The Yale University Library holds a medieval manuscript written in undecipherable code, in an unknown alphabet, in an unknown language, and it contains detailed drawings of more than one hundred plants none of which have ever been positively identified. Named after a bookseller who purchased it a century ago, the Voynich manuscript has been called the world's most mysterious manuscript.
Scholars think that the Voynich was written somewhere in Europe but it is unknown by whom. The text of the Voynich is of no help in determining authorship since it has never been decoded, and some of the world's best cryptographers have tried. But as the old saying goes, "One picture is worth a thousand words," and the Voynich manuscript is packed full of pictures. From these drawings, I have concluded that the authors of the manuscript were Cathars, a sect of religious heretics that prospered in southern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Specifically, the evidence is as follows:
a) in at least two different places the Voynich depicts Cathar women performing a baptism-like ceremony known as consolamentum, the only sacrament of Catharism. The Cathar Church had no formal clergy so a lay clergy of both sexes was empowered to perform this sacrament.
b) the Voynich depicts the round table of the governing lay clergy of the Cathar Church both in the European winter (mixture of men and women fully clothed) and at a summertime resort (now only naked women sitting in the circle). In sharp contrast to other medieval religions, women played a major role in the Cathar Church.
c) the Voynich depicts a European fortress with a round tower capped in a cone, exactly like the conned towers of the still-extant Carcassonne fortress, which was once a stronghold of Catharism and today is noted for its museum of torture, housing the original equipment used to convince the Cathars to repent.
d) though the underlying alphabetic characters of the Voynich are unknown, the manuscript utilizes recognizable accent marks: three different Voynich accents (the hook accent, the bloop accent, and the crossbar accent) can be found in the Homilies d'Organya, a manuscript of the old Catalan language, that is, a member of the Occitan family of languages spoken by the Cathars.
e) some of the women in the Voynich are depicted wearing an unusual top-of-the-head hair style, the same hair style seen in Europe in a medieval painting that depicts the Cathars being expelled from Carcassonne.
Moreover, please note that because of severe persecution by the Inquisition, the Cathars, more than any other people of medieval Europe, would have had a need to write in code. The Inquisition burned all the Cather literature that they could lay their hands on, so it unknown if, once upon a time, there were other manuscripts written in the Voynich script.
Radiocarbon experts from the University of Arizona have dated the Voynich manuscript to the early 15th century, between AD 1404 and AD 1438, which gives us a great anomaly. The Cathars --all half million of them-- are believed to have become extinct by the early 14th century, wiped out by the papal Crusades and Inquisition torture chambers. There were no known survivors except for reports that a handful of Cathars narrowly escaped the massacre at Montsegur in AD 1244, carrying with them the sacred relic of their faith. Apparently, neither these escapees nor their treasure (believed by some to be esoteric texts or the Holy Grail) were ever found.
The mystery compounds itself when we observe that no European botanist has ever identified any of the more than one hundred plants depicted, in great detail, in the Voynich manuscript. This raises suspicions that perhaps these are not plants of Europe after all but of some other place. Given the enormous diversity of exotic plants depicted in the manuscript, one place that quickly comes to mind is the Amazon rainforest of South America. This could also explain all the naked women seen in the Voynich manuscript, i.e. the survivors of Montsegur fled to the tropics where clothing was not particularly necessary.
I was elated when I found a picture of an Amazon plant with pointed green leaves and bunches of red berries that looked just like one of the Voynich plants, but then I discovered that similar plants exist elsewhere. The Voynich, however, has some extremely peculiar plants, so much so that they are suspected of being purely fictional concoctions. One such plant can be found between pages numbered 2 and 3 in the Yale PDF file, which is available online. I found a modern photograph of that plant and acquired rights to post it on my website, where I am currently awaiting the opinion of professional botanists on whether or not it is the exact same species.
It is doubtful that this plant --a tropical underwater plant of odd shape with one floral offshoot but lacking branches and leaves-- could even survive in Europe let alone be found there. Whether by disease, headhunters, or perhaps intermarriage with the natives, no Cathar settlement in the Amazon rainforest survived to see the arrival of the Conquistadors, but the Voynich manuscript nonetheless raises the intriguing possibility that the French Cathars reached the Americas ahead of the Spanish, by more than two hundred years.
Senin, 25 September 2017
Selasa, 05 September 2017
One Man's Junk Is Another Man's Treasure
In William S. Burrough's "Junky", a newly graduated English major scraps his middle class life in favor of the opiate addict lifestyle. Published in 1952, this semi-autobiography shows insight into the drug culture and underworld at the time. The main character, William Lee (nicknamed "Bill"), comes into possession of some morphine, and wondering about the allure of the substance to his buyers, decides to try his first "shot". William Lee quickly learns that opium consumes your life, giving junkies their own sense of time and distorted priorities.
After becoming a self-proclaimed "junkie," William Lee's life is ever changing, quickly consumed by opiates. William Lee's life is an ode to his mantra:
"Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life." (Burroughs 3)
The book shows a contrast of users stemming from all sociopolitical roots. William Lee (a portrayal of Burroughs) is a well-educated man with a wife and 150 dollars a month delivered to him from a trust fund. By contrast, William Lee begins consorting with people such as Jack, a career criminal and opiate addict, and his friends, Roy and Herman, career criminals down on their luck waiting for a "setup man" to tell them exactly what to do. Addiction is non-discriminatory.
Perhaps most fascinating is Burroughs accounts of the junkies he encounters. At the introduction of each new character in the book, Burroughs paints a vivid picture of the person, highlighting not only the sallow skin and decay of the junkie, but also the life behind the addiction. Take his description of Roy, for instance:
"The man sat up straighter and swung his legs off the couch. His jaw fell slackly, giving his face a vacant look. The skin of his face was smooth and brown. The cheekbones were high and he looked Oriental. His ears stuck out at right angles from his asymmetrical skull. The eyes were brown and they had a peculiar brilliance, as though points of light were shining behind them. The light in the room glinted on the points of light in his eyes like an opal." (7)
Throughout his account, Burroughs gives "junk" a consciousness of its own. A 'sick' junkie will find himself immobilized, without a sense of time or appetite. Upon receiving a shot, hunger, content, and sleep befall the junkie. William Lee never refers to getting "high," but rather calls his shots a "time of relief." In Burroughs' descriptions of characters, sickness is noted in the skin, with a pale, sallow quality, as opposed to the "smooth and brown" skin of Roy, the buyer of his morphine.
To Burroughs, an addict is always growing. Throughout times of sickness and finding the next shot, the body undergoes shock and then relief.
"When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. - A user is a continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed." (22)
To stop growing is to begin dying, thus in Burroughs' eyes, an addict has the potential for a long life. Burroughs himself lived from 1914 to 1997 (Miles 6). However just as a junkie is always changing, the underworld itself is always changing: "The man," or the dope-dealer is dependent on which junkie has the dope connection at the time. William Lee began dealing once he came to New York City to fund his opiate addiction. Getting his dope from an Italian connection who was constantly shorting him product, William Lee sells his dope to a variety of characters, one of whom a waiter by the name of Marvin.
Marvin is described as a dirty person, the type of person William Lee would never be able to sell to in public without suspicion. After Marvin cops (buys) some product in his own apartment, he goes "on the nod" right after injection. An update from his friend Roy later in the series explains Marvin died from an overdose, disproving the junkie immortality.
Dealing drugs brings immense stress to Lee: His Italian connect keeps shorting him, giving drugs on credit nibbles away at the profits, and there is the constantly looming worry that the police may be onto him. The law, as William Lee calls it, is aware that someone is selling 14-16% purity morphine caps to a plethora of addicts. That person is William Lee himself and although he sells the highest grade morphine in the city, his own addiction ensures he never saves much money. A tip off from a staff member of the hotel he was staying in alerted him that his clients made it obvious something illegitimate was going on. William Lee was lucky to have been tipped off rather than arrested, and counted his blessings before going straight to New Orleans to reinvent his life as a junkie.
Burroughs mentions "tea smokers" regularly as a focal point for comparing a lifestyle drug to life-enhancing drugs. There are comparisons of both, marijuana described as 'disturbing your sense of time and consequentially your sense of spatial relations'. A morphine high is described as an 'all around content.' Burroughs finds "tea heads" far too concentrated on the social aspect of drugs, explaining how when a weed smoker picks up he will expect to hang around and talk, whilst a junkie will pick up and leave (18). As weed is not physically addicting, a weed smoker will smoke to enhance his daily activities. A junkie's day to day life involves getting money for the drug, the time of sickness, and the time of relief.
Burroughs explains how the addiction begins, with one needing hundreds of shots before they become actually physically addicted. As a habit takes hold, other interests lose importance, and obtaining the next shot becomes the point of existence.
On top of his daily life consisting of stealing and dealing in order to support his habit, his own sense of time is consumed by "junk." William Lee describes his first high as "The physical impact of the face of death; the shitting off of breath; the stopping of blood." (7) When high, it is like time stops and a sense of content takes over, until William Lee begins "fiending" for his next shot. William Lee describes this phenomenon as "junk time." When a junkie is sick, time stops. William Lee notes his sense of external time returning a couple days after one of his attempts at stopping junk use.
"A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait." (87) To me, this embodies the essence of a junkie. Basically, your life as a junkie is consumed by your habit, thus not being able to shoot up freezes any incentive one would have to continue existence. This quote embodies the true soul of a junkie, one with a habit who cannot see past that habit until said habit is kicked.
Nearing the end of the book, William Lee finds himself in Mexico to escape charges back in New Orleans. In Mexico, "junk" is even more expensive than in the States, due to a 300-pound dealer named Lupita monopolizing the market and paying off the police to exonerate her from arrest. Lupita's heroin is twice as expensive in the states, and eventually William Lee finds a doctor who will prescribe him enough morphine to last him a month for a tenth of the cost back home. With an abundance of high grade morphine, Burroughs is overwhelmed and decides to kick his habit by trying peyote, a psychedelic used in Mexico for self-realization and discovery purposes, derived from the San Pedro cactus.
After trying out peyote, Burroughs has a new outlook on junkies: He notes that the young junkies seem full of life and energy, but once they have shot up junk, they slump over in their chair.
"The young hipsters seem Jacking in energy and spontaneous enjoyment of life. The mention of pot or junk will galvanize them like a shot of coke. They jump around and say, "Too much! Man, let's pick up! Let's get loaded." But after a shot, they slump into a chair like a resigned baby waiting for life to bring the bottle again." (169)
Again, there is mention of "junkie time," however in this Burroughs description; there is condescension towards the young junkies (referred to as hipsters). Burroughs compares the after effects of a shot on a young junkie as a "resigned baby waiting for life to bring the bottle again", whereas earlier in the book he described his morphine high as a "warm bath" as he lay on his bed.
As the book concludes, William Lee begins to search for a higher level of consciousness in Yage, a plant that contains the powerful psychedelic DMT (Morgan 132). Although psychedelics are non-addictive, unlike opiates, the main character always seems to dabble in narcotics. Junky shows the life of an addict from the rare time of contentment to the all too common "sickness" and struggle that consumes most of a junkie's life. Throughout the book it is obvious that Burroughs is of above average intelligence, a cynical character consumed by his fascination in the underworld.
Throughout the book there are a range of diverse characters, a range of crimes, and a great deal of avoiding the police, all centered on that next shot. Whereas people struggle with day to day life and their biological clocks, the junkie is centered around a time of relief, living in an underground world and most certainly having a time zone of their own. Upon finishing the book, one wonders what became of William Lee, and if he found comfort in a one track mind. In an ever changing world, one thing is for sure: Junky is an unforgettable look into the mind of an addict and for that it remains one thing: Timeless.
After becoming a self-proclaimed "junkie," William Lee's life is ever changing, quickly consumed by opiates. William Lee's life is an ode to his mantra:
"Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life." (Burroughs 3)
The book shows a contrast of users stemming from all sociopolitical roots. William Lee (a portrayal of Burroughs) is a well-educated man with a wife and 150 dollars a month delivered to him from a trust fund. By contrast, William Lee begins consorting with people such as Jack, a career criminal and opiate addict, and his friends, Roy and Herman, career criminals down on their luck waiting for a "setup man" to tell them exactly what to do. Addiction is non-discriminatory.
Perhaps most fascinating is Burroughs accounts of the junkies he encounters. At the introduction of each new character in the book, Burroughs paints a vivid picture of the person, highlighting not only the sallow skin and decay of the junkie, but also the life behind the addiction. Take his description of Roy, for instance:
"The man sat up straighter and swung his legs off the couch. His jaw fell slackly, giving his face a vacant look. The skin of his face was smooth and brown. The cheekbones were high and he looked Oriental. His ears stuck out at right angles from his asymmetrical skull. The eyes were brown and they had a peculiar brilliance, as though points of light were shining behind them. The light in the room glinted on the points of light in his eyes like an opal." (7)
Throughout his account, Burroughs gives "junk" a consciousness of its own. A 'sick' junkie will find himself immobilized, without a sense of time or appetite. Upon receiving a shot, hunger, content, and sleep befall the junkie. William Lee never refers to getting "high," but rather calls his shots a "time of relief." In Burroughs' descriptions of characters, sickness is noted in the skin, with a pale, sallow quality, as opposed to the "smooth and brown" skin of Roy, the buyer of his morphine.
To Burroughs, an addict is always growing. Throughout times of sickness and finding the next shot, the body undergoes shock and then relief.
"When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. - A user is a continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed." (22)
To stop growing is to begin dying, thus in Burroughs' eyes, an addict has the potential for a long life. Burroughs himself lived from 1914 to 1997 (Miles 6). However just as a junkie is always changing, the underworld itself is always changing: "The man," or the dope-dealer is dependent on which junkie has the dope connection at the time. William Lee began dealing once he came to New York City to fund his opiate addiction. Getting his dope from an Italian connection who was constantly shorting him product, William Lee sells his dope to a variety of characters, one of whom a waiter by the name of Marvin.
Marvin is described as a dirty person, the type of person William Lee would never be able to sell to in public without suspicion. After Marvin cops (buys) some product in his own apartment, he goes "on the nod" right after injection. An update from his friend Roy later in the series explains Marvin died from an overdose, disproving the junkie immortality.
Dealing drugs brings immense stress to Lee: His Italian connect keeps shorting him, giving drugs on credit nibbles away at the profits, and there is the constantly looming worry that the police may be onto him. The law, as William Lee calls it, is aware that someone is selling 14-16% purity morphine caps to a plethora of addicts. That person is William Lee himself and although he sells the highest grade morphine in the city, his own addiction ensures he never saves much money. A tip off from a staff member of the hotel he was staying in alerted him that his clients made it obvious something illegitimate was going on. William Lee was lucky to have been tipped off rather than arrested, and counted his blessings before going straight to New Orleans to reinvent his life as a junkie.
Burroughs mentions "tea smokers" regularly as a focal point for comparing a lifestyle drug to life-enhancing drugs. There are comparisons of both, marijuana described as 'disturbing your sense of time and consequentially your sense of spatial relations'. A morphine high is described as an 'all around content.' Burroughs finds "tea heads" far too concentrated on the social aspect of drugs, explaining how when a weed smoker picks up he will expect to hang around and talk, whilst a junkie will pick up and leave (18). As weed is not physically addicting, a weed smoker will smoke to enhance his daily activities. A junkie's day to day life involves getting money for the drug, the time of sickness, and the time of relief.
Burroughs explains how the addiction begins, with one needing hundreds of shots before they become actually physically addicted. As a habit takes hold, other interests lose importance, and obtaining the next shot becomes the point of existence.
On top of his daily life consisting of stealing and dealing in order to support his habit, his own sense of time is consumed by "junk." William Lee describes his first high as "The physical impact of the face of death; the shitting off of breath; the stopping of blood." (7) When high, it is like time stops and a sense of content takes over, until William Lee begins "fiending" for his next shot. William Lee describes this phenomenon as "junk time." When a junkie is sick, time stops. William Lee notes his sense of external time returning a couple days after one of his attempts at stopping junk use.
"A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait." (87) To me, this embodies the essence of a junkie. Basically, your life as a junkie is consumed by your habit, thus not being able to shoot up freezes any incentive one would have to continue existence. This quote embodies the true soul of a junkie, one with a habit who cannot see past that habit until said habit is kicked.
Nearing the end of the book, William Lee finds himself in Mexico to escape charges back in New Orleans. In Mexico, "junk" is even more expensive than in the States, due to a 300-pound dealer named Lupita monopolizing the market and paying off the police to exonerate her from arrest. Lupita's heroin is twice as expensive in the states, and eventually William Lee finds a doctor who will prescribe him enough morphine to last him a month for a tenth of the cost back home. With an abundance of high grade morphine, Burroughs is overwhelmed and decides to kick his habit by trying peyote, a psychedelic used in Mexico for self-realization and discovery purposes, derived from the San Pedro cactus.
After trying out peyote, Burroughs has a new outlook on junkies: He notes that the young junkies seem full of life and energy, but once they have shot up junk, they slump over in their chair.
"The young hipsters seem Jacking in energy and spontaneous enjoyment of life. The mention of pot or junk will galvanize them like a shot of coke. They jump around and say, "Too much! Man, let's pick up! Let's get loaded." But after a shot, they slump into a chair like a resigned baby waiting for life to bring the bottle again." (169)
Again, there is mention of "junkie time," however in this Burroughs description; there is condescension towards the young junkies (referred to as hipsters). Burroughs compares the after effects of a shot on a young junkie as a "resigned baby waiting for life to bring the bottle again", whereas earlier in the book he described his morphine high as a "warm bath" as he lay on his bed.
As the book concludes, William Lee begins to search for a higher level of consciousness in Yage, a plant that contains the powerful psychedelic DMT (Morgan 132). Although psychedelics are non-addictive, unlike opiates, the main character always seems to dabble in narcotics. Junky shows the life of an addict from the rare time of contentment to the all too common "sickness" and struggle that consumes most of a junkie's life. Throughout the book it is obvious that Burroughs is of above average intelligence, a cynical character consumed by his fascination in the underworld.
Throughout the book there are a range of diverse characters, a range of crimes, and a great deal of avoiding the police, all centered on that next shot. Whereas people struggle with day to day life and their biological clocks, the junkie is centered around a time of relief, living in an underground world and most certainly having a time zone of their own. Upon finishing the book, one wonders what became of William Lee, and if he found comfort in a one track mind. In an ever changing world, one thing is for sure: Junky is an unforgettable look into the mind of an addict and for that it remains one thing: Timeless.
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