-curve, appears anomalous in its "crude" context, but it is no more anomalous than the Voynich "text": the alphabet, and the construction of the text from it, is considered by some, myself included, to be the product of an extra-ordinarily intelligent and imaginative thinker. And, it takes a great deal of study to realize that the Voynich text is anomalous. The serious VMS-text students on this list don't much allude to the text being anomalous, but that's because they are used to that idea I think.
On German influence I would say certainly: via the Rosicrucian influences in the manuscript. Let me amplify on that with a hypothesis-of-the-evening.
Rosicrucianism takes off and becomes a fad, with every Tom, Dick, and Harry all over the place publishing another "esoteric" Rosicrucian book, creating a lot of pseudo-Rosicrucian noise. Time goes by, and the true Rosicrucians get concerned, and hold a meeting in Elias Ashmole's (1617-1692) house to discuss what to do about it. The decision is made to produce, and later release, a new Rosicrucian document, but one far more sophisticated than anything before, and carefully covert: a book that fools Mr. Average, should he ever even see it, as being just another late medieval physician throwback, but to the very restricted intended readership, the book signals the hand of the upper stratum of the intellectual elite. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) is designated to design parts of the "ancient" book.
Seventy-six = Seventy-six with the Pleiades panel, home of the PM-curve, is such a simple thing, and it needs nothing more to arrive at a tentative date marker for the Voynich manuscript.
Incidentally, in that Voynich star-page f104v, where a moment ago we were looking at GC-4ohaM on line 18, go up to the beginning of line 7 and have a look at the first glyph(s), transcribed by GC as GC-o.s and you'll see why I think the "pince-nez" glyph discussed in the other threads are so interesting. [27], [28]
If I'm not mistaken, Wilfrid Voynich wore a pince-nez at times. Not that that means anything special, except I might conjecture that a manuscripts fellow who wears a pince-nez might spot a glyph that resembles one.
Berj
[28] vms-list thread: VMs: Voynich Boxes at Beinecke; Tuesday, February 6, 2007 2:17 AM
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 11, 2007 11:55 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: DOKTR ASKAM revisited
Searching the list archives on "Doktr Askam" and "DOKTR ASKAM" I find four threads from 1997 - 1998.
I am familiar with Dr. Leonnell Strong's 1940's correspondence concerning the Voynich manuscript, but I have not read LS's cipher-work notes.
But as I understand it, it was LS who deciphered the words "DOKTR ASKAM" on page f93r of the VMS, leading to the theory that the manuscript's author was the 16th century Anthony Ascham, Dr. Ascham apparently, brother of the more famous Roger, this Anthony having written a book: A Litle Herball c. 1550.
My wondering-out-loud this evening is: assuming that "DOKTR ASKAM" does indeed decipher out of f93r, is it necessary to consider that it is a name, a name with a title, Doctor Askam, or could it just as well be something like: doctrine of Askam, where Askam is a noun that has its roots in the word "sin" or "shame" ? [1]
A doctrine of sin, or a shameful doctrine.
A Rosicrucian railing against a "doctrine of sin" or a "shameful doctrine" could make some sense in the Voynich origins, I would think.
Berj / KI3U
[1] King James Bible; Dr. James Strong's (1822-1894) Hebrew Dictionary:
http://www.htmlbible.com/sacrednamebiblecom/kjvstrongs/FRMSTRHEB8.htm
816 'asham aw-sham'
or mashem {aw-shame'}; a primitive root; to be guilty; by implication to be punished or perish:--X certainly, be(-come, made) desolate, destroy, X greatly, be(-come, found, hold) guilty, offend (acknowledge offence), trespass.
817 'asham aw-shawm'
from ''asham' (816); guilt; by implication, a fault; also a sin-offering:--guiltiness, (offering for) sin, trespass (offering).
818 'ashem aw-shame'
from ''asham' (816); guilty; hence, presenting a sin- offering:--one which is faulty, guilty.
819 'ashmah ash-maw'
feminine of ''asham' (817); guiltiness, a fault, the presentation of a sin-offering:--offend, sin, (cause of) trespass(-ing, offering).
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 12, 2007 5:46 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: Skeletons in every Voynich darkroom
I have not yet heard back from Yale - Beinecke on my 5 FEB query regarding "Nills" versus "Nill" on the front webpage of MS 408 images. In the meantime, unless I am reading incorrectly, Yale presents us a new puzzle online in the matter of us striving toward precision in the general investigation of the Voynich manuscript mystery.
Here is Yale's Guide to the Harvey Williams Cushing Papers:
http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/mssa.0160.con.html#series2afolder161
In Series II, Folders 161-165, the correspondence between Cushing and "Voynich, Wilfred M." also listed as "Voynich, W. M." is recorded as occurring:
" Book dealer correspondence: Voynich, W. M., 1914-1926 87 161 64 "
" Book dealer correspondence: Voynich, W. M., 1927 87 162 64 "
" Book dealer correspondence: Voynich, W. M., 1928 87 163 64 "
" Book dealer correspondence: Voynich, W. M., 1929-1930 Feb 87 164 64 "
" Book dealer correspondence: Voynich, W. M., 1930 Mar-1934 88 165 64 "
I thought Voynich died on 19 March 1930. [1] How then can he be corresponding with Cushing until 1934? If Cushing continued corresponding with Ethel Lilian Voynich after Wilfrid died, I would think the listing would make that clear. Or am I mis-reading the listing?
Berj
[1] Dr. Archibald Malloch, Librarian of the New York Academy of Medicine, eulogized Wilfrid Voynich in a Presidential Address at the Thirty-third annual meeting of the Medical Library Association, McGill University, 25-27 June, 1930. Malloch gives Voynich's date of death as 19 March "of this year":
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=234372
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 13, 2007 12:30 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: Re: DOKTR ASKAM revisited
GC wrote Monday, February 12, 2007 10:48 PM:
" Just for clarification, Anthony Ascham did not write "A Litle Herball, etc.". ...... The publication of the Litle Herball edition ascribed to Anthony Ascham coincides with his elevation to the priesthood and his name being offered for the position of Rector of Mehlay, which he gained in 1552. "
Thanks for clarifying that.
" The 15th century is a little early for the Rosicrucians, isn't it? "
So?
" Ascham's name does apparently appear on f93r and at least two other folios I've viewed, but this causes as many problems as it solves. Which Ascham, when? Anthony Ascham was never *actually* a Doctor. "
Do you mean the symbols-sequence "DOKTR ASKAM" appears? That is what I was wondering out loud about - why is it necessary to think that that is a name, and not, as I pondered, an abbreviated way to write: shameful doctrine or doctrine of sin?
" ..... this particular Anthony Ascham had the habit of writing his name every few pages, and unquestionably had the mathematical skills necessary to produce a document like the Voynich. "
If someone was carrying on about such a doctrine, the term "shameful doctrine" could well appear on a few pages.
I'd be delighted, as you know, to see convincing evidence that someone in the early 16th century unquestionably had the mathematical skills to conceive and calculate the f68r3 PM-curve, because, you remember, I believe that actual mathematics knowledge was somewhat ahead, secretly, of what known mathematical history diagrams it to be.
However, in the case of the PM-curve I doubt it very much, because, having spent a great deal of time analyzing that curve, and still doing so, I see the most natural path by which the originator of that curve CONCEIVED it, to start with that person having HIGH QUALITY ASTRONOMICAL DATA.
The PM-curve is not just a transformed elliptic trajectory, it is a transformed oscillating elliptic trajectory. That's a wallop!!
Moreover, the least complex conception for introducing the oscillation into the elliptic trajectory, is the conception of alternating elastic drag and push - another reason for Robert Hooke, the originator of the law of first-order elasticity, being, from my vantage point anyway, a top POI with respect to the origin of the PM-curve. Not to mention 76 = 76.
Ask yourself: what atmosphere of imagination would lead a brilliant person to produce such a description with sufficient mathematical precision in order to be able to calculate and plot such an idea? I see no other way but this one: that person was not just an excellent mathematician, but also an excellent astronomer as well, with access to high quality astronomical data, from HIGH QUALITY TELESCOPES. That's how it came to be that he or she got the idea for the PM-curve! With those conditions, the earliest dating of the PM-curve that makes sense, is in the second half of the 17th century.
Now, with the data presently available to me, posted in full detail recently in the f68r3 analysis thread, I have it tentatively, that f68r3 is pegged to January, 1665. In my mind that does not at all rule out other portions of the VMS being older, even far older. I mean think of it this way: today you start a special dedicated photo album: Voynich students I have met, say. Twenty years from now you paste in a last photo before starting a new album.
And there is always the possibility, until convincingly disproved, that the VMS was intentionally designed to give the appearance of a book more ancient, with "rebindings" and whatnot along the way, than it actually is. If the intent was to create a book with a deep provenance, then in the time frame of the PM-curve, you have a guy, a colleague of Robert Hooke, who had the knowledge AND the materials and artifacts to fake almost anything "ancient": the antiquarian Elias Ashmole, F.R.S.
I agree with you that those Ascham FYSHES on your website suggest strongly, that at least, Ascham and whoever did the VMS, both saw the same picture. Do you rule out that Elias Ashmole was ignorant of that picture or its source?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:13 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: DOKTR ASKAM revisited
Clay Holden wrote Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:47:36 -0800:
" FWIW, Elias Ashmole's handwriting is very distinctive, and there are reams of his manuscripts available for reference. Suffice to say that I can see absolutely no similarity between the hand or hands responsible for the VMS and the hundreds of pages I have read of Ashmole's writing. "
Hands responsible for the VMS and brains responsible for conceiving and designing the VMS can be completely different entities. I didn't say Ashmole did the writing in the VMS. I have consistently posted my view that MS 408 looks to me to have been copied from a master design, the mcP as I call it, by a woman or women scribes. We all know one of the first reasons why a scribal copy is indicated: the writing apparently has so few mistakes, corrections and so on. The reason I think women scripted it, is because the writing is small, and block letters, but perfectly executed.
I've pointed out Ashmole for the obvious reason: IF the assumption is: that, sometime in the second half of the 17th century, the Nine Rosettes Manuscript was intentionally designed to appear considerably older in at least some of its parts than late 17th century, AND it all originated in the NOI node around the London Royal Society, THEN Elias Ashmole could easily be the guy who could supply the necessary knowledge and materials for making a book appear to be a lot older than it really is.
Who among educated people in the late 17th c. NOI, would know better than Elias Ashmole what an old oddball physician's book, say from the 15th century, would look like.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 13, 2007 10:01 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: DOKTR ASKAM revisited
Robert Teague wrote Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:53:03 -0500:
" According to Starry Night, the moon was in the wrong position, and missed the Pleiades by 9°. It did occult Aldebaran on the 28th. "
Hello Robert
I wrote f68r3 is "pegged" to January, 1665. In other words, January, 1665, is a marker date, not necessarily an exact date, within a month, for f68r3 considerations. As a marker, it includes time both before, and after January, 1665. By how much, I don't know. And you know why I think it is a marker date, from the f68r3 PM-curve analysis thread: seventy-six = seventy-six and so on.
For example, Robert Hooke certainly must have counted his 78 Pleiades stars in his telescope, drawn as 76 to account for his discovered double-stars, before January, 1665, when his Micrographia was published with its Pleiades drawing.
If you remember - actually I myself am trying to remember as I'm at the moment too lazy :) to search my own pile of disorganized posts - during the crucial f58r star-page thread that led up to the PM-curve discovery, I was sounding out Greg on the possibility of f68r3 diagramming an overlay of several astronomical events. Recently off-list Greg told me he was looking into the distribution of the stars (adding up to 76) in the f68r3 wedges.
Now, it occurs to me, that since the f68r3 PM-curve describes an OSCILLATING elliptic trajectory, it could therefore well cover a time period of, say, decades, and therefore fit a series of related astro events, and logically, the earliest of these events would be well before January, 1665. And perhaps the distribution of star counts in the f68r3 wedges give a clue here.
I do still think that all three f68 astro panels are about the same astronomical something, and a comet is still my favorite theme for that. The moon in f68r3 could serve as as the origin of an astro coordinate system with which the comet's motion is described, rather than the panel depicting a lunar transit across the Pleiades.
It's just a possibility in my mind. We need more clues.
Berj
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Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:38:59 -0500 From: "Berj N. Ensanian" <>
To: "Berj N. Ensanian" <> Subject: Re: APUG 557 130r versus 9RMS f57v
Jan
I think you have discovered something VERY IMPORTANT!
Here is APUG 557 130v : http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=1554
Berj
Quoting "Berj N. Ensanian" <>:
> Jan
> Do you think that the bent arm and oval of APGUG 557 130r could be related to Voynich f57v - the man at east, with > the bent arm, holding a little disk? Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 15, 2007 10:05 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
Jan Hurych showed me an observation of his, and asked my opinion on it, offlist yesterday evening during our discussions of the Marci letters, that may be the first really solid indication that Athanasius Kircher and Johannes Marcus Marci were actually cognizant of the mysterious manuscript Beinecke MS 408, or at least some portion or theme of it.
To me, Jan's observation is stronger in that vein, than the vague allusions in the 1665/6 "last Marci letter to Kircher" that Wilfrid Voynich said he found with the manuscript. I was immediately very interested in what Jan showed me.
A few of the letters that Marci wrote to Kircher, as they are displayed online by APUG, show writing and other markings on the verso side.
On the verso of a 5 August 1650? letter, where Marci has addressed the letter to Kircher and placed the seal, is a very clear drawing of a bent arm with the index finger of its hand pointing to a star, framed by, or over an oval slab; and this diagram is drawn twice, in different sizes in ratio approximately 1:2, and the two ovals are in longitudinal alignment and touching. This drawing is completely unique among the Marci to Kircher letters made available online by APUG. The drawing suggests telescopic commentary to me. Here is its url:
APUG 557 130v : http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=1554
and the url of the letter's recto side:
APUG 557 130r : http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=1553
Compare the drawing of the arm pointing to a star with some of the MS 408 illustrations, for example the east-situated man in the f57v diagram.
This Marci letter to Kircher ought to be carefully studied I think - it may lead to some concrete answers in the history of MS 408. The letter mentions a Sigismundus Gref (Count? Sigismund).
From my perspective, focused on the f68r3 PM-curve and its implications, the possible implications of this Marci arm-star drawing reinforce the plausibility that MS 408 is the evolving product of a network of interest, the NOI, rather than a single author, and perhaps also, that discussions about the evolving themes that were ultimately collected into one ms, Beinecke MS 408, were proceeding in the NOI cryptically.
It seems to me, preliminarily, that the APUG 557 130v drawing is a diagrammatic way of saying that improved telescope performance, improved resolving power, is primarily obtained with larger telescope apertures, rather than longer focal lengths: the larger of the two ovals shows its star more sharply, whereas the smaller oval contains a star that is intentionally drawn rough. This crucial idea in the theoretical understanding of telescopes is generally attributed to the number 1 POI in the NOI: Robert Hooke.
I hope Jan's observation leads further into new territory. In any case, my reaction is that this is fresh and exciting material.
Berj / KI3U
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 15, 2007 3:38 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
Greg Stachowski wrote Thursday, February 15, 2007 2:43 PM:" ..... and thus also likely Kircher who drew the sketch. "
I'm trying blinking the verso and recto sides of the seal indentations and drawing area against each other - I'm still not sure I completely understand the genesis there. Of course if Kircher did the drawing on Marci's letter after receiving it, that would be just fine with me - easier to fathom Kircher, with his incomparable correspondence within the NOI, doodling something so interesting on the OUTSIDE of a letter - that has had me wondering - it would seem Marci would not put such a diagram on the outside of the letter he was sending.
" (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if that diagram exists in a 'neat' version somewhere; it looks to me like someone trying out an idea for an illustration on a rough scrap of paper.) "
You haven't yet committed yourself on the point: is the diagram astronomical in subject? :)
" Did not Hooke and Kircher correspond? I believe I read somehwere that they did, but can't immediately find the reference. "
Believe me, I've been trying to find out for a while! As I mentioned in a post recently, Hooke acknowledges Kircher's work in the Micrographia. And also I very much think that the younger Hooke was strongly influenced and inspired by Kircher's work - there was lots of overlap in their wide ranging interests.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 15, 2007 7:06 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
Jan Hurych wrote Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:40:21 -0800 (PST):
" Why it was done twice in different sizes, is probably not important, "
Hello Jan
You and Greg are demolishing my lovely telescopic comment theory of the diagram :-)
I do think it is important that there are two ovals, and they are longitudinally connected, and associated, at least physically, with the seal. Greg has a point - we should be on the lookout for refined diagrams in Kircher's papers.
By the way - does it seem that the hand is wearing a glove? If yes, is that some kind of symbol?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 15, 2007 7:25 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
Jan Hurych wrote Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:48:00 -0800 (PST):
" I have quite heretic idea: What if Kircher really solved the VM and used its content in some of his books? I am of course only teasing, but stil . . . . By the way, if Kircher wrote "Marcus Marci": there, . it should be easy to recognize his handwriting. Anybody has a sample of it? "
Hello Jan
There are lots of letters here in Kircher's hand to Herzog August: http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000005/comment.htm
Click on "Quelle", the German word for "Source", to see the images by themselves. It was these letters back a year ago that launched me into believing that Kircher may have scripted f116v. Then later, as I recently briefly posted, I started suspecting that some of the marks on the bottom of f1r, that are believed by some to be a "signature", may also partly be from Kircher's hand.
Actually your heretic idea then is not so far different from one of my heretic ideas: that Kircher was involved in the project that ultimately led to someone writing it down into a single set of quires, the mcP, and that somehow landed in our universe as Beinecke MS 408.
I'm much more comfortable with the idea that Kircher was actively involved in generating the mysterious ms, than just having had the thing brought to his attention.
Greg mentioned something I did not know: that Robert Boyle corresponded with Kircher! (I just can't seem to find a simple no-frills list on the web of Kircher's 763 correspondents!!!!!) Well, Boyle was Robert Hooke's early days employer. So the suspected direct link between Robert Hooke and Athanasius Kircher is getting stronger I think.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 15, 2007 9:42 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
I wrote (to Greg) earlier:
" What do you make of the date on the letter? The "5" in 5 Augusti does not at all resemble the second-last symbol in the alleged "1650". The alleged "0" could even be a "6" I suppose. "
I think the date of this letter is rather interesting. Its last two symbols may even be a single glyph. Presumably we can obtain some information toward the firm date from the contents of the letter once translation is completed. In the meantime I noticed that there are on the internet conflicting dates for Marci's death, with 1667 and 1677 coming up often. I'm trying to find online THE primary source for Marci's death date. This important resource may be citing the primary sources:
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/rhatch/pages/03-Sci-Rev/SCI-REV-Home/resource-ref-read/major-minor-ind/westfall-dsb/SAM-M.htm
At first blush, the year in the date of the APUG 557 130rv arm-star diagram letter looks to me like 1676. I know that seems ridiculous. So therefore I would like to track down THE primary witness for the death of Johannes Marcus Marci / Jan Marek Marci.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Friday, February 16, 2007 10:32 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
Good morning Jan
" For all that, he would be ideal author of the VM :-). "
Or an ideal collaborator in a secret NOI that is authoring an mcP that eventually is recorded and survives as our Nine Rosettes Manuscript :-).
" It may help to date the letter, if there is something in it that can be related to some event in his life. We inquired in Prague, but Kircher's letters to Marci were never found :-( "
I have some reasons for tentatively making a big deal of that odd looking date. Now, at first glance it would seem easy to deduce that the date on APUG 557 130r must be 5 August 1650, because we can look at another Marci-to-Kircher letter, APUG 557 122r which persuasively indicates its date as 23 July 1650, and the "1650" on this letter is also odd and similar to the "1650" on the arm-star letter APUG 557 130r.
But then things become less straightforward, especially from the point of view of precision, and I know from offlist that you also have noticed these things.
For example, and bluntly: who really is writing and signing these "Marci" letters?
122r and 130r presumably were written within a two-week period, but the "Marci" signatures are quite different. Most important of all from my point of view, Marci's personal sine (monogram) is absent underneath the 122r signature, but it appears underneath the 130r signature.
Complicating matters are some clerical errors in the cataloging, both in the original archival compilation that the APUG images reflect, TOMVS Imus Continet / Literas Pontif: Regum Principum / ad R. P. Athanasium Kircherum S. I., and the nominal Voynich websites-of-record that are usually easiest to consult first for pertinent APUG data. It is an enormous task checking all these things because the amount of material is tremendous, and not neatly organized for our specific interests.
But, to make this brief, here are my tenative rough thoughts which are driving my interest in this odd-looking 130r date. Marci starts out officially Jesuit and ends officially Jesuit, but inbetween throughout his life he publicly keeps Jesuits at arm's length, while carrying on a lively correspondence with his friend, the most famous Jesuit in the world: Kircher. One of Marci's cap-feathers is representing anti-Catholic factions in the Charles University merger, which the Jesuits win, and Marci still comes out of that deal smelling like a rose. Suspicion: Marci is a lifelong undercover Jesuit agent. If true, then that makes Marci all the more interesting. Of course, Marci is also involved in defending his city during war, and in general his life is a rather complicated mix of upper level pursuit of knowledge and upper level political intrigues. And so, when I see a sudden odd scripting of a date on one of his letters, I can't just fly by it imprecisely and not wonder if it could be developed into a lead that eventually gets us into our own specific area of interest. So, that's my reasoning in making, tentatively, a fuss about the odd scripting of the 130r date.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Friday, February 16, 2007 6:54 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: The arm-star diagram on APUG 557 130v
DANA SCOTT wrote 16 Feb 2007 13:50:04 -0700:
" I believe we can probably locate Marci's burial place which may provide the actual date. "
Hi Dana
I was actually wondering about that, and thinking of you also :)
That would at least give us a good datum. I do think that in the case of Marci, who was someone important enough to have had their likeness put on a postage stamp in modern times - I think that is correct, that his dates have been carefully investigated by someone. That doesn't mean the dates are firm of course. Ideally there would be multiple independent recordings in offical records, of his remains having been laid to rest, presumably shortly after he actually expired.
There are such oddities one encounters with records of the past! A quick example: long ago I bought some books at a yard sale. It turned out that among them was an American handwritten diary / notebook from the 1820's. It recorded a beautiful poem by an obscure European poet. I finally managed, after many years, to find some information on this poet, and a copy of the poem - it ends differently than the version I have! Needless to say, that project continues.
You probably know that the Buffalo area has been under heavy snow cover recently. Currently one would be lucky just to recognize the Forest Lawn cemetary, never mind Miss Nills' final resting place.
Marci is a mystery becoming more so. How for instance can a guy who is supposedly steadily losing his eyesight all his life, be the military leader defending his city against attack?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 18, 2007 2:31 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : VMs: Possible Voynich text in a Kircher letter
I caution that the following observation is extremely tentative, and will require quite a bit of work, best distributed among the Voynich manuscript experts available to this list, in order to resolve one way or another. We all know the implication: if resolved positively, then we finally have an example of the Yale Beinecke MS 408 text in another very old document, and not only that, in a document apparently by the hand of one of the chief suspects for a direct connection with MS 408: Fr. Athanasius Kircher, S.J.
I have been struggling to comb through the online images of the papers of Kircher, in particular those of the archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome (APUG) - the indexing of those at the moment, reflects centuries of wear and tear, and is very difficult to make use of. There is even at least one case where two completely different documents are online with identical shelfmarks - only their respective url's disambiguate them. The lack of a clear index, at least one that I know of, is part of the problem in what follows - the inability to locate the verso side of a Kircher letter, as we will see.
At this url:
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=4749
is displayed a letter with shelfmark APUG 563 292r.
It appears to have been written by Kircher, 16 April 1664, to the astronomer Fr. Adamus Schall, S.J. (Johann Adam Schall von Bell, 1591-1666), a Jesuit missionary in China, and key actor in one of the most sensitive episodes in Chinese scientific and cultural history of the least several centuries. [1]
The recto side of this letter displayed at the above url, you can see, shows what appears to be the writing on the verso side bleeding through the paper. It is a group of glyphs / symbols / letters on the verso side that appear to me to be immediate candidates for a possible Voynich-script text group, that, expressed in the GC transcription system [2], ASCII coding, are as follows:
AGC: 52+111+space+206+225+107+97
or in common GC format but necessarily very approximately: 4o.A1ka
Scroll down to the 7th line of the Kircher letter. Near this line's right-side end, locate "Nos" with the large "N". Above the third word to the left of "Nos" you can see, apparently bleeding through from the verso, a perfect Voynich GC-y / AGC:121. Now, in order to analyze the verso, we must almost certainly left-right flip the image. In that case this GC-y is written on the verso flipped from the way we know it in the Nine Rosettes Manuscript. So that is a curiosity, as well as one of the questions up for resolution.
Now to the really intriguing text group. Put your attention underneath the "Nos" between the 7th and 8th lines. Now look slightly to the left, and you will immediately see the symmetric double-looped "gallows" symbol, GC-k, with its accompanying symbols, bleeding through from the verso side. Once you flip the image, it is much easier to see, from the verso perspective, that there well could be a GC-4o to its left.
It is notable that the gallows group rises - as it was written on the verso. Tentatively I take this to mean that its sudden appearance in the middle of otherwise normal Latin, means something special.
I found all this less than twenty-four hours ago, and I have had very little time to try image processing - what little I've tried, seems to me to reinforce that the GC-k is indeed a Voynich-like GC-k, and not a ligatured "dl" or such as is commonly found in handwritten letters in the NOI back then. Instead, I have spent almost all of my available time trying to find the APUG verso image - so far I have not a clue if it is even available online.
Even at this early stage one cannot help speculate broadly. I wonder if the Voynich text is basically a reflection of an extremely secret Jesuit communications-script of those "back then" days, and that Fr. Athanasius knew it well, and that he expanded its alphabet some. For example, the Voynich alphabet has a set of symbols affectionately known as the "walking picnic table", walking left, walking right, and just standing. Fr. Athanasius could easily have gotten the idea for this picnic table from some Egyptian obelisk pictures in his possession:
APUG 565 389r http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=7765
APUG 565 390r: http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=7766
Perhaps the APUG 563 292v page will be found quickly, and the tentative 9RMS text will be shown to be just an optical illusion. Or, Wilfrid Voynich was right all along about at least Kircher's connection to the world's most mysterious manuscript, with scriptural evidence. In the meantime, as with the f68r3 PM-curve, astronomy seems to be the way to make some headway in this mystery.
Berj / KI3U
[1] The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIII. Published 1912, online here:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13520a.htm
[2] Voynich text transcription system "GC" is online here:
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~galethog/Voynich/
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Sunday, February 18, 2007 11:09 AM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Possible Voynich text in a Kircher letter
Jan Hurych wrote Sun, 18 Feb 2007 07:06:45 -0800 (PST): " make a negative of the letter APUG 563 ..... "
Good morning Jan One of the first things I did was make various negatives. We must remember this:
1.) The script of the Nine Rosettes Manuscript is evidence of a writing system of some kind.
2.) The 9RMS exemplar shows the system as it is printed in block letters.
3.) We cannot outright asume that a cursive version of this writing system does not exist. In fact, we are wise to assume that a cursive version does indeed exist, and go looking for possible candidates.
This candidate in Kircher's letter cannot be resolved one way or the other, I think, until the verso, APUG 563 292v, is found. In the meantime I am trying blinking versions of the image against processed images, including negatives.
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Monday, February 19, 2007 5:51 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Possible Voynich text in a Kircher letter
Some Questions for the investigation of the Voynich-similar glyphs group in the Fr. Athanasius Kircher, S.J. letter of 16 April 1664 to the astronomer Fr. Adamum (Adamus) Schall, S.J. in China.
What we currently have of the letter is the recto side, APUG 563 292r [1]
Questions:
1.) Is an image of the verso of the letter, regardless of any markings on the verso, available online under any catalog index?
2.) Is the letter a copy, or the original?
The letter is from Kircher to Schall, and does not appear to have been folded to make its own envelope. Many of the letters in this PUG Kircher archive are on the same kind of paper, and one can get one impression, among others, that Kircher made copies of the letters that he sent out. Kircher also used some letters as worksheets, recto and / or verso, for example to solve the enciphered portions of them.
3.) Is the glyphs group of interest (GGI) and its associated text something that was actually written on the verso, or is it a kind of contact transfer from wet ink from another paper?
4.) Is it agreed that the hand of the verso is the same as of the recto, i.e. Kircher's hand?
5.) If the GGI is to be interpreted as a ligature-genesis that was not a cursive version of 9RMS alphabet glyphs, then what Latin? word is this GGI, and does this Latin word appear on the recto side for a geometric structure comparison?
6.) What is the significance of the GGI rising at an angle from its line?
Rising words do appear here and there in the Kircher correspondence - perhaps the writer is intentionally signalling some sort of emphasis.
7.) Can enough of the verso text be deduced so as to get an idea of what is being said? How does it relate to what the recto side says?
8.) Is it significant that the GGI, tentatively two words, of which the first is ~ GC-4o, start verso line eight?
9.) Did Fr. Schall (d. 15 August 1666 in Peking) receive Kircher's (original) letter, and did he answer it, and if he did, is it locatable?
I mentioned earlier in this thread my impression of the possibility that the 9RMS writing system is a reflection of a Jesuits ultra-secret communications system, one long established, and thoroughly familiar to Athanasius, and perhaps even that Athanasius expanded its alphabet.
When you survey just the APUG holdings of Kircher's tremendous volume of papers [2] you see that Kircher was familiar with about every possible geometry of information-bearing scribble upon a script surface. Gallows-like forms, even if only as ligatures, were familiar to him by the cartload:
APUG 555 086r:
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=172
APUG 555 086v:
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=173
Every hand from exquisitely beautiful to horrible penmanship, every symbol imaginable, was familiar to Kircher:
APUG 568 332r:
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=7715
I cannot think of any 17th c. person who, more than Athanasius Kircher, would have been able to imagine an alphabet, an alphabet that we have in the Voynich manuscript. Yet strangely, in Kircher's own hand, which has tremendous, truly tremendous geometric-forms range, I think I sense almost an avoidance to exhibit it, when it seems to me it would have been so natural for Kircher to do it. And so this has me pondering about the hypothetical ultra-secret S.J. writing system.
I will here christen this hypothetical system: Ligatura Steganographia
In other words ligature steganography, a kind of distant cousin to the mathematical curve-cryptography that was explored in the f68r3 PM-curve analysis thread.
Those who had been taught the Ligatura Steganographia system, would know how to ligature, know how to make ascenders and descenders approach, or contact other letters on the same line or other lines, would know what paper to use, and how to format the layout of the overt plaintext, while having it covertly carry the hidden message.
Every detail of a letter or document would be part of the system, down to whether or not to fold the text-bearing part, and how to fold it.
Prophet Ekwall said, repeatedly: It's older than you think.
If the text of the Nine Rosettes Manuscript is a reflection of Ligatura Steganographia, then yes it surely is very old, going back to the ideas of the ancient Greeks anyway. Folding, "mis-gathering" quires, and so on, really very simple ideas, but altogether in a brilliant system these schemes would send would-be-decipherer conventional thinkers around in circles forever trying to impose conventional ideas of order on the evidence.
Perhaps the 9RMS alphabet and text are a reflection of an attempt, by Kircher or someone else, to exploit a block-print version of Ligatura Steganographia. See for example the beginning of Beinecke MS 408 botanical page f95v where it is nice and big; and for a smaller example, see the beginning glyph of line 9 on star-page f108r, where the intruding gallows is almost a complete heraldic knot of the kind of design that appears so often in Christine de Pizan's illustrations. Christine, I am convinced, was certainly using a kind of Ligatura Steganographia in her published books, and also dropping hints about it in her writings.
If Ligatura Steganographia is indeed going on in the Voynich manuscript, then the old problem of the evidence of non-linear scripting of the VMS pages is de-mystified: alternate lines scripted, or even sub-paragraphs. If the system is complex enough, then obviously some items must be put down in some sort of systematic order.
Another possibility for the Voynich block-print version of Ligatura Steganographia is that it was an attempt to save the original system in a kind of text-book form, perhaps upon fear of suppression of the practicing society.
Answers to the above questions about the GGI in Fr. Kircher's letter will, I think, result in some progress in penetrating the Voynich mystery. It might also shed light on why so many of Kircher's letters seem to be archival copies rather than originals.
Berj / KI3U
[1] http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=4749
or:
http://archimede.imss.fi.it/kircher/563/large/292r.jpg
[2] http://193.206.220.68/kircher/
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Tuesday, February 20, 2007 5:39 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Possible Voynich text in a Kircher letter
Jan Hurych wrote Tuesday, February 20, 2007 10:08 AM:
" ... and only the name of Jacobus in the VM indicates the manuscript was ever in Prague. "
Hello Jan
I don't think that is ironclad. Someone marked the bottom of page f1r so that, with great difficulty we might read, printed, the word "Tepenec" there on the parchment. That does not necessarily mean that even the f1r parchment was ever in Prague, much less the f1r parchment after the Voynich ms information was copied onto it. And as we all know, there is not the slightest convincing reason to believe that de Tepenec "signed" it.
" As we can see, every single point of existing provenance can be easily attacked. "
Yes, and I just did an attack, an easy one :) But of course we must try exploit what we've got, even if we suspect intentionally engineered twists and turns.
" If however we find Kircher's scribblings in the VM, it will make stronger case for the fact the VM was not faked by Kircher (unless he was really devious :-) and if we find Marci's scribblings in the VM, we have the proof it is really the "Prague" manuscript. "
Kircher might have put "Tepenec" on the bottom of the f1r parchment, and for any number of reasons. In general, my strongest reason for believing Kircher had some of the MS 408 parchment in his hands, is that over the course over the last year, after studying I don't know how many Kircher papers, I tend to think that the writing on the last page of the 9RMS, f116v, is from Kircher's hand; to me, the f116v writing indicates someone who is greatly familiar with a tremendous variety of alphabets and hands: Kircher!
I'm not firm on this belief, but I do tend to it. And therefore, because of resemblance to the f116v writing, also some of the other non-Voynich alphabet marginalia elsewhere in the 9RMS may be from Kircher's hand. How much of the normal VMS text and graphics was on the parchments when Kircher wrote on them, I don't know. Certainly I don't think that the normal VMS text is in Kircher's hand - I think a woman or women did most of that. So it does get complicated.
" Of course, the Kircher "conspiracy" looks to be big nonsense, ... "
I agree completely that Kircher was not the type of man to be involved in trivial conspiracies. When Kircher did things secretly, there were very serious reasons for it. For decades during the 17th c. he was perhaps the single most important person in the global Jesuit network - the very center-point of its communications hub. I think that with archives like APUG, as voluminous as they are, we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg of Kircher's communications - the GGI of the APUG 563 292r letter is a shadow of undiscovered material - you can, for example, in the APUG material see Kircher quickly solving ciphers, but where are his detailed worksheets and study sheets?
I would truly be surprised if it turns out that Kircher had absolutely nothing to do with the VMS. Even if Wilfrid Voynich faked the entire VMS history, there is just simply no other person in our NOI and time frame who would be more likely to be familiar with the Voynich script than Kircher, I think. So for me the question is not did Kircher have something to do with the VMS, but what did he have to do with it. Not that that thought is anything new of course.
Standard VMS history has it that a mysterious book was brought to Kircher's attention, and many assume this book was the Voynich manuscript. The assumption is based on no strong evidence really, mainly the vague last Marci letter. Nevertheless we would like to save as much of the standard history as we can. And I find a parallel between Kircher and Wilfrid Voynich - the more I study Voynich, the more I tend to regard him as an extraordinarily intelligent man. Therefore, if Wilfrid pre-engineered what he gave out publicly, I think his reasons could not have been trivial.
And in that vein the first pressing question remains: how could someone so extraordinarily intelligent, educated, and experienced as Wilfrid Voynich, push the idea, all the way to his death, that Roger Bacon authored the Nine Rosettes Manuscript?
The easiest answer seems to be that "Roger Bacon" is a cipher:
"Roger Bacon" = scientific philosophy
And therefore "Roger Bacon authored the mysterious manuscript" deciphers into: the scientific revolution NOI, especially once Francis Bacon took the hint from his heroes, authored the elements that were collected into a record that today is Beinecke MS 408.
And Marci, or whoever wrote the last Marci letter, and Dr. Raphael, Kinner et al and certainly Kircher, KNEW the "Roger Bacon" cipher. And Wilfrid Voynich understood that.
If something along those lines, then we still have many questions, including Kircher's and Marci's roles. The number of possibilities is not small. Here are just two that come quickly into mind:
If Marci and Kircher came into possession of the 9RMS as a complete book, then did Kircher suppress it, say, because it exposed the Ligatura Steganographia?
Or, did Marci and Kircher collaborate, with other members of the NOI, in producing the mcP of a "Roger Bacon" per above manuscript, the extant copy of said mcP being MS 408?
All these questions are related to even more elementary questions like: is the Voynich manuscript the product of a solitary author, or the reflection of a cooperating network? The sheer complexity and talent of the things we see in the 9RMS, and hidden so cleverly in the guise of a late medieval physician's book, from the grand nine rosettes foldout, through the anomalous script, to the mind-boggling transformed oscillating elliptic trajectory PM-curve, make me think that not even Robert Hooke or Athanasius Kircher working alone produced the book, but rather that it reflects a high level longtime running cooperative effort to produce a master mcP document: the "Roger Bacon cipher book" some would call it.
Now, wouldn't it really be something, if the mcP was actually hatched by Roger Bacon himself, he perhaps partly inspired by St. Hildegarde, and Christine de Pizan picked up on this and added her efforts, and the mcP continued to evolve and all our favorite actors including even John Dee contributed. Crazy as it might seem, it is conceivable that the "Roger Bacon cipher manuscript" may have been going on in closed circles for centuries, and that Francis Bacon, when he was initiated, took up the ideas and promoted them in vernacular terms.
I keep coming back to the NOI, our network of interest, because the material in the 9RMS is of such nature that it is inconceivable to me that a fair number of the people in the NOI that we regularly talk about, were clueless about the mcP of the 9RMS. The 9RMS reflects an entire sophisticated philosophy, evolved over a considerable period of time it seems, not something cooked up overnight, and all its technical elements were coin of the realm for the elite members of the NOI. How could they not have known about the 9RMS? Or at least, it is, to me, inconceivable that whoever gathered together the encyclopedic 9RMS, was not a friend or associate of someone in the NOI. The silence, and the fact of just a single extant copy, are easy to understand - people were still being persecuted here and there for openly expressing anti-Aristotlean views.
We see all these indicators in the 9RMS, traces of the Rosicrucians for example, yet we have trouble pin-pointing just WHO??? could have done this thing. That trouble can be turned back by considering: it was done by a network. The Roger Bacon network. My appeals for PRECISION in the proceedings of this list are in line with that.
To sum it up, a lot of Voynich students believe that Athanasius Kircher was involved with the Voynich Manuscript, and I am one of them. The remains of Kircher's papers are CONSPICUOUS for their total absence of any hint that Kircher ever even heard of the mysterious manuscript - this has been thorn number one in the derriere of the standard VMS history since the earliest days. Yet, Kircher's available papers indicate, even down to bizarre items like the walking picnic table glyph-symbol, that of all people in the world, Athanasius Kircher must have known the 9RMS alphabet and script. And Kircher's papers, as mentioned above, show indications that they are just the tip of an undiscovered iceberg.
With that, and all the other surrounding relevant material, is it not logical, that a truly serious attempt to penetrate the world's most mysterious manuscript, now demands that we try to figure out what is going on with the just-discovered GGI in Kircher's 16 April 1664 letter to Schall, APUG 563 292r ?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:50 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
I just received, from Reference Librarian Dr. Kathryn James, a friendly reply to my query to the Beinecke Library on "Nills" versus "Nill" in their MS 408 papers references on the MS 408 home webpage:
http://webtext.library.yale.edu/beinflat/pre1600.ms408.htm
The correct spelling in the papers they have is: Nill
Dr. James has informed the website technical folks so they can fix the clerical error.
The mysterious Miss Nill is beginning to yield to precision protocols - good.
Berj
*********************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, February 21, 2007 5:10 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Jan Hurych wrote Wednesday, February 21, 2007 2:26 PM: " ..... now they should also correct their provenance list as well, it is hopelessly obsolete and full of discrepancies, ....... Apparently, they are ignoiring the recent results of the research and the provenance seems to be even more mysterious than the VM itself :-). "
Hello Jan
Well I'd say they are pretty much in the same vein as the popular sources for Voynich history. An interpretation gets started and grows into a legend, and it acquires an inertia of sorts that resists corrections. In some cases the resistance to corrections is just incidental and automatic - probably the case with the Beinecke - MS 408 is just another item in their massive workload, and besides, the Beinecke has a tremendous amount of goodwill stock with us on account of the .sid images. The Beinecke, I really don't think, are consciously ignoring the latest VMS developments. But in other cases the inertia, or something more, comes from vested interests in the established legend, or parts of the legend.
And the Voynich mystery is so very complicated, requiring really years of study before one can routinely comment intelligently upon it - how many people invest that kind of effort, really invest that kind of effort? I think you really have to have put in a great amount of effort along a line of Voynich investigation, and see all your work vaporize as an illusion, at least once, before grasping the scope of the problem that has earned the reputation of the "world's most mysterious manuscript" since the 1920's or 30's - that's the trial by fire, I think.
Then journalists, of various grades, come into the picture from time to time to report to their audiences on the mystery. How many of them, even from an organization like the BBC, have you seen really prepare their inquiry, before producing their copy?
Now, this list used to be a pure research list, and it had the reputation for being the foremost Voynich research forum, well deserved. But the list has been having problems, of a similar nature to what you lamented, and I don't think they are doing the list any good. The growing Imperial Mammoth in the room that nobody wants to talk about, I've already mentioned a few times. Whose interests does it serve? Certainly the lurking plagiarizers. But also those who have an interest in keeping the latest research developments from reaching a wider audience. The wider audience does include those one in ten million individuals who will go on to become serious and dedicated Voynich manuscript students.
Lately a new thing is coloring this list: Voynich huckstering. There hasn't been an on-list discussion of the pros and cons of this growing phenomenon. Some of it is almost comical because of mouse-click errors: you see onlist, unintended, a set-up for a product review - an invitation to dinner. The presumably well-fed invitee then writes a product review in a magazine, and comes back onlist to declare the producer's work to be the new standard in Voynich research. And promptly the producer launches into another droning round of onlist product pitching, thinly disguised as authoritative, while in the meantime having someone plant a biography of the producer on wikipedia, and so on and so forth.
Well, so that is what marketing to the impressionable masses is all about: If you want to know the "truth" then you have to buy my product. Fine. Somebody has to sell something in order for the world to keep going around, true.
But, my point is: if this is the direction in which this list is to go, then ought it not have first been debated, and like other lists, some rules for commercial posts been proposed?
This list was for years looked to as THE place to get the latest straight advanced information on the Voynich mystery. Factionalism reflecting extremely different mentalities has been part of it all along. Currently for example, there is evident on-list much, much more interest in tracking down the meaning of an elephant with a second trunk growing out of its ass, then there is in tracking down the meaning of an apparent Voynich text group in a letter of Athanasius Kircher. Who is to say which of the two mind focuses will penetrate deeper into the mystery?
But factionalism aside, this list was a pure research list - it was a laboratory in action, with all the expected trials and errors necessary to advance the beach-head penetrating the mystery.
Is that a thing of the past? Is commercialism, with its inevitable influence on PRECISION INFORMATION, going to just happen, without any list rules to regulate it?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, February 21, 2007 5:21 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
OOPS Jan -I really meant that last post to be private offlist to you. Wrong mouse-click! ;-) Berj
******************
From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Wednesday, February 21, 2007 8:52 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: Re: The mysterious Miss Nill
Jan Hurych wrote Wednesday, February 21, 2007 6:33 PM: " Since the deciphering of the VM is closely related to its history, we may eventually admit that we should base our work on new discoveries and not on old legends which proved quite fruitless. "
Yes. And, I have to agree that Rudolf is not for me very much of a Voynich-involved suspect, but "Marci" is becoming more and more interesting lately. Now, since you've studied certain signatures and "signatures" as much anybody alive, I've got an idea I want to run by you. The idea is just forming in my mind, so I may not be presenting it very crisply, but here goes.
We've got this problem of the hands in the Marci letters. And the so-called "last" Marci letter, the one found by Voynich with the book, is the main pillar upon which the standard VMS history rests. Again, we'd like to save what we can of standard VMS history.
Anyway, this "last" Marci letter, reproduced in D'Imperio's book and elsewhere, e.g. Dana's website, has had a dating problem: 19 August 1665 versus 19 August 1666. One or the other date, or the earlier date changed by someone into the later date.
In APUG the latest Marci letter is the one that is clearly dated 10 September 1665:
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/aspimage.asp?ID=4077 or:
http://archimede.imss.fi.it/kircher/562/large/114r.jpg
By standard VMS history, this APUG Sept. 1665 letter is then the "second-last" Marci letter to Kircher, before Marci dies. Needless to say, if the 19 August letter is 1665 rather than 1666, then the order of the two letters is reversed, and new VMS history questions are raised.
Aside from that, and aside from how many hands are involved in these two letters, they both appear to have been signed by the same person, and both are the only Marci letters (that I know of) signed with the "a Cronland".
Neither of these two letters has underneath the signature the monogram sine. That sine is seen under signatures here and there in the APUG letters - my tentative impression is that certain priests used it to authenticate their letters - the basic design of the sine has subtle variations due to hand, variations that would permit a reader who knew the hand of the sender, to tell if the letter was genuine. That sine is absent from ten of the three dozen or so Marci letters we concern ourselves with.
This then is the idea, in the form of three questions:
1.) What is the significance of the presence or absence of the sine in Marci's letters?
2.) Could Marci have had most of his letters written for him by a woman, wife? or sister?, and he only authenticated them with his sine?
3.) Could that hypothetical woman scribe be the one who copied the Nine Rosettes Manuscript?
The "Joannes Marcus Marci" signature in the "last" Marci letter is quite small - based on data we got from Dana, I figured that its span was just 3.4 cm, and even with preparation to write small, my copy attempt completed just "Joannes Marcus M" in that 3.4 cm. [1]
There is the story that Marci's eyesight deteriorated steadily throughout his life - I do not know the primary source for that. But from my experience, as the eyesight of older people deteriorates, their writing becomes larger and less controlled. That is not at all apparent in the Marci signatures. But I have yet to carefully study all his sines.
Berj
[1] vms-list post: Re: VMs: Voynich Boxes at Beinecke; Wednesday, February 7, 2007 1:04 AM
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 22, 2007 2:56 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : RE: VMs: A writer replies to Berj...
" A writer replies " Well Nick, if PRECISION were a priority with you, you would have written: " A writer addresses "
I have not personally addressed you recently, on-list or off-list, and therefore your "replies" is your invention.
I have on-list commented upon commercialism creeping into the list. I have questioned this phenomenon proceeding without a list discussion of its implications, and the possibility of rules. In short, I have pointed out, even if only in general terms: A PRINCIPLE. But you, with this: " Goodness me: why not simply name me as your Voynichological Antichrist and save yourself so much typing? "
immediately side-step the principle, and cast your personal self in the central role of a persecuted Antichrist. In other words, according to you, Nick Pelling the self-styled Voynichological Antichrist, supercedes my bringing to the list's attention, a principle.
Now as to why you did that, there could be several plausible reasons, but I don't care enough to delve into it beyond my initial impression that you are reacting highly defensively and very insecurely to a principle being placed before the list's consciousness.
" What people tell me is that, ...... " Again, what does your "me" have to do with the principle that I brought up in the other thread?
Do you really seriously think that when I point to this principle, with respect to this long running research list, that all I have in mind is "Nick Pelling" ?
Unbelievable!
" .... they all took the time to read its 230 pages of observation and argument, which you have not (as far as I can tell). Here's an alternative way forward: send me your address off-list and I'll airmail you a review copy, so you can make up your own mind based on what the book actually says. "
Don't you think I saved the December 2006 offlist emails between us back when I was trying to BUY from you your book? Your book that you began steadily pitching on-list from last summer on. As you know, I was sincerely interested in achieving "took the time to read its 230 pages". In my emails, I told you that, like at least one other list member, I do not buy online, so as to minimize identity theft problems, and I offered to send you cash, bank draft, or U.S. Postal money order. And I told you that time was not a factor - I was quite willing to wait for the turn-around. I have bought books that way from England in the past. You rejected all those transaction methods, suggesting you would have difficulties with "anti-money-laundering legislation".
I thought to myself: What on Earth is this man thinking?! I'm trying to send him a crummy twenty-five or thirty dollars for his book plus shipping, and he comes back to me about money laundering!
And, in a display of non-comprehension of principle, you suggested that if I personally don't use Paypal, then I might get someone who does use Paypal to do the transaction for me. In other words, even if that someone routinely jumps into the fire, get them to jump into the fire for me. Well, I just don't do that: if it is a principle with me to avoid online buying, then I don't ask others to do it for me.
So I started losing interest in seeing your book, and at this point I don't have any interest left. And that is entirely separate from the principle of the character of this list: it was a research list, THE Voynich research list. Is it now to head down the commercial path, with marketing priorities influencing its conduct? I think it is entirely reasonable to bring up this principle on-list, even if you don't.
For instance, would a for-profit Voynich book that was critically dependent upon the old controversial notion that the marks on the bottom of f1r, are a "signature" in the hand of one "Sinapius", be inappropriately helped as to its sales, by the disfunctionality of the list's archives from 10 OCT 2006 on? Since 10 OCT 2006 there have been important advances in the f1r problem.
On this list's front door: http://www.voynich.net/ there has for a long time appeared this:
" A MHonArc-produced archive for 2000-2005 is available. This is a stopgap archiving operation until list member Nick Pelling has evaluated alternatives that scale well ..... "
I suppose from it, that you are a good person to ask about what I've been calling the growing Imperial Mammoth in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Do you, Nick, have ABSOLUTELY ZERO responsibility for fixing the archives problem, of disfunctionality after 10 OCT 2006?
Berj
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From : Berj N. Ensanian <> Reply-To : vms-list@voynich.net
Sent : Thursday, February 22, 2007 10:56 PM To : vms-list@voynich.net
Subject : Re: VMs: A writer replies to Berj...
GC, you wrote Thursday, February 22, 2007 8:23 PM:
" A book will still be in circulation years from now, long after the Voynich List and Voynich Archives have disappeared from the ether. "
Lately I've much been wondering: what, in principle, is this list and its archives, and what is its future? Reading between your lines, I can surmise some answers I suspected.
To do research, especially precision research, one has to be able to refer back to earlier research. The archives are dead for anyone with material posted after 10 OCT 2006. I see no signal in what you wrote, that that is going to change. But certainly a list owner can do with it as he wants.
Berj
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