I mentioned before that I joined a mailing list of a group of folks working to
decipher the Voynich Manuscript.

These people have a wide range of personalities and backgrounds. The one common
thread I see is the SAN loss that occurs whenever they feel they have found a
sudden insight. It's really interesting looking at it from a meta-list
viewpoint. There are people on both sides of every fence. The most common fence
is the one where one side looks at the other and says, "You've gone batty" while
the other side looks back and says, "You just don't get it."

The manuscript seems to be like a Rorschach inkblot: Everybody can see something
in it, but there can be no consensus as to it's contents.

Some of these people claim to have "proof" that it's an elaborate hoax dreamed
up by a medieval genius. The most vocal of these are those who have come up with
ciphers that can make "Voynichese writing" (as they all call it). This is much
akin to the random word generator at http://www.fourteenminutes.com/fun/words/ .
These folks think that because they have found an artificial way to create
gibberish that looks like Voynichese, that must mean that it's an artificial
language. So single-minded are they in their obsession that they can't conceive
of another explanation.

Then there are those who argue about what language it was actually enciphered
from, all of them assuming that it's written in code. Most think Italian. My
favorite conjecture is that some of the words are "obviously" of American Indian
origin. This is another of those fences where people on each side just can't
quite get along.

Today, a post came in that I think I'm going to go with insofar as my DG world
is concerned - simply because it's so unlike any if the other posts. A
cryptologist posted to the list for the first time this morning, after having
been "gripped in the interest of the Voynich Manuscript" for a year. She has no
musical training, yet feels that she has discovered that the entire manuscript
may be a kind of musical tablature in four movements. She points out that many
of the illustrations look like they could be artistic renditions of odd
instrument parts. She also mentions that some of the very things that have
caused many people to think it's an artificial language would actually be useful
in transcribing musical notation.

Here's an excerpt from her post:

The alphabet consists of at least five blocks of four characters each, that
are
very similar and differs only in the number of strokes (in most
transcriptions
namely i). This is much like the notes nowadays do or do not have a tail
and
additional 'feathers'. Notes do have two main parameters: frequency and
length.
Today frequency is drawn as location of the note inside a grid. This may be
well
done as different characters also. The length is usually drawn as
modifications
of the note in terms of tail and feathers, which could be also made by
additional
i-s. So the most common word "daiin" may consist of a prefix da telling
something about transposition, use of instrument, tempo or whatever and the
note n as a 1/4 note.

Obviously, she's put a lot of thought and analysis into this.

But here's what struck me: We had a discussion on this list a while back whose
subject line was, IIRC, Music of the Stars. The idea was that the ultra-subsonic
sound waves being produced by every heavenly body are constantly in flux and
that, at some point in the future, the stars would come right and the
frequencies would combine to shatter the locks of the prison of Cthulhu. We
conjectured that the requisite chord or song might be recorded somewhere. Well,
now we know it is.

The Voynich Manuscript is the written form of the starsong which will free the
Great Cthulhu!

This can be put to great use, no matter which side you're on. Build the
instrument(s) required to play this piece, learn to read the language of those
who transcribed the music, and play the doom-filled note and the endtimes are
upon us. Or, use the same instrument at the right time to play a
carefully-crafted counter-song and spoil the chord played naturally by the stars
to earn yourself a few more millennia.

The question is, where did the book come from?

Since it would need to be quite a lot older than it appears to be, I'd say that
some time warping is certainly in order. This points most obviously to a Yithian
connection. (True, only their minds travel through time, but they have contact
with other species who can physically make the trip.) The reason I'd pick
Yithians over one of the other traveling beasties is the fact that this thing
has been recorded in a book - a Yithian specialty.

So, during the wars when Cthulhu and his posse were imprisoned, there was a
Yithian around watching the proceedings. (Or at least somebody who was
subsequently nabbed by the Yithians and made to write.) A prison was built and
needed a lock. To make the lock, they had to know what the key would be like.
So, they crafted a song of the stars and put it into their rituals which shaped
the lock. Yithians, never ones to give up such knowledge, wrote the whole thing
down in case it would ever come in handy.

Then another Yithian came back from a trip to some time early in the 21'st
century and said, "Hey, we need to make sure that door gets unlocked before what
I just saw comes to pass." They conferred, and decided from what they knew of
the hairless apes that would be inhabiting the planet at that time that it would
take around 500 years or so for us to figure out how to decipher it. So, they
handed it off to somebody (say, oh, a Hound of Tindalos who was only too happy
to be an instrument that would bring about the downfall of the inhabitants of
our planet a few centuries later) who brought it to Rudolph II and sold it to
him for a pretty penny.

Thus, the book which was written when the world was young has an apparent age
putting it in the late 1400's to early 1500's.

Thoughts?

Marshall


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