New Blog post: "Mysterious Steganography"- a Damning Observation

[davidjackson]

My point is that... real or fake... most if not all of the unidentified languages and scripts in the 17th century were, by 1912, at least identified if not read. So for any language or characters to be both unidentifiable in the 1600's, AND then still be unidentifiable in 1912, is staggeringly unlikely. It strongly implies to me that... in order for this to be the case... the 1912 script and language would have to be invented around 1912, in order to fulfill the 17th century descriptions of "unknown" and "mysterious".

That's not really the argument, actually. Whether or not the same script was mysterious in both the 17th and 21st centuries or not is irrelevant, because that doesn't provide a link.
 
Your point is that it would have to be a script unknown to Western linguistics in the 17th century, but which fits the Voynich template.
I repeat what I have written before:

• The first is something that has been copied from a book and sent to him; he calls it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. writing. He does not analyse it, but says it would be easy enough, except that at the moment he has not the time; he promises to return to it when leisure allows.
  
  • This strongly suggests to me that Kircher is not looking at something unintelligible like cipher text, but something with a hidden meaning. Steganographici as a word existed since Tristhemius’s 1499 Stagnographii. This book was on the Prohibited List of the Church so Kircher would not, as a devoted Jesuit, have been able to read it; notwithstanding that, there were several popular books examining the work that weren’t banned and were freely available. As a linguist and a mathematician, Kircher would certainly be aware of the difference between steganographici and descifrando – he uses the latter term in his 1665 letter to Marci (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
    

[..]
The transcription of a book he was sent? The word staganographici, together with “a shrine of text”, worries me. It implies that the cover text was legible and had an apparent meaning, but that there was a hidden message to those who could “open the doors” and read it. That would not fit the VM, which was later to be described by Kircher himself as encrypted (he uses a definite term in 1665, decrypting). Furthermore, Kircher made no attempt to identify the alphabet or suggests that it is unknown (unlike in the next paragraph, where he does so for “the other sheet”), which seems to indicate that the alphabet was recognisable to all parties concerned. Again, this hinges entirely on the use of one word; but if Kircher had a choice of terms to use (encrypted or steganographic), and as a prominent linguist and mathematician, why use the more obscure term?

What I think we can take away from this letter is that in 1639 Kircher replies to Moretus saying he’s glanced at a handwritten excerpt or copy of a book he has been sent; that it is steganographic; that he has solved such problems before and is sure he could solve this one, except that he’s quite busy at the moment.
And we know that 17 month before Moretus was asked to pass on a handwritten excerpt from a book we assume to be the Voynich Manuscript to Kircher for his analysis. 17 months for this request to go across Europe across three parties, be looked at, then replied is not overly excessive I suppose, although it would far outlive my attention span in our digital age. Correspondents in the Republic of Letters were used to waits of months for their letters to be sent and replied to, and Barschius was not a member of the Republic, but acting through Moretus as his intermediary. Kircher had spent several months travelling around southern Italy in 1638, no doubt a lot of correspondence built up at the Colegio Romano for his attention when he returned.