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319 - The Voynich Manuscript

Jul 21, 2012, 67 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

“Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the ‘limit text’ of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.” -Terence McKenna

According to Wikipedia, the Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”, and so far it’s secret code has never been broken … including attempts by top U.S. Government cytologists. And this is the subject of today’s talk by Terence McKenna from an April 1983 lecture.

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And I’m going to begin today’s podcast with some rather unpleasant thoughts.

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Now, what follows are my opinions on a few issues, and only my opinions.

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So please don’t take them as absolute facts, because they only represent things as I see them,

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and I’m sure that there’s a wide range of opinions that differ from mine.

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as I see them, and I’m sure that there’s a wide range of opinions that differ from mine.

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Now, as you most likely know already, I’ve had to remove my podcast number 316 from the net.

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Didn’t have to, but I did it at the request of Dennis McKenna, and at this time I have no plans to restore it. So, if you are one of our fellow salonners who are subscribed to these podcasts via iTunes or some other aggregator,

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well, you now have what may become a collector’s item from the salon.

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And, by the way, if you don’t have an automatic subscription that downloads these podcasts as soon as I post them,

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well, maybe you want to look into signing up for one.

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You know, they’re free through iTunes and the other aggregators,

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and in case this ever happens again, then you won’t miss anything.

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Now, I really hate to begin this podcast from a negative point of view,

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particularly because, well, I was raised in one of those working-class families of the 40s and 50s,

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where we just never discussed anything that was considered to be unpleasant.

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So, this isn’t easy for me. However,

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now that I’m so much closer to the end of my life than to the beginning, I’ve decided that it’s time

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for me to change my stripes a bit and just bring all of this out into the open. After all, the way

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I see it, we’re a family here in the salon, and so let’s have a little family meeting, okay?

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First of all, after putting a significant amount of work into going to Esalen,

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where Bruce Dahmer performed what he called a deep dive into the mind of Terrence McKenna,

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and then going to the trouble of editing the podcast and podcasting his presentation,

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after all that, a controversy began in the McKenna family,

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which caused Dennis to request that the podcast be

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removed, along with all of the wonderful comments that our fellow salonners posted in regards to it.

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And out of respect for Dennis, who is now in an extremely difficult position,

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I have done so at the cost of receiving a lot of hate mail for doing so.

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Now what Bruce and I didn’t know at the time of this performance and podcast

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was that Dennis had apparently given McKenna family, including Terrence’s ex-wife, the final

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say as to what went into the book he is writing about his brother. And the appearance of some of

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the texts online as read by Bruce in his presentation has evidently caused quite an uproar.

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Since I in no way want to be the cause of these difficulties,

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I have permanently removed this podcast and the comments.

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And for that, I am very sorry and I apologize to everyone here in the salon,

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particularly those who posted comments.

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It was never my intention to cause you or the McKenna family any stress.

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That said, you should also know that never have any of the

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children of Terrence nor his ex-wife ever given any form of approval whatsoever to these podcasts

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here in the salon. And while I’ve attempted to contact them on several occasions over the years,

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my emails, well, they never receive an answer, nor have my inquiries sent via mutual friends.

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So I take that to mean that they

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simply don’t like the fact that I’m playing some of the talks given by Terrence. And while it saddens

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me to know that I’m not thought well of by them, it wasn’t me who made Terrence a public figure.

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He did that himself. As I see it, I’m just one of many messengers who have been positively

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influenced by Terrence’s lectures,

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and I feel a sense of obligation to repay him in some way for the insights that he’s helped me

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gain, and I’m doing that by replaying the talks that he freely gave permission for attendees to

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record as long as they weren’t sold for a profit. At least that was my understanding when I attended

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several of his lectures in person.

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And to many of us at the time, well, his lectures were sort of our version of a Grateful Dead concert’s bootleg tapes, if you know what I mean.

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So, Dennis is now making the final revisions to his book after meeting with the rest of the family.

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And in a way, this makes me sad for the position that Dennis finds himself in.

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And in a way, this makes me sad for the position that Dennis finds himself in.

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Having read parts of an early draft of his book, I found it very well written and extraordinarily helpful in further understanding the complex person of his brother Terrence.

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And I’m sure that the first half of the book, which describes their childhood and the expedition to La Charrera, will really be spectacular reading. However, we’re just going to have to wait and see about the remainder of the book,

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which will now be taking into account the feelings of Terrence’s children and his ex-wife.

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And, hey, who can blame Dennis for attempting to keep peace in the family?

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I’m sure I probably would have done exactly the same thing.

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Now, the upside here is that, in the past,

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I’ve heard from several budding historians

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who had hoped to write a book about Terrence themselves,

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but who abandoned their projects once Dennis’ book was announced.

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Now, with this new information about crafting Dennis’ book so as to spare the family any discomfort,

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it seems to me to reopen the possibility for other historians to also report

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as much of the history of the Bard McKenna as they can uncover from other first-hand sources.

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I do know that there are several people still alive

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who are also very intimately familiar with some of the more controversial aspects of Terrence’s life,

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and their stories should probably be collected before much longer

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if these first-hand accounts are to be preserved.

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As for me, please

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don’t write and ask for any help in pointing out who and where these people may be, because I’m now

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moving on and don’t plan on getting any further involved in the history of Terence McKenna.

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My position is simple, at least to me. I consider Terence to have been one of the most influential

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thinkers of the 20th century.

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Maybe not as much in his original thoughts, perhaps,

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but in the ways and numbers of people who his words touched.

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It’s quite obvious to me that the recordings of his lectures

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that I and thousands of others are posting on the net each year

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continue to seed the minds of large numbers of people, both old and young.

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So it seems to me that his thoughts should be preserved and listened to as fully and widely as possible,

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which means that I’m not going to abandon my own plans for doing what I can

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to preserve the spoken words of our beloved bard.

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However, that too seems to have become quite controversial as well.

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And here’s the story on that.

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too seems to have become quite controversial as well.

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And here’s the story on that.

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As you know, the Internet is packed with thousands of recordings of Terrence’s lectures.

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In fact, I recently received a somewhat snotty email from one of our fellow salonners who pointed out that of the tapes that I’ve played in what I’m now calling the Paul Herbert Collection,

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well, they’ve all been online in a variety of places for years.

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But then this person went on to say, and I quote,

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What’s the matter with you, Lorenzo? Haven’t you ever heard of Google?

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Well, yes, I have heard about Google, and yes, I do know that all of the McKenna talks

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that I’ve played here in the salon, with one exception, have been all over the net for years now.

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The exception being the Valley of Novelty

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series that I played about seven years ago, and I actually attended that workshop myself and have

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the tapes from that session which were not copyrighted. Everything else, as my rude critic

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pointed out, has been online for a long time, which now brings me to my plan for playing the

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Herbert Collection in the order in which they were recorded.

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I still plan on doing exactly that.

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However, I will first do that suggested Google search to be sure that I’m not the first or only person to post one of these recordings.

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That way, the threats of lawsuits that are being made will have to include suing more people than just myself.

00:08:23 ►

And now here’s the rest of this unpleasant story, since we’re a family here.

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Long ago, I was able to determine that the Dolphin Tapes,

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the company whose tapes bear a copyright notice from Paul Herbert’s company,

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which was Dolphin, was defunct, out of business, no longer in existence.

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Which meant to me, at least, that these recordings fell into that black hole

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called orphaned works. And this is a huge problem everywhere, not just with these tapes.

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You see, there are tens of millions of these so-called orphaned copyright works,

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and most libraries and other institutions are so freaked out about some long-forgotten person

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or group reappearing from the mists to claim ownership of the work and sue them for bringing it back into existence.

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As a result, this is a big gray area of the copyright law that, in my opinion, needs to be settled once and for all.

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And while I certainly don’t want to wind up in court,

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I at least feel obliged to do whatever I can to help clear up this mess.

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Now, after I began playing the first two tapes in the collection,

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the management at Esalen informed me that the dolphin rights

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had been transferred to some non-profit corporation

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that they also believed held the rights to everything else that was ever recorded at Esalen.

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And apparently for the past decade or so,

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they’ve been negotiating with the people who claim ownership of this material

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to have it all digitized so that they can sell it in the Esalen store.

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However, the Esalen people made it very clear to me that they make no claim to ownership of the copyrights themselves.

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And so I’ve been doing what due diligence I can with my limited resources,

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and I discovered that this non-profit corporation

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no longer seems to be in existence either. As far as I can tell, they haven’t kept their

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corporate charter fees up to date, and the most recent public record that I can find of their tax

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reports shows that as of 2010, they had zero income, zero expenses, and most importantly,

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zero assets.

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Now, perhaps they can go back and pay their fees and correct their tax returns to somehow claim ownership of the copyrights of these tapes.

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I really don’t know.

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So, I’m going to go ahead with my plans to podcast the Paul Herbert Collection

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until such time as the opponents of releasing this material lawyer up and sue me.

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Should that happen, then I’ve got two choices.

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I can attempt to engage the good folks at the Creative Commons to defend me

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and hopefully put to rest this ridiculous situation of orphaned copyrights

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and put it to rest once and for all.

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Or, if I can’t get free legal help, I’ll just close the salon.

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However, I do feel obliged to say, and this is pretty petty I guess,

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but it was the Esalen Institute who is ultimately responsible

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for the destruction of the McKenna Library and Archives,

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and now they are telling me I should probably hold off

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until they settle all these copyright issues with this,

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what I think is a defunct

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non-profit corporation.

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But hey, this is just my whining, I guess.

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So anyhow, I am very sorry for beginning this podcast on such a heavy note.

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But I’ve decided to break with my old family tradition of sweeping unpleasantness under

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the rug and bring you into a full view of what’s going on around here.

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To be honest, all of this controversy for a few days brought me to the verge of very seriously thinking about closing the doors here in the salon.

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And just having heard my podcasting friend, the Dope Fiend, saying that he’s starting to burn out as well and will be going to a monthly format next year,

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burn out as well and will be going to a monthly format next year, well, it actually got me to thinking that maybe I should just spend the last few good years I have left working on my writing

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and jettison all of the work associated with these podcasts. But then yesterday I logged into my

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PayPal account, which during the summer months gets very little action. So it’s usually during

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the summer that I have to dig into my savings a bit to pay for our server and online presence. But what a surprise I had. There were either direct

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donations or purchases of my books that came in and were enough to cover this month’s expenses and

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get us into the first week or so of next month. And suddenly a wave of love washed over me and

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I realized how much the salon means,

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not just to me, but to you and the rest of our fellow salonners as well.

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And if I hadn’t already taken so much of your time right now,

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I would read some of the kind messages that these wonderful people sent.

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But I suspect that you probably already share many of their sentiments.

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So thank you all ever so much.

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And as soon as I get this podcast posted,

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I’ll be sending you a personal note of thanks. But you have not only sponsored the next 30 days

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of podcasts, well, you’ve made my heart sing and finally got me out of the deep funk that all of

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this controversy was causing me. So let’s get on with the show, at least until the next shoe falls, huh? Anyway, today I’m going to play for

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you tape number five from the Paul Herbert Collection. But wait, you say, what about three

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and four? Well, even though it was my original intention to replay the talks that have already

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appeared here in the salon, I found that I wanted to hear something new. And so you will find the

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third tape in the collection in my podcast number 270 will find the third tape in the collection in my podcast number 270,

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and the fourth tape in the collection in my podcast number 261,

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should you want to re-listen yourself in chronological order.

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The talk that I’m going to play today, in case you think I don’t know how to use Google,

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is not only available on YouTube, where over 700 people have listened to it,

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but if you enter MP3, followed by Bonnich

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Manuscript, in quotes, followed by Terrence McKenna, in quotes, you’ll get over 2,600 hits.

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So at least if we get sued, there should be someone in that crowd with deep pockets who

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can afford a lawyer. For my part, I’ve already gone through my life savings, and I don’t own

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a house, and hell,

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I don’t even own a cell phone. So should the lawyers get involved, other than forcing all

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2,600 of us to remove this recording, I can save you some time and point you elsewhere in your

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search for cash. Now about today’s talk. One of the first things that you will notice if you’ve

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read the Wikipedia entry about the Vonage manuscript

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is that some of Terence’s facts, such as the price that Rudolph II allegedly paid for the manuscript,

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well, they don’t match with what the net now says.

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And I’m not saying that one or the other is wrong,

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because, well, Terence actually had one of the world’s most comprehensive alchemical libraries at one time,

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the library that was destroyed in the fire.

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So who knows what his sources were.

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But at one point, he said that Frederick the Elector died in the siege of Prague.

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However, if you want to believe Wikipedia, Frederick actually escaped to The Hague with his wife.

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However, my amateur status leads me to believe that it’s actually me and Wikipedia

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who’s mixed up here, but I’m sure that’ll be straightened out in the comments section

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for this podcast. Or maybe I should just Google it some more, huh? Anyway, let’s now give

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a listen to Terrence McKenna, not in the guise of a psychedelic warrior, but as the egg-headed professor, a role that he seemed to be born for.

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Today I’m going to be discussing the Vonage Manuscript, which is certainly one of the most interesting and has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world. I will describe the physical manuscript, place it in a historical context, and then

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discuss my own ideas about the people who may have been its authors. First of all, the

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manuscript itself is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist.

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It is an alphabetic script,

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but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from 19 to 28 letters,

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none of which bearing any relationship to any English or European letter system.

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The manuscript is small,

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seven by ten inches,

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but thick, nearly 170 pages,

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closely written in a free-running hand,

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copiously illustrated with bizarre line drawings

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that have been watercoloured,

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drawings of plants,

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drawings of little naked ladies appearing

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to take showers in a strange system of plumbing, which has been variously identified as organs

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of the body or a primitive set of fountains, and astrological drawings, or what have been

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interpreted as astrological drawings.

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But more about all this later.

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First of all, the known facts of the manuscript are few.

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They are that it appears in 1586

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that the court of Rudolf II of Bavaria

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was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period.

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This is the same Frederick who collected dwarfs,

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who collected, had a regiment of giants in his army.

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He was surrounded by astrologers.

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He was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented

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Protestant intellectual of this period.

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Anyway, to his court and among his courtiers

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came an unknown person

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who sold this manuscript to the king

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for 300 gold ducats,

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which translated into modern monetary units is about $14,000,

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which is an astonishing amount of money

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to have been paid for a manuscript at that time,

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and immediately signals that the emperor

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must have been highly impressed by this object if he was willing to put out that kind of money for it.

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Accompanying the manuscript is a letter which states that it is a manuscript of the Englishman Roger Bacon,

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Roger Bacon, who flourished in the 13th century and who was a noted pre-Copernican astronomer.

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Now, at that time in Prague,

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which was where the court of the emperor was being held,

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the reputation of Roger Bacon was at a great height.

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The court was a hotbed of alchemy, and among all these alchemists,

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the reputation of the English monk Roger Bacon was held very high.

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This is because two years previously,

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the sale of the Vonage manuscript to the Emperor being dated to 1586.

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Two years previously, John Dee, the great English navigator, astrologer, magician, intelligence agent, occultist…

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Wait a minute, I still am back on Frederick.

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You mean what was his relationship to all this?

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Could you develop him a little bit more?

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You say it was typical.

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Well, he epitomized the liberated Northern European prince

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who was a patron of alchemy,

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gave money to all these printing presses

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that were printing all this alchemical literature.

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The Rosicrucian conspiracy, about which I will say more later,

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was fomenting at this very period right under the surface.

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And Frederick patronized astrologers, magicians, alchemists.

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The reason John Dee had such a long stay at Frederick’s court

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was because his companion, Edward Kelly,

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claimed to be able to perform the alchemical opus,

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and the king more or less placed them under house arrest

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and asked them, you know, to do this for him as a favor

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since he had patronized them very heavily.

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And when they were unable to, Dee was able to talk his way out of it.

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Kelly had been the one who had made the major claims,

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and he was kept there and actually died in an effort to escape.

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He fell when the shale roofing on a high parapet of his castle

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slid way underneath his feet one moonlit night

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when he was trying to sneak out of the castle.

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But I anticipate my story

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because I think John Dee and Edward Kelly are probably,

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if they were not the,

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I certainly think they were the people who sold the emperor

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the Vonage

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manuscript because of circumstantial evidence surrounding their interest in subjects similar

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to those being covered by the manuscript.

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Frederick, Frederick, is the same one, is that the Winter Summer Queen, King and Queen,

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is that Frederick?

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No, we’re talking about Rudolf II.

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He was succeeded by this guy, Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia,

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who was also in this mold of a patron of Protestant alchemical aspirations in Central Europe.

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But anyway, the Vonage manuscript was accompanied by this letter

00:22:29 ►

stating that it was a Bacon manuscript, and the best astrologers and cryptographers in this court

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looked at it and could make nothing out of it. And it, and along with a great deal of other weird collections and material

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that Rudolf had gathered together from all over the world,

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was passed to various people at his death.

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And this book, because it contained botanical illustrations,

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passed to his botanist, who was a man named marcese and he had it for 20 years

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then it passed to an unnamed party who had it for 20 years and by this time we’re up to the 1620s

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and then it passed to athanasius kersher who was one of the great polymaths of the mid-17th century. He was a Catholic

00:23:29 ►

intellectual, an alchemist, a person who experimented with artificial languages. And before he obtained

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the Vonage manuscript, we know of letters of his to various people asking about it.

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And in fact, he was sent small portions

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of it reproduced

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that he struggled over

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but once he actually had the manuscript

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in his possession

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his diaries are silent

00:23:55 ►

about it and he says

00:23:57 ►

nothing even though five years

00:23:59 ►

after he acquired it

00:24:01 ►

he published a book called

00:24:02 ►

The Universal Study of Artificial Languages

00:24:05 ►

that nowhere mentions the Vonage manuscript.

00:24:10 ►

Maybe he called it something else,

00:24:13 ►

but there’s no reference of any sort to anything that he possessed that was like that.

00:24:18 ►

That’s right.

00:24:20 ►

And he decided to become a Jesuit in about 1660

00:24:24 ►

and had to give away all of his worldly goods.

00:24:29 ►

So he gave his library to this Jesuit seminary south of Rome,

00:24:36 ►

and in among his books was the Vonage Manuscript,

00:24:39 ►

and it sat on a shelf in the seminary from 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960, 220, 320 years, no, no, 280 years,

00:24:53 ►

till Alfred Vonich, a New York book dealer, bought the entire library on a trip to Europe

00:25:00 ►

in 1912, and we got it all back to New York and sorted through it.

00:25:05 ►

Among all this easily catalogued

00:25:07 ►

late Renaissance Italian theological material

00:25:11 ►

was this peculiar book,

00:25:15 ►

more than peculiar,

00:25:17 ►

totally anomalous book.

00:25:20 ►

And it’s very strange

00:25:23 ►

because the store of images

00:25:26 ►

even as late as the period when we first hear of the Vonage manuscript in the 1580s

00:25:33 ►

the store of images in the European mind was very limited

00:25:37 ►

for instance in speaking of the biological sections of the Vonage manuscript

00:25:42 ►

here you get 120 drawings of plants and yet there were only

00:25:48 ►

10 or 15 herbals in circulation among the educated people of Europe of that time and

00:25:55 ►

none of the Vonage images can be directly traced to any of these previously printed or circulated manuscripts. Likewise, the script itself,

00:26:07 ►

it has no antecedents and it spawned no imitators. Codes from the early 16th century onward were,

00:26:19 ►

in Europe, were all derived from a book called the Stenographica of

00:26:26 ►

Johannes Trithemius, Bishop

00:26:28 ►

of Sponheim

00:26:29 ►

who was an alchemist of

00:26:32 ►

Sponheim who was

00:26:34 ►

wrote on

00:26:37 ►

the encipherment of secret messages

00:26:40 ►

and he had about

00:26:42 ►

three methods

00:26:43 ►

and no military or alchemical or religious or political code was

00:26:51 ►

composed by any other means throughout a period which lasted well into the 17th century yet the

00:26:58 ►

Vonage manuscript does not appear to have any any relationship to the Trithymian codes.

00:27:08 ►

Trithymian codes?

00:27:09 ►

The codes derivative of Johannes Trithymius, Bishop of Sponheim.

00:27:16 ►

Is there something, do people research the Trithymian codes?

00:27:22 ►

Oh, the literature is voluminous on the Trithymian codes? Oh, the literature is voluminous

00:27:25 ►

on the Trithymian codes.

00:27:28 ►

Sure, there’s a book by Walker

00:27:31 ►

called Spiritual and Demonic Magic

00:27:34 ►

from Ficino to Campanella

00:27:36 ►

that covers all of this very well.

00:27:39 ►

Or Francis Yates’ book,

00:27:41 ►

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

00:27:43 ►

Although neither of them…

00:27:44 ►

John, have you talked about the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, although neither of them…

00:27:47 ►

Not quite yet.

00:27:49 ►

First of all,

00:27:51 ►

let’s see,

00:27:53 ►

more about

00:27:56 ►

Dee and why I think

00:27:58 ►

that Dee is the obvious

00:28:00 ►

candidate for

00:28:01 ►

being the author or being

00:28:04 ►

the purveyor, if not the author, being the purveyor if not the author of the

00:28:07 ►

Vonage manuscript. D, first of all, Trithemius’ book the Stenographica

00:28:15 ►

didn’t circulate in as a printed book until the 1580s but it circulated in

00:28:23 ►

manuscript form from about 1530 onward. And when Dee visited the

00:28:28 ►

continent as a fairly young man, he records in his diary that he spent three days hand-copying

00:28:34 ►

the relevant chapters of a manuscript copy of the stenographica that he was shown in Paris.

00:28:41 ►

So from very early in his intellectual life, he was in possession

00:28:46 ►

of the Trithemian code-making machinery. The next important event in his life, for my argument,

00:28:55 ►

and one of the most puzzling events in the whole history of science generally, is the

00:29:01 ►

afternoon in July of 1582, at Mortlake in his study

00:29:06 ►

John Dee was distracted by a brilliant light

00:29:10 ►

outside his window

00:29:11 ►

and stepped outside to receive

00:29:13 ►

from a creature he described as the angel Gabriel

00:29:17 ►

a polished lens of Lancasterian coal

00:29:23 ►

which he described in his

00:29:25 ►

diary from thenceforward as

00:29:27 ►

the Shoe Stone

00:29:29 ►

that’s S-A-T-W

00:29:32 ►

the Shoe Stone

00:29:34 ►

and

00:29:36 ►

he was

00:29:38 ►

able by meditating on this

00:29:40 ►

stone to induce

00:29:42 ►

visions and dialogues

00:29:44 ►

with spirits.

00:29:46 ►

However, this ability seemed to fade in the months after he received the stone until a

00:29:54 ►

strange personage came into his life in the spring of 1584, and this was Edward Kelly.

00:30:04 ►

and this was Edward Kelly.

00:30:08 ►

Now Kelly was a much younger man than Dee and Dee was married to a much younger woman, Ann Dee

00:30:12 ►

and Kelly was of the rascal class

00:30:18 ►

and he in fact in one account is described as being earless

00:30:23 ►

having had his ears removed for some petty crime in the provinces.

00:30:30 ►

Anyway, he arrived at Dee’s place in Mortlake, Popeye’d and breathless,

00:30:37 ►

with a wild story about how he had fallen asleep in a ransacked tomb in a monastery in Wales,

00:30:46 ►

and when he had awakened, beneath him in the tomb had been a vial of red powder,

00:30:52 ►

which was the transformative elixir, and a book in an undecipherable language,

00:31:00 ►

which he called the Gospel of St. Dunstable

00:31:06 ►

and said that he had been told around in the village

00:31:10 ►

that it was in Cypherd Welch.

00:31:13 ►

Now, we actually hear no more in anybody’s diaries or letters

00:31:18 ►

of the Gospel of St. Dunstable.

00:31:20 ►

However, Arthur Dee, the son of John Dee,

00:31:24 ►

writing some 30 years later and reminiscing

00:31:27 ►

about his father, said that from the time he met Kelly, he spent a great deal of time

00:31:32 ►

trying to unravel a book covered all over with hieroglyphics. And perhaps this is the diary or

00:31:44 ►

the Gospel of St. Dunstable

00:31:45 ►

and perhaps it is in fact the Vonage manuscript

00:31:48 ►

and that these two things are the same thing.

00:31:52 ►

In any case, Kelly’s entree to Dee was the undecipherable manuscript

00:31:58 ►

and the alchemical potion

00:32:00 ►

and he quickly from his conversations with Dee

00:32:06 ►

determined

00:32:07 ►

the story about the

00:32:09 ►

show stone and they

00:32:11 ►

set up a seance situation

00:32:14 ►

and Kelly proved himself

00:32:16 ►

to be a very

00:32:18 ►

adept scryer

00:32:20 ►

of the stone from the

00:32:22 ►

very first instance he

00:32:23 ►

could describe vast theatrical undertakings

00:32:29 ►

and speak all the parts of the characters.

00:32:33 ►

Oh, the show stone is in the British Museum.

00:32:36 ►

You can see it.

00:32:37 ►

There it sits.

00:32:38 ►

They still have it.

00:32:41 ►

Anyway, so then begins a period in Dee’s diaries

00:32:46 ►

which were published in

00:32:48 ►

1658 by Marie Cossabon

00:32:51 ►

as a true and faithful relation

00:32:53 ►

a series of diary entries

00:32:56 ►

that span the next ten years

00:32:58 ►

dozens, hundreds

00:33:00 ►

of spirit

00:33:02 ►

conversations

00:33:03 ►

and the delivering unto Dee and Kelly

00:33:08 ►

of an angelologic language called Enochian,

00:33:12 ►

which was composed of non-English letters,

00:33:17 ►

but which computer analysis has recently shown

00:33:20 ►

has a curious grammatical relationship to English.

00:33:24 ►

But over 4,000 words are known

00:33:27 ►

in Enochian, and they were transmitted by the ghostly apparitions which Kelly channeled

00:33:33 ►

to Dee, and Dee, and some of the messages were theological in nature, many were political,

00:33:42 ►

and came to them as they traveled about Europe, including visiting

00:33:47 ►

the court of Rudolf II of Bavaria, our man who was sold the Vonage manuscript. And they were the

00:33:55 ►

people who were responsible for telling everyone what a great alchemist Roger Bacon, the English

00:34:01 ►

monk, had been. They laid the public relations groundwork

00:34:05 ►

for turning this manuscript at a high premium, I maintain.

00:34:11 ►

In any case, the several groups that have studied the Vonage manuscript

00:34:17 ►

have not looked at the amounts of encrypted material in John Dee’s diaries,

00:34:23 ►

of which there’s over 92 pages of strings of numbers and letters,

00:34:29 ►

which if it were found to be encoded in the same way

00:34:33 ►

that the Vonage material is encoded,

00:34:36 ►

that would definitely solve the problem of the authorship of the manuscript.

00:34:43 ►

The manuscript, which would have had to have been written

00:34:46 ►

in the 13th century, if it were, by Roger Bacon,

00:34:50 ►

definitely shows all the physical signs

00:34:54 ►

of being a 16th century manuscript.

00:34:56 ►

I estimate it was done sometime around 1540.

00:35:01 ►

And D, this means Kelly perhaps obtained it somewhere

00:35:06 ►

otherwise it would have had to have been done later

00:35:09 ►

as late as the early 1580s

00:35:12 ►

if D actually wrote it

00:35:14 ►

then it should be possible to determine this

00:35:19 ►

because such large amounts of his encrypted

00:35:23 ►

though still undeciphered, material is on record.

00:35:30 ►

And perhaps now would be the moment to talk about the Rosicrucians

00:35:34 ►

and show how they work into all this.

00:35:38 ►

Dee died an old and broken-hearted man in the run to the reign of James I in 1608,

00:35:46 ►

many years after the events of the sale of the Vonage manuscript occurred.

00:35:51 ►

Why was he broken-hearted?

00:35:52 ►

Well, he had been the court astronomer of Elizabeth

00:35:56 ►

and the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and the most educated man in England.

00:36:01 ►

When James came to power, James had a total horror

00:36:05 ►

of the whole magical side of the Elizabethan court,

00:36:10 ►

and he just dismissed this guy as a crank.

00:36:13 ►

He didn’t want astrologers around him.

00:36:15 ►

He thought it was all creepy.

00:36:17 ►

He was a rationalist.

00:36:19 ►

His anti-Catholicism extended to a mistrust

00:36:24 ►

of the entire occult tradition generally.

00:36:28 ►

However, early in his flowering period, Dee had written a strange book called the Hieroglyphic Mona,

00:36:37 ►

the Monus Hieroglyphicum, which was 36 quasi-geometrical theorems,

00:36:44 ►

which actually hinted at some kind of mystical doctrine.

00:36:48 ►

And it’s this utterly obscure book.

00:36:52 ►

In the early 1580s, it circulated in manuscript

00:36:56 ►

and was printed a few years later.

00:36:59 ►

In 1604 and again in 1608,

00:37:03 ►

the primary Rosicrucian documents were anonymously circulated in Europe.

00:37:09 ►

They were called the Fama and the Confessio.

00:37:12 ►

And they came out of nowhere.

00:37:13 ►

They were like broadsheets distributed in the middle of the night from street corners.

00:37:18 ►

How could they do that?

00:37:19 ►

They said, we are a secret society.

00:37:23 ►

And who we are, you may not know,

00:37:26 ►

but if you’re hip enough, you’ll be contacted and asked to join.

00:37:34 ►

And people like Robert Flood, who was essentially the heir of the D tradition

00:37:38 ►

in English occultism and science, basically put out advertisements saying,

00:37:44 ►

if I ain’t good enough,

00:37:46 ►

nobody’s good enough, why haven’t you people contacted me? And the fact of the matter is that

00:37:52 ►

the Rosicrucians, meaning the authors of the Fama and the Confessio, never contacted anybody.

00:38:00 ►

And their claim was basically fraudulent. It was that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz, who had lived in the 14th century, again, it’s like discovered and that inside there were all these alchemical books and with a quasi-political overtone definitely favoring the bohemian court of Frederick the Elector Palatine.

00:38:40 ►

And that all this should be disseminated as gospel.

00:38:45 ►

It was a kind of alchemical Protestant revival.

00:38:47 ►

But curiously, these texts, the Fama and the Confessio,

00:38:51 ►

had many doctrinal similarities to Dee’s hieroglyphic monad,

00:38:57 ►

so that it appears that Dee either was used as the model

00:39:02 ►

for the Rosicrucian conspiracy by its authors, persons unnamed,

00:39:08 ►

but I suspect the Czech alchemist Johann Valentin Andrei as probably being the person

00:39:16 ►

behind this, because Andrei and Michael Meyer were people who definitely were old enough

00:39:26 ►

to have been involved in Dee’s earlier visits

00:39:30 ►

and have then just been at their intellectual,

00:39:33 ►

at the peak of their intellectual powers

00:39:35 ►

when the foment that you mentioned of the Winter Kingdom

00:39:40 ►

and the bringing of Frederick Elector and his wife to Prague as the king and

00:39:48 ►

queen this episode occurred. And in fact, I’ll now relate the Vonage Manuscript back to all of that.

00:39:56 ►

Previously, I mentioned that when Rudolf’s king, his court, fell into disarray, the Vonage

00:40:02 ►

Manuscript passed to his botanist. Well, what was happening

00:40:06 ►

was that the old emperor was dying at a great age and mad as a damn hatter, no question about it.

00:40:15 ►

Meanwhile, to the west, in Bohemia, the Frederick Elector, who is everything a Protestant alchemical prince could hope to be,

00:40:27 ►

young, brilliant, scheming, totally in charge of his lords,

00:40:33 ►

he weds Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England,

00:40:37 ►

and he takes the king’s decision to give him his daughter’s hand in marriage as tacit approval for his plan to

00:40:49 ►

establish an alchemical kingdom, a Protestant alchemical kingdom in Central Europe. Actually,

00:40:56 ►

James, being the conservative that he was, had a far more Machiavellian purpose in

00:41:05 ►

wedding his daughter to Frederick

00:41:07 ►

the Elector because he also

00:41:09 ►

had it in his mind to wed

00:41:11 ►

one of his sons to a Spanish

00:41:13 ►

Catholic Habsburg

00:41:16 ►

princess and

00:41:17 ►

was trying to steer

00:41:19 ►

a neutral course

00:41:21 ►

when he realized

00:41:23 ►

that Frederick and Elizabeth had gone off to Bohemia, to

00:41:30 ►

their court, to be with Michael Meyer and Gerhard Dorn and Johann André and all these

00:41:36 ►

guys, and to patronize these alchemical presses and astrology and all this stuff. He was much alarmed, but by that time it was too late to call it back,

00:41:50 ►

and he realized that Frederick the Elector was a wild card.

00:41:54 ►

When Rudolph finally did die, the princes of the Northern League gathered

00:42:03 ►

and chose his successor by secret ballot,

00:42:08 ►

Frederick I.

00:42:10 ►

And so in the winter, in the late fall of 1619,

00:42:14 ►

he and Elizabeth transferred their court to Prague

00:42:19 ►

and ruled for one winter until May of 1620.

00:42:26 ►

The Mayflower was landing in America in the same year,

00:42:32 ►

but it had nothing to do with any of this.

00:42:37 ►

Then the Habsburgs, by that time, had mounted an army

00:42:41 ►

and were able to crush this thing.

00:42:45 ►

In a sense, it can be seen as the opening shot of the Thirty Years’ War,

00:42:51 ►

although the Thirty Years’ War, well, it was the opening shot of the Thirty Years’ War.

00:42:55 ►

One of the young French soldiers in this Habsburg army laying siege to the city

00:43:01 ►

was the 19-year-old René Descartes,

00:43:04 ►

who would grow up to be

00:43:05 ►

the great proponent of modern French

00:43:09 ►

materialism. Michael Meyer, one of the

00:43:12 ►

last great synthesizers of the medieval

00:43:15 ►

alchemical vision, died in the siege of

00:43:19 ►

the city, and Frederick was killed, and

00:43:22 ►

Elizabeth fled.

00:43:25 ►

She lived in The Hague for many years.

00:43:28 ►

And so, see, in that confusion,

00:43:31 ►

the botanist of Rudolf held in his house

00:43:35 ►

somewhere in the suburbs of Prague the Vonage manuscript.

00:43:39 ►

And the Thirty Years’ War comes,

00:43:42 ►

modern times overtake Europe,

00:43:44 ►

and this thing drifts further and further from its roots.

00:43:47 ►

But my reconstruction of what must have happened is that in this period

00:43:56 ►

when Dee and Kelly were regaling Rudolf with tales of the alchemical prowess of Roger Bacon,

00:44:06 ►

that they ponied up this manuscript.

00:44:13 ►

Either they wrote it at that time, or they had it with them.

00:44:17 ►

If they had it with them, it’s a far more interesting story,

00:44:21 ►

because then perhaps they are not its authors.

00:44:24 ►

If they are its authors, then it merely

00:44:26 ►

reveals the grammatical deep structure of the deranged mind of an Elizabethan magician,

00:44:33 ►

and this would explain to some degree why it was outside the ken of the CIA. But if they didn’t

00:44:40 ►

write it, if they only had it in their possession, then the mystery continues, because where did they get it and what was it? by the lords who stuck with the king.

00:45:07 ►

And the Earl of Northumberland sacked monasteries that had large repositories

00:45:10 ►

of bacon material.

00:45:12 ►

And Dee’s library at Mortlake

00:45:15 ►

was known to have 53 Baconian manuscripts

00:45:20 ►

of which only 41 have survived into modern times.

00:45:24 ►

There are 41? Baconian times. There are 41?

00:45:27 ►

Baconian manuscripts.

00:45:29 ►

Where are they?

00:45:30 ►

Oh, they’re at the Bodleian Library at Oxford in the British Museum.

00:45:36 ►

They have all this D material.

00:45:38 ►

Have you seen it?

00:45:39 ►

No, no.

00:45:40 ►

Oh, well, it would be fun to see it.

00:45:41 ►

The most interesting thing is this huge book called A True and Faithful Relation,

00:45:47 ►

which is the day-by-day seances with these spirits as Dee and Kelly move all over Europe.

00:45:54 ►

It’s in that that it’s recorded.

00:45:56 ►

Oh, and this is a piece of circumstantial evidence I almost left out,

00:46:00 ►

that in the very month that the emperor paid the 300 gold ducats for the manuscript,

00:46:08 ►

Dee records in his diary that they received 320 gold ducats from a mysterious source.

00:46:16 ►

Now, it is true that another angle on Dee’s personality,

00:46:20 ►

and some biographers have taken the position that he didn’t believe in magic at all,

00:46:25 ►

that he only posed as a screwball,

00:46:28 ►

and that actually he was an intelligence agent for the British crown.

00:46:35 ►

He was visiting all these courts as an astrologer and a necromancer and an alchemist

00:46:41 ►

and actually encrypting very succinct military

00:46:45 ►

and strategic and diplomatic information into these letters

00:46:49 ►

which he was sending home.

00:46:51 ►

And because he could cast the finest horoscope in Europe,

00:46:55 ►

he had an entree into all these people’s scenes.

00:46:59 ►

And the truth lies somewhere in between.

00:47:01 ►

He was doing all of this.

00:47:03 ►

He was an agent for the British crown,

00:47:05 ►

but he was also, you know,

00:47:07 ►

the finest flower of the medieval mind.

00:47:11 ►

He was used by Shakespeare

00:47:13 ►

as the model for Prospero in The Tempest

00:47:16 ►

and is the model for Dr. Faustus

00:47:19 ►

in Christopher Marlowe’s version

00:47:21 ►

of that classic spellbinder.

00:47:26 ►

What do you think about the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy?

00:47:32 ►

Does that fit into that at all?

00:47:34 ►

Well, it just shows, you know, how tenuous our grip is on what was going on in this time.

00:47:40 ►

I mean, besides whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare,

00:47:43 ►

then you have the problem of things like the Vonage Manuscript.

00:47:49 ►

Bacon visited Dean.

00:47:51 ►

We’re now talking about Francis Bacon, who was, who claimed, actually, Roger Bacon as a…

00:47:59 ►

As one of his?

00:48:00 ►

As one of his, yes.

00:48:01 ►

You did?

00:48:02 ►

Oh, yes.

00:48:02 ►

I didn’t hear that.

00:48:03 ►

Oh, yes.

00:48:04 ►

That’s great. Queen Elizabeth and Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon visited John Dee at Mortlake one afternoon to see his library because he had more books than anyone in England.

00:48:18 ►

And he is a very, very peculiar person. One of the most interesting things about the Vonage manuscript

00:48:26 ►

is the people whose careers have floundered,

00:48:33 ►

foundered on decipherments,

00:48:37 ►

where people have come forward with very bold claims.

00:48:41 ►

very bold claims.

00:48:46 ►

This guy, William Romaine Newbury,

00:48:49 ►

Newbold, in the 1920s,

00:48:53 ►

who was a classic scholar, a medievalist,

00:48:56 ►

and by all accounts a very brilliant man,

00:49:00 ►

he announced that he had a complete decipherment

00:49:03 ►

of the Vonage manuscript and said that what it involved was shorthand strokes,

00:49:11 ►

tiny strokes that were components of each letter in the Vonage script,

00:49:18 ►

and that by staring through a magnifying loop,

00:49:22 ►

you could magnify these characters and see that encoded into each one

00:49:27 ►

were the distorted remains of a Roman shorthand system

00:49:31 ►

that had been lost for 600 years.

00:49:35 ►

And he produced astonishing decipherments

00:49:39 ►

in which he definitely thought

00:49:43 ►

that it was a Roger Bacon manuscript.

00:49:47 ►

He decoded passages that dealt with student uprisings at Oxford at Christmastime 1292,

00:49:56 ►

when the riot between the Blackfriars and the something or other,

00:50:01 ►

just, you know, long, long decipherments.

00:50:04 ►

and the something or other, just, you know, long, long decipherments. The problem with all of this was that no one else could extract the same sense

00:50:12 ►

using Professor Newbold’s method.

00:50:15 ►

His method involved so many choices from pools of letters

00:50:20 ►

at every given point along the line

00:50:23 ►

that you could demonstrate that hundreds of messages could be extracted.

00:50:30 ►

And Professor Newbold died a broken man.

00:50:34 ►

He was disgraced. His career shattered.

00:50:37 ►

He had gone too far.

00:50:39 ►

The Vonage manuscript had claimed its first victim.

00:50:43 ►

the Vonage Manuscript had claimed its first victim.

00:50:51 ►

The next person to advance a decipherment of the Vonage Manuscript was Robert S. Brumbaugh, also of Yale University.

00:50:57 ►

And his decipherment is in some ways almost as puzzling as the encryption.

00:51:03 ►

He would have us believe that the Vonage manuscript says things like

00:51:07 ►

liquid Syrian matter, liquid matter, plus Syrian, Sicilian, plus Syrian salt,

00:51:15 ►

European, Swedish, Sicilian, plus Syrian, plus Russian, Asian, Sicilian, salt,

00:51:22 ►

liquid, liquid, Asian, Italian, Syrian, salt, liquid, Sicilian, salt, liquid, liquid, Asian, Italian, Syrian, salt, liquid, Sicilian, Italian, plus Sicilian, plus salt, etc., etc.

00:51:35 ►

Who was that again?

00:51:37 ►

Robert S. Brumbaugh of Yale. when his method was examined by other people attempting to reproduce the same plain text,

00:51:47 ►

they got nowhere, and it can’t be taken seriously.

00:51:54 ►

How embarrassing.

00:51:55 ►

Another effort at decipherment, which is minor, perhaps, in comparison to the other two, but

00:52:01 ►

which provides an interesting anecdote, was a man named Strong,

00:52:05 ►

who was at San Diego, had claimed decipherment of certain of the labels of the illustrations

00:52:13 ►

of the Vonage Manuscript. And when Paul Lee formed a working group to look into the Vonage

00:52:22 ►

Manuscript, Dr. Strong was one of the people they wanted to interview,

00:52:27 ►

and my friend Ralph Abraham, who’s a mathematician at Santa Cruz,

00:52:32 ►

had photostats of certain folios of the Vonage manuscript,

00:52:38 ►

and he sent very detailed letters to Dr. Strong

00:52:42 ►

with these folios as enclosures

00:52:45 ►

and questions like,

00:52:46 ►

It is alleged that on folio 9B you translated a certain word as uterus.

00:52:52 ►

Here is a photostat of folio 9B.

00:52:55 ►

Please circle the word you translated.

00:52:59 ►

And this kind of thing.

00:53:01 ►

And Dr. Strong’s secretary wrote Ralph back and said that he was very old he was in his

00:53:08 ►

90s and he didn’t feel he could compose a letter to address all these questions but that if ralph

00:53:15 ►

would come to san diego he would satisfy him completely uh so that was a th Ralph made got a reservation to fly down

00:53:27 ►

on the following Monday

00:53:31 ►

and Sunday night

00:53:33 ►

the secretary called

00:53:36 ►

and said that Dr. Strong had died

00:53:38 ►

of a heart attack that evening

00:53:40 ►

so the Vonage manuscript

00:53:44 ►

has bedeviled people’s careers

00:53:49 ►

and people who have claimed to understand it

00:53:54 ►

have died with the secret

00:53:57 ►

untransmitted to the rest of us.

00:54:01 ►

The intelligence community

00:54:03 ►

inside the United States government has spent a fair bit of time looking into it simply because it is so unusual to come upon such a large amount of code from such an early period and have it resist decipherment. I mean, it is just unheard of that a 16th century manuscript could not

00:54:26 ►

be deciphered by modern methods. The most interesting thing, in fact, published on the

00:54:33 ►

Vonage Manuscript is a United States government technical information office publication called The Vonage Manuscript, An Elegant Enigma by Mary D’Imperio. And Mary D’Imperio must be a Renaissance PhD student somewhere who was hired by the government to basically collate everything known about the Vonage Manuscript.

00:55:02 ►

everything known about the Vonage manuscript.

00:55:08 ►

And some interesting things are known.

00:55:11 ►

Eventually, I think, perhaps it will yield,

00:55:12 ►

although I’m not sure.

00:55:17 ►

For instance, computer analysis of the handwriting in it shows that two hands are involved.

00:55:21 ►

It was written by two people.

00:55:23 ►

Does this mean it was written by Dee and Kelly?

00:55:26 ►

Is this the hands that we should look for?

00:55:30 ►

Can we then, by comparing it to the handwriting of Dee and or Kelly,

00:55:34 ►

get a further feeling for their relationship to it?

00:55:41 ►

How do you get a hold of one of these?

00:55:44 ►

You have to write to the

00:55:45 ►

Office of Technical Information Services

00:55:48 ►

in Springfield, Virginia

00:55:49 ►

and ask for this particular

00:55:51 ►

document whose number

00:55:53 ►

I’ll have to hunt down.

00:55:57 ►

And

00:55:57 ►

does it cost? Oh yes, it costs

00:55:59 ►

like five or six dollars.

00:56:01 ►

But it’s a wealth of information

00:56:03 ►

on the whole context in which

00:56:05 ►

i mean it discusses all kinds of magical alphabets and early systems for encoding and hiding

00:56:14 ►

information i think that what fascinated me about the vonage manuscript is above and beyond the

00:56:21 ►

historical puzzle above and beyond how interesting it would be

00:56:25 ►

to know what it actually says,

00:56:27 ►

and someone went to such great effort to hide what it says,

00:56:31 ►

is just the idea of an unreadable book

00:56:35 ►

is a kind of Borgesian concept that is attractive.

00:56:42 ►

There must be somewhere an unreadable book,

00:56:47 ►

and perhaps this is it.

00:56:48 ►

And it’s almost…

00:56:51 ►

I mean, if my analysis of it as being a product of Dee and Kelly

00:56:56 ►

has seemed too facile,

00:56:59 ►

let me assure you that it is,

00:57:02 ►

and that not all the facts are covered

00:57:05 ►

by that theory

00:57:07 ►

so much of Dee’s writing

00:57:09 ►

is known that I think

00:57:11 ►

if he had been the author

00:57:13 ►

it would be possible to find that out

00:57:16 ►

perhaps it is possible to find that

00:57:18 ►

out and we’re just premature

00:57:19 ►

in our wish for a resolution

00:57:21 ►

of it but the unreadable

00:57:23 ►

book,

00:57:28 ►

the idea that the world is information and the way by which we have cognizance of the world

00:57:32 ►

is by ordering all the information we come upon

00:57:37 ►

through relation to information that we already have accumulated.

00:57:43 ►

Patterns.

00:57:43 ►

Right.

00:57:44 ►

And an unreadable book in a non-English script

00:57:47 ►

with no dictionary attached is very puzzling

00:57:51 ►

because we are like linguistic oysters.

00:57:55 ►

We secrete around it.

00:57:57 ►

We insist it into our metaphysic,

00:58:00 ►

but we don’t know what it says,

00:58:02 ►

which always carries with it the possibility

00:58:05 ►

that it says something which would unhinge our conceptions of things,

00:58:11 ►

or that its real message is its unsayability.

00:58:16 ►

It simply is, it points to the otherness of the nature of information.

00:58:23 ►

It’s what’s called then a limit text,

00:58:26 ►

as Finnegan’s Wake is a limit text, or…

00:58:31 ►

What does that term come from?

00:58:33 ►

It’s a term of French structuralist criticism,

00:58:39 ►

the search for limit text.

00:58:41 ►

Well, certainly the Vonage Manuscript

00:58:43 ►

is the limit text of

00:58:45 ►

Western occultism. No one can read it.

00:58:48 ►

It is truly an occult

00:58:50 ►

book.

00:58:55 ►

Definitely a literal book.

00:58:57 ►

It is like a literalizing of

00:59:00 ►

the

00:59:01 ►

mythical book in H.P. Lovecraft’s

00:59:04 ►

work, which is the Necronomicon,

00:59:06 ►

the writings of the mad era of Alhazrad.

00:59:10 ►

And in fact, Colin Wilson, in his book The Philosopher’s Stone,

00:59:14 ►

connects the Vonage Manuscript to The Necronomicon.

00:59:18 ►

The Shoe Stone, maybe, too?

00:59:20 ►

Perhaps The Shoe Stone.

00:59:21 ►

Well, The Philosopher’s Stone was The the shoe stone for D, for sure.

00:59:26 ►

It’s very interesting, this business of the angelic language in Noccian,

00:59:34 ►

because, as I say, 4,000 words were delivered through the shoe stone to D.

00:59:39 ►

In the 1950s, there was a famous UFO case

00:59:43 ►

where a woman who claimed she was in contact with UFOs taught a colonel in the CIA how to be in contact with the same group of saucers.

00:59:54 ►

And he was demonstrating this ability for a group of his superiors in a room in the Pentagon.

01:00:00 ►

And he asked for a demonstration.

01:00:04 ►

He was communicating with them through automatic writing

01:00:07 ►

and they said, go to the window and look out.

01:00:10 ►

And they all went to the window and looked out

01:00:11 ►

and there was a brilliant golden disk of light cruising past the Pentagon.

01:00:17 ►

And they went berserk, called the nearby Air Force base

01:00:22 ►

to see what was on the scopes.

01:00:23 ►

The radar had just gone out in this sector,

01:00:26 ►

et cetera, et cetera.

01:00:27 ►

But what was, to tie it in with my point,

01:00:30 ►

these messages that this guy was getting

01:00:33 ►

on this Ouija board were signed

01:00:35 ►

A-F-F-A, A-F-A,

01:00:38 ►

which any scholar of Enochian can tell you

01:00:40 ►

is the Enochian word for nothingness, friends.

01:00:47 ►

Jaw-dropper.

01:00:48 ►

So, it’s very interesting.

01:00:52 ►

Blake spoke with angels.

01:00:55 ►

He was the flower of English poetry at a certain point in time.

01:01:00 ►

Dee spoke with angels.

01:01:01 ►

He was the flower of English science and mechanics at a certain period. but is simply a book in a non-human language,

01:01:28 ►

and therefore there is no Rosetta Stone to it.

01:01:34 ►

It is just utterly beyond the pale, as they say in Ireland.

01:01:37 ►

Well, I think they should analyze the inks.

01:01:38 ►

That’s one way.

01:01:41 ►

I really think that’s a very important thing to do,

01:01:44 ►

even if it was written in the 1500s and that were to say.

01:01:45 ►

But there would also be a way to locate its origin.

01:01:49 ►

That’s right.

01:01:49 ►

I mean, there’s all sorts of approaches.

01:01:51 ►

In the summation in this book by D’Imperio, where she suggests things that can be done,

01:01:58 ►

the first thing she suggests, as being totally obvious, is the physical book should be analyzed

01:02:04 ►

because this has never been done.

01:02:06 ►

This would settle once and for all at least the century of its origin.

01:02:12 ►

And, you know, a number of things could be done.

01:02:15 ►

The libraries of the world should be searched for other examples of Vonage script.

01:02:20 ►

I mean, after all, are we really sure that there’s no other extant example

01:02:24 ►

of this strange writing?

01:02:28 ►

Computer analysis, this has been part of the approach of the Santa Cruz group,

01:02:33 ►

is first of all settling on a standard alphabet for Von H,

01:02:37 ►

and then cataloging every character and the number of times it occurs,

01:02:42 ►

and in what combinations with other characters.

01:02:45 ►

And the graphics of it as well.

01:02:47 ►

Just the patterns that it forms,

01:02:50 ►

if they did a fully computer graphics on it,

01:02:54 ►

I bet that that would give a three-dimensional…

01:02:56 ►

Yes, well, none of the illustrations

01:02:58 ►

have ever been satisfactorily interpreted.

01:03:01 ►

Like what are called the astrological illustrations

01:03:04 ►

are only nominally

01:03:07 ►

that they could be anything they just seem to have stars and circles in them but otherwise

01:03:12 ►

they’re not particularly relatable to the sky the so-called pharmaceutical section which is all

01:03:18 ►

these little canisters and things and these strange little naked women bathing in all this plumbing,

01:03:27 ►

which is called the pharmaceutical or the anatomical section.

01:03:31 ►

You know, could be anything.

01:03:33 ►

Could be an obscure form of central German hydrotherapy

01:03:37 ►

or, you know, actually the doodlings of a deranged imagination.

01:03:43 ►

When you only have one of something,

01:03:47 ►

it gets quite dicey placing it in the correct context in cultural history,

01:03:55 ►

especially since there was a lot of secrecy in this period,

01:03:59 ►

a lot of people running around,

01:04:01 ►

faking manuscripts in other people’s names,

01:04:03 ►

using secret cover languages,

01:04:07 ►

communicating in secret codes,

01:04:10 ►

plotting secret societies.

01:04:12 ►

I mean, this was really the breakup of the medieval mind,

01:04:16 ►

just like today.

01:04:19 ►

All sorts of medieval mentalities.

01:04:23 ►

Yes, well, this hope to establish

01:04:26 ►

an alchemical political union in Central Europe

01:04:29 ►

was in the context of what followed the 30 years

01:04:33 ►

and modern times can just be seen as

01:04:35 ►

one of those places where the river of history

01:04:39 ►

chose not to run.

01:04:41 ►

It was a path not taken. But had things turned out differently, had the King

01:04:48 ►

of England been behind it wholeheartedly, had certain things been different, it might

01:04:55 ►

have all unraveled somewhat differently.

01:04:59 ►

So, what do you want to do about it?

01:05:01 ►

About the Vonage Manuscript?

01:05:03 ►

Yeah.

01:05:01 ►

So what do you want to do about it?

01:05:03 ►

About the Vonage manuscript?

01:05:03 ►

Yeah.

01:05:09 ►

Oh, I would like to think about it as an object of thought.

01:05:11 ►

I think it’s very interesting.

01:05:12 ►

It’s like thinking about your DNA. One thing I have thought to do about it is there are now what’s called psychic archaeologists,

01:05:21 ►

which when all else fails, you bring in these people,

01:05:24 ►

and by various means,

01:05:26 ►

esoteric and exoteric, they attempt to divine what story resides in an object. Since the

01:05:36 ►

Vonage manuscript is at the Benecke Rare Book Room at Yale, I’m sure any serious scholar

01:05:43 ►

would be allowed to look at it and

01:05:45 ►

spend time with it.

01:05:47 ►

I’ve never seen it. I would like to

01:05:49 ►

see it. The book

01:05:51 ►

which Robert Brumbaugh edited

01:05:53 ►

called The Most Mysterious Manuscript,

01:05:56 ►

which is now out of date

01:05:58 ►

in that his conclusions

01:05:59 ►

cannot be taken seriously.

01:06:01 ►

Nevertheless, it

01:06:03 ►

reproduces a number of the folios from the manuscript,

01:06:08 ►

and when you see them, just the pure weirdness of it all is conveyed quite readily. I mean,

01:06:16 ►

it is unearthly. It does not fit in the context of late medieval alchemical manuscripts or

01:06:22 ►

late medieval any other kind of manuscripts.

01:06:24 ►

Does it compare other writings in there?

01:06:26 ►

It doesn’t, but D’Imperio’s book does.

01:06:30 ►

She has many magical alphabets,

01:06:33 ►

many different forms of shorthand

01:06:36 ►

and specialized note-keeping scripts

01:06:38 ►

that were current in Europe throughout the Middle Ages,

01:06:42 ►

and none of them look particularly like Vonage script.

01:06:47 ►

Ralph Abraham made the suggestion

01:06:48 ►

that Vonage script had some relation

01:06:51 ►

to early Brahmanic number systems.

01:06:54 ►

He thought perhaps it was a string of numbers

01:06:57 ►

that would then have to be decoded from that

01:07:01 ►

and then further unencrypted to get sense out of.

01:07:06 ►

One thing that might be said about it is perhaps modern people

01:07:10 ►

simply overrate the sophistication of our code-breaking machinery.

01:07:17 ►

Perhaps there are simple ways of encoding material

01:07:20 ►

that simply have not occurred to the CIA.

01:07:24 ►

And so when the Vonage text is finally broken, material that simply have not occurred to the CIA and so

01:07:25 ►

when the Vonage text is

01:07:28 ►

finally broken it will

01:07:30 ►

be trivial the way in which it

01:07:32 ►

was encrypted trivial

01:07:33 ►

but unexpected in some

01:07:36 ►

way for instance Ralph made

01:07:38 ►

the suggestion to me that

01:07:39 ►

grids where you

01:07:42 ►

have a grid

01:07:44 ►

which has holes in it,

01:07:45 ►

when laid over a page,

01:07:48 ►

shows you the parts of the text which are to be dealt with,

01:07:51 ►

and all the rest of it is noise.

01:07:53 ►

If the grid changes from page to page

01:07:57 ►

and is completely irrational in the way it changes,

01:08:01 ►

then no computer program imaginable

01:08:04 ►

could separate the plain text from the noise

01:08:08 ►

because it isn’t a recursive formula. It’s an ever-changing variable that could be just

01:08:15 ►

whim, the whim of how you made the grids. And this would preclude, I think, any machine-oriented

01:08:22 ►

effort to decipher it. It would mean that it didn’t

01:08:26 ►

want to be deciphered. It would mean that

01:08:28 ►

the author decided to do it

01:08:30 ►

that way. Because no one

01:08:32 ►

could have, at that time,

01:08:34 ►

deciphered it either. That’s right.

01:08:35 ►

It would not be written for anyone. Oh, this grid method

01:08:37 ►

is known long enough that this

01:08:39 ►

may be the key. So that may

01:08:41 ►

mean that somewhere there either

01:08:43 ►

exist these grids

01:08:45 ►

or there exist the instructions

01:08:47 ►

for building them. And then

01:08:50 ►

out of that you could extract

01:08:52 ►

a portion of Vonage text which would

01:08:54 ►

quickly yield to modern methods

01:08:56 ►

of decipherment because it

01:08:58 ►

is the only part of the message

01:09:00 ►

which is really sensed. This is a

01:09:02 ►

standard method

01:09:04 ►

of hiding.

01:09:09 ►

A message is to embed it in great amounts of garbled material,

01:09:11 ►

hours of garbled material.

01:09:12 ►

Well, that’s what alchemy is.

01:09:13 ►

Yes.

01:09:14 ►

That’s what really alchemy is.

01:09:19 ►

It would have appealed to the alchemical imagination of Dee or Kelly or any of their educated occult contemporaries

01:09:22 ►

to use this kind of method.

01:09:25 ►

So it’s very interesting.

01:09:28 ►

What would you say the difference between an alchemist and a shaman is?

01:09:35 ►

Well, they have different spheres into which they project themselves.

01:09:39 ►

They have different models of the universe.

01:09:42 ►

of different models of the universe.

01:09:50 ►

The medieval alchemist had a discontinuous and fleeting,

01:09:53 ►

but nevertheless somehow ontologically founded,

01:09:55 ►

conception of an inside and an outside. He knew that his ontology was naive,

01:10:00 ►

but he accepted the existence of an exterior world on some terms,

01:10:05 ►

then it was to be manipulated through the alchemical process.

01:10:10 ►

Shaman actually translate into another dimension.

01:10:14 ►

They are true transect statics,

01:10:17 ►

and in that sense it probably represents a higher resolution of that intent.

01:10:27 ►

But Merciliad has traced back alchemists into smithing,

01:10:33 ►

into early metallurgy and metalworking,

01:10:37 ►

which was always thought to be a magical task.

01:10:40 ►

And it runs together then with alchemy.

01:10:43 ►

Alchemy and shamanism are united in the figure of the primitive blacksmith

01:10:48 ►

because he is both proto-chemist and shaman.

01:10:54 ►

So at that point in time it’s fused

01:10:57 ►

and that’s why there is so much stress on metal in primitive shamanism,

01:11:01 ►

on hanging metal off of your body, on smelting metal.

01:11:05 ►

It was like magic to turn metal red-hot

01:11:09 ►

and to change it into weapons and figures

01:11:13 ►

and that sort of thing.

01:11:15 ►

So the Bonage Manuscript would be really by an alchemist?

01:11:23 ►

Well, we don’t know what it says.

01:11:25 ►

We only know the traditions

01:11:26 ►

in which we find it embedded.

01:11:28 ►

We assume it’s by an alchemist.

01:11:30 ►

But anybody that would do that sort of a thing

01:11:33 ►

at that time would be labeled alchemist.

01:11:35 ►

Yes, it comes out of an alchemical mentality.

01:11:39 ►

It’s very mysterious.

01:11:41 ►

It’s quite an enigma.

01:11:52 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:11:56 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:12:01 ►

It’s very mysterious. It’s quite an enigma.

01:12:03 ►

So says the Bard McKenna.

01:12:06 ►

Well, I don’t know about you you but I just love a good mystery story

01:12:08 ►

and I thought that it was

01:12:10 ►

interesting there near the end of this conversation

01:12:12 ►

where Terence explained

01:12:14 ►

how he saw the difference between an alchemist

01:12:16 ►

and a shaman

01:12:16 ►

actually I’d never even thought about that question before

01:12:20 ►

and I think that Terence made a good stab

01:12:22 ►

at distinguishing those two tracks

01:12:24 ►

but since I’ve already done more than my share of talking here today and I think that Terrence made a good stab at distinguishing those two crafts.

01:12:28 ►

But since I’ve already done more than my share of talking here today,

01:12:33 ►

I’m going to leave the rest of my commentary about this talk for interactions with you and our other fellow salonners in the comments section of the program notes for this podcast,

01:12:39 ►

which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:12:43 ►

However, to close on a really upbeat and positive note,

01:12:47 ►

I want to let you know about the Planque Norte lectures

01:12:50 ►

that are going to return to the playa at Burning Man this year.

01:12:53 ►

Next week, I’ll give you some more details,

01:12:56 ►

but just to whet your appetite,

01:12:57 ►

here are some of the speakers who have confirmed spots on the schedule this year.

01:13:02 ►

And they are Troy Dayton,

01:13:04 ►

Dr. Nautily, Annie Oak, Allison and Alex

01:13:08 ►

Gray, John Gilmore, Bruce Dahmer, Rick Doblin, and Paul Stamets. And if all goes well, I’ll be

01:13:16 ►

playing recordings of these talks here in the salon later this year. And as I said in my next

01:13:22 ►

podcast, I’ll have more details about this year’s Palenque Norte lectures at Burning Man,

01:13:26 ►

so that if you plan on attending, you’ll be able to know ahead of time when and where these talks will be held.

01:13:32 ►

But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:13:36 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

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