September 5, 2020 • 51 mins
Browse the libraries of the world and you’ll find nothing stranger and perplexing than the so-called Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century tome that has perplexed linguists and codebreakers for hundreds of years -- and remains a mystery. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss just why we can't stop looking to its weird pages. (Originally published 9/3/2019)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a classic episode from the Vault. This was
part one of our exploration of the Voytage Manuscript, published
on September three, nineteen. Yeah, this is a great one.
This is a mystery, a cryptic mystery. So join us
(00:25):
in this two parter beginning right now. Welcome Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How
Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
(00:46):
today we have a conundrum to consider a book that
cannot be read by anyone. So it's kind of a
riddle in the dark, isn't it like something that Gollum
might ask of a Bilbo, or Bilbo might cunningly ask
of Gollum. Right, It's like I walk, but I have
no feed. I stand, but I have no legs. Yea,
(01:09):
and so it but but but it is an intriguing
kind of riddle. Why can't the book in question be read?
So we instantly can think to some of the tricks
of riddles. Right, Well, perhaps the book does not exist.
You cannot read a non existent fictional book such as
uh your hey, Luis Borges, the Book of sand or
(01:29):
a thorough perez rovertas the Book of Nine Doors to
the Kingdom of Shadows. These are books that exist within
stories or within other works that have no reality in
our world. Likewise, you cannot read a book that no
longer exists, you know, a book that has become lost,
such as you know, the various destroyed Maya Codices or
aristotle Second Book of Poetics, which, of course the major
(01:52):
plot point in Burro Echo is the Name of the Rose. Right.
But no, the book that we're talking about here, it
is real and it definitely exists. Okay, so that might
lead you to the next like level of of contemplation here. Okay, well,
perhaps this book cannot be read because it is forbidden.
You know, some powerful librarian or clerk keeps it hidden,
(02:14):
perhaps alongside the Ark of the Covenant or something. Right. Okay,
so like that same Aristotle text, but in the Name
of the Rose, right, Yeah, where where somebody just preventing
you from viewing it and reading it. No, that's not
the case with this, But because plenty of people have
attempted to read it and still attempt to. Any serious scholar,
can you know, they can actually travel to its physical
(02:35):
location and and go through the you know, the necessary
of paperwork one presumes, can examine it physically, and you, you,
the listener, can even attempt to read it on the internet,
or you can you can acquire a printed fac simile,
many of which are very nice, I understand. Okay, I
got one. Well, there are a lot of texts from
the ancient world that only exists in some incredibly degraded format. Right,
(02:59):
so there we have evidence that a book existed, but
you you can't make out what's on the page anymore.
Maybe there's only a scrap of it left, right, it's
been destroyed, or it's been or perhaps you know, it's
been scraped away and other things have been printed on
top of it. But nope, that's not the case with
this book. It's it's actually quite well preserved for a
centuries old manuscript. Okay, here's one. Maybe you can't read
(03:20):
it because it's not made of language. Ah, that's that's
a that's a clever a clever guest picture book or something. Yeah,
but this book actually contains quite a bit of text, okay,
and so that that leads us to the next level
of a contemplation here. Okay, then the text must be
in a language that is forgotten, or a nonsensical representation
(03:42):
of language, or perhaps what appears to be language is
actually a code for something else. Okay. So there is
a book. You can look at it, there is text
in it, but for some reason you can't make sense
of the text. Right. And in this we're getting to
like the heart of many of the discussions surrounding the
book we're going to be discussing today. This book is
(04:03):
written in a language or code, or some under other
manner of textual form that no one at least no
one living or no one that has lived in the
in the previous centuries, is capable of understanding. In fact,
while various people have claimed to have cracked it or
translated or figured out some or all of its secrets,
we can state with a fair amount of certainty, as
(04:25):
of this recording, and probably you know, for you know
the duration for the shelf life of this episode, no
one has been able to read this book at least
not for many many centuries, at least as far as
we know, and unless one of these people on like
YouTube or read it is onto something and nobody has
really uh nobody's given them credit yet. Yeah, or somebody
(04:46):
has figured it out but decided not to share it
with anyone, which is generally not the case. Generally, there
are plenty of people even today that are claiming to
have some theory as to uh, you know, that they
have some angle some in that's going to allow them
to uh, you know, to this nut. So what we're
talking about today is a real manuscript that exists in
(05:06):
the world. Some of you may well have heard of it.
It's actually I think if you go back, it's something
that listeners have requested us to cover in the past.
I don't know if we've got to request recently, but
in the years I've been on the show, I know
people have written to us asking like, hey, what's your
take on it? And it is a manuscript known as
the Voytage Manuscript or the I've also heard it pronounced Vonage,
(05:26):
but I think we'll say Voytage. It's v A Y
N I C H. All right, well, let's just describe
it to everyone. For starters, we should just drive home
that again. You can look up a copy of this.
It's what it's a very readily available on what our
archive got or got exactly, and not only you can
you should Well we'll talk more about the contents of
it in a minute, but maybe we should start with
(05:48):
just the base physical reality of what this codex is.
It's in the form of a codex, right, So it's
not a scroll. It's like a you know, a folding
book with pages that you can leave through. Yeah, it's
a roughly seven by ten inches. Uh, not a huge
tone right, not huge. So a lot of these older
books you think of as being this big thing that
(06:09):
you put up on a lectern and you open the
giant uh cover of it that may be made of
wood or whatever, and you leave through the huge pages
with their illuminations. But no, this is a little thing,
maybe to be cradled in a wizard's knobby fingers. Uh.
The precise dimensions I was reading are it's like twenty
three point five centimeters by sixteen point two centimeters and
(06:30):
about five centimeters thick. So it's little, yeah, and that's
what what's Look the page count some of some of
the neighborhood of two seventy. Yeah, it's so the number
of pages existing today. I've seen a couple of different
counts of two forty or two forty six pages. I
think that might be depending on what types of leafs
you're counting on the edges. But it's believed that some
(06:51):
original pages of this manuscript are lost. It may originally
have had around two hundred and seventy pages or so,
but we don't know for sure. And these pages are
made of parchment, specifically of vellum, which was a common
medieval writing material. Parchment means a prepared version of an
animal skin that was used for writing vellums. Specifically, I
(07:13):
think it's calf skin, so these are calf skin pages
with ink writing on them. Also about the pages in
this book, we should note that in the format we
have it today, some pages appear to be out of order.
So I think at some point this manuscript was not
fully bound. It's bound now, but I think it has
been through different binding over the ages, and at some
(07:35):
point it looks like some pages got shuffled out of order,
and the version we have it now has pages that
look like they're from the wrong section in which they're
currently placed. So that's just just how it is as
we have it. It's probably due to some owner throughout
the centuries making an error and rearranging them when the
pages became loose. The text in the book is closely
(07:55):
written in freerunning alphabetic script. Uh. The number of letters Uh.
One source I was looking at said nineteen to twenty
eight letters. I don't know if you found a different figure. Yeah,
I've seen several different estimates of like fifteen to twenty
five or estimates of thirty letters. I think it's difficult
because there are some symbols in there which could be
copies of the same letter you've already seen, or could
(08:18):
be slightly different letters. Uh. And it's hard to tell
if you're not working with a known alphabet, right. And
that's part of it is that like these for the
most part, don't seem to have real counterparts in European
letter systems. Um. You know, at first glance, it looks
like like just standard texts that should relate to some
European language. But upon closer inspection and things become more difficult.
(08:40):
The letters have a lot of fascinating loops and yeah,
like they're they're full of these uh, these knots and
lassos and then the illustrations, of course, which have already
alluded to. They has all these these strange line drawings
that have been colored in with watercolors, and they consist
of you know, plants, possible astrological drawings, weird illustrations of
(09:03):
naked women, uh, seeming debay their shower, and what might
be giant plants or other things. Well, we'll get more
into what the illustrations represent later on. Um, now it
was it is written in ink. I think it has
watercolors in it. Yeah, the watercolors definitely to color the illustrations.
But then the ink itself I read was a brown
(09:23):
ink and it seems to have been like an inexpensive
inc of the time. So nothing particularly notable. Okay, Now
we've already mentioned that it is not a readable document.
It is in a language. If it is a language,
the language is unknown. Yes, sometimes called voi a cheese,
which is just a modern appellation because we don't know
what it is. Yeah, and uh, what's something like a
(09:45):
hundred and seventy thousand characters in the book some you know,
we already talked about the number of alphabetic characters, maybe
somewhere in the range of thirty uh, depending on what
you define as being in a distinct alphabetic character, and
then roughly what thirty five thousand strings of characters of
varying length which can be interpreted as words. These are
usually thought of his words, whether by the you know
(10:07):
cryptographers who look at this there are something like thirty
five thousand or like thirty seven thousand words, and they
might not correlate to real words. Now where you will
where will you find this book? Now, well, you'll find
it in the United States. Yes, we'll get into the
history of the book. They brought it to the United States,
but it is currently housed at the banecky Rare Book
(10:28):
Room at Yale New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah, so it's in
a library at Yale and it is open to being
looked at by scholars. I remember I read a couple
of sources talking about how later in his life Umberto
Echo went to view it personally. Yeah, he was visiting
the library. It's the only book in the library that
he asked to view. And you can find the photos
of him Burto Echo reading or well looking at the book.
(10:52):
And of course it's a perfect thing for Umberto Echo
to show interest in. You've read the name of the Rose,
you know, his love for mysterious manuscripts of unknown medieval origin,
and that gets to one of the real mysteries of
this text. This text is one of the great standing
mysteries of I don't know, I guess, of medievalism, of
(11:12):
of linguistics, of cryptography. It's just this wonderful enigma that's
still out there. And part of the enigma is we
don't know its actual origin. We we pick up with
it in history at a certain point where we we
know where it first arrived and was recorded, but we
don't know who made it, or how why they made it,
(11:33):
or how they made it right. Yeah, for for the
longest there was also no carbon dating of the book,
so eston it's used to range. You know, usually people
were saying fifteenth century, so uh, some were saying thirteenth century.
And I think there's a reason for that, because it
was originally attributed to the English monk and philosopher Roger Bacon,
you know, of course, considered by many to be one
(11:55):
of the fathers of modern science. And since Roger Bacon
lived in the thirteenth century, if he had written it,
this would place its origin in the thirteenth century. But
I don't think any modern scholars actually believe Roger Bacon
wrote it, and later radiocarbon dating would prove that right,
And we'll get back to the Roger Bacon connection in
a bit. But yeah, in two thousand nine, the vellum
(12:16):
that it's printed on was carbon dated to the University
of Arizona, and it was carbon dated to the early
fifteenth century, so fourteen o four too roughly. And so
one note on how carbon dating works, of course, is
that carbon dating is used to date things that were
at some point alive or at some point had carbon
(12:36):
from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fixed into them because
a certain because a certain known proportion of this carbon
is radioactive, it decays at a known rate. So therefore
you can tell basically if it comes from a thing
that was once alive, when did the thing that it
was made out of die? Right, When did it stop
incorporating new gas from the atmosphere into itself. So you
(13:00):
could say that it could have been no earlier than
this time that the document was produced, but it could
possibly have been later that the document was produced, just
as long as the vellum was actually this old. Yeah,
it kind of depends on how long the vellum was
said on the shelf. Right. Also, it's bound in goat skin,
though it also seems to have once had a wooden
cover based on some of the details in the manuscript. Yeah,
(13:23):
I think it's a different binding over the centuries. Done. Now,
there used to be some theories that this was a
modern forgery, maybe by the very book collector it's now
named after, who will discuss later on, but that really
seems unlikely now given that it has been carbon dated
to the fifteenth century, right. Yeah. Now in terms of
the author, well, that's part of the unknown origins. Nobody
(13:46):
signed it. Yeah. Handwriting analysis has suggested as few as
two or many or as many as eight writers, which,
of course Simon wouldn't really be that uncommon for a
book of this time period. Okay, but at least the
illustrations are signed. Right now, nobody knows who made the illustrations. Uh,
you know, the origin is ultimately unknown. And when it
(14:06):
comes to you know, copies, this this is it. This
is the one copy of the Voyage Manuscript. Now we mentioned,
of course that Voytage that what we call it now
is the Voyage Manuscript, and that name comes from a
modern person not from you know, a medieval person. So
what this book was originally called was, well, we don't know, unknown. Yeah,
(14:27):
I mean, it's had various sort of catalog numbers along
the way. But you know what will come back to.
Voytage refers to Wilfred Michael vonage Uh and dates back
to nineve So given the history of the book called
It's It's it's current name is relatively recent, I think
maybe we should take a quick break and when we
come back we can discuss more of the mystery of
(14:49):
this fascinating text. All right, we're back. So we're talking
today about the Voytage Manuscript, the classic enigmatic text to
believe now to be from the fifteenth century or so
due to carbon dating. But we don't know who wrote it.
We don't know where it came from. We just know
it sort of shows up at one point in history
(15:10):
and then trades hands for a while until it resurfaced
around nineteen twelve. Now, if you have never browsed through
this book, do yourself a favor and just pause the
episode and go do that. Now, a scan of it
is or you know, obviously not if you're driving or whatever,
but then just get the audio pot Oh, would that'd
be great an audio version of the point, Yeah, amazing,
(15:34):
we gotta cash in on that. But so that you
can look it up on the internet, there's a full
scan of it that's hosted on archive dot org. You
can flip all the way through the book. I would
say it is almost a necessary experience, just the same
way that if you have the means you should try
to travel and like expand your mind through seeing other cultures.
If you have the Internet, you should try to expand
(15:55):
your mind through this esoteric document. Yeah, I mean really,
this stuff like this is the reason we have the Internet.
That's on the benefits of the Internet is being able
to a document like this can be accessed by everybody. Yeah. Now,
there are a few things we can if we're going
to be chasing the mystery of who created this document,
can it be translated? What does it mean? We should
look at a few other facts about the text itself.
(16:18):
So it's in a script that is clearly written from
left to right and from top to bottom, so much
like English or like many other European languages. But not
all languages are like this. Arabic is not like this.
Urdu farcie I mean, there are a bunch of examples
of languages that go from the right to the left,
so it is probably not drawing from that kind of
(16:39):
tradition unless they just switched it for no reason. No.
Another fact that might seem interesting to us about the
text is that there are no punctuation marks, but it
turns out that's not necessarily all that interesting given the
time from which it comes, because it's extremely common in
older documents in many languages for their not to be punctuation.
Another thing is that there are no chapter markings or bettings.
(17:00):
But based on the illustrations, it's clear that there are
sections that appear to be about different subjects if they're
about anything, And I think maybe we should talk about
some of those different sections of the manuscript to try
to help us understand it absolutely well. The first half
of the book is the the herbal section, and it's
full of botanical illustrations. You could say, yeah, I mean,
(17:23):
they clearly are supposed to be plants, but we should
stress that while some of the illustrations of plants look
kind of like plants you would recognize, I'm not necessarily
saying they are illustrations of real plants, but they at
least look like terrestrial plants. Some of these illustrations do
not look like terrestrial plants. Some look like green ice
snakes from the methane likes of Titan, or like strange
(17:46):
constricter caterpillars from the heart of a comet. That truly
weird alien drawings, things that are sort of green and
look like they have leaves but also have what looks
like tentacles or eyeballs. Yeah, they they are strange to
be held. And this is the most normal section of
the manuscript. Yeah, it is so. The German computer scientist
(18:07):
Klaus Schmi who wrote a two thousand eleven article for
Skeptical Inquirer about the Voyage Manuscript. I'm gonna refer back
to that article quite a few times, but but he
was writing about this section, and he writes that none
of the illustrations of plants in the document have been
conclusively identified by botanists, so nobody has been able to
(18:28):
look at that and say, yep, that is definitely a geranium.
One theory by the botanist Hugh O'Neill claimed to have
identified two of the illustrations as the sunflower and the
capsicum plant, and of course, Capsicum is a genus of
plants in the night shade family that produced peppers. Peppers
are great, right, except peppers are not European, so both
(18:49):
of these plants did not spread to Europe until after
contact with the America's which would date the document a
little bit later. But there is not a general consensus
that O'Neill's identify cation of these illustrations is correct. It's
just not clear at all that these are actually drawings
of sunflowers and pepper plants. So generally the botanical section
is a big old question marks. Some of them look
(19:11):
like they could be real plants, but there's none you
can point to. There there are none you can point
to and say, yep, we know what that is. Well,
this trend kind of continues in the next section, which
is the astrological section, which is full of circular illustrations
that are often interpreted as being perhaps astrological in nature,
But as as pointed out by Josephine Livingston in her
(19:33):
New York Or article The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Vonage Manuscript,
of which I'll also refer back to, she says that
to call this section astrological is generous yes, because it doesn't. Now,
there are illustrations in it that do seem to correlate
to classic astrological imagery, but then again there are depictions
(19:55):
of like astronomical objects that don't appear to correlate to anything.
For about eight or nine years now, I should just
say I've had a page of the Voytage manuscript pinned
up on the backboard of my desk at work. I
don't see it as much now because now it's under
the raised part of my desk um, but it's a
it's a page from what is believed to be the
astrological section. Specifically, it's a page that just has a
(20:18):
bunch of concentric circles of these untranslatable words between megas
looking dudes sitting in buckets or dunk tanks or something
with stars coming out of their fingertips, and they're all
ringed as if in reverence, around the figure of a
prancing goat with a mouthful of green plant matter. And
I figured that's a good enough metaphor, is anything for
(20:39):
the work we do? Alright? The next section is often
referred to as the baliological section, right, and of course
that refers to the study or field of bathing, which
if that sounds like, wait a minute, could there be
a field of that? Yeah, medieval text there were a
lot of thoughts about bathing. There were thoughts about the
restorative powers of certain types of waters or mineral baths
(21:03):
and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, I mean
it's you know, it's it's an important subject. You're getting
into the issues of hygiene, which of course influence overall
bodily health, public health, but also hygiene has has long
been intertwined with their ideas of spiritual purity as well.
Now you might think, okay, well, this section has got
to be kind of normal because it's just depicting people bathing, right,
(21:24):
Bathing can't get that weird? Uh it this is maybe
the weirdest section of all. Yeah, because there are all
these images of nude female figures in pools of liquid
I mean or tubs of liquid, but also possibly like
large oversized flowers. And then there's tubular plumbing that suggests
(21:44):
plants or even like viscera or of some sort. Yeah,
it's a very strange section of the manuscript. The writing
in this part, I noticed, suddenly gets very dense, whereas
in previous pages there might have been a large illustration
of the plant and then some small, you know, some
lines of text around it. Here you've got some densely
packed text. And again I want to stress that some
(22:07):
of the illustrations of the section look like they could
be referring to real world objects and practices, Like some
appear to just show nude women bathing maybe in mineral
baths or in streams or in aqueducts or along waterfalls,
But others show things that I don't even know how
to describe. What Like I've got an example here for
Robert to look at that is it's like a woman
(22:27):
standing in what looks like a giant instrument horn that's
growing out of something. It's the spreading horn that I
think maybe it's supposed to have water flowing in it.
But then also growing out of this horn is like
this alligator pod that I don't know how to I mean,
it's sort of green gray brown with like holes that
(22:50):
have water coming out of them, but like a space
tentacle with shower heads, like bio shower heads coming out
of it, with like ridged alligator scales on its back,
and and yeah, like like lotus like lotus pods that
have water. Yeah. Yeah, like it almost has kind of
like a Susian or even like a gig or S
quality to it. I was noticing in this section how
(23:12):
much the Voyage Manuscript, and I think this is not
an accident, how much it reminds me of another book
that I've liked for years, the Codex Serafinitus, which is
an entirely fictional and intentionally fictional encyclopedia created by the
Italian artist Luigi Serafini in the late nineteen seventies. I
think it was published in nine one. Basically, it is
like an artist's attempt to create a new voyage manuscript
(23:36):
type document. It's got a constructed language, lots of alien
illustrations of plants, animals, objects and processes that don't exist
on Earth. It's like an encyclopedia from another world. But
that is basically what the Voytage Manuscript sort of appears
to be. All Right, So we've had plants, we've had
possible charts of the stars and so forth, we've had
(23:57):
weird alien showers, and then at at the end here
and that this final section is what, according to Livingstone,
seems to be related to practical instructions for the use
of the mysterious plants from earlier. It basically looks like
it has recipes at the end, and I think this
breaks down into multiple sort of subsections, like there it
is believed that there some parts of it are supposed
(24:18):
to be pharmaceutical, like they depict the creation of medicines
and storage and viols, and other parts appear to be
about cooking or something. Yeah, so it's just as mysterious
as the rest of it. But yeah, but at this
point you don't really encounter any illustrations. It's more it's
more textual in nature. But yeah, so this is the book,
(24:39):
and the book is is just so unique in its style.
It does not seem to have any true surviving peers.
It does not cleanly fit with late medieval alchemical texts,
because certainly there are other weird texts. Oh yeah, I
mean that's something we should point out. I mean, if
you're thinking, well, how could a text be about plants
and astrology and bathing and hideing and medicine and cooking
(25:01):
all at the same time, that's a weird combination of subjects.
I would say, actually, this is not unusual at all
for the time it was written. There were plenty of
encyclopedia type documents that collected diverse subject matter at the time,
and there was a general blurring of the lines between science, medicine, magic,
and household advice. All Right, you were the type of
(25:22):
individual that either wrote or contributed to the writing of
a book, You likely had a lot to say about
various topics, right, or a lot to crib from earlier encyclopedias.
I mean a lot of times. What you'll find in
some of these medieval encyclopedias is a mixture of original
observations with people like I don't know, reproducing encyclopedia entries
by plenty or something and just saying like, and here's
(25:43):
the ancient wisdom of Scipio Africanus. Yeah, I mean it
comes back to a quote from Burda Burdo Ecco in
the name of the Roads. The observation that books speak
to other books. You know that translations from other books,
ideas from other books. But it does not seem that
there were there were a lot of books, at least
books that have survived. You know that we're speaking to
the Voytage manuscript like it. It does seem to be
(26:06):
this singular thing that's left out. That's you know, that's
it doesn't really fit in with manuscripts of the period. Uh,
you know, it's in many ways, it's kind of like
an outside context book, at least to most of those
who have viewed it over the last several centuries. Um. Then,
of course, to be clear, many books of the past
were lost, many languages were lost, whole cultures have perished.
(26:30):
So just because it's one of a kind now does
not necessarily mean it was always one of a kind. Yeah,
there could have been a whole library of voyage type
books that just all got lost except for this one.
And then likewise, the context of our texts are always
fading away. And that's why it's always instructive too. If
you pick up, say the works of William Shakespeare, or uh,
you know, you pick up a copy of you know,
(26:51):
Dante's The Divine Comedy, it generally pays off to have
some sort of reference guide if unless you were just schooled,
say in Dante's case, in like you know, in medieval
culture and Italian politics and so forth, like you need
something to help you make sense of all the references, uh,
you know, the cultural contexts, any symbols that are trotted
out or the religious context. Yes, uh, in a similar
(27:16):
case can be it can be made for the arts.
You know, there are some of the stranger works of
art from the past. Um, you know, they look extra
strange to us because we generally don't have the same
you know, contextual understanding for the references and for the symbols. Uh,
you know, symbols and references that would have probably been
known to the original intended audience, Like we are not
(27:37):
the intended audience of of those works. And then I think,
along with most theories regarding the Vontage Manuscript, you can
say that we are certainly not the intended audience of
it today. Um, though there's at least one, I don't know,
there's at least one theory that maybe supports the idea
that that the way that we are reacting to the
Vantage manuscript is appropriate. But but we'll get back to that, right.
(27:59):
We are going to go on to try to parse
out the different theories that could explain its origin, all right,
So I wanted to talk about a few more observations
about the Voytage Manuscript of the Vantage Manuscript from that
article I mentioned earlier by from two thousand eleven and
Skeptical Inquirer by the German computer scientist Klaus Schmi. I
thought it made quite a few good points, and one
(28:21):
of the most interesting points it made. I don't know
why this stuck out to me so much, but I
I suspect will end up referring back to it. He
pointed out that there are no visible corrections in the
Voyage manuscript, and this is pretty strange for a document
produced by hand. Think about it. Could you write out
(28:41):
a document of thirty five thousand words in ink with
no mistakes at all, no cross throughs or scratch outs. No,
I mean yeah, I mean it would certainly have. You
would have to be something that was just so you know,
wrote for you, that was just so uh, you know,
formed in your mind, can just do it without any mistakes,
(29:02):
or it would have to be something where mistakes didn't matter,
such as if you were just making it all up exactly. Yeah.
So I feel like this is a significant point because
when you look at handwritten or hand copied documents from
the ancient world, there are tons of emendations. You see
word is scratched out or cross through or or fixed.
I mean, this is just common at a time when
(29:23):
documents were handwritten instead of produced by a printing press
or a computer. Yeah, it took a lot of time
to make days. It took a lot of skill, and
paper was expensive. Ink was expensive. Ultimately, if you had
to cross out of word, you cross out of work. Yeah,
and humans are imperfect copying machines. Now, again, we don't
know whether the Voidese manuscript is an original document and
(29:43):
that's like the original copy from the author, or it's
a copy of another document. I would say this, this
to me very much argues against it being a copy
from another document, just because I mean, scribes, scribes make mistakes.
You're going thirty five thousand words, You're going to make
some mistakes and end up having to scratch them out
and rewrite the word. So so this would this would
(30:06):
seem to argue for the idea that this was, if
not one of a kind, like this was at least
a singular piece, right, Yes, Or it might go for
one of the theories we'll talk about later on the
theory that there is not actually a meaning or message
in the text. But then again, there are arguments against that,
so we should not get committed to that that that
endpoint Another thing that she may points out is that
(30:28):
people have tried to source the book by looking at
the astrological imagery in it, but this hasn't really turned
up anything solid either. But a great note he has
that some researchers believed to identify illustrations in the book
as Andromeda like or as Andromeda fog like the galaxy Andromeda,
or as the PLI E. D S. But again he
(30:49):
says that this is just it's speculation, kind of like
the botanical thing, you know, where somebody looks at an
illustration and says, I think that could be a capsicum plant,
that could be a pepper, but it's not clear enough
that other scholars look at it and say, yeah, that's
definitely what it is. And this is touching on a
trend that will continue to discuss. And I mean this
in the in a completely non magical, non speculative way,
(31:13):
but it does seem to be the case that the
longer you stare at the Advantage manuscript, the longer you
deal with it, the more likely you are to find connections,
the more like you are to see things. It certainly
encourages the conspiratorial cast of mind, or the well i
don't know. Again, there's a nice way to frame that
(31:34):
in a in a bad way to frame that, Like
when when you want to make connections between things. I mean,
on one hand, I feel like that's something I love
doing on this show, is making a connection you might
not have expected between one idea or one thing and another. Right,
And it's how we solve That's how we figure out
so many ancient uh you know, works of art or
works of literature, to go back to the Rosetta Stone.
(31:57):
That is how we eventually were able to do to
solve the riddle of Egyptian hieroglyphics. So yeah, this is
the exercise of figuring things out. But the Vontage manuscript
seems remarkably resistant to such unraveling well right, I mean,
and it seems to encourage a perhaps unhealthy type of obsession.
Also where I mean, if you take this principle of
(32:19):
making connections too far, of course, where you end up
is conspiracy theory world, right, Like you're just finding crazy
coincidences between things, or you even get into numerology. You know, oh,
it looks it looks like there are you know, seventeen
line breaks on this page and and that corresponds to
the number of wounds on Christ in this painting or something.
(32:40):
You know, that that kind of thing where you can
find connections if you're determined to find connections, no matter
how tenuous the link anyway. So to get back to
h a few of these observations that I noted from
schmis analysis. One is that the clothing and hairstyles worn
by the people in the illustrations and the voice which
manuscript seem to date the document to Europe in the
(33:03):
period of about fourteen fifty to fifteen twenty, but it's
hard to be sure. But this is something that that
is done with other documents sometimes, like if you look
at the illustrations of people, what they're wearing, how they
wear their hair, that will tend to correlate to certain
styles from certain periods in places in history. Shema points
out that the average word length in the document is
(33:24):
about four to five letters, and this doesn't help us
a whole lot because that could be consistent with a
number of European languages. It just sort of makes it
look like, yes, this is plausibly a language. But there
there are some other things, like one is that it
has fewer recurring words uh, than would appear to be
expected for a natural language, And this sort of argues
(33:46):
against the idea of the text being a simple letter substitution.
But then again, maybe if it is a real language,
or if it is something in code, it's not a
simple letter substitution. Maybe it's a more complex type of cipher.
But ultimately, Schmay concludes that no theory has held up
under scrutiny yet, which is a great place to be
because now we get to discuss them absolutely. So what
(34:10):
we're gonna do is we're gonna take another break, and
when we come back, we're gonna first take us to
take us through the known history of the Vantage Manuscript,
like when when it first occurs, and some of the
key points in history that we're we're relatively sure of. Okay, alright,
we're back, all right. So, as we've mentioned before, we
don't know who created the Vantage Manuscript. That is one
(34:32):
of the great mysteries. We don't know who wrote it.
We don't know if it was the original, if the
version we have now is the original copy, or if
it's a copy of something. We don't know for sure.
But at some point in history this document just shows
up and and I guess that's where we should dive in.
So we're gonna dive in in the sixteenth century, right,
the year is fifty six, and this is when the
(34:54):
manuscript first pops up in the court of Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolph the Second of Bohemia, who, by my most accounts,
was an eccentric monarch, which is, it's not hard to
be an eccentric monarch. Monarchy tends to invite eccentricity, and
uh and but but this is an individual who's very
interested in the occult, in alchemy and kept a great library,
(35:18):
and I've also read was was very fascinated by by
giants and dwarves as well. Yeah, he apparently collected little people.
That seems like a strange kind of medieval monarch fascination.
I guess Renaissance monarch here. So in many ways is
weird as a weird guy, but he's also sort of
the character that you would expect from a medieval monarch.
(35:38):
So the this document shows up in his possession, right,
and the we're not sure who sold it to him,
but the the the unknown seller sold it for six
hundred gold. Duckets, and duckets are docts. I think it's
gonna be duckets. Duckets, I like thinking doct two cats. Yeah,
(36:01):
well I always I always think duets. So six hundred
six hundred gold anyway to put it more like dungeons
and dragons. Uh level. Now this came with like a
certificate of authenticity, right, Yeah, essentially it came with a
letter stating that it was written by Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon,
as we already alluded to, uh, was a Franciscan friar
(36:21):
who lived twelve nineteen through twelve two roughly, and uh
he was also said to be a wizard. Of course,
this is kind of common with with learned individuals and
you know of that time, right like later on their
stories about them, they are not only were they learned,
but perhaps they had powers as well. Well. As we've
discussed on the show many times, in the medieval period
(36:43):
and the Renaissance period, there was a significant amount of
blurring between the lines of science and magic. People who
were genuinely making scientific observations about the world and about
natural phenomena also sometimes believed in demonology and and just
kind of like grouped all this knowledge together. Yeah, but
at any rate, Bacon was an individual who in many
(37:03):
ways he was an early advocate of what would become
the scientific methodism. Yeah. The on the other hand, you know,
he was also interested in codes and secrets and uh
and certainly later on became very associated with the occult,
became sort of a focus of a cold interest. Now
we've already mentioned that modern scholars do not think that
(37:25):
the Vantage Manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, and it
also seems almost conclusively argued against by the carbon dating
of it, which put it in the fifteenth century. Right,
I mean, I guess, I mean about the only thing
you could make a case for would be what if
Roger Bacon had written it and this was like a
copy of that text, and but then we lost all
references to the original, you know, more leaps of of
(37:48):
believability there. But at any ry, Yeah, pretty pretty much
nobody is saying that Bacon had anything to do with
the Vantage Manuscript other than him being cited in this
letter that accompanied it on sale to the Holy Roman
Roman Emperor. So it'd be like if you showed up
with a document and you know, it's a weird document
that nobody can read, and you just said, George Washington
(38:11):
wrote this. You can easily see how attaching the name
of a famous person to something could make the could
get you more money for it. So Rudolph the Second was,
you know, the type of individual who was, you know,
very excited to to obtain this document. He probably put
some of his best minds to figuring it out, but
nobody was able to crack it. He was a sixteenth
century readitor. Definitely he's on the case. But but nobody
(38:34):
was able to figure it out. You know, it alluded
experts of the time, just as it has always alluded
to experts. So he ends up being passed on, uh
to a botanist by the name of jacob Um hor Riki.
I think the Latin name would be uh Jacobus Sinapius.
But it was passed on to a botanist essentially because
(38:56):
it does contain a number of what seemed to be
botanical illustrations. And then the botanist keeps it for twenty
years uh. And during this time, Rudolph himself dies in
sixteen twelve, and then the book passes on to an
unknown person who keeps it for yet another twenty years,
and then in the sixteen twenties, the book enters the
possession of Athanasius Kircher, who lives six two through sixteen eighty.
(39:20):
And this is this is another just fascinating character. A
German scholar and polly math who who also set out
to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics at one point, and his assumptions
ended up being incorrect, but he actually made some correct
connections between the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the and the Coptic languages.
(39:40):
He also studied Chinese language as well as various artificial languages.
His letters show that he was quite interested in this
particular book acquired prior to obtaining it, but then five
years after acquiring it he published a Universal Study of
Artificial Languages and apparently makes no mention of the monach
Man Innuscript. So presumably it perplexed him, just as it
(40:03):
perplexed so many others. That's interesting. So he's interested in
this book, he's interested in artificial languages. That would make
it seem like either he did not conclude that this
was an artificial language, or that he had to stay
silent about it for some reason. Well, and this is
just my take. I wonder if people I would think
that maybe another reason would be if he could not
(40:25):
figure it out like it, he didn't mention it, because
who wants to be the expert on artificial languages and say,
you know, I couldn't crack this well, right, he could
have the Isaac Newton mentality, where you know Isaac Newton
said like, here's what I've figured out as for these
other as for the cause of gravity, the underlying cause.
He just said, I do not feign hypotheses. You can
(40:46):
kind of respect that. Now. I do think it's something
we should come back and discuss artificial languages at some
point on the show, because it is is fascinating to
to realize that here's this book on the study of
artificial languages, and of course this is central as before.
You know, we encountered cling On or doth Iraqi or
any of thee or Esperanto, So it would be fun
(41:08):
to come back to that. Well, I've actually thought about
the idea of covering artificially invented languages on Invention on
our other podcast. That would be a good one. So
keep keep an eye out over there Invention, the other
podcast that we do. You can find it at invention
pod dot com. Uh you can subscribe wherever you subscribe
to your podcast. It is uh, it is human techno history,
(41:28):
one invention at a time. All right, So Athanasious Kircher,
he's got the Vointage manuscript, and what happens to it? Then, well,
he has it for a while, but then he becomes
a Jesuit monk and he gives away all of his
earthly possessions, which includes his books and so his his library,
and the Vontage manuscript itself lands in the library of
a Jesuit seminary, which I believe it is a Collegio Romano,
(41:51):
just south of Rome, and it remains there for something
like two hundred and fifty years. Though according to Livingstone,
the book quote appears to have bounced around progue for
a while. In sixteen thirty nine, a person named uh
Barcias described it as a is quote a certain riddle
of the sphinx, a piece of writing and unknown characters unquote,
(42:13):
and guests that quote the whole thing is medical unquote.
The book's historical trail vanishes in sixteen seventy up until
the time that Volinage purchased it. And that's from that
New Yorker article. Yes, that's from the New Yorker piece. Okay,
so then we get up to the twentieth century, and
this is when it shows up with the guy actually
named Voyage, yet another fascinating weird individual to enter into
(42:35):
the history. And we haven't even covered some of the
other weird individuals that factor into its history. So it
ends up in the sort of along with a purchase
of other books in the hands of this eccentric book
dealer named Wilfred Michael Voyinage, Yeah, who lived eighteen sixty
five through nineteen thirty and yeah, he publishes the entire
library and uh, and it ends up being moved to America,
(42:58):
and this of course includes the book that would take
his name right, So yeah, Polish born. He's an interesting
fellow to say the least. He knew He allegedly knew
twenty different languages. Was at one point investigated by the
FBI for possessing Bacon cipher, an actual cipher, for creating
coded message that it was devised by Roger Bacon just
to bring Roger Bacon back into everything. And he even
(43:21):
apparently sold a forgery to the British Museum at one point,
though perhaps by accident. Yeah, there their whole story he
was a very well traveled, adventuring individual. At some point,
I think he was sent to a prison in Siberia
for his political activities. Uh he somehow escaped to England
at some point and became a book collector. In that
(43:43):
that Josephine Livingstone article, she talks about this story that
he would he would delight in showing off his wounds people,
and he would like lift his shirt up and he
would say here by sword, here by bullet. But yeah,
so Voinese is a really interesting guy. And at one
point in hyping his manuscript, this is also quoted in
(44:06):
in Josphine Livingstone's piece, he was talking to the Times
and he said, when the time comes, I will prove
to the world that the black magic of the Middle
Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth century science.
And I think this speaks to a certain kind of
attitude that documents like this inspire and other historical mysteries,
(44:28):
all kinds of things, you know, the anti kate, thero
a mechanism, or untranslated documents. Anytime you've got this object
from history that seems to contain information or learning, or
indicate information or learning, but is not fully solved at
the time people are looking at it. It tends to
to make people want to go toward these almost conspiracy
(44:50):
theory level ideas of like lost knowledge and and you know,
like like ancient aliens kind of territory. Why do we
have such a tendency in those directions, like why why
is it? Why are our brains wired to go to
that conclusion rather than like, oh, here's a strange document
in code. Well, I mean, I guess at one level,
you know, we look to the modern age and we
(45:12):
we we had we tend to regard our current scientific
technological understanding the world is superior to that of the past. Um,
you know, by and large, I mean, certainly there are
areas where and we've discussed some of these in the show,
where we can point to things in the modern world
that are perhaps inferior to ways of dealing with things
(45:32):
in the past. You know, generally things that are more
cultural or interpersonal. Uh. But we we tend to think,
you know, when it comes to like figuring out how
the world works, especially the natural world, like today is
the day, and then never have we had a greater understanding.
And yet at the same time, there are things that
we do not understand about the world yet, and there
are things, particularly details from the past, details from history,
(45:55):
that we can never fully understand, you know, that are
going to just remain, you know, gaps essentially gaps in
the fossil records of of our literary and historical legacy.
I've said this on the show before, but I remain
committed to a to a middle position here between the
sort of the condescending modern idea that looks at the
(46:15):
past and says ancient and medieval people's they were just stupid,
they didn't know anything, versus the one on the other hand,
that tends toward believing in some lost golden age, you know,
ancient loss knowledge that far surpasses our own. I think
the reality is that it's not like there's an ancient
lost Golden Age. There wasn't an Atlantis where they had
flying cars and stuff like that. It's more like that
(46:37):
people in the past were struggling with limitations that we
don't face. They had they didn't have the technology we have,
but they were also incredibly smart. They were super clever
and came up with amazing workarounds and methods for things
using the limited technology they have. This is what I
always think about, you know, the classic construction of the
Pyramids example, It's like, no, it doesn't mean that they
(46:58):
had like alien technology. It just means that, like, these
are smart people and they had to figure out how
to solve big problems with limited tools. I think also
we sometimes fall into this trap of thinking thinking about
the you know, our modern world's contemplation of the past
is kind of a battle between the present and past,
Like the past is an enemy to be defeated in
(47:19):
our attempt to understand it, to kind of make an
adversary out of it. And I guess part of that
is maybe like you know, maybe this part of it
is just found in all cultures where the past is
something an enemy to the mabile overcome. Maybe it's part
of the colonial legacy, or maybe it's because of Indiana Jones,
you know, with uh, you know, this idea of somebody
like like physically combating the past in order to acquire
(47:40):
its secrets. And then if something is resistant to this assault,
then it must it must have some sort of secret knowledge.
It must there must be something more than like the
fault cannot be our own. It must be some hidden
power of the past. That's interesting, all right, Well we
gotta get back to what happened to the Voytage manuscript, right,
So it was in Vona's possession, and then he dies
(48:03):
and it passes to his widow, Ethel, and he died
in nineteen thirty, yes, nineteen thirty, and then it passes
from Ethel to a close friend who then sells the
book to an antique antique book dealer by the name
of hands P. Krauss in nineteen sixty one. So Krauss,
he tries to find a buyer for the book, but
cannot find a suitable buyer. What nobody wanted it? Well,
(48:24):
maybe not for his price. Yeah, I don't know the details.
I don't know if he was maybe if he was
asking too much, or he wanted to sell it to
the right type of collector. I mean, who knows, But
not somebody who's gonna chop it up and make make
Voytage manuscript sausage out of it. I don't know. I mean,
he ends up donating it to Yale University in nineteen
sixty nine. So without without knowing the details of Kross myself,
(48:46):
and perhaps there's better documentation out there, you know, I
would presume it was a situation of where he's like,
I can't sell it to the type of client, you know,
the type of purchaser I want, so I'll sell it
to Yale, Or perhaps he reached the point where he's
he realized, like this book is is a truly fascinating
historical specimen. It does not belong in the hands of
you know, a rare occult book. It doesn't need to
(49:06):
be in another rare book dealers antique stash. It needs
to be with the university. All right, Well, I guess
that sort of brings us up to the modern period,
in which there's been an enormous amount of scholarship on
the Voyage Manuscript, of people trying to both to to
translate it or decrypt it, which in some ways are
similar jobs, or people trying to figure out what it
(49:29):
means or where it came from, who wrote it. A
lot of these mysteries remain, and there have been huge,
hugely interesting attempts to solve these questions over the decades.
But on that note, we're actually gonna have to call
this episode and return in a second episode where we'll
get into these various attempts to unravel the manuscript. In
the meantime, you can check out other episodes of Sufchable
(49:50):
your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
You can also, of course find this podcast wherever you
get your podcasts. Wherever you do find us, make sure
that you rate and review us. That really helps us out.
And uh, you know, if you want to discuss this
episode with other users other listeners, there's actually a Facebook
discussion group called the discussion module Stay Stuff to Bow
(50:14):
your Mind Discussion Module. That's kind of a fun place
to check out. Hey, have you subscribed to our other podcast,
Invention yet. If not, go subscribe to Invention. Subscribe to
Invention huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producers,
Maya Cole and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
(50:34):
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(50:57):
listen to your favorite shows. The pay four foot fo
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a classic episode from the Vault. This was
part one of our exploration of the Voytage Manuscript, published
on September three, nineteen. Yeah, this is a great one.
This is a mystery, a cryptic mystery. So join us
(00:25):
in this two parter beginning right now. Welcome Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How
Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
(00:46):
today we have a conundrum to consider a book that
cannot be read by anyone. So it's kind of a
riddle in the dark, isn't it like something that Gollum
might ask of a Bilbo, or Bilbo might cunningly ask
of Gollum. Right, It's like I walk, but I have
no feed. I stand, but I have no legs. Yea,
(01:09):
and so it but but but it is an intriguing
kind of riddle. Why can't the book in question be read?
So we instantly can think to some of the tricks
of riddles. Right, Well, perhaps the book does not exist.
You cannot read a non existent fictional book such as
uh your hey, Luis Borges, the Book of sand or
(01:29):
a thorough perez rovertas the Book of Nine Doors to
the Kingdom of Shadows. These are books that exist within
stories or within other works that have no reality in
our world. Likewise, you cannot read a book that no
longer exists, you know, a book that has become lost,
such as you know, the various destroyed Maya Codices or
aristotle Second Book of Poetics, which, of course the major
(01:52):
plot point in Burro Echo is the Name of the Rose. Right.
But no, the book that we're talking about here, it
is real and it definitely exists. Okay, so that might
lead you to the next like level of of contemplation here. Okay, well,
perhaps this book cannot be read because it is forbidden.
You know, some powerful librarian or clerk keeps it hidden,
(02:14):
perhaps alongside the Ark of the Covenant or something. Right. Okay,
so like that same Aristotle text, but in the Name
of the Rose, right, Yeah, where where somebody just preventing
you from viewing it and reading it. No, that's not
the case with this, But because plenty of people have
attempted to read it and still attempt to. Any serious scholar,
can you know, they can actually travel to its physical
(02:35):
location and and go through the you know, the necessary
of paperwork one presumes, can examine it physically, and you, you,
the listener, can even attempt to read it on the internet,
or you can you can acquire a printed fac simile,
many of which are very nice, I understand. Okay, I
got one. Well, there are a lot of texts from
the ancient world that only exists in some incredibly degraded format. Right,
(02:59):
so there we have evidence that a book existed, but
you you can't make out what's on the page anymore.
Maybe there's only a scrap of it left, right, it's
been destroyed, or it's been or perhaps you know, it's
been scraped away and other things have been printed on
top of it. But nope, that's not the case with
this book. It's it's actually quite well preserved for a
centuries old manuscript. Okay, here's one. Maybe you can't read
(03:20):
it because it's not made of language. Ah, that's that's
a that's a clever a clever guest picture book or something. Yeah,
but this book actually contains quite a bit of text, okay,
and so that that leads us to the next level
of a contemplation here. Okay, then the text must be
in a language that is forgotten, or a nonsensical representation
(03:42):
of language, or perhaps what appears to be language is
actually a code for something else. Okay. So there is
a book. You can look at it, there is text
in it, but for some reason you can't make sense
of the text. Right. And in this we're getting to
like the heart of many of the discussions surrounding the
book we're going to be discussing today. This book is
(04:03):
written in a language or code, or some under other
manner of textual form that no one at least no
one living or no one that has lived in the
in the previous centuries, is capable of understanding. In fact,
while various people have claimed to have cracked it or
translated or figured out some or all of its secrets,
we can state with a fair amount of certainty, as
(04:25):
of this recording, and probably you know, for you know
the duration for the shelf life of this episode, no
one has been able to read this book at least
not for many many centuries, at least as far as
we know, and unless one of these people on like
YouTube or read it is onto something and nobody has
really uh nobody's given them credit yet. Yeah, or somebody
(04:46):
has figured it out but decided not to share it
with anyone, which is generally not the case. Generally, there
are plenty of people even today that are claiming to
have some theory as to uh, you know, that they
have some angle some in that's going to allow them
to uh, you know, to this nut. So what we're
talking about today is a real manuscript that exists in
(05:06):
the world. Some of you may well have heard of it.
It's actually I think if you go back, it's something
that listeners have requested us to cover in the past.
I don't know if we've got to request recently, but
in the years I've been on the show, I know
people have written to us asking like, hey, what's your
take on it? And it is a manuscript known as
the Voytage Manuscript or the I've also heard it pronounced Vonage,
(05:26):
but I think we'll say Voytage. It's v A Y
N I C H. All right, well, let's just describe
it to everyone. For starters, we should just drive home
that again. You can look up a copy of this.
It's what it's a very readily available on what our
archive got or got exactly, and not only you can
you should Well we'll talk more about the contents of
it in a minute, but maybe we should start with
(05:48):
just the base physical reality of what this codex is.
It's in the form of a codex, right, So it's
not a scroll. It's like a you know, a folding
book with pages that you can leave through. Yeah, it's
a roughly seven by ten inches. Uh, not a huge
tone right, not huge. So a lot of these older
books you think of as being this big thing that
(06:09):
you put up on a lectern and you open the
giant uh cover of it that may be made of
wood or whatever, and you leave through the huge pages
with their illuminations. But no, this is a little thing,
maybe to be cradled in a wizard's knobby fingers. Uh.
The precise dimensions I was reading are it's like twenty
three point five centimeters by sixteen point two centimeters and
(06:30):
about five centimeters thick. So it's little, yeah, and that's
what what's Look the page count some of some of
the neighborhood of two seventy. Yeah, it's so the number
of pages existing today. I've seen a couple of different
counts of two forty or two forty six pages. I
think that might be depending on what types of leafs
you're counting on the edges. But it's believed that some
(06:51):
original pages of this manuscript are lost. It may originally
have had around two hundred and seventy pages or so,
but we don't know for sure. And these pages are
made of parchment, specifically of vellum, which was a common
medieval writing material. Parchment means a prepared version of an
animal skin that was used for writing vellums. Specifically, I
(07:13):
think it's calf skin, so these are calf skin pages
with ink writing on them. Also about the pages in
this book, we should note that in the format we
have it today, some pages appear to be out of order.
So I think at some point this manuscript was not
fully bound. It's bound now, but I think it has
been through different binding over the ages, and at some
(07:35):
point it looks like some pages got shuffled out of order,
and the version we have it now has pages that
look like they're from the wrong section in which they're
currently placed. So that's just just how it is as
we have it. It's probably due to some owner throughout
the centuries making an error and rearranging them when the
pages became loose. The text in the book is closely
(07:55):
written in freerunning alphabetic script. Uh. The number of letters Uh.
One source I was looking at said nineteen to twenty
eight letters. I don't know if you found a different figure. Yeah,
I've seen several different estimates of like fifteen to twenty
five or estimates of thirty letters. I think it's difficult
because there are some symbols in there which could be
copies of the same letter you've already seen, or could
(08:18):
be slightly different letters. Uh. And it's hard to tell
if you're not working with a known alphabet, right. And
that's part of it is that like these for the
most part, don't seem to have real counterparts in European
letter systems. Um. You know, at first glance, it looks
like like just standard texts that should relate to some
European language. But upon closer inspection and things become more difficult.
(08:40):
The letters have a lot of fascinating loops and yeah,
like they're they're full of these uh, these knots and
lassos and then the illustrations, of course, which have already
alluded to. They has all these these strange line drawings
that have been colored in with watercolors, and they consist
of you know, plants, possible astrological drawings, weird illustrations of
(09:03):
naked women, uh, seeming debay their shower, and what might
be giant plants or other things. Well, we'll get more
into what the illustrations represent later on. Um, now it
was it is written in ink. I think it has
watercolors in it. Yeah, the watercolors definitely to color the illustrations.
But then the ink itself I read was a brown
(09:23):
ink and it seems to have been like an inexpensive
inc of the time. So nothing particularly notable. Okay, Now
we've already mentioned that it is not a readable document.
It is in a language. If it is a language,
the language is unknown. Yes, sometimes called voi a cheese,
which is just a modern appellation because we don't know
what it is. Yeah, and uh, what's something like a
(09:45):
hundred and seventy thousand characters in the book some you know,
we already talked about the number of alphabetic characters, maybe
somewhere in the range of thirty uh, depending on what
you define as being in a distinct alphabetic character, and
then roughly what thirty five thousand strings of characters of
varying length which can be interpreted as words. These are
usually thought of his words, whether by the you know
(10:07):
cryptographers who look at this there are something like thirty
five thousand or like thirty seven thousand words, and they
might not correlate to real words. Now where you will
where will you find this book? Now, well, you'll find
it in the United States. Yes, we'll get into the
history of the book. They brought it to the United States,
but it is currently housed at the banecky Rare Book
(10:28):
Room at Yale New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah, so it's in
a library at Yale and it is open to being
looked at by scholars. I remember I read a couple
of sources talking about how later in his life Umberto
Echo went to view it personally. Yeah, he was visiting
the library. It's the only book in the library that
he asked to view. And you can find the photos
of him Burto Echo reading or well looking at the book.
(10:52):
And of course it's a perfect thing for Umberto Echo
to show interest in. You've read the name of the Rose,
you know, his love for mysterious manuscripts of unknown medieval origin,
and that gets to one of the real mysteries of
this text. This text is one of the great standing
mysteries of I don't know, I guess, of medievalism, of
(11:12):
of linguistics, of cryptography. It's just this wonderful enigma that's
still out there. And part of the enigma is we
don't know its actual origin. We we pick up with
it in history at a certain point where we we
know where it first arrived and was recorded, but we
don't know who made it, or how why they made it,
(11:33):
or how they made it right. Yeah, for for the
longest there was also no carbon dating of the book,
so eston it's used to range. You know, usually people
were saying fifteenth century, so uh, some were saying thirteenth century.
And I think there's a reason for that, because it
was originally attributed to the English monk and philosopher Roger Bacon,
you know, of course, considered by many to be one
(11:55):
of the fathers of modern science. And since Roger Bacon
lived in the thirteenth century, if he had written it,
this would place its origin in the thirteenth century. But
I don't think any modern scholars actually believe Roger Bacon
wrote it, and later radiocarbon dating would prove that right,
And we'll get back to the Roger Bacon connection in
a bit. But yeah, in two thousand nine, the vellum
(12:16):
that it's printed on was carbon dated to the University
of Arizona, and it was carbon dated to the early
fifteenth century, so fourteen o four too roughly. And so
one note on how carbon dating works, of course, is
that carbon dating is used to date things that were
at some point alive or at some point had carbon
(12:36):
from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fixed into them because
a certain because a certain known proportion of this carbon
is radioactive, it decays at a known rate. So therefore
you can tell basically if it comes from a thing
that was once alive, when did the thing that it
was made out of die? Right, When did it stop
incorporating new gas from the atmosphere into itself. So you
(13:00):
could say that it could have been no earlier than
this time that the document was produced, but it could
possibly have been later that the document was produced, just
as long as the vellum was actually this old. Yeah,
it kind of depends on how long the vellum was
said on the shelf. Right. Also, it's bound in goat skin,
though it also seems to have once had a wooden
cover based on some of the details in the manuscript. Yeah,
(13:23):
I think it's a different binding over the centuries. Done. Now,
there used to be some theories that this was a
modern forgery, maybe by the very book collector it's now
named after, who will discuss later on, but that really
seems unlikely now given that it has been carbon dated
to the fifteenth century, right. Yeah. Now in terms of
the author, well, that's part of the unknown origins. Nobody
(13:46):
signed it. Yeah. Handwriting analysis has suggested as few as
two or many or as many as eight writers, which,
of course Simon wouldn't really be that uncommon for a
book of this time period. Okay, but at least the
illustrations are signed. Right now, nobody knows who made the illustrations. Uh,
you know, the origin is ultimately unknown. And when it
(14:06):
comes to you know, copies, this this is it. This
is the one copy of the Voyage Manuscript. Now we mentioned,
of course that Voytage that what we call it now
is the Voyage Manuscript, and that name comes from a
modern person not from you know, a medieval person. So
what this book was originally called was, well, we don't know, unknown. Yeah,
(14:27):
I mean, it's had various sort of catalog numbers along
the way. But you know what will come back to.
Voytage refers to Wilfred Michael vonage Uh and dates back
to nineve So given the history of the book called
It's It's it's current name is relatively recent, I think
maybe we should take a quick break and when we
come back we can discuss more of the mystery of
(14:49):
this fascinating text. All right, we're back. So we're talking
today about the Voytage Manuscript, the classic enigmatic text to
believe now to be from the fifteenth century or so
due to carbon dating. But we don't know who wrote it.
We don't know where it came from. We just know
it sort of shows up at one point in history
(15:10):
and then trades hands for a while until it resurfaced
around nineteen twelve. Now, if you have never browsed through
this book, do yourself a favor and just pause the
episode and go do that. Now, a scan of it
is or you know, obviously not if you're driving or whatever,
but then just get the audio pot Oh, would that'd
be great an audio version of the point, Yeah, amazing,
(15:34):
we gotta cash in on that. But so that you
can look it up on the internet, there's a full
scan of it that's hosted on archive dot org. You
can flip all the way through the book. I would
say it is almost a necessary experience, just the same
way that if you have the means you should try
to travel and like expand your mind through seeing other cultures.
If you have the Internet, you should try to expand
(15:55):
your mind through this esoteric document. Yeah, I mean really,
this stuff like this is the reason we have the Internet.
That's on the benefits of the Internet is being able
to a document like this can be accessed by everybody. Yeah. Now,
there are a few things we can if we're going
to be chasing the mystery of who created this document,
can it be translated? What does it mean? We should
look at a few other facts about the text itself.
(16:18):
So it's in a script that is clearly written from
left to right and from top to bottom, so much
like English or like many other European languages. But not
all languages are like this. Arabic is not like this.
Urdu farcie I mean, there are a bunch of examples
of languages that go from the right to the left,
so it is probably not drawing from that kind of
(16:39):
tradition unless they just switched it for no reason. No.
Another fact that might seem interesting to us about the
text is that there are no punctuation marks, but it
turns out that's not necessarily all that interesting given the
time from which it comes, because it's extremely common in
older documents in many languages for their not to be punctuation.
Another thing is that there are no chapter markings or bettings.
(17:00):
But based on the illustrations, it's clear that there are
sections that appear to be about different subjects if they're
about anything, And I think maybe we should talk about
some of those different sections of the manuscript to try
to help us understand it absolutely well. The first half
of the book is the the herbal section, and it's
full of botanical illustrations. You could say, yeah, I mean,
(17:23):
they clearly are supposed to be plants, but we should
stress that while some of the illustrations of plants look
kind of like plants you would recognize, I'm not necessarily
saying they are illustrations of real plants, but they at
least look like terrestrial plants. Some of these illustrations do
not look like terrestrial plants. Some look like green ice
snakes from the methane likes of Titan, or like strange
(17:46):
constricter caterpillars from the heart of a comet. That truly
weird alien drawings, things that are sort of green and
look like they have leaves but also have what looks
like tentacles or eyeballs. Yeah, they they are strange to
be held. And this is the most normal section of
the manuscript. Yeah, it is so. The German computer scientist
(18:07):
Klaus Schmi who wrote a two thousand eleven article for
Skeptical Inquirer about the Voyage Manuscript. I'm gonna refer back
to that article quite a few times, but but he
was writing about this section, and he writes that none
of the illustrations of plants in the document have been
conclusively identified by botanists, so nobody has been able to
(18:28):
look at that and say, yep, that is definitely a geranium.
One theory by the botanist Hugh O'Neill claimed to have
identified two of the illustrations as the sunflower and the
capsicum plant, and of course, Capsicum is a genus of
plants in the night shade family that produced peppers. Peppers
are great, right, except peppers are not European, so both
(18:49):
of these plants did not spread to Europe until after
contact with the America's which would date the document a
little bit later. But there is not a general consensus
that O'Neill's identify cation of these illustrations is correct. It's
just not clear at all that these are actually drawings
of sunflowers and pepper plants. So generally the botanical section
is a big old question marks. Some of them look
(19:11):
like they could be real plants, but there's none you
can point to. There there are none you can point
to and say, yep, we know what that is. Well,
this trend kind of continues in the next section, which
is the astrological section, which is full of circular illustrations
that are often interpreted as being perhaps astrological in nature,
But as as pointed out by Josephine Livingston in her
(19:33):
New York Or article The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Vonage Manuscript,
of which I'll also refer back to, she says that
to call this section astrological is generous yes, because it doesn't. Now,
there are illustrations in it that do seem to correlate
to classic astrological imagery, but then again there are depictions
(19:55):
of like astronomical objects that don't appear to correlate to anything.
For about eight or nine years now, I should just
say I've had a page of the Voytage manuscript pinned
up on the backboard of my desk at work. I
don't see it as much now because now it's under
the raised part of my desk um, but it's a
it's a page from what is believed to be the
astrological section. Specifically, it's a page that just has a
(20:18):
bunch of concentric circles of these untranslatable words between megas
looking dudes sitting in buckets or dunk tanks or something
with stars coming out of their fingertips, and they're all
ringed as if in reverence, around the figure of a
prancing goat with a mouthful of green plant matter. And
I figured that's a good enough metaphor, is anything for
(20:39):
the work we do? Alright? The next section is often
referred to as the baliological section, right, and of course
that refers to the study or field of bathing, which
if that sounds like, wait a minute, could there be
a field of that? Yeah, medieval text there were a
lot of thoughts about bathing. There were thoughts about the
restorative powers of certain types of waters or mineral baths
(21:03):
and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, I mean
it's you know, it's it's an important subject. You're getting
into the issues of hygiene, which of course influence overall
bodily health, public health, but also hygiene has has long
been intertwined with their ideas of spiritual purity as well.
Now you might think, okay, well, this section has got
to be kind of normal because it's just depicting people bathing, right,
(21:24):
Bathing can't get that weird? Uh it this is maybe
the weirdest section of all. Yeah, because there are all
these images of nude female figures in pools of liquid
I mean or tubs of liquid, but also possibly like
large oversized flowers. And then there's tubular plumbing that suggests
(21:44):
plants or even like viscera or of some sort. Yeah,
it's a very strange section of the manuscript. The writing
in this part, I noticed, suddenly gets very dense, whereas
in previous pages there might have been a large illustration
of the plant and then some small, you know, some
lines of text around it. Here you've got some densely
packed text. And again I want to stress that some
(22:07):
of the illustrations of the section look like they could
be referring to real world objects and practices, Like some
appear to just show nude women bathing maybe in mineral
baths or in streams or in aqueducts or along waterfalls,
But others show things that I don't even know how
to describe. What Like I've got an example here for
Robert to look at that is it's like a woman
(22:27):
standing in what looks like a giant instrument horn that's
growing out of something. It's the spreading horn that I
think maybe it's supposed to have water flowing in it.
But then also growing out of this horn is like
this alligator pod that I don't know how to I mean,
it's sort of green gray brown with like holes that
(22:50):
have water coming out of them, but like a space
tentacle with shower heads, like bio shower heads coming out
of it, with like ridged alligator scales on its back,
and and yeah, like like lotus like lotus pods that
have water. Yeah. Yeah, like it almost has kind of
like a Susian or even like a gig or S
quality to it. I was noticing in this section how
(23:12):
much the Voyage Manuscript, and I think this is not
an accident, how much it reminds me of another book
that I've liked for years, the Codex Serafinitus, which is
an entirely fictional and intentionally fictional encyclopedia created by the
Italian artist Luigi Serafini in the late nineteen seventies. I
think it was published in nine one. Basically, it is
like an artist's attempt to create a new voyage manuscript
(23:36):
type document. It's got a constructed language, lots of alien
illustrations of plants, animals, objects and processes that don't exist
on Earth. It's like an encyclopedia from another world. But
that is basically what the Voytage Manuscript sort of appears
to be. All Right, So we've had plants, we've had
possible charts of the stars and so forth, we've had
(23:57):
weird alien showers, and then at at the end here
and that this final section is what, according to Livingstone,
seems to be related to practical instructions for the use
of the mysterious plants from earlier. It basically looks like
it has recipes at the end, and I think this
breaks down into multiple sort of subsections, like there it
is believed that there some parts of it are supposed
(24:18):
to be pharmaceutical, like they depict the creation of medicines
and storage and viols, and other parts appear to be
about cooking or something. Yeah, so it's just as mysterious
as the rest of it. But yeah, but at this
point you don't really encounter any illustrations. It's more it's
more textual in nature. But yeah, so this is the book,
(24:39):
and the book is is just so unique in its style.
It does not seem to have any true surviving peers.
It does not cleanly fit with late medieval alchemical texts,
because certainly there are other weird texts. Oh yeah, I
mean that's something we should point out. I mean, if
you're thinking, well, how could a text be about plants
and astrology and bathing and hideing and medicine and cooking
(25:01):
all at the same time, that's a weird combination of subjects.
I would say, actually, this is not unusual at all
for the time it was written. There were plenty of
encyclopedia type documents that collected diverse subject matter at the time,
and there was a general blurring of the lines between science, medicine, magic,
and household advice. All Right, you were the type of
(25:22):
individual that either wrote or contributed to the writing of
a book, You likely had a lot to say about
various topics, right, or a lot to crib from earlier encyclopedias.
I mean a lot of times. What you'll find in
some of these medieval encyclopedias is a mixture of original
observations with people like I don't know, reproducing encyclopedia entries
by plenty or something and just saying like, and here's
(25:43):
the ancient wisdom of Scipio Africanus. Yeah, I mean it
comes back to a quote from Burda Burdo Ecco in
the name of the Roads. The observation that books speak
to other books. You know that translations from other books,
ideas from other books. But it does not seem that
there were there were a lot of books, at least
books that have survived. You know that we're speaking to
the Voytage manuscript like it. It does seem to be
(26:06):
this singular thing that's left out. That's you know, that's
it doesn't really fit in with manuscripts of the period. Uh,
you know, it's in many ways, it's kind of like
an outside context book, at least to most of those
who have viewed it over the last several centuries. Um. Then,
of course, to be clear, many books of the past
were lost, many languages were lost, whole cultures have perished.
(26:30):
So just because it's one of a kind now does
not necessarily mean it was always one of a kind. Yeah,
there could have been a whole library of voyage type
books that just all got lost except for this one.
And then likewise, the context of our texts are always
fading away. And that's why it's always instructive too. If
you pick up, say the works of William Shakespeare, or uh,
you know, you pick up a copy of you know,
(26:51):
Dante's The Divine Comedy, it generally pays off to have
some sort of reference guide if unless you were just schooled,
say in Dante's case, in like you know, in medieval
culture and Italian politics and so forth, like you need
something to help you make sense of all the references, uh,
you know, the cultural contexts, any symbols that are trotted
out or the religious context. Yes, uh, in a similar
(27:16):
case can be it can be made for the arts.
You know, there are some of the stranger works of
art from the past. Um, you know, they look extra
strange to us because we generally don't have the same
you know, contextual understanding for the references and for the symbols. Uh,
you know, symbols and references that would have probably been
known to the original intended audience, Like we are not
(27:37):
the intended audience of of those works. And then I think,
along with most theories regarding the Vontage Manuscript, you can
say that we are certainly not the intended audience of
it today. Um, though there's at least one, I don't know,
there's at least one theory that maybe supports the idea
that that the way that we are reacting to the
Vantage manuscript is appropriate. But but we'll get back to that, right.
(27:59):
We are going to go on to try to parse
out the different theories that could explain its origin, all right,
So I wanted to talk about a few more observations
about the Voytage Manuscript of the Vantage Manuscript from that
article I mentioned earlier by from two thousand eleven and
Skeptical Inquirer by the German computer scientist Klaus Schmi. I
thought it made quite a few good points, and one
(28:21):
of the most interesting points it made. I don't know
why this stuck out to me so much, but I
I suspect will end up referring back to it. He
pointed out that there are no visible corrections in the
Voyage manuscript, and this is pretty strange for a document
produced by hand. Think about it. Could you write out
(28:41):
a document of thirty five thousand words in ink with
no mistakes at all, no cross throughs or scratch outs. No,
I mean yeah, I mean it would certainly have. You
would have to be something that was just so you know,
wrote for you, that was just so uh, you know,
formed in your mind, can just do it without any mistakes,
(29:02):
or it would have to be something where mistakes didn't matter,
such as if you were just making it all up exactly. Yeah.
So I feel like this is a significant point because
when you look at handwritten or hand copied documents from
the ancient world, there are tons of emendations. You see
word is scratched out or cross through or or fixed.
I mean, this is just common at a time when
(29:23):
documents were handwritten instead of produced by a printing press
or a computer. Yeah, it took a lot of time
to make days. It took a lot of skill, and
paper was expensive. Ink was expensive. Ultimately, if you had
to cross out of word, you cross out of work. Yeah,
and humans are imperfect copying machines. Now, again, we don't
know whether the Voidese manuscript is an original document and
(29:43):
that's like the original copy from the author, or it's
a copy of another document. I would say this, this
to me very much argues against it being a copy
from another document, just because I mean, scribes, scribes make mistakes.
You're going thirty five thousand words, You're going to make
some mistakes and end up having to scratch them out
and rewrite the word. So so this would this would
(30:06):
seem to argue for the idea that this was, if
not one of a kind, like this was at least
a singular piece, right, Yes, Or it might go for
one of the theories we'll talk about later on the
theory that there is not actually a meaning or message
in the text. But then again, there are arguments against that,
so we should not get committed to that that that
endpoint Another thing that she may points out is that
(30:28):
people have tried to source the book by looking at
the astrological imagery in it, but this hasn't really turned
up anything solid either. But a great note he has
that some researchers believed to identify illustrations in the book
as Andromeda like or as Andromeda fog like the galaxy Andromeda,
or as the PLI E. D S. But again he
(30:49):
says that this is just it's speculation, kind of like
the botanical thing, you know, where somebody looks at an
illustration and says, I think that could be a capsicum plant,
that could be a pepper, but it's not clear enough
that other scholars look at it and say, yeah, that's
definitely what it is. And this is touching on a
trend that will continue to discuss. And I mean this
in the in a completely non magical, non speculative way,
(31:13):
but it does seem to be the case that the
longer you stare at the Advantage manuscript, the longer you
deal with it, the more likely you are to find connections,
the more like you are to see things. It certainly
encourages the conspiratorial cast of mind, or the well i
don't know. Again, there's a nice way to frame that
(31:34):
in a in a bad way to frame that, Like
when when you want to make connections between things. I mean,
on one hand, I feel like that's something I love
doing on this show, is making a connection you might
not have expected between one idea or one thing and another. Right,
And it's how we solve That's how we figure out
so many ancient uh you know, works of art or
works of literature, to go back to the Rosetta Stone.
(31:57):
That is how we eventually were able to do to
solve the riddle of Egyptian hieroglyphics. So yeah, this is
the exercise of figuring things out. But the Vontage manuscript
seems remarkably resistant to such unraveling well right, I mean,
and it seems to encourage a perhaps unhealthy type of obsession.
Also where I mean, if you take this principle of
(32:19):
making connections too far, of course, where you end up
is conspiracy theory world, right, Like you're just finding crazy
coincidences between things, or you even get into numerology. You know, oh,
it looks it looks like there are you know, seventeen
line breaks on this page and and that corresponds to
the number of wounds on Christ in this painting or something.
(32:40):
You know, that that kind of thing where you can
find connections if you're determined to find connections, no matter
how tenuous the link anyway. So to get back to
h a few of these observations that I noted from
schmis analysis. One is that the clothing and hairstyles worn
by the people in the illustrations and the voice which
manuscript seem to date the document to Europe in the
(33:03):
period of about fourteen fifty to fifteen twenty, but it's
hard to be sure. But this is something that that
is done with other documents sometimes, like if you look
at the illustrations of people, what they're wearing, how they
wear their hair, that will tend to correlate to certain
styles from certain periods in places in history. Shema points
out that the average word length in the document is
(33:24):
about four to five letters, and this doesn't help us
a whole lot because that could be consistent with a
number of European languages. It just sort of makes it
look like, yes, this is plausibly a language. But there
there are some other things, like one is that it
has fewer recurring words uh, than would appear to be
expected for a natural language, And this sort of argues
(33:46):
against the idea of the text being a simple letter substitution.
But then again, maybe if it is a real language,
or if it is something in code, it's not a
simple letter substitution. Maybe it's a more complex type of cipher.
But ultimately, Schmay concludes that no theory has held up
under scrutiny yet, which is a great place to be
because now we get to discuss them absolutely. So what
(34:10):
we're gonna do is we're gonna take another break, and
when we come back, we're gonna first take us to
take us through the known history of the Vantage Manuscript,
like when when it first occurs, and some of the
key points in history that we're we're relatively sure of. Okay, alright,
we're back, all right. So, as we've mentioned before, we
don't know who created the Vantage Manuscript. That is one
(34:32):
of the great mysteries. We don't know who wrote it.
We don't know if it was the original, if the
version we have now is the original copy, or if
it's a copy of something. We don't know for sure.
But at some point in history this document just shows
up and and I guess that's where we should dive in.
So we're gonna dive in in the sixteenth century, right,
the year is fifty six, and this is when the
(34:54):
manuscript first pops up in the court of Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolph the Second of Bohemia, who, by my most accounts,
was an eccentric monarch, which is, it's not hard to
be an eccentric monarch. Monarchy tends to invite eccentricity, and
uh and but but this is an individual who's very
interested in the occult, in alchemy and kept a great library,
(35:18):
and I've also read was was very fascinated by by
giants and dwarves as well. Yeah, he apparently collected little people.
That seems like a strange kind of medieval monarch fascination.
I guess Renaissance monarch here. So in many ways is
weird as a weird guy, but he's also sort of
the character that you would expect from a medieval monarch.
(35:38):
So the this document shows up in his possession, right,
and the we're not sure who sold it to him,
but the the the unknown seller sold it for six
hundred gold. Duckets, and duckets are docts. I think it's
gonna be duckets. Duckets, I like thinking doct two cats. Yeah,
(36:01):
well I always I always think duets. So six hundred
six hundred gold anyway to put it more like dungeons
and dragons. Uh level. Now this came with like a
certificate of authenticity, right, Yeah, essentially it came with a
letter stating that it was written by Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon,
as we already alluded to, uh, was a Franciscan friar
(36:21):
who lived twelve nineteen through twelve two roughly, and uh
he was also said to be a wizard. Of course,
this is kind of common with with learned individuals and
you know of that time, right like later on their
stories about them, they are not only were they learned,
but perhaps they had powers as well. Well. As we've
discussed on the show many times, in the medieval period
(36:43):
and the Renaissance period, there was a significant amount of
blurring between the lines of science and magic. People who
were genuinely making scientific observations about the world and about
natural phenomena also sometimes believed in demonology and and just
kind of like grouped all this knowledge together. Yeah, but
at any rate, Bacon was an individual who in many
(37:03):
ways he was an early advocate of what would become
the scientific methodism. Yeah. The on the other hand, you know,
he was also interested in codes and secrets and uh
and certainly later on became very associated with the occult,
became sort of a focus of a cold interest. Now
we've already mentioned that modern scholars do not think that
(37:25):
the Vantage Manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, and it
also seems almost conclusively argued against by the carbon dating
of it, which put it in the fifteenth century. Right,
I mean, I guess, I mean about the only thing
you could make a case for would be what if
Roger Bacon had written it and this was like a
copy of that text, and but then we lost all
references to the original, you know, more leaps of of
(37:48):
believability there. But at any ry, Yeah, pretty pretty much
nobody is saying that Bacon had anything to do with
the Vantage Manuscript other than him being cited in this
letter that accompanied it on sale to the Holy Roman
Roman Emperor. So it'd be like if you showed up
with a document and you know, it's a weird document
that nobody can read, and you just said, George Washington
(38:11):
wrote this. You can easily see how attaching the name
of a famous person to something could make the could
get you more money for it. So Rudolph the Second was,
you know, the type of individual who was, you know,
very excited to to obtain this document. He probably put
some of his best minds to figuring it out, but
nobody was able to crack it. He was a sixteenth
century readitor. Definitely he's on the case. But but nobody
(38:34):
was able to figure it out. You know, it alluded
experts of the time, just as it has always alluded
to experts. So he ends up being passed on, uh
to a botanist by the name of jacob Um hor Riki.
I think the Latin name would be uh Jacobus Sinapius.
But it was passed on to a botanist essentially because
(38:56):
it does contain a number of what seemed to be
botanical illustrations. And then the botanist keeps it for twenty
years uh. And during this time, Rudolph himself dies in
sixteen twelve, and then the book passes on to an
unknown person who keeps it for yet another twenty years,
and then in the sixteen twenties, the book enters the
possession of Athanasius Kircher, who lives six two through sixteen eighty.
(39:20):
And this is this is another just fascinating character. A
German scholar and polly math who who also set out
to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics at one point, and his assumptions
ended up being incorrect, but he actually made some correct
connections between the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the and the Coptic languages.
(39:40):
He also studied Chinese language as well as various artificial languages.
His letters show that he was quite interested in this
particular book acquired prior to obtaining it, but then five
years after acquiring it he published a Universal Study of
Artificial Languages and apparently makes no mention of the monach
Man Innuscript. So presumably it perplexed him, just as it
(40:03):
perplexed so many others. That's interesting. So he's interested in
this book, he's interested in artificial languages. That would make
it seem like either he did not conclude that this
was an artificial language, or that he had to stay
silent about it for some reason. Well, and this is
just my take. I wonder if people I would think
that maybe another reason would be if he could not
(40:25):
figure it out like it, he didn't mention it, because
who wants to be the expert on artificial languages and say,
you know, I couldn't crack this well, right, he could
have the Isaac Newton mentality, where you know Isaac Newton
said like, here's what I've figured out as for these
other as for the cause of gravity, the underlying cause.
He just said, I do not feign hypotheses. You can
(40:46):
kind of respect that. Now. I do think it's something
we should come back and discuss artificial languages at some
point on the show, because it is is fascinating to
to realize that here's this book on the study of
artificial languages, and of course this is central as before.
You know, we encountered cling On or doth Iraqi or
any of thee or Esperanto, So it would be fun
(41:08):
to come back to that. Well, I've actually thought about
the idea of covering artificially invented languages on Invention on
our other podcast. That would be a good one. So
keep keep an eye out over there Invention, the other
podcast that we do. You can find it at invention
pod dot com. Uh you can subscribe wherever you subscribe
to your podcast. It is uh, it is human techno history,
(41:28):
one invention at a time. All right, So Athanasious Kircher,
he's got the Vointage manuscript, and what happens to it? Then, well,
he has it for a while, but then he becomes
a Jesuit monk and he gives away all of his
earthly possessions, which includes his books and so his his library,
and the Vontage manuscript itself lands in the library of
a Jesuit seminary, which I believe it is a Collegio Romano,
(41:51):
just south of Rome, and it remains there for something
like two hundred and fifty years. Though according to Livingstone,
the book quote appears to have bounced around progue for
a while. In sixteen thirty nine, a person named uh
Barcias described it as a is quote a certain riddle
of the sphinx, a piece of writing and unknown characters unquote,
(42:13):
and guests that quote the whole thing is medical unquote.
The book's historical trail vanishes in sixteen seventy up until
the time that Volinage purchased it. And that's from that
New Yorker article. Yes, that's from the New Yorker piece. Okay,
so then we get up to the twentieth century, and
this is when it shows up with the guy actually
named Voyage, yet another fascinating weird individual to enter into
(42:35):
the history. And we haven't even covered some of the
other weird individuals that factor into its history. So it
ends up in the sort of along with a purchase
of other books in the hands of this eccentric book
dealer named Wilfred Michael Voyinage, Yeah, who lived eighteen sixty
five through nineteen thirty and yeah, he publishes the entire
library and uh, and it ends up being moved to America,
(42:58):
and this of course includes the book that would take
his name right, So yeah, Polish born. He's an interesting
fellow to say the least. He knew He allegedly knew
twenty different languages. Was at one point investigated by the
FBI for possessing Bacon cipher, an actual cipher, for creating
coded message that it was devised by Roger Bacon just
to bring Roger Bacon back into everything. And he even
(43:21):
apparently sold a forgery to the British Museum at one point,
though perhaps by accident. Yeah, there their whole story he
was a very well traveled, adventuring individual. At some point,
I think he was sent to a prison in Siberia
for his political activities. Uh he somehow escaped to England
at some point and became a book collector. In that
(43:43):
that Josephine Livingstone article, she talks about this story that
he would he would delight in showing off his wounds people,
and he would like lift his shirt up and he
would say here by sword, here by bullet. But yeah,
so Voinese is a really interesting guy. And at one
point in hyping his manuscript, this is also quoted in
(44:06):
in Josphine Livingstone's piece, he was talking to the Times
and he said, when the time comes, I will prove
to the world that the black magic of the Middle
Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth century science.
And I think this speaks to a certain kind of
attitude that documents like this inspire and other historical mysteries,
(44:28):
all kinds of things, you know, the anti kate, thero
a mechanism, or untranslated documents. Anytime you've got this object
from history that seems to contain information or learning, or
indicate information or learning, but is not fully solved at
the time people are looking at it. It tends to
to make people want to go toward these almost conspiracy
(44:50):
theory level ideas of like lost knowledge and and you know,
like like ancient aliens kind of territory. Why do we
have such a tendency in those directions, like why why
is it? Why are our brains wired to go to
that conclusion rather than like, oh, here's a strange document
in code. Well, I mean, I guess at one level,
you know, we look to the modern age and we
(45:12):
we we had we tend to regard our current scientific
technological understanding the world is superior to that of the past. Um,
you know, by and large, I mean, certainly there are
areas where and we've discussed some of these in the show,
where we can point to things in the modern world
that are perhaps inferior to ways of dealing with things
(45:32):
in the past. You know, generally things that are more
cultural or interpersonal. Uh. But we we tend to think,
you know, when it comes to like figuring out how
the world works, especially the natural world, like today is
the day, and then never have we had a greater understanding.
And yet at the same time, there are things that
we do not understand about the world yet, and there
are things, particularly details from the past, details from history,
(45:55):
that we can never fully understand, you know, that are
going to just remain, you know, gaps essentially gaps in
the fossil records of of our literary and historical legacy.
I've said this on the show before, but I remain
committed to a to a middle position here between the
sort of the condescending modern idea that looks at the
(46:15):
past and says ancient and medieval people's they were just stupid,
they didn't know anything, versus the one on the other hand,
that tends toward believing in some lost golden age, you know,
ancient loss knowledge that far surpasses our own. I think
the reality is that it's not like there's an ancient
lost Golden Age. There wasn't an Atlantis where they had
flying cars and stuff like that. It's more like that
(46:37):
people in the past were struggling with limitations that we
don't face. They had they didn't have the technology we have,
but they were also incredibly smart. They were super clever
and came up with amazing workarounds and methods for things
using the limited technology they have. This is what I
always think about, you know, the classic construction of the
Pyramids example, It's like, no, it doesn't mean that they
(46:58):
had like alien technology. It just means that, like, these
are smart people and they had to figure out how
to solve big problems with limited tools. I think also
we sometimes fall into this trap of thinking thinking about
the you know, our modern world's contemplation of the past
is kind of a battle between the present and past,
Like the past is an enemy to be defeated in
(47:19):
our attempt to understand it, to kind of make an
adversary out of it. And I guess part of that
is maybe like you know, maybe this part of it
is just found in all cultures where the past is
something an enemy to the mabile overcome. Maybe it's part
of the colonial legacy, or maybe it's because of Indiana Jones,
you know, with uh, you know, this idea of somebody
like like physically combating the past in order to acquire
(47:40):
its secrets. And then if something is resistant to this assault,
then it must it must have some sort of secret knowledge.
It must there must be something more than like the
fault cannot be our own. It must be some hidden
power of the past. That's interesting, all right, Well we
gotta get back to what happened to the Voytage manuscript, right,
So it was in Vona's possession, and then he dies
(48:03):
and it passes to his widow, Ethel, and he died
in nineteen thirty, yes, nineteen thirty, and then it passes
from Ethel to a close friend who then sells the
book to an antique antique book dealer by the name
of hands P. Krauss in nineteen sixty one. So Krauss,
he tries to find a buyer for the book, but
cannot find a suitable buyer. What nobody wanted it? Well,
(48:24):
maybe not for his price. Yeah, I don't know the details.
I don't know if he was maybe if he was
asking too much, or he wanted to sell it to
the right type of collector. I mean, who knows, But
not somebody who's gonna chop it up and make make
Voytage manuscript sausage out of it. I don't know. I mean,
he ends up donating it to Yale University in nineteen
sixty nine. So without without knowing the details of Kross myself,
(48:46):
and perhaps there's better documentation out there, you know, I
would presume it was a situation of where he's like,
I can't sell it to the type of client, you know,
the type of purchaser I want, so I'll sell it
to Yale, Or perhaps he reached the point where he's
he realized, like this book is is a truly fascinating
historical specimen. It does not belong in the hands of
you know, a rare occult book. It doesn't need to
(49:06):
be in another rare book dealers antique stash. It needs
to be with the university. All right, Well, I guess
that sort of brings us up to the modern period,
in which there's been an enormous amount of scholarship on
the Voyage Manuscript, of people trying to both to to
translate it or decrypt it, which in some ways are
similar jobs, or people trying to figure out what it
(49:29):
means or where it came from, who wrote it. A
lot of these mysteries remain, and there have been huge,
hugely interesting attempts to solve these questions over the decades.
But on that note, we're actually gonna have to call
this episode and return in a second episode where we'll
get into these various attempts to unravel the manuscript. In
the meantime, you can check out other episodes of Sufchable
(49:50):
your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
You can also, of course find this podcast wherever you
get your podcasts. Wherever you do find us, make sure
that you rate and review us. That really helps us out.
And uh, you know, if you want to discuss this
episode with other users other listeners, there's actually a Facebook
discussion group called the discussion module Stay Stuff to Bow
(50:14):
your Mind Discussion Module. That's kind of a fun place
to check out. Hey, have you subscribed to our other podcast,
Invention yet. If not, go subscribe to Invention. Subscribe to
Invention huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producers,
Maya Cole and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
(50:34):
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's
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