To read the first two installments in the Voynich Cycle, go here , and here. There can be no audio VoiceOver today, as the piece is necessarily image-dependent, and images cannot, ordinarily, be sounded out though I tried.
We know, also, that our man was no stranger to the art of the jest, or of what a century earlier would have been easily identifiable as the genre of mystification , working to win our confidence, but soon enough tipping his hand to reveal, at least to those who are paying sufficiently close attention, the ambiguous nature of his source material. Yet even for Friedman it is a bit much —is it not?
Surely, we must suppose, he would only bother to do this if he were in fact trying to do something more. What else might be happening, then, beneath the topsoil of this bright yet evidently substanceless mental florescence? This book, on the face it, appears nearly as mystifying as anything Friedman himself ever conjured. But over time the connection between the signs and the signified to speak in terms that would become available only in the twentieth century would be lost, so that writing now mostly appears arbitrary to us.
Yet once we remind ourselves that writing is drawn from the world, Friderici thinks, we are thereby enabled to use that same world as the limitless fount of elements for our secret compositions. The third class introduces the student of cryptography to a method of transmitting messages to correspondents by means of such unconventional units as musical notes:.
Friderici begins his introduction to horticultural cryptography with a fairly elementary case, in which different quantities of stalks of common garden herbs are used to represent the Latin alphabet:.
