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Welcome to The Eclectarium of Doctor Shuker, showcasing the varied interests of Dr Karl Shuker beyond cryptozoology - everything from fantasy art and literature, James Dean, masks, science-fiction, motorbikes, clowns, ancient civilisations, Forteana, esoteric science anomalies, philately, Sherlock Holmes, animation, the supernatural, rock 'n' roll music, quiz trivia, and much more. If it's unusual, intriguing, and obscure, it may well appear here, sooner or later!
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Monday 14 July 2014
ShukerNature: CREEPY CREATIONS AND CRYPTOZOOLOGY – MONSTROUSLY-AWESOME ARTWORK FROM SHIVER AND SHAKE
ShukerNature: CREEPY CREATIONS AND CRYPTOZOOLOGY – MONSTROUSLY-AWESOME ARTWORK FROM SHIVER AND SHAKE: The Turkish Turn-Eyed Twitter – one of my favourite Creepy Creations (© Kevin Reid/IPC) Unless, like me, you were a child or early...
Tuesday 6 May 2014
ShukerNature: THE BIG GREY MAN OF BEN MACDHUI - BRITAIN'S VERY OWN BIGFOOT?
ShukerNature: THE BIG GREY MAN OF BEN MACDHUI - BRITAIN'S VERY OWN BIGFOOT?: Ben MacDhui’s principal claim to fame is that, at 4296 ft (1309 m), it is the highest mountain in the Cairngorms range and is second ...
Wednesday 2 April 2014
PRESENTING THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT - THE WORLD'S MOST BAFFLING BOOK
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 32, depicting unrecognisable plant forms (public domain) NB - please click on each picture in this article (and also in all of my other blog articles) to obtain an enlarged view.
Amid the vast store of knowledge
contained within Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is
a unique manuscript lavishly illustrated with colour paintings of strange
plants and astronomical/astrological symbols, not to mention a varied selection
of what its researchers refer to as 'nymphs' (i.e. nude women). The only
problem is that the ornate script of the text in this very remarkable book is
written in a wholly unknown language that has withstood all attempts in modern
times to decipher it.
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 170, including fold-out sections (public domain)
This baffling tome (which is over
200 pages long – though some pages are missing - and also includes several
fold-out, multi-part pages) is known as the Voynich Manuscript. It is named
after New York-based Polish book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich who purchased it in
1912 from the library of the Villa Mondragone, a former Jesuit college in the
commune of Frascati, central Italy. Accompanying the manuscript when he
purchased it was a letter dated 1666, written to the famous Jesuit scholar
Athanasius Kircher (died 1680) by his former tutor, the eminent Bohemian
doctor/scientist Johannes Marcus Marci (died 1667). In his letter, Marci
claimed that the manuscript's author had been identified as Roger Bacon, a 13th-Century
Franciscan friar who was also an outstanding
English proto-scientist/alchemist, by one of the manuscript's most illustrious previous
owners - the Holy Roman Emperor and Bavarian king Rudolf II (died 1612). In 2009,
however, precise internal carbon-14-dating of its vellum by researchers from
the University of Arizona revealed that it had actually been created two
centuries later, some time between 1404 and 1458, probably originating in
northern Italy during the Renaissance.
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 158 - multi-page representations of inexplicable astronomical and/or
astrological symbols (public domain)
Rudolf II passed the manuscript to
Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (died 1622), who presided over the emperor's
botanical gardens, from whom it somehow found its way into the ownership of
Georg Baresch, a Prague alchemist. Unable to decode its contents, in 1639 Baresch
sent samples of it to Kircher, in the hope that this acclaimed scholar and
code-breaker could succeed where he had failed, but there is no record of any
results obtained by Kircher, though he did seek, unsuccessfully, to purchase
the manuscript from Baresch. Following Baresch's death in 1662, however, it was
acquired by Marci, who did pass it on to Kircher – but what happened to it
then, and, indeed, for the next two centuries, is unknown. However, in or
around the 1870s, along with Kircher's collected correspondence from a lifetime
of scholarly research and writings, the manuscript found its way into the
personal libraries of the faculty of the Collegio Romano (which is now the
Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome), and thence to the Villa Mondragone,
where in 1912 it was seen and purchased by Voynich.
After purchasing it, Voynich made
copies of this puzzling manuscript available to many of the world's leading
code-breakers, including British and American teams previously and subsequently
employed in cipher interpretation during the two World Wars, as well as ancient
language researchers - but all to no avail. Not only is the language resolutely
incomprehensible, most of the illustrated species of flower do not even exist!
In fact, many seem to be chimerical, combining portions from several totally
separate species (e.g. the flowers of one species combined with the roots of a
second species and the leaves of a third). Indeed, as noted by Gerry Kennedy
and Rob Churchill in their comprehensive investigative book The Voynich
Manuscript (2004), it is as if even the very illustrations themselves have
been encrypted – and perhaps they have!
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 66, depicting some additional unidentifiable plants (public domain)
Voynich died in 1930, after which
the manuscript passed to his widow, Ethel Lilian, and when she died in 1960, she
bequeathed it to her good friend Anne Nill, who in turn sold it the following
year to antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus. However, Kraus's attempts even to
market it (let alone translate it) ended in such disappointment that in 1969 he
donated the exasperating tome to Yale University, where it still resides to
this day, officially catalogued there as Beinecke MS 408.
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 24 (public domain)
But who was the author of this
most extraordinary of tomes, and how did it come into the possession of Rudolf
II? These questions frame a mystery just as sizeable, a controversy just as
considerable, as the nature of this manuscript's contents. Voynich thought it
likely that the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf II was none other than
esteemed English mathematician, scholar, and mage John Dee (1527-1608).
However, his belief stemmed from Marci's mistaken claim that the manuscript had
once been owned by Roger Bacon (Voynich was aware that Dee had possessed a
notable collection of Bacon's manuscripts), but Marci's claim was of course
discounted almost half a century after Voynich's death by the radiocarbon-dating
results that placed the manuscript's creation two centuries after Bacon had
died. So Bacon had never owned it, nor could he have authored it – a popular
theory prior to the radiocarbon tests.
Several other historical figures,
including Marci himself, have been named as potential authors by various
researchers, but none is convincing in this role. Moreover, some investigators have
even deemed it possible that Voynich himself created the manuscript – i.e. a
skilful modern-day forgery that someone with his specialised knowledge of
antiquarian books and documents might have successfully accomplished. However,
the very precise internal nature of the radiocarbon-dating would seem to
invalidate this hypothesis.
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 78, containing the famous, so-called 'nymphs in a bathtub' illustration (public domain)
As for what the Voynich Manuscript
actually represents – once again, the theories are as diverse as they are
diverting. Among the identities offered to explain it are that it represents an
attempt to devise an artificial language; it is an extravagant hoax that has no
meaning whatsoever; it is an example of spirit-mediated automatic writing; or it
is an exceedingly peculiar herbal or pharmacopoeia. However, one of the very
few persons to achieve even the slightest degree of success in exposing its secrets,
Yale University's own Professor Robert S. Brumbaugh (author of The World's
Most Mysterious Manuscript, 1977), considers it to be an alchemical work -
such works are well known for their intricate symbolism and cryptic text. A few
scribbled calculations in the manuscript's margins led him to formulating a
code whereby he was able to decipher some of the names of those few illustrated
plants in it that are recognisable species, and also certain stars. Aside from
that, the text's contents continue to remain a complete mystery.
I too have speculated that it may
conceivably be an elaborate alchemical treatise. The reason why such works were
so fiendishly (but purposefully) impenetrable was so that only bona fide
alchemists could translate them and discover the lore that they contained -
thereby protecting them, and their alchemist readers, from persecution and
obliteration by contemporary religious zealots who considered alchemy to be
blasphemous and a dark art.
Bizarre plant-animal
hybrids depicted in the Codex Seraphinianus (© Luigi Serafini/Franco
Maria Ricci)
The hoax identity for the Voynich
Manuscript is also intriguing, if only because there is at least one very
relevant precedent in existence – the Codex Seraphinianus. Originally
published in Italy by Franco Maria Ricci in 1981, this is another fascinating
tome, consisting of two volumes each of 127 pages, which are packed throughout with
gorgeous multicoloured illustrations of grotesque non-existent plants (and all
manner of phantasmagorical animals too, as well as bizarre anatomies, food, and
fashion) plus text written in an indecipherable language and unique script.
Miraculous
mer-folk(?) from the Codex Seraphinianus (© Luigi Serafini/Franco
Maria Ricci)
However, the origin of this ostensibly
enigmatic work is not – and never has been - in dispute. It is the creation of
Italian artist and designer Luigi Serafini, who expressly prepared it between
1976 and 1978 in order to demonstrate that a highly complex and very perplexing
manuscript but one without any meaning to it whatsoever could indeed be produced.
Fabulous flora from
the Codex Seraphinianus
(© Luigi Serafini/Franco Maria Ricci)
Incidentally, if, like me, you are
fascinated by spellbinding works such as this one, you will be pleased to learn
that the Codex Seraphinianus is readily available to purchase (albeit at
a not-inconsiderable price) here on
Amazon's UK site and here on its USA
site.
A scene from the
weird wonderland depicted in the Codex Seraphinianus
(© Luigi Serafini/Franco Maria Ricci)
The nature of the Voynich
Manuscript text's language has attracted several different suggestions. As
noted earlier, one such suggestion is that it constitutes an artificial,
constructed language. Others include the possibility that it is an example of
micrography (i.e. its meaning is concealed within the construction of each text
character), or of steganography (i.e. its true message is hidden within another,
outer message), or is a little-known natural language written in a manufactured
alphabet. Alternatively, perhaps it is a more familiar language but which has
been purposefully rendered obscure by mapping it through a cipher to the
manuscript's alphabet. Or could it be a series of codes needing to be looked up
in a codebook – but if so, where and what is this crucial codebook?
Close-up of the
Voynich Manuscript text's elegant but esoteric script (public domain)
On 20 February 2014, media articles
around the world reported the claim by linguistics professor Stephen Bax that
he had made a breakthrough in that he had successfully identified and
deciphered various astronomical and botanical proper nouns (numbering 10 in total) within the manuscript's
text, including the constellation Taurus, what appears to be the seven-member
Pleiades star cluster, and 'kantairon' – a word seemingly alluding to the herb
commonly known as centaury, popular in medieval times. However, it was stressed
that Prof. Bax had not solved the entire mystery of the manuscript's meaning,
but that he was reporting what he had uncovered so far in order to encourage
others to investigate and help decode this centuries-old riddle.
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 80 (public domain)
When I wrote the original, much shorter
version of this account back in 1995, for inclusion in my forthcoming book The Unexplained, I wondered if Yale University
had considered the idea of self-publishing the Voynich Manuscript, selling it
in their bookshops and any others willing to stock it, and announcing in a
blaze of media publicity that a handsome prize would be given to anyone who
succeeded in deciphering the manuscript and made their methods available for
independent scrutiny. (In 2005, a facsimile edition was indeed published, with
an introduction in French.)
Having said that, perhaps it is no
bad thing that the radiocarbon-dating tests have demonstrated that this
mystifying manuscript is not the work of Roger Bacon. After all, bearing in
mind his fame in accurately predicting all manner of major scientific
inventions and principles many centuries before they were formally conceived, who
knows, this extraordinary manuscript might contain secrets best left
undiscovered, even in this modern-day age.
But now that we live in the world of the internet
and already have immediate online access to an ever-expanding, near-limitless
corpus of knowledge, such concerns are of little avail. Indeed, among this
incalculable quantity of online data is none other than the Voynich Manuscript
itself – because a complete high-resolution scan of it can be freely accessed
and downloaded here directly from Yale
University,
and also here
from the U.S. Archives.
Voynich Manuscript,
p. 176 (public domain)
So if you enjoy cryptology – the study and
application of codes and code-breaking techniques – why not visit this virtual
Voynich tome right now, and who knows? Perhaps you may be the one to prise
forth at long last its abstruse, opaque secrets from its
beautifully-illustrated and elegantly-scripted but currently still-bemusing
pages.
This present Eclectarium post article of mine is a
much-expanded and updated version of my original account of the Voynich
manuscript that appeared in my book The Unexplained: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Natural and Paranormal Mysteries (Carlton: London, 1996).
And finally - I just can't resist: here's one last, gloriously-inexplicable illustration from the totally splendiferous Codex Seraphinianus, a copy of which will definitely be added to my library very shortly!
Unique, mesmerising, arcane - welcome to the surreal, spectacular world of the Codex Seraphinianus
(© Luigi Serafini/Franco Maria Ricci)
Tuesday 1 April 2014
ShukerNature: REMEMBERING MY MOTHER
ShukerNature: REMEMBERING MY MOTHER: Mom, wearing the beautiful protea-decorated coat that she purchased in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2008 (© Dr Karl Shuker)
Friday 28 March 2014
SHERLOCK HOLMES VS THE SPECKLED BAND AND THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA
My Sherlock Holmes toby jug confronts
the Giant Rat of Sumatra! (© Dr Karl Shuker)
When I first opened my Eclectarium, I promised that
it would include some Sherlockian exhibits, and I am nothing if not a man of my
word.
So now, courtesy of my ShukerNature blog, I have
great pleasure in presenting not one but two of the great fictional detective's
most daunting foes of the zoological kind. Click here
to face the creeping terror that is the dreaded Speckled Band; and click here to encounter the mysterious – and monstrous –
Giant Rat of Sumatra.
Thursday 27 March 2014
MY TOP TEN MOST ECCENTRIC FESTIVALS IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND
The straw bear of Whittlesey, 2008 (Kev747/Wikipedia)
What do dwyle flunking, goat crowning, straw bears dancing, a village packed full of human-sized faceless scarecrows, and fireball flinging all have in common? They all feature in some of the most bizarre, eccentric festivals held annually in various parts of the British Isles. I recently penned an article that presented my personal top ten examples, which has just been published by Enterprise Magazine and can be accessed online here. So if you're looking for something out of the ordinary to visit and perhaps even participate in this year, be sure to check it out!
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