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OII Halloween Lecture, Illuminating the Illuminated: 
Uncovering Patterns in Indecipherable Books – The Voynich Manuscript

with Dr. Joss Wright

Date & Time:
17:15 - 18:15 GMT
Monday 30 October, 2023

Location:
Oxford Internet Institute, Seminar Room
1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS United Kingdom

Free event. On-site only. No online access. Registration required.

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"The evenings draw in, the candles flicker, the leaves wither and fall.

Ancient fears and dark rumours gather around our darkly dreaming spires.

The anodyne veneer of modern rationality, the brittle lens of our sciences; both falter in the face of primal fears that emerge with the night.

At this time of year, when our resolve against the unknown is at its weakest, we are challenged as scientists to defend and deploy our ideals, our methods, our tools. As Halloween descends we brace ourselves against the umbral tide, and struggle to draw understanding from the darkness around us.

Folklore, legends, myth. Hauntings, strange creatures in the mist, and mysterious lights in the sky. From the earliest terrified reports to modern digital documentation, data describing arcane phenomena has grown and shifted, just as has our capacity, and our stumbling willingness, to interrogate their secrets.

To celebrate the season, you are invited to the annual OII Halloween Lecture.

This year we will delve into the mysteries recorded in the leaves of half-forgotten texts discovered in strange circumstances. The Voynich manuscript is perhaps the most famous and well-documented cryptic tome as yet undeciphered. Written in an unknown alphabet, and filled with peculiar, unearthly diagrams, this 15th century folio has baffled linguists, cryptographers, and intelligence agencies for over three centuries.

In this lecture, we will examine some of the history surrounding the Voynich, and apply statistical tools to explore some of its characterics. A hoax? Or an unfathomable repository of ancient wisdom?

The lecture will be a light-hearted presentation of around thirty minutes, liberally doused with informal discussions on any related topics of interest. Following the talk, we will reconvene at a nearby pub for those brave, or foolhardy, paranormal social scientists who dare to glimpse beyond the murky veil of horrifying reality.


Dr Joss Wright is a Senior Research Fellow, Co-Director of the Oxford EPSRC Cybersecurity Doctoral Training Centre and a Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade. His work focuses on computational approaches to social science questions, with a particular focus on technologies that exert, resist, or subvert control over information.

Joss’ main areas of research are information controls, with a focus on internet censorship and shutdowns; privacy enhancing technologies and data anonymisation; and cybercrime, with a particular focus on the online illegal wildlife trade and its implications for biodiversity and conservation.

Joss gained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of York, where his work focused on the modelling and analysis of anonymous communication systems. Following this, he spent time at the University of Siegen in Germany, researching security and privacy issues in cloud computing. He joined the OII as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2010."

Hi,

I've just finished my second article in my Voynich marathon. It's about distance based ciphers, as an example of one-to-many encoding schemes. I hope you'll like it 

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In the VMS the lines very often end so nicely that one could assume that the last words of a line could be "filler words". If this is so, the last words thus only consist of "character salad", then this could have an effect on whether syllables occur in it and, if so, whether this occurrence deviates in the frequency from other comparison texts. Therefore I counted the syllables in the last word of each line and put them in relation to the total number of lines. The value in the (latin mapped ) VMS deviates very clearly from the Italian divina commedia and the Latin Bible. I would have liked to take the Ackermann (ger) in addition, but unfortunately the text is available to me only reformatted. I would be grateful for links to other, useful comparison texts.


Here are the results in detail:

Dante Alighieri: La divina commedia (ita)
Total letters and spaces: 530871
Total syllables: 161284
Syllable percentage: 30.381015350%
Average syllables per word: 1.651214218
Total syllables in last words of lines: 34805

Average syllables per line ( last words ): 2.427296185


Part of the Bible: Latin Vulgate (lat)
Total letters and spaces: 1252196
Total syllables: 397977
Syllable percentage: 31.782324812%
Average syllables per word: 2.095453971
Total syllables in last words of lines: 24565

Average syllables per line ( last words ): 2.174086202


Voynich Manuscript: (alphabet mapped to latin)
Total letters and spaces: 234658
Total syllables: 55220
Syllable percentage: 23.532119084%
Average syllables per word: 1.457530486
Total syllables in last words of lines: 7528

Average syllables per line ( last words ): 1.442974890

The link to the code:
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Not sure if this belongs to Astrology or Astronomy 

I've spent a few days learning about possible ways of matching planets on f67r2 and created a rather lengthy page about this. It's my first attempt writing about VMS, hope you enjoy it! There are pictures, and charts and even some computer noises 

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Quick summary of the most interesting results:

The chart on f67r2 has a very distinct pattern of planetary labels with a four-in-a-row sequence: 111101010100, that resembles actual astronomical or
astrological charts. If this chart depicts a real astrological or astronomical configuration we can make some guesses about which label belongs to which
planet, considering only where the labels are placed on the circle without trying to interpret the labels themselves.

I tried recreating various astrological patterns and comparing them to f67r2 and found a good match with a partial domicile chart. After this I
encountered the same pattern in 1490x - 1500x editions of De Sphere Mundi. If it's the same pattern, in Voynich manuscript it's rotated 160 degrees
clockwise (putting Jupiter on top).

I've also simulated real sky configurations of the XI - XV centuries and compared them to VMS and De Sphaere Mundi charts.

It's possible to create potential mappings between various labels on f67r2 and astrological/astronomical concepts using this information.

It's hard to put any exact probabilities on these mappings, but overall they look like an interesting venue for in-depth research.

Attaching an image that shows f67r2 with the domicile planetary chart from De Sphaere Mundi put over it, and the label correspondence between two charts.

Attached Files

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The Manuscript was independently published in May 2020 and is a humorous, romantic, historical fiction account of the creation of the Voynich Manuscript, its travels to America to Yale, a secret society trying to solve it, and an aspiring artist named Emma Novak who becomes entangled in their plotting.

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Below is an image of 16 numbered glyphs, all taken from the main text of the VM. All I did was isolate the glyphs from two folios which were by the same scribe, same section (I would have used one folio, but two gave me just a bit more to work with). My question is simple: how would you transliterate these glyphs? Do you draw a line somewhere? One, two, three... different ones? How do you decide between one glyph and the other? Not that I put them in a rough order evolving from one extreme to the other, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily neatly grouped per type.

   

Rules:
* No need to use EVA, you can invent your own system if you wish.
* Most importantly, the aim is not to capture every possible different stroke, but rather to represent each glyph you think is intended to be the same one by the same letter. For example, if you think glyphs 1, 2 and 3 are meant as the same letter and the rest is meant as a different letter, you can write: "A, A, A, B, B, B, B..."
* DO NOT look at any websites or existing transliterations. Just use your own intuition. It doesn't matter whether you're familiar with any existing systems or not.
* There is most definitely no right answer. I don't know the answer, and I'm pretty sure nobody does. I just want to find out how different people would tackle this problem.
* PM me your answer. Even if you use spoiler tags here, people will peek. Please participate, because the more answers I get, the more informative this will be.

I will just leave this clip from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. here to cause some confusion, no need to transcribe that.

   

A contact in Spain sent me the following picture, which appeared on a Spanish TV programme last Friday.
People should identify what is the connection of each of these six images with the Voynich MS.

   

People may use the spoiler tags if they have the answer, or send me a message. I will not respond to each individual message but will post a summary if this happens.

The person who sent me this, also gave me the name of the person in the upper left corner, which helped me a lot, but I do not know if this was also given in the programme.
So I don't include it here .

I am interested in the labels next to the small plants which I intend to use in conjunction with the matching information for textual comparison. So, for example, to compare the text against a root with the matching text against a leaf. I think there is also some scope for comparing herbal paragragh text with the labels of matching small plants. In addition comparison with small plant paragraph text may be of interest.

Hey.

So this came to me as a bit of a surprise and got me quite excited - though it may still be a bit of a long-shot ----
I was recently visiting an exhibition in the Town of Třeboň called "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.". It displays several manuscripts written by a medieval Czech scribe called Kříž z Telče (Crux de Telcz/Cross of Telč) who lived in 1434-1504,  he was a prolific writer on a very wide range of topics including medicine, astronomy, religion, law, alchemy etc.


What caught my attention was the sometimes close resemblance of his style and drawings to those of the voynich manuscript. Moreover, the timeframe (granted Crux lived a little later than the radiocarbon dating of the voynich suggests, but I think it's easily possible that he could have used parchment that was some thirty or so years old) and also the location of origin - Bohemia - seem to line up quite well with what we know about the Voynich.

You can check out for instance folio 176r - 200v of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.manuscript.

And here are some examples:


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Attached Files

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Interest in the VMS at universities seems to continue. The University of Vienna, for example, is offering a seminar on the topic in the winter semester of 2023. Lecturer is Dr. Martina Pippal (art historian).

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