kaos

Deception is the keynote of the whole. Nothing is what it seems to be. His beautifully
written characters are all shams. They look like a, s, m, n, and so on, but they are nothing
of the kind. Nearly every one is built up with amazing skill and ingenuity out of
microscopic shorthand characters. He was the only man on earth possessed of a good
microscope, and he relies upon it as part of his apparatus of concealment. I have long
known the fact that his letters were built up out of significant elements and had been
using an ordinary reading glass to help resolve them, but only about four months ago,
when it occurred to me to turn a pretty strong microscope upon them, did I discover that
nearly all the letters which I had been taking as wholes were really perfect nests of tiny
characters.
It never seemed to have occurred to him that this was simply the way the pigmented
ink had cracked with age on the vellum parchment. The feasibility of meticulously
writing microscopic shorthand signs such that they built up into letters, words, and
sentences that have every appearance of otherwise being fast-flowing freehand strokes
in another language is not something Newbold addressed, so convinced was he he was
right.
Newbold read all sorts of things into the ms., and spared no effort to understand it,
he thought nothing of learning Catalan to resolve a small point. As a boy he had been
thrilled by Sir Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains, and copied a cuneiform text by
impressing a clay tablet with a stylus. He baked the tablet in the oven and buried it,
amusing himself with the thought that one day it might be dug up and lead some
scholar to propose the Assyrian conquest of New Jersey. It’s hard not to like and even
admire Newbold for the enthusiasm he brought to his task and to think of something
that is never mentioned by those who see in Newbold only a tragic misguided figure:
the sheer joy he must have felt to believe he had cracked the Voynich manuscript, that
he was really onto something, a delusion that sustained him and held him fast in a
fascination for years until his death. His descriptions of the folios are fully given over to
the boundless eccentricity one might expect on realising that the researcher has tipped
over into genuine madness and left his critical faculties behind. The Voynich ms. became
for Newbold a skrying mirror capable of drawing out subconscious imaginings he then
projected onto the otherwise unintelligible words and in the end he could, quite literally,
read the text. Who is to say that this is not the method? Might one by skrying the
manuscript as intently as one might peer into a crystal globe or Aztec obsidian mirror
come to be able to read it? The difficulty is in knowing for certain whether what one has
seen is actually there.
Is to understand Voynich 408 necessarily going to be a descent into madness? There
are demons in the Goetia that may be evoked to teach a student how to unencrypt
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