Subject: Voynich Manuscript Article Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 23:58:47 -0600 From: National Enquirer To: voynich@rand.org Hi! We just got this article on the Voynich Manuscript. We'd like to hear what you think about it. A higher source told me that we published an article on the Voynich Manuscript a long time ago, but I can't find it. This thing sounds a little too, well, scholarly for us. Yours truly, Heinz Annielmann Associate Editor National Enquirer ------------------------------------------------------------------- Out of Africa by Douglas Frederick Recent research has established that the Voynich Manuscript is written in the Edo language of western Africa. The old African state of Benin (now Benin City in Nigeria, not to be confused with the 20th-century state named Benin), where the Edo language is spoken, had had contact with the Portuguese beginning about 1485. Sometime shortly after 1504, Esigie, the oba (king) of Benin, sent an ambassador named Ohen-okun to Lisbon. The Portuguese in turn sent missionaries to Benin. In Lisbon Ohen-okun encountered several representatives of the Hanseatic League in the diplomatic community. One of these, Eberhard Schertz, took a keen interest in this new, totally exotic culture. He managed to learn some Edo from Ohen-okun. As Schertz was an amateur linguist, he started work on a written script for the Edo language. Sometime around 1520, one of the missionaries, a Catholic priest named Father Teodoro Pedrosoao, returned to Lisbon. Pedrosoao by then could speak Edo fairly well. Pedrosoao was also an amateur artist who had made drawings of African flora. He was highly imaginative; consequently his drawings did not accurately reflect African flora. He also made drawings of the new Edo system of astrology, Iwe-uki, after the typical European manner of the time. In what we have called the biological drawings of the Voynich Manuscript, Pedrosoao drew the West African goddess of fresh water, Oxun, in multiple guises. Oxun appears today in some of the Afro- Christian syncretic religions of the New World. Since Pedrosoao had grown up near a Portuguese spa, he represented Oxun in European-style baths and as a Caucasian. He had never born celibacy well, hence his fascination with this theme. In Lisbon Pedersoao met Eberhard Schertz. (It is not clear whether Ohen-okun was still in Lisbon.) Schertz took a keen interest in Pedersoao's drawings. He was also interested in setting down a written account of Benin, its natural surroundings, and its culture. Pedrosoao's drawings were a natural starting point. As Schertz was an amateur linguist, he wished to add examples of their language and lore. With discussions with Pedrosoao, he was able to more or less finish his script for Edo. Schertz' script reflected the German orthography of the early 1500's noted by Panofsky in what we have so far called the Voynich Manuscript. He used multiple letters to represent vowels and consonants, some of which were unfamiliar to him, as well as the tone phonemes of Edo. His system was confusing, as it involved many alternate spellings for Edo words. With the aid of Pedrosoao, Schertz taught his system, along with some Edo, to two scribes whose names have unfortunately not survived. Therefore, we shall call them A and B. At that point, Schertz unfortunately fell ill and died. The task of setting down Edo written lore thus lay with A and B. Communication between Pedrosoao, A, and B was difficult. However, the job was done, although A and B used Schertz' system in different fashions. They simply set down Pedrosoao's dictation over his drawings. Pedrosoao's account was the Edo Sacred Oracle, a traditional divination system, which did not bear any particular relation to the drawings. Pedrosoao never really understood Schertz' script. Pedrosoao scribbled on what is now f116v, the last page of what we call the Voynich Manuscript. He wrote "oladabas" for Currier OPAR8AR on f67r1, at 11 o'clock in the outermost text ring. Pedrosoao left the resulting manuscript with the Hanseatic trade mission. After several decades, another Hanseatic trader took the manuscript to England, where he sold it to Dr. John Dee, which book he paginated and bestowed much time upon, but I could not hear that he could make it out. He eventually sold it to Rudolph II for 600 ducats during his stay at Rudolph's court. With the publication of some of the Yoruba Sacred Ifa Oracle in English, we have works related to the Edo Sacred Oracle. The Edo language and culture of Benin are closely related to the Yoruba. Therefore, the remaining decipherment should be fairly easy! *References* Bastide, Roger; translated by Helen Sebba; *The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations.* (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978; original version c1960.) ISBN 0-8018-2056-1. Egharevba, Jacob; *A Short History of Benin. 4th Edition.* (Ibadan University Press, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1968.) pp. 26-9. Epega, Afolabi A.; and Neimark, Philip John, translators and commentators; *The Sacred Ifa Oracle.* (HarperSanFrancisco, 1160 Battery St., San Francisco CA 94111, 1995.) 549 pp. $18. Reviewed by Nisi Shawl in *Gnosis*, no. 38, Winter 1996, pp. 74-5. Evans, Robert John Weston; *Rudolph II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576-1612.* (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973.) Katzner, Kenneth; *Languages of the World.* (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, c1986.) ISBN 0-7102-0861-8. p. 6, pp. 350-1 Murphy, E. Jefferson; *History of African Civilization.* (Dell Publishing Co., New York, c1972.) ISBN 0-440-53735-5. pp. 172-177, pp. 254-295. Panofsky, Erwin; "Answers to Questions for Prof. E. Panofsky," personal communication to William F. Friedman. March 19, 1954. Subject: Re: Voynich Manuscript Article Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 01:45:50 -0500 (EST) From: Karl Kluge To: voynich@rand.org Dear Heinz, I am sorry to have to disagree with your intriguing hypothesis, but I'm afraid *I* have recently come up with the solution to the connundrum posed by the Voynich Mss. As you are no doubt aware, there have been a number of proposed decipherments. The first, by Newbold, involved reading small strokes making up the characters as Greek shorthand symbols -- one can almost hear Roger Bacon saying, "Miss Hathaway, take a herbal" -- then performing a table look up operation in the back of Newbold's posthumous book (proving both survival after death *and* that Roger Bacon, in addition to inventing the microscope and telescope, had also invented a time machine), followed by a bit of anagramming. This solution was later dismissed as a consequence of objections raised by Manly, Friedman, et al, but still has it's defenders, who ask, "If this solution isn't correct, then how could Newbold have extracted all that coherent text?" The second decipherment (chronologically in this list, although we are only now able to examine his work in detail) was Strong's. He believed that the text was encrypted with a fairly straight forward polyalphabetic cipher, and that it contained an early version of the Kinsey report, or perhaps Anthony Ascham's early effort at a Renaissance "Our Crawknots, Our Selves". While some doubts are being expressed as to the consistency of the alphabets used and the anachronistic words such as "folklore" (suggesting, perhaps, that Ascham also had a time machine), again defenders ask "If this solution isn't correct, then how could Strong have extracted so much coherent text?" Finally, there was the work of Brumbaugh, who managed to find the names of Greek philosophers in the Zodiac folio labels, and a great salsa recipe involving pepper on folio 101 verso. He believed that the characters in the Mss. were variant forms of Arabic numberals, and that a code much like using a telephone dial to map letters to digits had been used. While this did an iffy job at extracting plant and proper names from labels, it failed miserably at the main body of the text. Still, one has to ask, "If this solution is wrong, how could he have gotten coherent text for those labels?" I believe the most parsimonious solution to this vexing riddle is to cut the Gordian Knot by saying that all three are correct. Well, Strong is wrong about the author and dating, but let that pass. Suppose Roger Bacon really did encipher the Mss, as Newbold proposed. But he knows that people will try to wrest his secret from the book, so he employs two levels of misdirection. He uses a "telephone dial" code of the sort attested to later in Agrippa (see _Magic, It's Rites and History_) to encipher bogus plant and star labels. He knows that once someone cracks that code they will notice that the running text is nonsense. He therefore encodes lurid gynocological stuff as a cover text for the shorthand, precociously using a polyalphabetic cipher. Never mind that the state of the art in encipherment in English monastaries two centuries later (c. 1450) was using the next letter in the alphabet to conceal the word first known use of the word "f*ck" in the poem "Fleas, Flies, and Friars" (the monks of a certain monestary won't go to Heaven because they "gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk" = "fvccant vvivys of Geni" -- remember, u and v were a single letter at the time, and w is a double u, so "vvivys" is "wives"). Bacon, after all, according to Newbold had microscopes and telescopes, so coming up with a polyalphabetic cipher would be child's play. As to the suppose New World plants, perhaps Saint Brendan had brought back drawings. Karl Subject: Re: Voynich Manuscript Article Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 11:41:59 +0200 (MEST) From: Alex Schroeder To: (National Enquirer) CC: voynich@rand.org > In Lisbon Ohen-okun encountered several representatives of the > Hanseatic League in the diplomatic community. One of these, Eberhard > Schertz, took a keen interest in this new, totally exotic culture. He > managed to learn some Edo from Ohen-okun. As Schertz was an amateur > linguist, he started work on a written script for the Edo language. Be aware that "Scherz" in German means "joke". -- Rhamm Groohm! Auuurgh! Ogouuun. Ooorgh! Ooorgh! Subject: Loof Lirpa ? Date: Tue, 01 Apr 97 17:25:17 GMT From: Denis Mardle To: National Enquirer CC: VMs List From D.V.M. 1 April !997 Sadly you have missed your dead line of noon in the UK As for Father Petersen it is RIP. Subject: The VM deciphered! Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 16:40:53 -0500 From: (Robert Firth) To: voynich@rand.org Folks Well, Strong was on the right track after all - he just didn't take his ideas far enough. After many hours of patient work, I now feel my decipherment of the VMs is sufficiently sound to be published. It gives clear, sensible plaintext for every folio I've tried it on. The system is quite simple: all the visible letters are nulls and the cypher text is encoded only by the spaces. These encode a 24-letter alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X Z Each space therefore has 24 alternative decodings, which gives rise to some ambiguity in the decode, but, as Strong so powerfully argues, one familiar with the subject matter can usually make sensible guesses. The underlying text is late-mediaeval english, in a southern dialect, with a lot of norman-french borrowings. For example, The text in the first Aries zodiacal folder reads E-L-O-O-F- -E-L-L-I-R-P-A which seems to be an allusion to one of the Major Arcana of the Italian Tarot deck, so suggesting an astrological or divinational purpose for these folios, as we have suspected. TTFN Robert Subject: VMS Deciphered Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 17:15:12 -0600 (CST) From: (M. Sulla) To: voynich@rand.org Merriment and mirth To Mr. Firth Happy April Fool's. sulla rura cano rurisque deos. --Tibullus Subject: VMS solved! Date: Wed, 2 Apr 1997 12:30:15 +0200 From:Rene Zandbergen To: voynich@rand.org To R. Firth: Germany, some time after 1997/04/01 11:59:59 Congratulations with your decryption method of the VMs. A similar assumption helped me solve the mystery of the Faistos disk (see E-mail from Oct. 8, 1996). I concur that your solution is even more elegant, as it does not require the use of alternate notations (space) vs. (space)* This pair of successes makes me confident that the Rongo-rongo tablets will reveal their secrets soon. To allow others to study the VMs in this light, I have replaced my EVMT transcription with a new file, approx. 150kbytes long, by removing the nulls. I shall be able to E-mail it to those interested. Kind regards, Rene Zandbergen