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 Just
two years before the outbreak of the First World War, an American
antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, was traveling
Europe in search of rare medieval illuminated manuscripts. While
examining a large collection of ancient manuscripts kept in Villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, he discovered a very rare and
completely inexplicable manuscript.
This manuscript was unlike any other that had ever been found in that it was written in an unknown script, with characters and symbols that
are different than that of any known language in the world. The
manuscript is also lavishly illustrated with odd drawings of plants,
stars, and alchemical symbols. To this day, the interpretation of the
manuscript has baffled scholars and historians. In recognition of
Wilfred’s re-discovery of this remarkable work, the manuscript was
given the name "The Voynich Manuscript."
In an earlier time, the manuscript was part of a collection owned by a
resident of Prague. In 1639, the manuscript’s owner Georg Baresch,
wrote to the famous Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher, telling him of
the mysterious work. He explained to the scientist that the manuscript
was written in a script that he could not understand and that it was
profusely illustrated with awkward and oddly colored drawings. Baresch
believed that Kircher would be able to decipher the manuscript. The
famous scientist, however, was never able to decipher the document, and
neither have a long and distinguished list of modern-day linguists and
cryptographers who have tried to make sense of the manuscript.
While
no one knows of the origin of the manuscript, scientific analysis of the
paper and the pigments of the colored inks along with a scholarly assessment
of the style of the calligraphy and drawings, suggest that the
manuscript dates back to at least the 13th century.
Cryptograms:
The
time in which the Voynich manuscript was thought to have originated was
a period of treachery, persecution, and betrayal. In those harsh times
it was a foolish man who wrote down a secret in any way other than one
in which it would be concealed from his enemies or detractors. In the
late medieval period, the craft of cryptography was (thought to be)
somewhat unsophisticated using relatively simple methods such as words
written backward, or replacing vowels with symbols or even dots.
Cryptograms (ciphers) were used not only to conceal matters of the
church and state, but were also used to conceal alchemical and magical
writings, which their authors considered too powerful or too
incriminating, to fall into the wrong hands.
The
Vatican and the Italian city-states were pioneers in the development of
the cryptogram. In 1379, the first of the Avignon popes, Clement
VII, had separate cryptographic systems constructed for each of
twenty-four correspondents. As cryptography evolved, ciphers
developed more complex methods, languages, and algorithms that were
unknown and unintelligible to their own race or others and would require
men of science or scholar to decipher (with a great deal of effort.)
The
Manuscript:
For
some very strange reason the actual length of the manuscript is debated.
Some researchers assess that it is 200 pages, while others consider it
to be only 170 pages in length. Part of the disagreement is largely due
to two points of view. One point of view suggests some believe it is an incomplete
document, and evidence suggests several pages have disappeared
over the years. Therefore, it is impossible to say with any certainty how
long the manuscript may be. The other point of view suggests it is constructed in a
"folio" style with certain pages folding multiple times into
the book, and that when opened, they prove to be up to six times the size
of other pages in the manuscript.
With various speculations that the manuscript is some kind of ancient
alchemist’s guide or a book of mystical spells, enchantments, and
incantations concealed in a secret script, the manuscript has provided
a few clues at least to its structure. Several researchers feel that the
illustrations actually identify topical sections of the manuscript
(although, this is still in the realm of speculation since the script
has in no way been deciphered):
Manuscript
Sections:
-
Astronomical
section (with what appear to be zodiac symbols)
-
Herbal
section (unidentified fantasy plants)
-
Pharmaceutical
section (vases, pedestals & parts of plants)
-
Biological
section ('anatomical' drawings & human figures)
-
Cosmological
section (circles, stars & celestial spheres)
-
Recipes
section (section with short paragraphs)
The
Script:
The
"script" appears to be an alphabetic script. The alphabet
appears (depending on the scholar that you ask) to have between nineteen
to twenty-eight letters, (again disagreement on the count) none of which
appear to bear any relationship to any English or European alphabetic
system. Other symbols are largely unrecognizable but hint at being of
alchemical or astrological intent.
As
with the clues provided with the illustrations, there are also artifacts
within the script that may provide useful clues to eventually
deciphering the manuscript, such as:
-
several
'key-like' (cryptographic) sequences throughout the book
-
margin
notes in archaic German (probably added later in a deciphering
attempt)
-
names
of the months in the astronomical section (appear to have been added
later)
-
extraneous
writing that is different from the rest of the manuscript
-
pagination
and gathering numbers
The Illustrations:
As
long as the script cannot be deciphered and read, the illustrations are
really the only clue that could reveal the true nature of the book.
According to these illustrations, the manuscript would appear to be some
type of scientific book. While many of the drawings seem to be of a
herbal or horticultural nature, the plants are not recognizable as
plants that grow or have grown on earth.
In addition, there are drawings that are rendered in an odd geometric
style and have a mathematical or astrological sense about them. Many
interpreters feel that many of the "chart like" illustrations
depict astronomical objects as might be seen through a telescope, or as
others suggest, live cells as might be observed through a powerful
microscope.
Stranger
still are numerous illustrations that include images of tiny
naked women, who appear to be taking baths or showers wrapped in some
sort of strange apparatus. In other illustrations the nude images appear
to be part of intricate plumbing systems, with the connections appearing
to be anatomical rather than hydraulic, emanating from various parts of
their bodies.
Deciphering
Attempts:
Attempts
to unravel the coded mystery of the manuscript have occurred many, many
times over several hundred years, all of which have failed. Noted
scholars and both private and military cryptographers have applied their
best efforts to the task, but so far no one has solved even a fragment
of the mystery. In several instances, frustrated scholars and
cryptographers have suggested that the manuscript is a hoax, created in
the dark-ages to simply defraud noblemen out of large sums of money.
(In
1586, Rudolph II of Bohemia, purchased the manuscript for three hundred
gold ducats, or in today’s equivalent, roughly fourteen to fifteen
thousand dollars.)
There
is one perplexing flaw in the hoax theory however, and that is certain word structures and statistics found in the manuscript are
characteristic of natural languages (according to Zipf's laws first
postulated in 1935). What this really means to the scholars is that it
is extremely unlikely that any forgery from the 15 or 16th century would
"by mere chance" produce a text that follows these linguistics
laws. Furthering the mystery, in 1976, a Captain Prescott Currier
discovered, and was able to provide convincing evidence that the Voynich
Manuscript must have been developed by at least two different authors
and in reality two different languages.
This
discovery of this additional "cryptographic" complexity at
least offers clues as to why the best minds in the world have struggled
to unravel the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.
The Voynich Manuscript is currently archived at the
Beinecke
Rare Book Room at Yale and is accessible to serious scholars and
researchers. [catalogue number MS 408]
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