I've written about the Voynich manuscript here only once, years ago. Here's a quick review: Wilfred Voynich was an early 20th century ms dealer, and the manuscript that bears his name was a mysterious book he bought from the Jesuits, a book that originated in the 15th century (something carbon dating has confirmed). In the century since Voynich made its existence known to the world, nobody has been able to make hide nor hair of it, except for the guess -- based on the illustrations -- that its a medical or pharmacological text. The usual guess has been that the author performed some sort of cryptographical trickery upon Hebrew, although even that still isn't a matter of consensus. And, even if it were, that wouldn't get the job done. What trickery? Now some new information. A team of Canadian scientists think their algorithm has worked it out. Or at least parts of it. They derive this as the first sentence of the text, translated and decoded, " She made...
Posts
Following up on yesterday's observation. The original Hebrew word for Satan is a noun meaning obstruction or opposition. Likewise, the Greek "diabolos" means "slanderer." These are hardly terms one employs for a faithful employee. So the etymology would seem to pose a problem for the warden/functionary view I mentioned yesterday. But well after the origin of such terms, and well before Dante's time, Satan had taken on some of the contours of a functionary. The concept of a Great Chain of Being suggests, after all, a harmonious universe where everything has its place, presided over by God, so that the very concept of an active adversary of God on the cosmic level comes to seem absurd, and there is little left but room for a warden who is sometimes also a trickster. The Nicolas Cage movie DRIVE ANGRY comes to mind in this connection.
A common political meme, "Lots of money is going to waste doing x. Think of all the better things we [some collective 'we'] could do with that money!" This kind of thing seems to have evolved to support taxation of those frivolous activities by various states representing that collective we. I thought of this recently whist reading TUDORS, a recent popular history of the English dynasty of that name written by Peter Ackroyd. When Ackroyd is telling us about the despoliation of the Catholic monasteries by Henry VIII pursuant to his (Henry's) dispute with Rome, he reminds me that this meme is an old one. The monastic life was considered one of the frivolous activities that meme would have 'us' target, as was the veneration of saints, etc. How did it work out? Ackroyd (pictured above) writes thus: "It had previously been proposed that the dissolution of the monasteries was for the higher good for the nation. The incomes of the var...