Voynich Manuscript – Centuries old secrets on the verge of being revealed in a real life piece of scholarship.

Going through the blogs I follow, I found that Paleobabble had a link to some new information about the Voynich Manuscript.  For those of you who are interested in esoteric texts or making props for movies or RPGs, this manuscript should be an inspiration.  I know the unraveling of a centuries old mystery certainly piques my interest.

The Voynich Manuscript has been known to the public for only a century although it appears much older.   This book contains fantastic drawings of people and animals and more tantalizing, a text in an unknown language and/or a secret code.  The Voynich Manuscript has been labeled as an outright modern fraud, a secret book of magic, a scholarly or artistic hoax and many other things in the popular press, the most specious link the Voynich Manuscript to Atlantis or space aliens.

Lately some scholars and amateurs have been taking a fresh look at the Voynich Manuscript by attempting to identify the fabulous plants illustrated.  Previously, experts insisted they did not resemble any plant seen by man on this planet.  The new investigators were not so sure.  They threw out all previous presumptions and returned to investigative bedrock, having botanists look at the drawings of the plants, often in historical artistic context of the 1500s.

What they found was that some of the plants could in fact be identified and were not alien species or fantasy items.  They were plants found in Central America about the time of the Conquistadors.  This new approach is exciting because it breaks new ground in attempting to decipher the Voynich Manuscript.  Once you had identified some of the plants, it was logical that the accompanying text would be a reference to the plant itself, thus linking a known object to a work group. 

This is not a new technique because by using comparison and association, linguists managed to translate languages that were previously unreadable to modern people.  The same thing happened when Coptic was used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.  The plants function as a visual Rosetta stone.  If you identify the plant pictured in the Voynich Manuscript, match it up to an Amerind language, then you have a lever to open up the text.   Previously the Mayan glyph written language could be read by using similar techniques.

This is not a full decipherment by any means and the tentative identification of plant/word associations in the Voynich Manuscript, while exciting will have to be followed up by years of scholarship and peer validation.  See the following articles:  http://m.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-botanical-council-publishes-revolutionary-analysis-unlocking-mysteries-of-500-year-old-manuscript-241140041.html  and  http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1689897#ixzz2sH68WeEh 

Botanist Arthur Tucker and information technologist Rexford Talbert have managed to identify 37 plants depicted as plants from the Americas, notably in Mexico. They similarly identified six animals and one mineral. They also have identified several plant names in the text as being written in Nahuatl, a Native-American language from modern day Mexico. The calligraphy of the manuscript bears resemblance to the calligraphy of another 16th century Mexican Codex, the Codex Cruz-Badianus from 1552.

The original article in The Herbal Gram is Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript  by Dr Arthur Tucker and Rex Talbert  which is about their findings in their botanical attack on unlocking the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.  The original article can be found in full here:  http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-voynich.html

The Voynich Manuscript is now safely housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  You can view images of the Voynich Manuscript here:  http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_manuscrito07a.htm

I've always loved unusual and old manuscripts and seeing The Voynich Manuscript beginning to give up its secrets is exciting.  I hope you will follow some of the links and explore the articles.
                                                                                                                           CoastConFan

PROPPING UP THE MYTHS – PALEOBABBLE STYLE

Propnomicon Expedition Patch

One of my favorite blog sites is one called Paleobabble.  It is generally comprised of actual scientists and experts debunking hoaxes and pop culture twaddle.  The 21 January 2012 post on Paleobabble leads to an article talking about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse belief. 

    Update May 2014, Paleobabble has moved to a new location 
    although the old articles will remain in place, for the time    
    being although comments are closed.

As I read the article, I was surprised to find that H. P.Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is given some credit in anthropological circles for the pop Maya Apocalypse genre.  The following is part of a fascinating interview by Maggie Koeroth-Baker interviewing anthropologist John Hoopes.

 

Propnomicon prop creature

 Here is an excerpt:  “Also, the most recent research I’ve been doing, and I haven’t published on this yet, but I’m finding links between the work of H.P. Lovecraft and influence of that on 2012. Michael Coe was a huge Lovecraft fan, even. I’m working on a manuscript on that right now. But Lovecraft is at the root of a lot of the ideas here, like the cycles of destruction, for instance. That’s not Mayan, that’s Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself had a lot of skepticism and felt that spiritualism was appropriate for fiction but didn’t believe any of it in everyday reality, and he kind of used his fiction as a way to mock those beliefs a little. But now that’s being used as reality.”

 

Brendon Lenzi bottle

I really urge you to read the article in full and follow the links.  I was surprised at how powerful the diverse influences as Age of Aquarius hippies, horror fiction (H. P. Lovecraft),  Aldous Huxley, and others  in archeo-mythology and pseudo-archeology.

Its funny how this feedback loop exists between fiction writers and pop culture “facts”.   Who knows, the props featured on such sites as Propnomicon and the like, may eventually be enshrined as fact in a few centuries, or maybe even sooner. 

 

                                                          CoastConFan

Florian Mellies desk of horrors

PaleoBabble and A Breath of Rational Air

Just as James Randi debunks fake paranormal and circus phenomena masquerading as truth, PaleoBabble by Mike Heiser is a great site involved with debunking a smorgasbord of historical, archeological, anthropological, and scientific logical fallacies, some of which are long-standing, some obscure, and a number of “popular” bits of twaddle that inhabit the Nut-O-Sphere.   Primarily, the method of debunking is simply using scientific method, good scholarship, and showing complete context of the object or subject.  I highly recommend PaleoBabble to people interested in history, artifacts and have a bent towards rationality, logic and a belief in scientific method.


For those of you making props for the  Call of Cthulhu RPG and film genre, this site is a great warehouse of information for mining in making objects for movies and games. Nobody making CoC props are attempting to hoax the scientific community or make wild claims about authenticity of these items, but it is nice to view some of the prime fake objects of the past to get a feel for the genre. We all have a lot of fun with CoC and props and I am sure that everybody involved in the gaming community really enjoys a finely crafted and presented gaming or movie props. Dig through PaleoBabble’s blog archives to see some exploded myths and hoaxes with a dash of scintillating repartee in the archaeological and scientific community.
                                                                                                    CoastConFan

Update May 2014:  Mike Heiser has moved PaleoBabble to new digs at http://drmsh.com/.  The articles are still available at the old location, although comments have ended there.  Lots of luck to his new new site.