How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

In the cred­its of Phil Collins’ No Jack­et Required appears the dis­claimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryp­tic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buy­ers, tech­nol­o­gy-mind­ed musi­cians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its intro­duc­tion, the Fairlight Com­put­er Musi­cal Instru­ment, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at least the pop music cre­at­ed by acts who could afford one. The device may have cost as much as a house, but for those who under­stood the poten­tial of play­ing and manip­u­lat­ing the sounds of real-life instru­ments (or of any­thing else besides) dig­i­tal­ly, mon­ey was no object.

The his­to­ry of the Fairlight CMI is told in the video above from the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald and The Age, incor­po­rat­ing inter­views from its Aus­tralian inven­tors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. Accord­ing to Ryrie, No Jack­et Required actu­al­ly did use the Fairlight, in the sense that one of its musi­cians sam­pled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musi­cians, using the tech­nol­o­gy not yet wide­ly known as dig­i­tal sam­pling would have felt like mag­ic; to lis­ten­ers, it meant a whole range of sounds they’d nev­er heard before, or at least nev­er used in that way. Take the “orches­tra hit” orig­i­nal­ly sam­pled from a record of Stravin­sky’s The Fire­bird (and whose sto­ry is told in the Vox video just above), which soon became prac­ti­cal­ly inescapable.

We might call the orches­tra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” though its breathy, faint­ly vocal sam­ple known as “ARR1” also saw a lot of action across gen­res. A desire for those par­tic­u­lar effects brought a lot of musi­cians and pro­duc­ers onto the band­wag­on through­out the eight­ies, but it was the ear­ly adopters who used the Fairlight most cre­ative­ly. The ear­li­est among them was Peter Gabriel, who appears in the clip from the French doc­u­men­tary above gath­er­ing sounds to sam­ple, blow­ing wind through pipes and smash­ing up tele­vi­sions in a junk­yard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a spe­cial fer­vor, using not just its sam­pling capa­bil­i­ties but also its ground­break­ing sequenc­ing soft­ware (includ­ed from the Series II onward) to cre­ate her 1985 hit “Run­ning Up That Hill,” which made a sur­prise return to pop­u­lar­i­ty just a few years ago.

The Fairlight’s high-pro­file Amer­i­can users includ­ed Ste­vie Won­der, Todd Rund­gren, and Her­bie Han­cock, who demon­strates his own mod­el along­side the late Quin­cy Jones in the doc­u­men­tary clip above. With its green-on-black mon­i­tor, its gigan­tic flop­py disks, and its futur­is­tic-look­ing “light pen” (as nat­ur­al a point­ing device as any in an era when most of human­i­ty had nev­er laid eyes on a mouse), it resem­bles less a musi­cal instru­ment than an ear­ly per­son­al com­put­er with a piano key­board attached. It had its cum­ber­some qual­i­ties, and some leaned rather too heav­i­ly on its packed-in sounds, but as Han­cock points out, a tool is a tool, and it’s all down to the human being in con­trol to get pleas­ing results out of it: “It does­n’t plug itself in. It does­n’t pro­gram itself… yet.” To which the always-pre­scient Jones adds: “It’s on the way, though.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Her­bie Han­cock Demo a Fairlight CMI Syn­the­siz­er on Sesame Street (1983)

How the Yama­ha DX7 Dig­i­tal Syn­the­siz­er Defined the Sound of 1980s Music

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Every­thing Thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Syn­the­siz­er: A Vin­tage Three-Hour Crash Course

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter find your­self an inn, tav­ern, or ale­house,” says Tast­ing His­to­ry host Max Miller in the video above. The dif­fer­ences between them had to do with qual­i­ty: the tav­erns were nicer than the ale­hous­es, and the inns were nicer than the tav­erns, hav­ing begun as full-ser­vice estab­lish­ments where cus­tomers could stay the night.

As for what inn‑, tavern‑, or ale­house-goers would actu­al­ly con­sume, Miller men­tions that the local avail­abil­i­ty of ingre­di­ents would always be a fac­tor. “You might just get a veg­etable potage; in some places it would just be beans and cab­bage.”

Else­where, though, it could be “a fish stew, or some­thing with real­ly qual­i­ty meat in it.” For the recipe of the episode — this being a cook­ing show, after all — Miller choos­es a com­mon medieval meat stew called buke­nade or bok­nade. The actu­al instruc­tions he reads con­tain words reveal­ing of their time peri­od: the Bib­li­cal sound­ing smyte for cut, for instance, or eyroun, the Mid­dle Eng­lish term that ulti­mate­ly lost favor to eggs.

The cus­tomers of tav­erns would orig­i­nal­ly have drunk wine, which in Eng­land was import­ed from France at some expense. As they grew more pop­u­lar, these busi­ness­es diver­si­fied their menus, offer­ing “cider from apples and per­ry from pears,” as well as the pre­mi­um option of mead made with hon­ey. Ale­hous­es, as their name would sug­gest, began as pri­vate homes whose wives sold ale, at least the excess that the fam­i­ly itself could­n’t drink. How­ev­er infor­mal they sound, they were still sub­ject to the same reg­u­la­tions as oth­er drink­ing spots, and alewives found to be sell­ing an infe­ri­or prod­uct were sub­ject to the same kind of pub­lic humil­i­a­tions inflict­ed upon any medieval mis­cre­ant — the likes of whom we might rec­og­nize from any num­ber of the high-fan­ta­sy tales we read today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

The Entire Man­u­script Col­lec­tion of Geof­frey Chaucer Gets Dig­i­tized: A New Archive Fea­tures 25,000 Images of The Can­ter­bury Tales & Oth­er Illus­trat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

Peo­ple under­stand evo­lu­tion in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We’ve all heard a vari­ety of folk expla­na­tions of that all-impor­tant phe­nom­e­non, from “sur­vival of the fittest” to “humans come from mon­keys,” that run the spec­trum from broad­ly cor­rect to bad­ly man­gled. One less often heard but more ele­gant way to put it is that all species, liv­ing or extinct, share a com­mon ances­tor. This is true of evo­lu­tion as Dar­win knew it, and it could well be true of oth­er forms of “evo­lu­tion” out­side the bio­log­i­cal realm as well. Take lan­guages, which we know full well have changed and split into dif­fer­ent vari­eties over time: do they, too, all share a sin­gle ances­tor?

In the Rob­Words video above, lan­guage Youtu­ber Rob Watts starts with his native Eng­lish and traces its roots back as far as pos­si­ble. He ascends up the fam­i­ly tree past Low West Ger­man, past Pro­to-Ger­man­ic — “a lan­guage that was the­o­ret­i­cal­ly spo­ken by a sin­gle group of peo­ple who would even­tu­al­ly go on to become the Swedes, the Ger­mans, the Dutch, the Eng­lish, and more” — back to an ances­tor of not just Eng­lish and the Ger­man­ic lan­guages, but almost all the Euro­pean lan­guages, as well as of Asian lan­guages like Hin­di, Pash­tu, Kur­dish, Far­si, and Ben­gali. Its name? Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean.

Watts quotes the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry philol­o­gist Sir William Jones, who wrote that the ancient Asian lan­guage of San­skrit has a struc­ture “more per­fect than the Greek, more copi­ous than the Latin, and more exquis­ite­ly refined than either, yet bear­ing to both of them a stronger affin­i­ty, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of gram­mar, than could pos­si­bly have been pro­duced by acci­dent.” As with such con­spic­u­ous­ly shared traits observed in dis­parate species of plant or ani­mal, no expert “could exam­ine all three with­out believ­ing them to have sprung from some com­mon source, which, per­haps, no longer exists.”

The evi­dence is every­where, if you pay atten­tion to the sort of unex­pect­ed cog­nates and very-near­ly-cog­nates Watts points out span­ning geo­graph­i­cal­ly and tem­po­ral­ly var­i­ous lan­guages. Take the Eng­lish hun­dred, the Latin cen­tum, the Ancient Greek heka­ton, the Russ­ian sto, and the San­skrit Shatam; or the more deeply buried resem­blances of Eng­lish heart, the Latin cordis, the Russ­ian serd­ce, and the san­skrit hrd. In some cas­es, lin­guists have actu­al­ly used these com­mon­al­i­ties to reverse-engi­neer Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean words, though always with the caveat that the whole thing “is a recon­struct­ed lan­guage; it’s our best guess of what a com­mon ances­tral lan­guage could have been like.” Was there a still old­er lan­guage from which the non-Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean-descend­ed lan­guages also descend­ed? That’s a ques­tion to push the lin­guis­tic imag­i­na­tion to its very lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Was There a First Human Lan­guage?: The­o­ries from the Enlight­en­ment Through Noam Chom­sky

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

The Alpha­bet Explained: The Ori­gin of Every Let­ter

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Who Was the Greatest Scientific Mind in History

Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent his career talk­ing up not just sci­ence itself, but also its prac­ti­tion­ers. If asked to name the great­est sci­en­tist of all time, one might expect him to need a minute to think about it — or even to find him­self unable to choose. But that’s hard­ly Tyson’s style, as evi­denced by the clip above from his 92nd Street Y con­ver­sa­tion with Fareed Zakaria. “Who do you think is the most extra­or­di­nary sci­en­tif­ic mind that human­i­ty has pro­duced?” Zakaria asks. “There’s no con­test,” Tyson imme­di­ate­ly responds. “Isaac New­ton.”

Those famil­iar with Tyson will know he would be pre­pared for the fol­low-up. By way of expla­na­tion, he nar­rates cer­tain events of New­ton’s life: “He, work­ing alone, dis­cov­ers the laws of motion. Then he dis­cov­ers the law of grav­i­ty.” Faced with the ques­tion of why plan­ets orbit in ellipses rather than per­fect cir­cles, he first invents inte­gral and dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus in order to deter­mine the answer. Then he dis­cov­ers the laws of optics. “Then he turns 26.” At this point in the sto­ry, young lis­ten­ers who aspire to sci­en­tif­ic careers of their own will be ner­vous­ly recal­cu­lat­ing their own intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al tra­jec­to­ries.

They must remem­ber that New­ton was a man of his place and time, specif­i­cal­ly the Eng­land of the late sev­en­teenth and ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­turies. And even there, he was an out­lier the likes of which his­to­ry has hard­ly known, whose eccen­tric ten­den­cies also inspired him to come up with pow­dered toad-vom­it lozenges and pre­dict the date of the apoc­a­lypse (not that he’s yet been proven wrong on that score). But in our time as in his, future (or cur­rent) sci­en­tists would do well to inter­nal­ize New­ton’s spir­it of inquiry, which got him pre­scient­ly won­der­ing whether, for instance, “the stars of the night sky are just like our sun, but just much, much far­ther away.”

“Great sci­en­tists are not marked by their answers, but by how great their ques­tions are.” To find such ques­tions, one needs not just curios­i­ty, but also humil­i­ty before the expanse of one’s own igno­rance. “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” New­ton once wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy play­ing on the seashore, and divert­ing myself in now and then find­ing a smoother peb­ble or a pret­ti­er shell than ordi­nary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis­cov­ered before me.” Near­ly three cen­turies after his death, that ocean remains for­bid­ding­ly but promis­ing­ly vast — at least to those who know how to look at it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents a Brief His­to­ry of Every­thing in an 8.5 Minute Ani­ma­tion

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dict­ed That the World Will End in 2060

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of our age, espe­cial­ly since arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to be back on the slate of pos­si­bil­i­ties. While there would be no Sil­i­con Val­ley with­out sil­i­ca sand, semi­con­duc­tors are hard­ly the first mar­vel human­i­ty has forged out of that kind of mate­r­i­al. Con­sid­er the three mil­len­nia of his­to­ry behind the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, long known even out­side the Japan­ese lan­guage as the katana (lit­er­al­ly “one-sided blade”) — or, more to the point of the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, the 1,200 years in which such weapons have been made out of steel. How Japan­ese Mas­ters Turn Sand Into Swords

In explain­ing the sci­ence of the katana, Ver­i­ta­si­um host Derek Muller begins more than two and a half bil­lion years ago, when Earth­’s oceans were “rich with dis­solved iron.” But then, cyanobac­te­ria start­ed pho­to­syn­the­siz­ing that iron and cre­at­ing oxy­gen as a by-prod­uct. This process dropped lay­ers of iron onto the sea floor, which even­tu­al­ly hard­ened into lay­ers of sed­i­men­ta­ry rock.

With few such for­ma­tions of its own, the geo­log­i­cal­ly vol­canic Japan actu­al­ly came late to steel, import­ing it long before it could man­age domes­tic pro­duc­tion using the iron oxide that accu­mu­lat­ed in its rivers, recov­ered as “iron sand.”

By that time, iron swords would no longer cut it, as it were, but the addi­tion of char­coal in the heat­ing process could pro­duce the “incred­i­bly strong alloy” of steel. Cer­tain Japan­ese sword­smiths have con­tin­ued to use steel made with the more or less tra­di­tion­al smelt­ing process you can see per­formed in rur­al Shi­mane pre­fec­ture in the video. To the dis­ap­point­ment of its pro­duc­er, Petr Lebe­dev, who par­tic­i­pates in the whole process, the foot-oper­at­ed bel­lows of yore have been elec­tri­fied, but he hard­ly seems dis­ap­point­ed by his chance to take up a katana him­self. He may have yet to attain the skill of a mas­ter swords­man, but under­stand­ing every sci­en­tif­ic detail of the weapon he wields must make slic­ing bam­boo clean in half that much more sat­is­fy­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

A Vin­tage Short Film about the Samu­rai Sword, Nar­rat­ed by George Takei (1969)

A Demon­stra­tion of Per­fect Samu­rai Swords­man­ship

An Origa­mi Samu­rai Made from a Sin­gle Sheet of Rice Paper, With­out Any Cut­ting

Watch the Old­est Japan­ese Ani­me Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

We can all remem­ber see­ing images of medieval Euro­peans wear­ing pointy shoes, but most of us have paid scant atten­tion to the shoes them­selves. That may be for the best, since the more we dwell on one fact of life in the Mid­dle Ages or anoth­er, the more we imag­ine how uncom­fort­able or even painful it must have been by our stan­dards. Den­tistry would be the most vivid exam­ple, but even that fash­ion­able, vague­ly elfin footwear inflict­ed suf­fer­ing, espe­cial­ly at the height of its pop­u­lar­i­ty — not least among flashy young men — in the four­teenth and fif­teenth cen­turies.

Called poulaines, a name drawn from the French word for Poland in ref­er­ence to the footwear’s sup­pos­ed­ly Pol­ish ori­gin, these pointy shoes appeared around the time of Richard II’s mar­riage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. “Both men and women wore them, although the aris­to­crat­ic men’s shoes tend­ed to have the longest toes, some­times as long as five inch­es,” writes Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Jen­nifer Ouel­lette. “The toes were typ­i­cal­ly stuffed with moss, wool, or horse­hair to help them hold their shape.” If you’ve ever watched the first Black­ad­der series, know that the shoes worn by Rowan Atkin­son’s hap­less plot­ting prince may be com­ic, but they’re not an exag­ger­a­tion.

Regard­less, he was a bit behind the times, giv­en that the show was set in 1485, right when poulaines went out of fash­ion. But they’d already done their dam­age, as evi­denced by a 2021 study link­ing their wear­ing to nasty foot dis­or­ders. “Bunions — or hal­lux val­gus — are bulges that appear on the side of the foot as the big toe leans in towards the oth­er toes and the first metatarsal bone points out­wards,” writes the Guardian’s Nico­la Davis. A team of Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge researchers found signs of them being more preva­lent in the remains of indi­vid­u­als buried in the four­teenth and fif­teenth cen­turies than those buried from the eleventh through the thir­teenth cen­turies.

Yet bunions were hard­ly the evil against which the poulaine’s con­tem­po­rary crit­ics inveighed. After the Great Pesti­lence of 1348, says the Lon­don Muse­um, “cler­ics claimed the plague was sent by God to pun­ish Lon­don­ers for their sins, espe­cial­ly sex­u­al sins.” The shoes’ las­civ­i­ous asso­ci­a­tions con­tin­ued to draw ire: “In 1362, Pope Urban V passed an edict ban­ning them, but it did­n’t real­ly stop any­body from wear­ing them.” Then came sump­tu­ary laws, accord­ing to which “com­mon­ers were charged to wear short­er poulaines than barons and knights.” The pow­er of the state may be as noth­ing against that of the fash­ion cycle, but had there been a law against the blunt­ly square-toed shoes in vogue when I was in high school, I can’t say I would’ve object­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ele­gant 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

Exquis­ite 2300-Year-Old Scythi­an Woman’s Boot Pre­served in the Frozen Ground of Siberia

The Ancient Romans First Com­mit­ted the Sar­to­r­i­al Crime of Wear­ing Socks with San­dals, Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Sug­gests

Doc Martens Boots Adorned with Hierony­mus Bosch’s “Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights”

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Cen­tu­ry Armor: A Reen­act­ment

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Explore a Digitized Edition of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious Book”

A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script no one has ever decod­ed, filled with cryp­tic illus­tra­tions, its ori­gins remain­ing to this day a mys­tery…. It’s not as sat­is­fy­ing a plot, say, of a Nation­al Trea­sure or Dan Brown thriller, cer­tain­ly not as action-packed as pick-your-Indi­ana Jones…. The Voyn­ich Man­u­script, named for the anti­quar­i­an who redis­cov­ered it in 1912, has a much more her­met­ic nature, some­what like the work of Hen­ry Darg­er; it presents us with an inscrutably alien world, pieced togeth­er from hybridized motifs drawn from its con­tem­po­rary sur­round­ings.

The Voyn­ich Man­u­script is unique for hav­ing made up its own alpha­bet while also seem­ing to be in con­ver­sa­tion with oth­er famil­iar works of the peri­od, such that it resem­bles an uncan­ny dop­pel­ganger of many a medieval text.

A com­par­a­tive­ly long book at 234 pages, it rough­ly divides into sev­en sec­tions, any of which might be found on the shelves of your aver­age 1400s Euro­pean reader—a fair­ly small and rar­efied group. “Over time, Voyn­ich enthu­si­asts have giv­en each sec­tion a con­ven­tion­al name” for its dom­i­nant imagery: “botan­i­cal, astro­nom­i­cal, cos­mo­log­i­cal, zodi­ac, bio­log­i­cal, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, and recipes.”

Schol­ars can only spec­u­late about these cat­e­gories. The man­u­scrip­t’s ori­gins and intent have baf­fled cryp­tol­o­gists since at least the 17th cen­tu­ry, when, notes Vox, “an alchemist described it as ‘a cer­tain rid­dle of the Sphinx.’” We can pre­sume, “judg­ing by its illus­tra­tions,” writes Reed John­son at The New York­er, that Voyn­ich is “a com­pendi­um of knowl­edge relat­ed to the nat­ur­al world.” But its “illus­tra­tions range from the fan­ci­ful (legions of heavy-head­ed flow­ers that bear no rela­tion to any earth­ly vari­ety) to the bizarre (naked and pos­si­bly preg­nant women, frol­ick­ing in what look like amuse­ment-park water­slides from the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry).”

The manuscript’s “botan­i­cal draw­ings are no less strange: the plants appear to be chimeri­cal, com­bin­ing incom­pat­i­ble parts from dif­fer­ent species, even dif­fer­ent king­doms.” These draw­ings led schol­ar Nicholas Gibbs to com­pare it to the Tro­tu­la, a Medieval com­pi­la­tion that “spe­cial­izes in the dis­eases and com­plaints of women,” as he wrote in a Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment arti­cle. It turns out, accord­ing to sev­er­al Medieval man­u­script experts who have stud­ied the Voyn­ich, that Gibbs’ pro­posed decod­ing may not actu­al­ly solve the puz­zle.

The degree of doubt should be enough to keep us in sus­pense, and there­in lies the Voyn­ich Man­u­script’s endur­ing appeal—it is a black box, about which we might always ask, as Sarah Zhang does, “What could be so scan­dalous, so dan­ger­ous, or so impor­tant to be writ­ten in such an uncrack­able cipher?” Wil­fred Voyn­ich him­self asked the same ques­tion in 1912, believ­ing the man­u­script to be “a work of excep­tion­al impor­tance… the text must be unrav­eled and the his­to­ry of the man­u­script must be traced.” Though “not an espe­cial­ly glam­orous phys­i­cal object,” Zhang observes, it has nonethe­less tak­en on the aura of a pow­er­ful occult charm.

But maybe it’s com­plete gib­ber­ish, a high-con­cept prac­ti­cal joke con­coct­ed by 15th cen­tu­ry scribes to troll us in the future, know­ing we’d fill in the space of not-know­ing with the most fan­tas­ti­cal­ly strange spec­u­la­tions. This is a propo­si­tion Stephen Bax, anoth­er con­tender for a Voyn­ich solu­tion, finds hard­ly cred­i­ble. “Why on earth would any­one waste their time cre­at­ing a hoax of this kind?,” he asks. Maybe it’s a rel­ic from an insu­lar com­mu­ni­ty of magi­cians who left no oth­er trace of them­selves. Sure­ly in the last 300 years every pos­si­ble the­o­ry has been sug­gest­ed, dis­card­ed, then picked up again.

Should you care to take a crack at sleuthing out the Voyn­ich mystery—or just to browse through it for curiosity’s sake—you can find the man­u­script scanned at Yale’s Bei­necke Rare Book & Man­u­script Library, which hous­es the vel­lum orig­i­nal. Or flip through the Inter­net Archive’s dig­i­tal ver­sion above. Anoth­er pri­vate­ly-run site con­tains a his­to­ry and descrip­tion of the man­u­script and anno­ta­tions on the illus­tra­tions and the script, along with sev­er­al pos­si­ble tran­scrip­tions of its sym­bols pro­posed by schol­ars. Good luck!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

An Intro­duc­tion to the Codex Seraphini­anus, the Strangest Book Ever Pub­lished

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Mahatma Gandhi’s List of the Seven Social Sins; or Tips on How to Avoid Living the Bad Life

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 590 AD, Pope Gre­go­ry I unveiled a list of the Sev­en Dead­ly Sins – lust, glut­tony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from stray­ing into the thorny fields of ungod­li­ness. These days, though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list seems less like a means to moral behav­ior than a descrip­tion of cable TV pro­gram­ming.

So instead, let’s look to one of the saints of the 20th cen­tu­ry–Mahat­ma Gand­hi. On Octo­ber 22, 1925, Gand­hi pub­lished a list he called the Sev­en Social Sins in his week­ly news­pa­per Young India.

  • Pol­i­tics with­out prin­ci­ples.
  • Wealth with­out work.
  • Plea­sure with­out con­science.
  • Knowl­edge with­out char­ac­ter.
  • Com­merce with­out moral­i­ty.
  • Sci­ence with­out human­i­ty.
  • Wor­ship with­out sac­ri­fice.

The list sprang from a cor­re­spon­dence that Gand­hi had with some­one only iden­ti­fied as a “fair friend.” He pub­lished the list with­out com­men­tary save for the fol­low­ing line: “Nat­u­ral­ly, the friend does not want the read­ers to know these things mere­ly through the intel­lect but to know them through the heart so as to avoid them.”

Unlike the Catholic Church’s list, Gandhi’s list is express­ly focused on the con­duct of the indi­vid­ual in soci­ety. Gand­hi preached non-vio­lence and inter­de­pen­dence and every sin­gle one of these sins are exam­ples of self­ish­ness win­ning out over the com­mon good.

It’s also a list that, if ful­ly absorbed, will make the folks over at the US Cham­ber of Com­merce and Ayn Rand Insti­tute itch. After all, “Wealth with­out work,” is a pret­ty accu­rate descrip­tion of America’s 1%. (Invest­ments ain’t work. Ask Thomas Piket­ty.) “Com­merce with­out moral­i­ty” sounds a lot like every sin­gle oil com­pa­ny out there and “knowl­edge with­out char­ac­ter” describes half the hacks on cable news. “Pol­i­tics with­out prin­ci­ples” describes the oth­er half.

In 1947, Gand­hi gave his fifth grand­son, Arun Gand­hi, a slip of paper with this same list on it, say­ing that it con­tained “the sev­en blun­ders that human soci­ety com­mits, and that cause all the vio­lence.” The next day, Arun returned to his home in South Africa. Three months lat­er, Gand­hi was shot to death by a Hin­du extrem­ist.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tol­stoy and Gand­hi Exchange Let­ters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gen­tle­ness, Humil­i­ty & Love (1909)

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Mahat­ma Gand­hi Talks (in First Record­ed Video)

When Mahat­ma Gand­hi Met Char­lie Chap­lin (1931)

Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Exis­tence of God (1931)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions,

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

More in this category... »
Quantcast