this is odd

A couple of weeks ago, when I was surfing for images to steal for the cover of my collection of short stories, I came across some photos of the Voynich manuscript, which I'd never heard of before. I looked at this mysterious, unattributed manuscript, and thought two things:

1. Neat.

2. Bet that's fake.

Now Neil Gaiman's posted a link about the manuscript in his blog.

I should say that I don't regard this as a Meaningful Coincidence. Most cited examples of synchronicity are conclusive evidence of sloppy thinking. It only makes sense that both Neil G. and I would be interested in inexplicable manuscripts.

The article is from Scientific American, which I used to read back when it was cool. It covers most of my ideas about the source of the manuscript (hoax or delusion):

"Voynichese is also much more complex than anything found in pathological speech caused by brain damage or psychological disorders."

and intruduces me to the Cardan grille, almost as interesting as the Voynich itself. If you've ever seen the movie Con Air, Cyrus the Virus uses a Cardan grille to communicate jailbreak plans to his Rag-Tag Gang of Misfits. It was invented by this gentleman.

The author of the article proves you can generate a similarly complex and pseudolinguistic manuscript using just a grille, but with a fairly elaborate nested process. For someone familiar with computer science, this isn't a particularly strange thing to do, but is it very 16th century? Still, this goes a long way to convincing me:
"Elizabethan scholar John Dee and his disreputable associate Edward Kelley visited the court of Rudolf II during the 1580s. Kelley was a notorious forger, mystic and alchemist who was familiar with Cardan grilles. Some experts on the Voynich manuscript have long suspected that Kelley was the author."

There you go. Devious magician types. Liable to do anything, even create finicky fake coded languages.

And John Dee (via a comics character whose connection to the original I do not know) features, of course, in Sandman.

--rf

I'm kidding. Scientific American was never cool.