Voynich Vision

“What therefore you worship as unknown,

This I proclaim to you.”

(Acts 17:23b)

 

“qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy”

(from the Voynich Manuscript)

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2008

Volume 2 Number 42

First United Methodist Church, 111 West Church Street, Warren, Arkansas 71671

 

 

The bizarre string of letters above, nonsensical non-words, are from the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript, discovered in Italy in 1912 and named for the antiquities dealer who purchased it.  The history of Voynich, however, goes back much further.  The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1576 – 1612) paid the equivalent of $30,000 for it, believing it to be a secret work of the 13^th century philosopher Roger Bacon.  It has 234 hand-lettered pages and is thought by Voynich enthusiasts to embody a code so fantastic as to be, even today, un-deciphered -- a code with an Unknown message.  Richly illustrated with images of plants not known on earth, astrological symbols with constellations not seen from earth, human figures whose features are in odd proportion to what we know as reality, the Voynich Manuscript is a mystery indeed.

 

During World War 2 Allied cryptologists, the very ones who managed to break top secret Nazi codes, played with Voynich in their spare time, never making headway.  All experts since – linguists, botanists, mathematicians, astrologers, medievalists and other historians, computer experts, literary scholars – have tried and failed to break the code.

 

Three years ago, one student of Voynich playfully suggested I take a crack at it.  When I first read an article in WIRED about how some medical schools are using what they called Voynich Vision principles to take a new look at Alzheimers, one of the great medical mysteries of our day, I wrote a sermon (based on a different text than we are using this morning).  A few days later I received an e-mail from a Voynich enthusiast, one who had written several articles on the manuscript.  After complimenting the sermon and noting in my bio on the church website that I had studied narrative structure in Hebrew and Semitic languages, he suggested that I look more closely at the manuscript. 

 

Suppose I would like to do so, but where’s the time?  Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it since, but when I stood at the base of Mars Hill last month, the Areopagas of ancient Athens, and remembered Paul saying to the Athenians, “what therefore you worship as Unknown, this I proclaim to you,” I remembered that e-mail exchange.   What is I had been able, like Paul, to make the Unknown Known?   The thought stayed with me, so upon returning from Athens and deciding to write a sermon about Paul’s words, I Googled – Voynich Vision, sermon --   and found my old sermon mentioned in a blog of Voynich lovers.  One wrote, “Do you have (his sermon) ‘Voynich Vision’?  He can’t see the forest for the trees.  Is there a doctor in the house?” I found that very clever, as you will see in a few moments.  Then I found the reply from the gentlemen who had originally contacted me. “I have to admit, this is at least original.  I never thought I’d see the Voynich manuscript as a springboard for a Christian sermon.  I contacted him and gave him some of our links . . . Who knows, he might be the one who solves it. Perhaps he has some powerful help.”  His message ends with a Smiley Face.  No, I’m afraid it’s beyond me.  “Powerful help J” from above would certainly be required. 

 

One solution which has met with widespread scholarly acceptance and has been published in Cryptologia.  The author is a psychologist from England’s Keele University, Gordon Rugg.  Basically, he surmises, “Sorry folks, Voynich says nothing at all.  It’s an elaborate hoax.”  

 

You might say that Dr. Rugg is doing an imitation of St. Paul in Athens.  Paul famously looked at their objects of worship and commented on one inscription, “to an unknown god,” proceeding to declare that they are, in fact, Unknown and Unknowable.  “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands . . . we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” 

 

As Dr. Rugg suggested that Voynich is an elaborate hoax saying nothing at all, Paul was saying that the polytheistic belief system of Greek/Roman theologies with their many and various gods and goddesses was, at last, empty, propagated by centuries of myopic vision and unquestioning adherence to a theological system which had literalized ancient myths of meaning, solidifying those myths into ornately developed objects of worship.  What Paul was saying was nothing if not revolutionary, “Open your minds to another way of seeing.  The mystery of your divinity is no mystery with deeper meaning, but is empty of meaning, Unknowable, bankrupt as a theological system.  Let me, instead, declare to you the God you really can know.” 

 

Rugg declares the Voynich Manuscript a hoax generated by an Elizabethan con artist to dupe the king into paying a large sum to acquire it.  He’s not the first, of course, to suggest Voynich was a hoax, but certainly his arguments have met with wider acceptance than earlier attempts.  Perhaps the idea of Voynich being empty of code and meaning has been so difficult to grasp simply because the work so amazingly elaborate.  One wonders if perhaps this is the very same reason that the gods and goddesses of classical Greek and Roman mythologies survived so long.  The system was so elaborate, so rich in tradition, so embedded in the culture, that for these things to be considered Unreal only very slowly developed. 

 

With respect to Voynich, experts, when asked to view the manuscript and consider it from their perspective, had de facto assumed it to genuine because previous experts had so surmised, not challenging its authenticity, but only admitting their lack of success in opening up the mystery of the code.  Each expert picked at the linguistic lock on Voynich from the perspective of their own expertise, looking for patterns recognizable in their unique discipline. 

 

Specialists naturally rely on principles from their field of expertise, considering each problem from their niche perspective, which can translate into missing the big picture.   This, of course, is one of the drawbacks in a world of specialists – the more expert one becomes in a highly specialized field, the more one risks locking the door of overall perception, potentially missing the big picture by being blinded to the contribution of other perspectives. 

 

Voynich Vision, then, is the ability to back off and take an overall view that looks for gaps in the compartmentalized logic of the different experts, seeking to ask questions that haven’t been yet asked.  I find it fascinating that several medical schools are using Voynich Vision principles to take a new look at Alzheimer’s, one of the great medical mysteries of our day and a classic candidate for this approach, having been studied by tens of thousands of highly specialized scientists, yet still defying basic definition. 

 

One medical television series operates on the principles of Voynich Vision, the value placed on backing off and taking a look at a problem from a fresh perspective.  That is Fox’s House, in which the ill-mannered Dr. Greg House heads a hospital department called simply, “Diagnostic Medicine.” Each week, the villain of the show is a new disease.  Each of his hand-picked experts in various medical fields look at the problem from their own perspective – immunology, neurology, etc.  With different perspectives up on the board, they struggle to understand a unique medical dilemma, to expose gaps in the logic of each specialty.  It amounts to, “Let’s back off and come at this problem from a different perspective.  We must be missing something in the big picture.  Let’s not allow our expertise to lock us into a field of perception which may lead us to a wrong conclusion and cost us an opportunity to save this person’s life.”  

 

There’s a certain bold wisdom in the willingness of those committed to an opinion, to back off and re-approach a problem from a different angle. 

 

Of course, Voynich Vision is hardly new.  Christians are Easter people.  On that very first Easter day, John’s gospel tells us that the disciples were locked into the room where they gathered.  John means us to understand this as literally true, locked doors emphasizing Jesus’ appearance as a miracle of resurrection. 

 

Let’s consider these locked doors, however, on a deeper level – that the doors of their perception were locked.  Their training, their life experience, caused them to see the evidence of the empty tomb from rational perspectives.  Their perceptions of life and death, of the finality of death, locked them into a field of vision now being challenged.  The reports had come that the tomb is empty.  “But, how can this be?  It doesn’t fit with what life’s experience has taught us.  Unless the Romans took the body?  But, why would they?”  Locked into the perceptions allowed by experience, this visit from Jesus would challenge those perceptions.

 

This is the message Paul carried throughout Asia Minor and across the Aegean Sea, even to Athens, the account of which we’ve read this morning in Acts 17.  The people were locked into a perception which their culture had provided.  Paul asked them to develop Voynich Vision, to back off and look at the problem differently.  He offered a different view, a monotheistic view of God “in whom we live and move and have our being.”  To those immersed in the Greco-Roman perception this was revolutionary and counter-intuitive, filling stadiums such as at Ephesus (Acts 19) with the faithful chanting, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians, as the fearful economic implications of this new proclamation of an ancient faith bankrupt and empty began to set in. 

 

Speaking of doctors approaching problems from a different perspective made me think of the movie Patch Adams, based on the true story of Dr. Hunter Adams, founder of the Gesundheit Institute.  Robin Williams played Dr. Patch Adams, who came at medical problems from a different, to say the least, perspective – often a child’s perspective.  

 

In 1969 Hunter Adams was so depressed that he became dangerously suicidal.  He checked himself into a psychiatric ward for help, and that’s where the movie opens.  In that psychiatric ward Hunter meets an eccentric named Arthur, a once bright and successful entrepreneur who was running around the ward holding up four fingers, asking everybody how many fingers they saw.  When people would respond “four,” Arthur turned furious, storming off, amazed nobody could see what he saw.  When the newly arrived Hunter answered the same as all the others, “Four,” Arthur turns away and walks off saying, “Another idiot.”

 

Eventually, though, Patch comes to see Arthur at a different level.  He senses there was a code in Arthur’s bizarre act.  There is meaning here.  So, what answer is Arthur looking for?  Hunter seeks out Arthur and befriends him, and Arthur smiles and holds up four fingers between his own face and Hunter’s.  Arthur tells Hunter not to look at the fingers, but to stare beyond, at Arthur’s face.  “Focus on me.  Focus beyond the problem.”  As Hunter focuses on Arthur’s face, like a camera fixing on the wrong object in the background, the fingers blur and double vision causes Patch to smile and say, “Oh, I see eight fingers.” 

 

With that, Arthur smiles with satisfaction.  At last, someone has given him the right answer, has unlocked the door of narrow perception that everyone else has insisted on keeping locked.  Arthur says to Patch, “If you focus on the problem you can’t see the solution.  Never focus on the problem!  See what no one else sees.  See what everyone else chooses not to see, out of fear, conformity, or laziness.  See the whole world anew each day!”

 

Was this not the message Jesus offered the disciples looking for bread to feed the multitude?  Phillip punched numbers into the calculator and said, “Lord, six months wages wouldn’t feed all these people.”  Jesus was saying, “If you focus on the problem, you’ll never see the solution. Don’t listen to what you’re told to think.  You might just find a better way.  You’re seeing what everyone else chooses not to see.  That will help you to see the whole world anew each day.” 

 

Faith has eyes to see what others choose not to see, eyes that can focus beyond the problem, focusing on God with eyes that inexplicably see eight instead of four, food to feed the multitudes rather than a few barley loaves and fish, life and light in Christ instead of death and darkness.  May we be blessed with Voynich Vision.

       

 

Sources and notes:

“The Verifier Approach,” a sermon in HOMILETICS, April 2005.

 

“Scientific Method Man,” an article by Joseph D’Agnese in WIRED, September 2004.