The Voynich Manuscript [a.k.a. Beinecke MS 408] download it"when i was younger, roaming the forests of Oregon hungrily wanting to eat every plant that crossed my path, but also fearful of the unknown, i always wondered how humans first found out what plants were edible or not—whether neanderthal tribes had guinea pigs that were the first to try things. & then once they discovered what plants were edible, how this information was documented so others would know what not to eat & how to prepare the things you could eat. i'm sure these are natural thoughts to have. you could almost argue that this was the initial driving force for the invention of language—for the communication of information relevant to survival. in this day & age most people take both language & our acquired knowledge of food for granted. they are things baked into our DNA, or if not, it's readily accessible on the internet.
i've managed to resist all the Michael Pollan hype thus far, but the other day j was watching one of his Ted Talks & it caught my attention, where he postulates that agriculture was developed by plants to propagate their genes. «what if human consciousness isn't the end-all and be-all of Darwinism?» he asks. «What if we are all just pawns in corn's clever strategy game to rule the Earth?»
it's not a novel idea [which he admits]. Terrence McKenna saying: «Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around» is the first i remember hearing this idea articulated in so many words, the first time it stuck [& struck home] for me anyway, perhaps because it puts into language a sneaking suspicion i've always had, at least on some subconscious level. this is the role of language, a tool to reveal in words what we already suspect, like a darkroom solution that develops invisible-inked code etched in the vestigial recesses of our brains. with this in mind, i switch from food to my other favorite topic: books. & the mother of all book objects, the so-called Voynich Manuscript.
Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.
This is how Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library describes the so-called «Voynich Manuscript», which it houses on its shelves as Beinecke MS 408 [a name i prefer to The Voynich Manuscript as Voynich was merely the self-proclaimed discoverer who tried to exploit it for his own fame & monetary gain]. it has also been called «the world's most mysterious manuscript». when I visited Beinecke last year, i made a half-ass attempt to view MS 408 for myself but alas fat chance for a hack like me with no academic credentials. no matter, they've graciously allowed you to view it online, which is probably better than having someone with white gloves flip pages for you & watch you while you read—further reconfirming my belief that in this day & age there are fewer & fewer reasons to leave home [Rome, just north of Villa Mondragone, which which was home to Beinecke MS 408 for hundreds of years, before Voynich got his grubby hands on it & named it after himself].
Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill's book on the subject [The Voynich Manuscript: The Mysterious Code That Has Defied Interpretation for Centuries] gives a good overview & insight into the book for anyone interested. the history of Beinecke MS 408 is as mysterious & veiled as the book itself. i won't bother to go into the hisory & all the various theories & attempts to decode it, except to give my 5 cents here. i could state 5 theories giving rise to Beinecke MS 408: that it's a hoax, that it was a private journal of doodles, that it contains coded secrets, that it's asemic babble—the written equivalent of speaking in tongues—or that it's simply a work of art, but in my mind no substantiated truth about Beinecke MS 408 would change what it intrinsically is, which is a work of art, book object as performance art, an object that has acquired the history of all eyes & hands that have beheld it & made theories about it, tried to decode it, read into it. it's a bit like Piero Manzoni's «Artist's Shit»—the discovery that it was not shit but plaster did nothing to diminish the brilliance [or auction value]. it was the idea behind it, an idea put into a object that was put forth into the world to make people think [even if duped] & acquired the meaning of the sum of all the thinking into it's physical manifestation.who knows what the original intention of the author was & who cares. rumors abound as to authorship: Francis Bacon, Leonardo Da Vinci, Voynich, John Dee [my gut feeling if i had to pick one]—but what's interesting to me is not who wrote it, but why his or her name is not on it, whether this was intentional or not. maybe they just didn't think to, maybe it was intended to be private, or maybe they deliberately chose not to, or maybe they did, but it was erased. the front & back cover of Beinecke MS 408 is completely blank:
i can't imagine a braver & more brilliant cover for a book, intentional or not. not only does it lack an author but it lacks a title! no indication when you open to the first page either, it just jumps right into the heart of the matter. but then again, there are missing & re-ordered pages, so who's to say. there's no denying that the book is botanical in nature though—when i say it jumps right into it, the first page, & the next 112 after that are encyclopedic looking pages of different plant species.
there are a few lapses, sections with mandala-like astrological charts & then the famous series of nude nymphs in hot-tubs, but it eventually circles back to botany with a hundred or so more pages of pharmaceutical/plant drawings/babel. if it were just for these illustrated pages, you might think the text is placeholder gibberish, FPO, put in for appearance, perhaps even writ in after the fact, but there are also dozens of pages of just text.
there's no denying there was an intent to communicate with this text & statistical analysis has shown the entropy of the language is similar to known languages. Kennedy & Churchill [& plenty of others] go into this & all the various failed attempts at interpretation/translation. but the thing is, how would we know if it ever was decoded? what sort of message are we expecting?
in one convoluted multi-step cipher-decoding scheme, the text on the above page (78R) is translated as follows:Well humidified, it ramifies; afterward it is broken down smaller; afterwards, at a distance, into the fore bladder it comes. Then veselled, it is awhile-after ruminated; well humidified it is clothed with veinlets. Thence after-a-bit they move down below; tiny teats they provide in the out-pimpling of the veinlets. They are impermiated; are thrown down below; they are ruminated; they are ferminised with tiny teats. It is operated so that it happens that they are fully vested with feminity.
regardless of what Kennedy & Churchill [& James Martin Feely, the lawyer from Rochester responsible for this particular decryption] think, it makes perfect sense to me! but they dismiss it, saying the results were «unintelligible» & «unreadable». but perhaps this was the original author's intent, a form of stream-of-conscious poetry. & perhaps s/he feared persecution for writing such crazy shit & that's why it was encoded. any misunderstanding comes at the reader's end. even if Beinecke MS 408 was deciphered with certainty, nobody would believe it.
one of the leading studies of Beinecke MS 408 was written by Mary D'Imperio [who works for the U.S. National Security Agency of all places]. she had this to say about another attempt [by Leonell Strong] at decoding the manuscript:The reader may arrive at his own conclusions from the following sample: 'When skuge of tun'e-bag rip, seo uogon kum sli of se mosure-issue ped-stans sku-bent, stokked kimbo-elbow crawknot.'
again, in my mind, genius! regardless of whether it was the intended meaning or not. but then D'Imperio says «To my mind, at least, this seems a highly unlikely thing for any writer of any age to have said, whether in cipher or not.» maybe some OULIPO poets should be «deciphering» the Beinecke MS 408 instead of government agents worried about whether the document contains secrets that could threaten national security. [for anyone interested in Mary D'Imperio's in-depth take on it [written in 1978] it's posted online here—your tax dollars paid for it, may as well read it!]
after delving into the convoluted history & quack attempts at interpretation, Kennedy & Churchill come to a somewhat sensible conclusion, driven by intuition, taking a holistic look at the manuscript rather than deciphering bits & pieces, respecting the book object for what it is. though they lean more skeptically on the hoax side than i do, though i guess it depends on the meaning of «hoax»—& whether it was intended as a hoax, or whether it has been turned into a hoax by the legions of entrepeneurial geeks who have tried to decode & capitalize on it, claim it as their own. i'd agree with Kennedy & Churchill when they say: «The overriding sense is that the creator of the manuscript had a purpose other than to create something of "beauty", and was driven by a desire to convey meaning.» & also when they say, after arriving at the conclusion that you can draw no conclusions:
The conflicting opinions of the many Voynich scholars arise not just because of the strange and inexplicable nature of the manuscript itself, but also due to the diverse and conflicting personalities who have applied their particular intellectual skills to the conundrum. In Hamlet's instructions to the Players, Shakespeare provided us with the defining purpose of their art, namely: 'to hold as t'were a mirror up to nature.' The 'art' of the Voynich manuscript is to hold a mirror up to each and every investigator, in which he or she often sees, instead of the truth underpinning the manuscript, a reflection of their own preconceptions and beliefs.
then they go on to compare Beinecke MS 408 with Schrödingers Cat, in that it lives in a state of indeterminacy. «With its true meaning still unknown, and with its seemingly unique ability to provide corroborating evidence for almost all of the various hypotheses that have ever been suggested, at a fundamental level the Voynich manuscript fits all the theories that have ever been put forward about it, and at the same time, none of them.» i would go one step further & say to live in a state of indeterminacy is/was it's intent—to «decipher» it would be to kill the cat. & again, even if we did have a reputable interpretation, nobody would accept it, because in the end people believe what they want to believe.
in the Kennedy & Churchill book, they also implore Beinecke Library to allow the book to be carbon-14 dated & in fact, this past February it was, by the same University of Arizona lab that dated the Shroud of Turin [& also the cranium they determined did not belong to Francesco Petrarca [despite being attached to his body in his tomb]] with the result that, with 95% certainty, the vellum on which it was written dates back to between 1404 & 1438, which is 100 years or so earlier than previously suspected [thus Beinecke needs to update their description as Wikipedia already has]. so if it was Francis Bacon [b. 1561] or John Dee [b. 1521] they would've had to author it on 100+ year old paper, which is not inconceivable, but even more far-fetched. unfortunately carbon-dating the ink is near impossible. but again, does it matter? they conclusively dated the Shroud of Turin to 1260—1390 A.D. but that doesn't stop the Vatican from still saying that Jesus was buried in it. they can believe what they want to believe, just as any interpretation of Beinecke MS 408 is valid. this is the beauty of it.in the end, the search for meaning becomes the meaning. getting back to the thought that seeded this post, of humans being invented by plants to spread their seeds, i declare that Beinecke MS 408 is a sort of transcription of the genetic code of the plants it illustrates, real or not. i can speculate that a nameless author channeled the information from these plants, either by deep introspection, or perhaps even by ingesting them & writing under their influence, & no one can prove otherwise. the «language» Beinecke MS 408 is written in cannot be deciphered because it is not a cipher to begin with—it IS the information—a direct reflection of how the information exists in a chemical or molecular or biological form.
musing on Beinecke MS 408 got me to thinking more about language & plants. as an undergraduate studying math at UC Santa Cruz i was somewhat obsessed with plant morphology. coincidentally, in the video in the last post, Terrence McKenna said he first learned of Beinecke MS 408 from Ralph Abraham, who was my first choice as senior thesis advisor at UCSC, but alas, he was on sabbatical or not taking on any more students, i forget. i vaguely remember the so-called Voynich manuscript talked about in hushed tones amongst the computational math geeks, but in those days [late 80s] the internet wasn't that connected so i don't remember actually seeing images/text from it. plus i wasn't that interested in breaking code, which seemed to be the brunt of the interest in the so-called Voynich manuscript....i wrote my senior thesis on Phyllotaxis, or the whorling patterns that plants exhibit as they spew out leaves along their stems...it's no secret that the Fibonacci sequence crops up everywhere in plants—if you count the number of petals on a flower, 9 out of 10 times there'll be 5, 8, 13 or 21 petals, but few & far in between will you get non-Fibonacci numbers. & i'm sure everyone's heard that if you count the spirals in a pine cone or aloe or artichoke you get Fibonacci numbers, etc... but i wanted to know why. & strangely when i discovered why it was in some obscure journal [Tony Van Ravenstein «Optimal Spacing of Points on a Circle» Fibonacci Quarterly, Vol 27 no. 1, 18-24 (1989)], wherein he proves that the so-called golden ratio allows for optimal spacing of points along a circle. & since the golden ratio is an approximation to the ratio between successive Fibonacci numbers, having plants that put out leaves using this spiraling arrangement of successive Fibonacci numbers [in opposing direction], leads to optimal spacing of leaves along the stalk of the plant, minimizing overlap of leaves & thus allowing for maximum sunlight & photosynthesis. while this is all in my rear view mirror now & i've shifted gears to language & art, these ideas seem to still inevitably creep in to my work.
not only does the overall structure of Ark Codex hinge on Fibonacci numbers [144 pages divided into 5 folios, each of successive Fibonacci numbers] but this idea of phyllotaxis & bifurcation keeps creeping in probably in more ways than i even know.
i'm not gonna get into the nitty gritty here, of why plants express Fibonacci numbers in phyllotaxis, there's a mathematical proof in the above linked-to Van Ravenstein paper. like Beinecke MS 408, i don't think most people care about the real meaning behind it, but are more fascinated by the mystery & strangeness of it all—almost as if knowing the truth kills the intrigue. & discovering a reason or a wizard behind the curtain perhaps gives less of a reason to believe in «god» or magic or whatever unseen mysterious forces people want to believe in. readers will project their own beliefs. when i look at Beinecke it looks like genetic plant code to me & i see lots of 89s & 8s & 2s [Fibonacci numbers].
Tony van Ravenstein gave a proof for the reason plants express successive Fibonacci numbers in spiralings, but it still doesn't explain how plants discovered it, or how they implement it. sure it's a simple bi-product of natural selection, the optimization of leaves around a stem to maximize sunlight, but i'm not talking about this underlying reasoning so much as the mathematical & lingual interpretation—the realization in a language for human understanding [this was all that was «discovered» after all]. it's nothing plants need to know. & cycling back to the beginning of the last post—that the purpose of human existence is to fulfill the will of plants—perhaps we are only here to put this into language for the plants. to document it for prosperity's sake. we are possessed by plants to spread their seeds, whether it be agricultural [as Michael Pollan [ironic his name sounds like pollen] tells us], or in the case of the unknown author of Beinecke MS 408, to document the genes/memes of plants into some coded language knowing full well that some day it will get filed away in the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. humans are driven by the pursuit of authorship, publish or perish, but who's driving this ship? plants. they are true authors in this case [Beinecke MS 408], we are merely ghost writers.
these [& pretty much everything i post on 5cense] are things i think about as i work on the Ark Codex. seeing some cool art in Indonesia once i inquired as to the artists & the gallery owners shrugged their shoulders—maybe one person worked on it some, then a few others, it didn't matter. they felt no need to put their names on paintings & this struck me. & when i got some drawings on our recent trip to India it was the same story. of course you could argue that a lack of an «artist» demotes the art to being that of a «craft». but the art is in the eye of the beholder & the only thing being beheld is the art object, so the only «artist» there is once the object is created, is on the receiving end. in the case of science, it's the discovery that matters, not who «discovered» it [or put into language fit for human understanding]. in the case of a book, the published object is all that matters. the information conveyed is at the heart of it. the art is in the presentation, the display. we are merely disposable beings whose biology was driven by the needs of this information to propagate in an artful form. contemporary music is ahead of the other arts in this regard, in the recent trend to have «projects», a person, or people that get together to make an album or a song & then perhaps regroup into something else, so what becomes important is the project, not the people behind it. & regardless, both are façades, scaffolding that crumbles away when finished. at the end of the day all that's left is the song. artists die, but the songs remain the same.
the influence of Beinecke MS 408 on Luigi Serafini's codex is obvious [not that i've read anywhere that Serafini states Beinecke MS 408 as an influence... i'm not even sure he outwardly explains at all what influenced him or what his codex means, nor should he].some people have speculated that Beinecke MS 408 is simply a recipe book written in code—a botanical/pharmaceutical knowledge-base of what's edible & how to use & prepare [medicinally or culinarily] the plant. makes sense to me, but then again the Finnegan's Wakean translation makes perfect sense to me too. yesterday i went to Macaresse to hijack j's language lesson & then have lunch with some of her seed-hunting cohorts, including the so-called «Rocket Man». supposedly before the 1990s, rocket, or arugula, was only picked in the wild & not many people outside of Italy knew of it's existence. thanks to the efforts of the Rocket Man & others a wide assortment of tasty & nutritious plants are available for us to eat. here's the Rocket Man imitating a Turkmenistanian mountain goat:
something the Rocket Man said that stuck with me is that in all these efforts to preserve seeds, not a lot of effort is being made to gather the information on how to actually grow & prepare these plants. when j was in St. Petersburg a few weeks ago she was hanging out with some of the supporting «seed-hunters» in this documentary. while most of these seed-hunters have the biodioversified presence of mind to consider the entire ecosystems, to think holistically beyond just the seeds, i'm not so sure about the intentions of the main bloke who made this documentary: Dr. Ken Street, the self-made Indiana Jones of the seed-hunters, the type that pillages exotic & remote communities at all costs to save seeds from extinction, «green gold» as he calls them. but what's the point of «saving» all these seeds if you aren't working with the farmers & food workers that work with & live off these plants? the «custodians of knowledge» as the Rocket Man calls them. agriculture is more than just seeds—its the whole culture revolving around them, botanical & human, from «farm to fork» as the saying goes.
it's a bit reminiscent of Beinecke MS 408—in similar Indiana Jones-fashion, Wilfrid M. Voynich «saved» this manuscript from extinction. but without the knowledge around the found manuscript, without even someone that can read it, it's just an artifact. which in the art world is something, but in the food world, an envelope of archived seeds in a seed bank by itself is meaningless. you can't eat genes. part of me is fascinated by & immensely respects the efforts of those that are trying to save extinct languages. but at the same time, if there is no culture left around these languages, is it a language? if there is one person left in the world speaking a language, what's the point? or if there are zero people left but we have a dictionary & all the rules of that language, but no one left to read it, then what is it? what needs to be preserved is the culture around language, the literature. language is useless without literature & literature is useless without language. & both are useless without conscious beings. you can store all these seeds up in the Svalbard «doomsday seed vault» but who cares if we're all dead. who cares if we have all these seeds & don't know what to do with them. just as with dying languages, there's elders in remote places around the world, or even here in Italy, that have knowledge of growing & cooking crops that will die with them when they die. you could make the argument with both languages & plant species that if they aren't useful in this ever-changing modern world, if they can't keep up with the Joneses [in the corn-belt of Indiana], then what's the point of preserving them? sadly, people will be more apt to survive if they learn the dominant language for commerce in whatever region they live & same goes with food crops. what can you do, except put your own 2, 3 or 5 cents on the internet to one day become extinct..." - Derek White
Wikipedia articleVoynich page
more Voynich
William F. Friedman’s Transcription of the Voynich Manuscript
