In search of the Voynich authors, the following renowned documents were considered and studied. This current book presents the discovery and decryption of ciphers concealed in these works.
Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
This mysterious Renaissance opus was first published in 1499. It is written in a strange language mixing mainly Latin and Italian language elements. Similarly to the Voynich manuscript, this document bears no author name either. Based on implicit evidences (architectural clues and numerology), Lefaivre (2005) and March (2015) suggested that the author of this Renaissance opus was Leon Battista Alberti.
This current book provides explicit evidence of Alberti’s authorship and presents the discovery and decryption of some concealed ciphers therein.
Johannes Trithemius’ Steganographia
Written around 1500 (the same time that Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia was first published), Trithemius’ Steganographia represents the first book-sized treatise on Western cryptography [Reeds98, Strasser07]. Ernst (1996) and Reeds (1998) discovered and solved a number-based cipher in Tabula punctualis of Book III in Trithemius’ Steganographia.
This current book presents the discovery and decryption of an embedded, non-local, context-dependent cipher concealed in the solution of Tabula punctualis. In addition, further concealed ciphers are presented here that were discovered and decypted in the Conjurations of Book I and II of Trithemius’ Steganographia. These non-local, context-dependent ciphers appear closely related to John Dee’s Enochian cipher.
John Dee’s Enochian Texts
Allegedly, through their angelic conferences, John Dee, together with his scryer Edward Kelly, created the mysterious Enochian texts during the late 16th century [Laycock01]. Already 300 years ago, the English polymath Robert Hooke suspected that these contained a cipher [Hooke1705], but nobody was able find it yet.
This current book presents the discovery and decryption of John Dee’s concealed Enochian cipher and relates it to the Voynich and Trithemius ciphers.
John Dee’s Handbell Cipher
The 163 mysterious Greek letters carved into the inside of Emperor Rudolf II’s Alchemical Handbell (created around 1600) posed a long-standing enigma [Bean23].
This current book presents the decryption of this fascinating cipher and proves that it was also created by John Dee. This utmost cunning polyphonic cipher turned out to be closely related to the Voynich and Enochian ciphers, and it was constructed based on Roger Bacon’s cryptographic suggestions. Due to these relations and its highly superposed letter renderings, John Dee’s Handbell cipher can be considered a super-Voynich, super-Enochian, or super-Bacon cipher, a truly ingenious construct.
Its decrypted contents include John Dee’s clandestine ars poetica (matching well the one he encrypted in the Voynich manuscript) and some other astounding texts that agree well with the pertinent contents decrypted from the Voynich manuscript as well as from Dr. Dee’s Enochian cipher.
References
- Bean, R., C. Gannon, S. Lang 2023. The cipher of Emperor Rudolf II’s “Alchemical Hand Bell”.
- Ernst, T. 1996. Schwarzweiße Magie. Der Schlüssel zum dritten Buch der “Steganographia” des Trithemius, Daphnis: Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur 25(1):1-205.
- Hooke, R. 1705. Of Dr. Dee’s Book of Spirits in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke. Richard Waller, London.
- Laycock, D. C. 2001. The Complete Enochian Dictionary. Weiser Books San Francisco, CA/Newburyport, MA, USA.
- Lefaivre, L. 2005. Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance. The MIT Press, Cambridge, USA.
- March, M. 2015. Leon Battista Alberti as Author of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Nexus Network Journal, 17:697-721.
- Reeds, J. 1998. Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia. Cryptologia 22(4):291-317.
- Strasser, G. F. 2007. The Rise of Cryptology in the European Renaissance. In: The History of Information Security: A Comprehensive Handbook. Eds. Karl de Leeuw and Jan Bergstra. Elsevier.