01-04-2022, 07:43 PM
After a pleasant dinner earlier this week that including stimulating conversation with another long-time member of the Voynich manuscript research community I drifted off to sleep with thoughts of that vexing sphinx filling my head. I dreamt that I was looking at John Dee's scrying equipment in the British Museum. Gazing into his crystal orb I found myself standing in a mist-filled void containing a lectern with MS 408 on it. The book flipped open to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [1], and as I examined the page the snake in the root of the left plant turned to fix me with its steely gaze, speaking as follows:
Though at first glance I seem mild snake,
T'would be a foolish error to make!
No garter snake, I! Don't void your bladder --
I am, in fact, the loathsome Adder!
While I seem brown, I fade, alack!
So know, in truth, my hue is BLACK!
Heed me well, though 'tis hard to imagine it,
For I am the glorious serpent Plantagenet!
The snake loomed larger, its jaws gaping, and I found myself falling into its ravenous maw. Waking bathed in sweat, I somehow knew I had been given the key to the Voynich manuscript.
Puzzled, I did a Google search for some sort of "black adder" or "blackadder". Buried among results for William Blackadder (executed for his role in the murder of Lord Darnley), St. Andrew Blackadder Parish Church, and every Thursday being Curry Night at The Blackadder Hotel Bar & Restaurant [1], I found references to a BBC historical drama involving a fringe theory regarding the final years of the Plantagenet dynasty [2]. A thrilling dramatization that features all the historical accuracy that viewers of _I, Claudius_ had come to expect [3] from the Beeb, it follows the adventures of the Black Adder (Prince Edmumd, younger son of Richard IV (sic!)), and his associates Baldrick and Lord Percy Percy.
I pondered on how to use this information to solve the mystery of the text, when it hit me – I could use names as cribs! Let Feely search in vain for his "ovaries"; let Brumbaugh spice his theory with "pepper" and "paprika"; with the aid of "Black Adder" and "Baldrick", I had a cunning plan. I would use the pattern of common letters in the two names to find them in the cipher text in much the same way that Champollion used the shared letters in “Ptolemy” and “Cleopatra” to make an initial break into reading Egyptian hieroglyphs [5].
Initially I lined the names up as follows, with each unique letter assigned a number:
B L A C K A D D E R
1 2 3 4 5 3 6 6 7 8
B A L D R I C K
1 3 2 6 8 9 4 5
After failing to find appropriate matches to those patterns of letters, I reconsidered my approach. S. Reddy & K. Knight say, "The similarity with devoweled scripts, especially Arabic, reinforces the hypothesis that the VMS script may be an abjad." [6]. R. Zandbergen says, "Other typical features of the ciphers in Tranchedino are...that double characters are usually represented by a single code character." [7] Since there is some debate over whether spaces in the text are word separators, I decided to remove them as well. Then I tried the following modified cribs:
B L C K D R
1 2 3 4 5 6
B L D R C K
1 2 5 6 3 4
I used the D’Imperio transcription [8] for two main reasons: 1) this is an April Fool’s joke, so why not?, and 2) if you can’t trust the NSA, who can you trust? Modifying an existing Awk [9] program I use to look at k-gram statistics, I was soon pumping out possible matches to my cribs:
BLCKDR Count BLDRCK Count
[...]
ZC94OF 53 ZCOF94 2
SC94OF 55 SCOF94 2
OEZC89 67 OE89ZC 3
OESC89 108 OE89SC 3
4OFC89 201 4O89FC 2
Faced with multiple possible matches, I looked for the most common match for BLCKDR that occurred on f43v, and lo and behold, there was SC94OF! Looking at that line in the raw transcription file:
08404B 8ZC9/9FCC89/SCC2/AN/Z9/4OQC89/SC9/4OFAR/SCX9/OFAJ-
the match for BLCKDR starts after a space, but (1) has a space in the middle between ‘9’ and ‘4’, and (2) does not have a space at the end of the word. Point (1) is worth examining as it illuminates the sort of issues that lead some to question whether spaces in the manuscript are word separators. Looking at the Herbal A “language” pages in the D’Imperio transcription, 67% of the time a ‘9’ is followed by a space (1097 occurrences); 11% of the time it is followed by the end of a line (203 occurrences). It is *never* directly followed by ‘4’ without an intervening space -- the only glyphs that follow it within a "word" more than a single-digit number of times are ‘F’ (103), ‘P’ (92), ‘8’ (52), ‘S’ (51), and ‘B’ (16) (‘Z’ just misses the cutoff at 8 occurrences).
Having successfully identified two plaintext words and determined the consonantal values of six Currier glyphs, it is now necessary to explain why further application of this key produces gibberish. This is a reef multiple previous proposed decipherments using cribs have run aground on, so I see no reason not to follow their example and double down, insisting on the patently obvious correctness of the deciphered cribs and maintaining that further study will no doubt solve the problem. Beyond the far less standardized spelling common in the late 15th century, part of the incomprehensibility may be a result of Baldrick having written portions of the manuscript. While no texts written by him survive, it is known that a Victorian-era descendant of his had such appalling spelling that he gave Mr. Ebenezer Blackadder a holiday card which managed to misspell "Christmas" so badly that it didn't include any of the actual letters in the word [10].
It might also be objected that the reign of Prince Edmund’s father, King Richard IV, (1485 to 1498) falls outside the 95% probability interval of 1404 and 1435 generated by C-14 dating of vellum samples from the manuscript [11]. As it has been scientifically established that there were heaps of unused vellum just lying around waiting for later use, I don’t see that this objection has any force.
Speculating further on the yet-undeciphered content of the manuscript, I would suggest that the so-called “Zodiac” folios are, in fact, Prince Edmund’s list of conquests – similar to that of the legendary Don Juan [12] but arranged by the zodiac sign of the lady in question rather than country of residence, with Baldrick as the Prince's Leporello. Such a large set of paramours would make him a worthy great-great-great-great-grandson of Edward III, who sired so many children that one estimate has it that the probability that a Briton born in the 1970s isn't related to Edward III is as small as 0.0000000000000000000000000001 [13]. If my hypothesis is correct, then it is as least as likely that almost all current Britons have a little bit of Prince Edmund’s DNA in them as well. (Ironically, the large number of Britons with a little bit of his DNA in them was one of the reasons cited by two of the three popes at the time in their Bulls excommunicating Prince Edmund after an unfortunate incident in a nunnery in November of 1487 [14].)
Given the confirmation this provides for the reality of the reign of Richard IV (written out of the history books for centuries by people like Alison Weir [15]), an additional avenue of research this decipherment opens up is the extent to which Henry VII was responsible for the broader fabrication of British history uncovered by A. T. Fomenko and G.V.Nosovskij. They claim "...ancient and medieval English events are to be transferred to the epoch which begins from 9-10th cc....many of these events prove to be the reflections of certain events from real Byzantine-Roman history of 9-15th cc." [16]. Thus, for instance, they claim that the English King William I (conventionally 1066-1087 C.E.) and the Byzantine Emperor Theodore I Lascaris (conventionally 1204-1222 C.E.) were, in fact, the same person. While they blame Scaliger and Petavius for this confusion, the distortions of English history pointed out by the narrator in [17] suggest Henry VII as an equally likely contributor/culprit:
”History has known many great liars: Copernicus, Goebbels, St Ralph the Liar -- but there have been none quite so vile as the Tudor king Henry VII. It was he who rewrote history to portray his predecessor Richard III as a deformed maniac who killed his nephews in the Tower. But the real truth is that Richard was a kind and thoughtful man who cherished his young wards. In particular: Richard, Duke of York, who grew into a big, strong boy. Henry also claimed he won the Battle of Bosworth Field and killed Richard III. Again, the truth is very different; for it was Richard, Duke of York, who became king after Bosworth Field, and reigned for thirteen glorious years.”
No doubt additional light will be shed on those glorious years as further progress is made deciphering the manuscript following the initial chink I have opened in its armor. If so, no doubt there will be books written about me, and songs sung about me, and the History Channel will show episodes from my life weekly at half past nine starring some great heroic actor of our age in the lead role.
Assuming, of course, that Alison Weir doesn't put out a hit on me....
References:
[1] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[2] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. respectively
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[9] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[10] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (“However, be that as it may...’A Merry Messy Christmas.’ ‘Christmas’ has an H in it, Mr. Baldrick....and an R. Also an I, and an S. Also T and M and A....and another S. Oh, and you’ve missed out the C at the beginning. Congratulations, Mr. Baldrick! Something of a triumph, I think — you must be the first person ever to spell `Christmas’ without getting any of the letters right at all.” The title card at the end reveals that Baldrick had spelled it "Kweznuz" after initially trying and crossing out "Kwelfnuve.”)
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[12] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[13] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[14] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (quoting the Mother Superior of the nunnery: “And finally, you got two knights drunk and invited them to come and wrestle with you inside the nunnery in an orgy of heathen perversity?...it has the unmistakable ring of truth to it, and I must therefore tell you that this morning I have written urgently to all three popes recommending your immediate excommunication. Nevermore may you be Archbishop of Canterbury!”)
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Though at first glance I seem mild snake,
T'would be a foolish error to make!
No garter snake, I! Don't void your bladder --
I am, in fact, the loathsome Adder!
While I seem brown, I fade, alack!
So know, in truth, my hue is BLACK!
Heed me well, though 'tis hard to imagine it,
For I am the glorious serpent Plantagenet!
The snake loomed larger, its jaws gaping, and I found myself falling into its ravenous maw. Waking bathed in sweat, I somehow knew I had been given the key to the Voynich manuscript.
Puzzled, I did a Google search for some sort of "black adder" or "blackadder". Buried among results for William Blackadder (executed for his role in the murder of Lord Darnley), St. Andrew Blackadder Parish Church, and every Thursday being Curry Night at The Blackadder Hotel Bar & Restaurant [1], I found references to a BBC historical drama involving a fringe theory regarding the final years of the Plantagenet dynasty [2]. A thrilling dramatization that features all the historical accuracy that viewers of _I, Claudius_ had come to expect [3] from the Beeb, it follows the adventures of the Black Adder (Prince Edmumd, younger son of Richard IV (sic!)), and his associates Baldrick and Lord Percy Percy.
I pondered on how to use this information to solve the mystery of the text, when it hit me – I could use names as cribs! Let Feely search in vain for his "ovaries"; let Brumbaugh spice his theory with "pepper" and "paprika"; with the aid of "Black Adder" and "Baldrick", I had a cunning plan. I would use the pattern of common letters in the two names to find them in the cipher text in much the same way that Champollion used the shared letters in “Ptolemy” and “Cleopatra” to make an initial break into reading Egyptian hieroglyphs [5].
Initially I lined the names up as follows, with each unique letter assigned a number:
B L A C K A D D E R
1 2 3 4 5 3 6 6 7 8
B A L D R I C K
1 3 2 6 8 9 4 5
After failing to find appropriate matches to those patterns of letters, I reconsidered my approach. S. Reddy & K. Knight say, "The similarity with devoweled scripts, especially Arabic, reinforces the hypothesis that the VMS script may be an abjad." [6]. R. Zandbergen says, "Other typical features of the ciphers in Tranchedino are...that double characters are usually represented by a single code character." [7] Since there is some debate over whether spaces in the text are word separators, I decided to remove them as well. Then I tried the following modified cribs:
B L C K D R
1 2 3 4 5 6
B L D R C K
1 2 5 6 3 4
I used the D’Imperio transcription [8] for two main reasons: 1) this is an April Fool’s joke, so why not?, and 2) if you can’t trust the NSA, who can you trust? Modifying an existing Awk [9] program I use to look at k-gram statistics, I was soon pumping out possible matches to my cribs:
BLCKDR Count BLDRCK Count
[...]
ZC94OF 53 ZCOF94 2
SC94OF 55 SCOF94 2
OEZC89 67 OE89ZC 3
OESC89 108 OE89SC 3
4OFC89 201 4O89FC 2
Faced with multiple possible matches, I looked for the most common match for BLCKDR that occurred on f43v, and lo and behold, there was SC94OF! Looking at that line in the raw transcription file:
08404B 8ZC9/9FCC89/SCC2/AN/Z9/4OQC89/SC9/4OFAR/SCX9/OFAJ-
the match for BLCKDR starts after a space, but (1) has a space in the middle between ‘9’ and ‘4’, and (2) does not have a space at the end of the word. Point (1) is worth examining as it illuminates the sort of issues that lead some to question whether spaces in the manuscript are word separators. Looking at the Herbal A “language” pages in the D’Imperio transcription, 67% of the time a ‘9’ is followed by a space (1097 occurrences); 11% of the time it is followed by the end of a line (203 occurrences). It is *never* directly followed by ‘4’ without an intervening space -- the only glyphs that follow it within a "word" more than a single-digit number of times are ‘F’ (103), ‘P’ (92), ‘8’ (52), ‘S’ (51), and ‘B’ (16) (‘Z’ just misses the cutoff at 8 occurrences).
Having successfully identified two plaintext words and determined the consonantal values of six Currier glyphs, it is now necessary to explain why further application of this key produces gibberish. This is a reef multiple previous proposed decipherments using cribs have run aground on, so I see no reason not to follow their example and double down, insisting on the patently obvious correctness of the deciphered cribs and maintaining that further study will no doubt solve the problem. Beyond the far less standardized spelling common in the late 15th century, part of the incomprehensibility may be a result of Baldrick having written portions of the manuscript. While no texts written by him survive, it is known that a Victorian-era descendant of his had such appalling spelling that he gave Mr. Ebenezer Blackadder a holiday card which managed to misspell "Christmas" so badly that it didn't include any of the actual letters in the word [10].
It might also be objected that the reign of Prince Edmund’s father, King Richard IV, (1485 to 1498) falls outside the 95% probability interval of 1404 and 1435 generated by C-14 dating of vellum samples from the manuscript [11]. As it has been scientifically established that there were heaps of unused vellum just lying around waiting for later use, I don’t see that this objection has any force.
Speculating further on the yet-undeciphered content of the manuscript, I would suggest that the so-called “Zodiac” folios are, in fact, Prince Edmund’s list of conquests – similar to that of the legendary Don Juan [12] but arranged by the zodiac sign of the lady in question rather than country of residence, with Baldrick as the Prince's Leporello. Such a large set of paramours would make him a worthy great-great-great-great-grandson of Edward III, who sired so many children that one estimate has it that the probability that a Briton born in the 1970s isn't related to Edward III is as small as 0.0000000000000000000000000001 [13]. If my hypothesis is correct, then it is as least as likely that almost all current Britons have a little bit of Prince Edmund’s DNA in them as well. (Ironically, the large number of Britons with a little bit of his DNA in them was one of the reasons cited by two of the three popes at the time in their Bulls excommunicating Prince Edmund after an unfortunate incident in a nunnery in November of 1487 [14].)
Given the confirmation this provides for the reality of the reign of Richard IV (written out of the history books for centuries by people like Alison Weir [15]), an additional avenue of research this decipherment opens up is the extent to which Henry VII was responsible for the broader fabrication of British history uncovered by A. T. Fomenko and G.V.Nosovskij. They claim "...ancient and medieval English events are to be transferred to the epoch which begins from 9-10th cc....many of these events prove to be the reflections of certain events from real Byzantine-Roman history of 9-15th cc." [16]. Thus, for instance, they claim that the English King William I (conventionally 1066-1087 C.E.) and the Byzantine Emperor Theodore I Lascaris (conventionally 1204-1222 C.E.) were, in fact, the same person. While they blame Scaliger and Petavius for this confusion, the distortions of English history pointed out by the narrator in [17] suggest Henry VII as an equally likely contributor/culprit:
”History has known many great liars: Copernicus, Goebbels, St Ralph the Liar -- but there have been none quite so vile as the Tudor king Henry VII. It was he who rewrote history to portray his predecessor Richard III as a deformed maniac who killed his nephews in the Tower. But the real truth is that Richard was a kind and thoughtful man who cherished his young wards. In particular: Richard, Duke of York, who grew into a big, strong boy. Henry also claimed he won the Battle of Bosworth Field and killed Richard III. Again, the truth is very different; for it was Richard, Duke of York, who became king after Bosworth Field, and reigned for thirteen glorious years.”
No doubt additional light will be shed on those glorious years as further progress is made deciphering the manuscript following the initial chink I have opened in its armor. If so, no doubt there will be books written about me, and songs sung about me, and the History Channel will show episodes from my life weekly at half past nine starring some great heroic actor of our age in the lead role.
Assuming, of course, that Alison Weir doesn't put out a hit on me....
References:
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[2] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. respectively
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[9] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[10] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (“However, be that as it may...’A Merry Messy Christmas.’ ‘Christmas’ has an H in it, Mr. Baldrick....and an R. Also an I, and an S. Also T and M and A....and another S. Oh, and you’ve missed out the C at the beginning. Congratulations, Mr. Baldrick! Something of a triumph, I think — you must be the first person ever to spell `Christmas’ without getting any of the letters right at all.” The title card at the end reveals that Baldrick had spelled it "Kweznuz" after initially trying and crossing out "Kwelfnuve.”)
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[12] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[13] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[14] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (quoting the Mother Superior of the nunnery: “And finally, you got two knights drunk and invited them to come and wrestle with you inside the nunnery in an orgy of heathen perversity?...it has the unmistakable ring of truth to it, and I must therefore tell you that this morning I have written urgently to all three popes recommending your immediate excommunication. Nevermore may you be Archbishop of Canterbury!”)
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)