Author

Dr Rod Blackhirst, retired Australian academic. 

My research and teaching pursuits over the decades have inevitably led me to the Voynich manuscript. I completed a PhD thesis on Plato's Timaeus and ancient Greek natural science and from that basis studied a range of traditional and religious cosmologies. These studies included a wide array of strange things under the heading of 'alchemy'. 

At the same time I taught Biblical Studies with an emphasis on the Dead Sea Scrolls debate, and Islam/West relations. Most of my academic publications concerned the apocryphal and enigmatic medieval Gospel of Barnabas.

I have a long background in Philosophy & Religious Studies with an emphasis on traditional cosmologies and reflective methodologies. I taught early Renaissance art for a decade. My final year paper was a study of Massacio.

For many years I included the Voynich ms. in an Arts course for graduates entitled Lost Texts & Apocrypha. I've dabbled in the Voynich on and off for over thirty years.

My other approach to Voynich-related matters is from a false start to a career in homoeopathic and herbal pharmacy, and 30+ years first hand experience in organic gardening and herb growing. With a work like this, it helps to have dirt under your nails.

A long career in academia has imbued me with a healthy scepticism towards experts and boffins, and towards contemporary conceptual norms. Most of the problems we face when dealing with a work like the Voynich ms. are conceptual. We have an abundance of evidence. We are just not thinking about it properly.

I try to offer new, constructive, independent ways of thinking about the text, more from the perspective of the Humane disciplines than the forensic sciences.

I write for the interested and intelligent layman, as free from jargon and statistobabble as possible. 

I value talented amateurs and well-read autodidacts and suspect a solution to the Voynich mystery is more likely to come from an outsider perspective than from any official domain of 'Voynich Studies'.

I can be contacted at blackhirst @ gmx.com, one word lower case. 

I sometimes write under the name Harper McAlpine Black, a family name. To escape from the strictures of academic prose I also write satirical and whimsical short stories, in the Australian short story tradition, under the name O. Spaniel Murray.

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