pyramid - suppressed transmission - crypto icon - the voynich manuscript

8/3/2019 Pyramid - Suppressed Transmission - Crypto Icon - The Voynich Manuscript

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Crypto *** Icon: The Voynich Manuscript

"The unreadable book hints at the idea that the world is information . . . But we don't know what it says, which always carries with it the possibility that it says something that would unhinge our conceptions of things . . . It points to the Otherness of the nature of information, and is what is called in structuralism a 'lim it text.' Certain ly the

Voynich Manuscript is the lim it text of Western occultism . It is truly an occult book - - one that no one can read." -- Terence McKenna, "The Voynich Manuscript," in The Archaic Revival

What's the difference between meaning nothing and meaning everything? Everything-- and nothing. As evidence, consider the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript. As asymbol of the Enigma, the insoluble question, it is supreme. If it is ever deciphered,the most likely result would be its complete disappearance from the mind of man. Aslong as it means nothing, it means everything to cryptographers, medievalists, andRosicrucians. But should it come to mean something, it will become meaningless --another expired mystery, another thing that everybody knows and nobody cares

about.

But until then, of course, it makes a superbly bisociative thing for your game. It canbe a McGuffin, a grimoire, a gate, a lever, an instruction kit, or just an easilyportable item worth $200,000. It is, after all, about the size of a thick hardback novel(say, Cryptonom icon ), roughly six by nine by three inches, although since vellum(even thin, high-quality vellum like the Manuscript contains) is thicker than paper,it's only 235 pages long.

What's on those pages? Well, therein lies the problem . The Manuscript containsmany variegated illustrations: plants, star maps, body parts, zodiacs, tiny images,

mortars and pestles -- moons and stars and hearts and clovers and diamonds. Oneparticularly enigmatic section (the third, if I understand things correctly) sportsmyriads of naked, Rubenesque women in baths and tubs connected and plumbedby Terry Gilliamesque pipe works and valves. Some of the illustrations are in color;red and green and blue painted in; many of them appear high ly technical andcraftsmanlike. But the most arresting thing about the Manuscript is that the text,written firm ly and confidently, is in no known alphabet and (hence, likely) no knownlanguage. It looks kind of like Tolkien's tengwar, and kind of like Arabic, and kind oflike 13th century monastic Latin m iniscule. The whole Manuscript, as somebodyonce said, looks kind of like a lot of things, and in general like nothing at all.

"The former owner of this book once asked your opinion by letter, copying and sending you a portion of the book from which he believed you would be able to read the remainder, but he at that time refused to send the book itself. To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send you



herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as these obey no-one but their master . . ." -- letter from Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher, accompanying theVoynich Manuscript, August 19 1665

It's called the Voynich Manuscript, by the way, because the antiquities dealer WilfridM. Voynich bought it from the Jesuit College at Villa Mondragone in Frascati, Italy.

Wilfrid died in 1930, and h is wife wound up with the Manuscript; she sold it toanother dealer who, unable to get the price he wanted for it, un loaded it on YaleUniversity's Beinecke Library of rare books, where it rests in proud opacity as MS408. The nice librarians at the Beinecke are not at all tired of dealing with cranks,cryptoids, and Atlantean channelers (stop here and think: wouldn't it be fun if, thenext time your PCs go to the Rare Book Room to consult the Bad News Codex,rather than a sense of brooding evil they get put into a "kook file" and treated like abad smell?) who all want to see the Manuscript.

Tracing the Voynich Manuscript back before Voynich is tougher. It was in thepersonal library of the 22nd General of the Jesuit Order, the euphoniously named

Petrus Beckx, S.J., for much of the 19th century. Before that, it most likely belongedto the polymathic Athanasius Kircher (also S.J., but 200 years earlier -- hetranslated hieroglyphics, or at least, he thought he did, which was the same thing inthose days). At least, there's a letter folded into the Manuscript from one JohannesMarcus Marci to Kircher, which mentions a puzzling cipher manuscript. (The lettercould be a forgery. Or, of course, the letter could be genuine, and the VoynichManuscript could be a forgery, or a substitution made by the Jesuits or Voynich foran even More Mysterious Manuscript.) The earliest certain date we have is 1608; thefirst folio has the signature of Jacobus de Tepenecz, director of the Emperor RudolfII's botanical gardens, on it, and we know when the former Jake Horicki got to callhim self "de Tepenecz" -- 1608.

"If my analysis of the Voynich Manuscript as the product of Dee and Kelley has seemed too facile, let me assure my reader that it is, and that not all the facts are covered by this theory." -- Terence McKenna, "The Voynich Manuscript," in The Archaic Revival

So, assuming that the Manuscript is genuinely of the 17th century (annoyingly,atmospheric carbon-14 plateaus make specific dates coincidentally impossible forthe period rough ly, say, 1608-1912), and that Rudolf II had it, where did he get it?Marci's letter theorizes that the manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, the greatest

of the medieval scientist-cum-magi (he invented gunpowder and spectacles andspoke to a magical bronze head -- see James Blish's Doctor Mirabilis ). One of theManuscript's earliest (and, as it turns out, craziest) decipherers, one WilliamRomaine Newbold, thought so, too, and thought that it proved that Bacon also knewabout germs and moons of Saturn and eclipses and, gosh, everything. It turns outthat Newbold was deciphering cracks in the vellum instead of words. But much ofBacon's library wound up in the library of Queen Elizabeth's magus John Dee, andJohn Dee went to Rudolf's court in Prague in 1584, which gives us a vector.

John Dee also, of course, invented (or, as he insisted, channeled from the angels)his own language, Enochian. The Manuscript is probably not in the Enochian

alphabet, although it m ight be in the Enochian language. John Dee also hungaround with a contemptible con man named Edward Kelley (his "skryer" -- the guywho actually talked to the angels for Dee), who wouldn 't have been above preyingon Emperor Rudolf's well-known collector's urge and providing him with a "genuine"



Bacon ian manuscript (for the sweet sum of 600 ducats) filled in with copied datafrom Dee's works. And, of course, Edward Kelley was a convicted (wait for it)forger. Looks bad for Voynich.

"The man is insane who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar and make it intelligible only with difficulty even to scientific men and earnest students . . . Certain persons have achieved concealment by means of

letters not then used by their own race or others but arbitrarily invented by themselves." -- Roger Bacon, Letter on the Secret Works of Art

Dee, however, also invented and broke codes himself. Even if the VoynichManuscript is a forgery, in some sense, it's still a n igh-unbreakable cryptogram.(There have been a number of Voynich decipherings -- none of them much moreconvincing than Newbold's.) Roger Bacon also invented h is own alphabet for codedwritings; none of them have survived -- that we know of. Thomas Peterson, amedievalist at Catholic University, suggests that the Manuscript might be the work ofthe great 12th-century mystic St. Hildegard of Bingen, who received her "ignota

lingua" (unknown language) from the angels. (We detect a trend -- Someone istrying to send these folks a Message, and it's probably not about plum p ladies inbathtubs.) Newbold was part of the U.S. government's codebreaking team in WorldWar I; during WWII a team under William Friedman tried cracking the VoynichManuscript using an IBM tabulating computer but disbanded after the war ended.(Computer analysis hasn't yet decided how many letters are in the Voynich alphabet,although it's very likely that the language is an invented tongue with a Romancebackground -- and that there are two "Voynichese" forms in the Manuscript. Thisjust keeps getting weirder.) Even now, knowledgeable folks insist that the DoD orNSA continue to plug away at the Voynich language -- for obvious reasons.Between Yale (home of the CIA), the NSA, the Jesuits, the Rosicrucians Dee and

Rudolf, and the Cathars (tied to Voynich by another spurious translation), you canstick the Voynich Manuscript into any conspiracy game from the grittiest to thegooniest.

"Yet as soon as I handled the Voynich Manuscript, I had a nasty sensation. I cannot describe it more precisely than that. It was not a sense of evil or horror or dread -- just nastiness; like the sensation I used to have as a child passing the house of a woman who was reputed to have eaten her sister." -- Colin Wilson, "The Return of the Lloigor"

Or, of course, you can make the Voynich Manuscript a thing of magick, an enigmabecause it comes from a place where the Rules are different. Is it the originalNecronomicon orPnakotic Fragm ents? A coded codex from Uqbar, a channeleddocument from Atlantis (there are no script errors, no scratching-out - the scribeknew his work cold, and may even have been copying from yet another manuscript),a commun ication from Them? Associations abound, from Levitov's Cathar Society ofIsis to the Villa Mondragone (the House of the Mandrake) itself. One scholar sees anAmerican sunflower in the il lustrations, and insists that the Manuscript postdates1492, little knowing that the Templar-Masonic Rosslyn Chapel of 1440 hassunflowers carved on its walls. The final sentence of the Manuscript, the only one(aside from German marginalia probably put there by our buddy Jake) in ordinary

letters, reads: "Michiton oladabas multos te tccr cerc portas." Ignoring "tccr" andsuchlike, you can make it say "To me thou gavest many gates." Many gates indeed;the Voynich Manuscript can be read any way and for any purpose you wish, andlead you to any number of game ideas.

pyramid - suppressed transmission - crypto icon - the voynich manuscript

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