Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (38 page)

Renowned as the world's most mysterious book, the Voynich Manuscript
is a 500 year-old enigma. It is written
by an anonymous author in an unintelligible language and covered in unexplained symbols and strange
illustrations. The book acquired its
name from Wilfred M. Voynich, a Polish-American book dealer, who discovered it by chance in 1912 among a
collection of ancient documents in the
Jesuit College at Frascati near Rome.

What is puzzling about the Voynich
Manuscript is that it is written in a
unique alphabetic script whose letters
do not resemble English, or any other
European letter system. It has puzzled
the greatest cryptographers of the
20th century and continues to do so
today. After purchasing the book in
1912, Wilfred Voynich made photostats
of it and distributed them to cryptographers, experts in ancient languages, astronomers, and botanists, but they could make nothing of the odd
language employed in the manuscript.
Dr. William Romaine Newbold of the
University of Pennsylvania, a student
of medieval philosophy and science
(and also a cryptographer) thought he
had broken the code in 1919. However,
his interpretation was later disproved.
During World War II, expert British
and American codebreakers studied
the manuscript but failed to decipher
a single word.

The history of the Voynich Manuscript is fittingly mysterious and unusual. It may have originally belonged
to the eccentric Emperor Rudolph II
of Bohemia (1552-1612) who is said to
have bought it in around 1586 for 600
gold ducats (just over $60,000 today),
from an unknown seller, who some
have suggested was John Dee, an English occultist and astrologer to Queen
Elizabeth I. What is known for sure is
that the signature of botanist, alchemist, and private physician to
Rudolph, Jacobus Horcicky de
Tepenecz, is on the folio. He died in
1622, after which the next identified
owner of the book is an alchemist
called Georgius Barschius, who called
it a sphynx, in reference to its enigmatic contents, which he was not able
to translate. At his death, some time
before 1662, he left the book, along
with the rest of his library, to his friend
Johannes Marcus Marci, one time rector of Charles University in Prague.

The surviving manuscript has a letter dated 1666 attached to it, written
in Latin by Marci to the learned German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher
in Rome. The letter offers the manuscript to Kircher for decoding and
mentions it as once being the property

of Emperor Rudolf II. Marci further
adds that it was believed by some that
the manuscript was written by English
Franciscan friar and philosopher
Roger Bacon, who lived from 1214 to
1294, though it is clear from the letter
that Marci himself was not convinced
of this. The manuscript became the
property of Kircher's institute, the
Roman Jesuit University (the Collegio
Romano) where it may have been
stored in its library until Victor
Emmanuel II of Italy annexed the Papal States in 1870, and it was moved
to the Jesuit College at the Villa
Mondragone, where Voynich discovered it in 1912. After Voynich died in
1930, the manuscript was inherited by
his widow, the author Ethel Lilian
Voynich. After Voynich's widow died
in 1960, the book was inherited by her
friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, New
York antiquarian book dealer H.P.
Kraus made headlines when he bought
the manuscript from her for the sum
of $24,500. The manuscript was later
valued at $160,000, but Kraus was unable to sell it, and in 1969 donated it
to Yale University, where it is kept
today in the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.

The manuscript itself measures
about 6 by 9 inches and contains
around 240 vellum pages, though it
may once have had more than 270. The
enciphered text was written by hand
using a quill pen, which was also used
for the outline of the crudely drawn
figures, and later a kind of colored
paint was added to these figures. The
majority of the pages contain illustrations colored in red, blue, brown, yellow, and green, and these drawings
indicate that the book was divided up into five parts, each dealing with different subjects. The first and longest
section, filling almost half the volume,
is known as the Herbal section. Each
page in this part consists of one or
sometimes two illustrations of plants
accompanied by a few paragraphs of
text. The plants in the drawings cannot always be identified, and some are
probably fanciful inventions. The next
section contains (among other things)
drawings of suns, moons, and stars,
and has been identified as astronomical and astrological in nature. Following this is a section called the
Biological, as it contains some apparently anatomical figures, including
small, nude women, and pipes and
tubes that resemble blood vessels. The
fourth is a section which has been labeled Pharmaceutical, as it includes
pictures of plant roots, leaves, and
other plant parts and labeled containers, which may be apothecary jars. The
fifth and last part is the Recipes section, and includes a number of short
paragraphs, each marked with a star
in the margin; this section may have
been some kind of calendar or almanac. The book ends with a page containing the Key.

In 1944, Hugh O'Neill, Benedictine
monk and botanist at the Catholic
University, identified some plants illustrated in the book as being species
from the Americas, specifically an
American sunflower and a red pepper.
This would mean that the manuscript
must date after 1493, when Columbus
brought the seeds to Europe. However,
the illustrations are not at all clear in
the manuscript, and some have disputed O'Neill's identifications. An interesting development regarding the
manuscript came in the 1970s with

Captain Prescott Currier, a U.S. military cryptology expert. Based on the
statistical properties of the text, he
identified two distinct styles in the
manuscript, which he interpreted as
two separate languages, which he
dubbed A and B. His conclusion was
that the manuscript had been written
by at least two different people, although it is conceivable that it could
have been written by a single individual at different times.

There have been many theories as
to the language used in the manuscript, its origins, and its purpose. One
of the names put forward most often
is that of Roger Bacon, a man often
persecuted for his writings and scientific discoveries when he was alive,
and who mentions in his works the
need to conceal certain secrets in cipher. Mainly because Bacon is mentioned as a possible author by Marci
in the letter that accompanied the
manuscript, Wilfred Voynich was almost sure he was the original author
and undertook a great deal of historical research to try and prove it. He
found out that Dr. John Dee had been
a great collector of the works of Bacon
and had certainly visited Rudolph at
the time of the supposed first appearance of the manuscript. Evidence that
page numbers on the manuscript were
written by Dee has, however, been
challenged by many Dee scholars.
Apart from these page numbers there
is no direct evidence to link Dee with
the manuscript and he makes no mention of it in his detailed diaries. Nevertheless, Voynich's ideas have been a
huge influence on subsequent research
and attempts at decipherment. In
1943, New York lawyer Joseph Martin Feely published Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Right Key Found, in which
he claimed that the text was written
by Bacon in a kind of highly abbreviated Medieval Latin. No one has accepted this proposal, and experts on
the work of Bacon who have examined
the Voynich Manuscript have denied
the possibility of his authorship.

Dr. Leo Levitov, author of Solution
of the Voynich Manuscript (1987)
claims to have deciphered the manuscript and identifies it is a liturgical
manual for the Cathar religion of the
12th to 14th centuries. However, his
identification has been contested on
the basis of its obvious disparities with
the known practices of the Cathars in
the south of France. In his 2004 book,
Pandora's Hope, James Finn proposed
that the language in the manuscript
was visually encoded Hebrew. His ingenious theory is that the words in the
cipher are the same Hebrew words
repeated throughout the text in different forms, so for example, ain, the Hebrew word for eye, can be found in the
text as aiin or aiiin, so it appears that
different words are being employed
when they are actually variations of
the same word. This idea would explain why scholars and cryptographers
have had so much trouble deciphering
the text. On the other hand, Finn's
explanation would mean that there
would be a vast array of possible interpretations of the same text, and
thus a great possibility that the original meaning would be lost or misinterpreted. Perhaps that is a risk the
original author would not have been
prepared to take.

The repeated failure to find a plausible solution to the Voynich mystery
has lent it an aura of impenetrable
mystery that is, perhaps, deserved.

But the indecipherability along with
the manuscripts more bizarre features,
such as the high rate of word repetition and its fantastical illustrations,
have also led some researchers to become suspicious of its authenticity and
even to suspect an elaborate hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Wilfred Voynich
himself. However, the latter possibility can be discounted thanks to written evidence for its existence prior to
the time it was purchased by Voynich.

A recent solution to the Voynich
Manuscript pointing to a hoax was suggested in 2003 by Dr. Gordon Rugg, a
senior lecturer in computer science at
Keele University in England. He
showed that text, with characteristics
similar to the Voynich manuscript,
could have been randomly generated
using a device known as a Cardan
Grille, invented around 1550 as a way
of encrypting text. Some believe Edward Kelley, a spirit medium who
worked with John Dee, perpetrated
the hoax manuscript in order to sell
it to Emperor Rudolf II, who was
known to be interested in rare and
unusual items. However, as has been
mentioned earlier, there is no direct
evidence linking Dee with the manuscript, and Kelley's name seems only
to have been put forward because, together with Dee, he used and probably
invented Enochian, a language allegedly revealed to Kelley by angels. However, studies of this occult language
have shown that it has no relationship
with the contents of the Voynich
Manuscript. The difficulty with Gordon Rugg's conclusion, and any suggestion that the Voynich Manuscript is a
hoax, is that statistical analysis of the
book has shown patterns similar to
natural languages. For instance, the text follows something known as Zipfs
Law, which concerns the frequency of
words in a piece of text. It is unlikely
that a 16th century hoaxer could somehow produce a body of random text that
followed these basic laws of language.

The manuscript then, does appear
to be genuine. But that brings us no
closer to identifying its puropose. The
general consensus today is that it was
probably written in Central Europe
some time in the 15th or early 16th
century. There have been suggestions
that it was designed as a book of medieval herbal remedies, or an alchemical or astrological text. But known
examples of such works do not resemble the Voynich Manuscript in any
way. And surely no one would use such
a perplexingly unbreakable code unless the information in the text was
either extremely dangerous or particu

larly secret. If the origin of the book
could be determined for sure, or if the
identity of the person who brought it
to the court of Rudolph II at Prague
could be discovered, then perhaps we
would be closer to understanding its
purpose. In 2005, the whole manuscript was published in facsimile for
the first time by a French editor, JeanClaude Gawsewitch, as Le Code
Voynich. Today, through the medium
of the Internet, hundreds of scholars
and enthusiastic amateurs are exchanging ideas and theories on this
mysterious manuscript, and more
people than ever before are working
on a solution. But so far this strange
book has refused to give up its secrets.
Perhaps the author of the Voynich
Manuscript truly invented an unbreakable cipher.

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