The Voynich Manuscript, Part 1

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. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
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 today we have a conundrum to consider
a book that cannot be read by anyone. So it's

(00:26):
kind of a riddle in the dark, isn't it like
something that Gollum might ask of of 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. 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

(00:49):
like the tricks of riddles. Right, Well, perhaps the book
does not exist. You cannot read a non existent fictional
book such as your hey, Luis Borges, the Book of
sand or 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

(01:10):
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 plot point in burto Echo is the Name
of the Rose. But no, the book that we're talking

(01:30):
about here, it is real and it definitely exists. 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, 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,

(01:53):
where where somebody just preventing you from viewing it and
reading it. No, that's not the case with this book,
because plenty of p wooll have attempted to read it
and still attempt to. Any serious scholar, can you know,
they can actually travel to its physical location and and
go through the you know, the necessary of paperwork one presumes,
can examine it physically, and you, you, the listener, can

(02:15):
even attempt to read it on the internet, or you
can you can acquire a printed fac simile, many of
which are very nice to understand. Okay, I got one. Well,
there are a lot of texts from the ancient world
that only exist in some incredibly degraded format. Right. So
there we have evidence that a book existed, but you
you can't make out what's on the page anymore. Maybe

(02:36):
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 it because it's not
made of language. Ah, that's that's a that's a clever,
clever guest picture book or something. Yeah, But at the

(03:00):
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 of language,
or perhaps what appears to be language is actually a
code for something else. Okay. So there is a book.

(03:20):
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 are getting to like the heart
of many of the discussions surrounding the book we're going
to be discussing today. This book is written in a
language or code or some other manner of textual form
that no one at least no one living or no

(03:42):
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 it, or figured
out some or all of its secrets, we can state
with a fair amount of certainty as of this recording,
and probably of you know, for you know, the duration,
for the shelf life of this episode, no one has

(04:04):
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, where somebody 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

(04:26):
theory as to h you know, that they have some
angles some in that's going to allow them to uh,
you know, to crack this nut. So what we're talking
about today is a real manuscript that exists in 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

(04:48):
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, but I
think we'll say Voytage v O 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

(05:08):
up a copy of this, it's what it's a bit
readily available on what our archive dot organ 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 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,

(05:28):
a folding book with pages that you can leave through. Yeah,
it's a roughly seven by ten inches, not a huge tone, right,
not huge. So a lot of these older books you
think of as being this big thing that 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.

(05:50):
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
meters by sixteen point two centimeters and about five centimeters thick.
So it's a little yeah, and that's what What was
the page count some of some of the neighborhood of
two forty seventy Yeah, it's so the number of pages

(06:12):
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 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

(06:34):
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 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

(06:55):
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 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

(07:16):
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 written and freerunning alphabetic script.
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

(07:37):
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 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

(07:58):
have real counterparts and 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. 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,

(08:20):
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 naked women, uh seeming debay
their shower and what might be giant plants or other things. Well,

(08:41):
we'll get more into what the illustrations represent later on. Um.
Now it was it's 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 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.

(09:03):
It is in a language. If it is a language,
the language is unknown. Yes, sometimes called voia cheese, which
is just a modern appellation because we don't know what
it is. Yeah, and uh, it's something like a 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

(09:26):
you define as being 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 as words, whether by the you know, 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

(09:49):
you find this book? Now? Well, you'll find it in
the United States. Yes, we'll get into the history of
the book that brought it to the United States, but
it is currently housed at the banecky Rare Book Whom
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

(10:12):
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 it the photos of
him Burto Echo reading or well looking at the book.
And of course it's a perfect thing for Umberto Echo
to show interest in. If 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

(10:35):
real mysteries of this text. This text is one of
the great standing mysteries of I don't know, I guess,
of medievalism, of 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

(10:58):
where we we know we're at first a i'ved and
was recorded, but we don't know who made it, or
how why they made it, or how they made it. Right. Yeah,
for the longest there was also no carbon dating of
the book, so estimates 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

(11:19):
because it was originally attributed to the English monk and
philosopher Roger Bacon, you know, of course, considered by many
to be one 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 radio carbon dating

(11:40):
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 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
to fourteen thirty eight roughly, and So one note on
how carbon date works, of course, is that carbon dating

(12:02):
is used to date things that were at some point
alive or at some point had carbon 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,

(12:23):
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 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

(12:43):
this old. Yeah, it kind of depends on how long
the vellum was sitting 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, I think it's a different
binding over the centuries. Now. There used to be some
theories this was a modern forgery, maybe by the very
book collector it's now named after, who will discuss later on.

(13:06):
But that really seems unlikely now, given that it has
been carbon dated to the fifteenth century. Right now, in
terms of the author, well, that's part of the unknown origins.
Nobody signed it. Yeah, handwriting analysis has suggested as few
as two or many or as many as eight writers,
which of course I wouldn't really be that uncommon for

(13:27):
a you know, 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 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

(13:47):
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, I mean, it's
had various sort of catalog numbers along the way, but
he knows what will come back to. Voytage refers to
Wilfred Michael Vonage. Uh, and it dates back to nineteen twelve.

(14:10):
So given the history of the book, uh cause 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 this
fascinating text. Alright, we're back. So we're talking today about
the Voyage Manuscript, a classic enigmatic text to believe now

(14:31):
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's
sort of shows up at one point in history 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

(14:52):
go do that. Now, a scan of it is of course,
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, 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

(15:13):
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 your
mind through this esoteric document. Yeah, I mean really, this
stuff like this is the reason we have the Internet.
That's the one on the benefits of the Internet is

(15:33):
being able to you know, a document like this can
be accessed by everybody. Yeah, now there are a few
things we can't if we're gonna 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. So it's in a script
that is clearly written from left to right and from

(15:54):
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, Rudu farci. 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 tradition unless they just switched
it for no reason. No. Another fact that might seem

(16:14):
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 subheadings, but based on
the illustrations, it's clear that there are sections that appear

(16:38):
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 as well. The first half of the book
is the the herbal section, and it's full of botanical illustrations.
You could say that, yeah, I mean, they clearly are
supposed to be plants, but we should stress that while

(16:58):
some of the illustrations of plans 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 constricter caterpillars from

(17:20):
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 looked like tentacles or eyeballs. Yeah,
they are. They are strange to be held. And this
is the most normal section of the script. Yeah, it
is so. The German computer scientist Klaus Schmi who wrote

(17:41):
a two thousand eleven article for Skeptical Enquirer 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 look that and say, yep,
that is definitely a geranium. One theory by the botanist

(18:05):
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 of these plants did not
spread to Europe until after contact with the America's which

(18:25):
would date the document a little bit later. But there
is not a general consensus that O'Neill's identification 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 big old question marks. Some
of them look like they could be real plants, but
there's none you can point to. There there are none

(18:47):
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
astra logical in nature. But as as pointed out by
Josephine Livingstone in her New York Or article The Unsolvable
Mysteries of the Vantage Manuscript, of which I'll also refer

(19:11):
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 of like astronomical objects
that don't appear to correlate to anything. For about eight

(19:32):
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 bunch of concentric
circles of these untranslatable words between megas looking dudes sitting

(19:57):
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 the work we do? Alright?
The next section is often referred to as the baliological section, right,

(20:18):
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 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

(20:41):
influence overall bodily health public health, but also hygiene has
has long been intertwined with our 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, Bathing can't get that weird? Uh
It this is maybe the weird section of all Yeah,
because there are all these images of nude female figures

(21:04):
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 plants or even like viscera of
some sort. Yeah, it's a very strange section of the manuscript.
The writing in this part, I noticed, suddenly gets very dense.

(21:26):
Whereas in previous pages there might have been a large
illustration of the plant and then some small, you know
if some lines of text around it. Here you've got
some densely packed text. And again I want to stress
that some 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

(21:46):
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's standing in what looks like a giant instrument
horn that's growing out of something. It's the spreading horn

(22:07):
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, yeah, I don't know
how to I mean, the sort of green gray brown
with like holes that have water coming out of them,
but like a space tentacle with shower heads like bio

(22:27):
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 gigeras quality to it. I was noticing in this
section how much the Voytage Manuscript, and I think this
is not an accident, how much it reminds me of

(22:49):
another book that I've liked for years, the Codex Seraphninus,
which is an entirely fictional and intentionally fictional encyclopedia created
by the Italian artist Luigi Serafini in the late night
teen seventies. I think it was published in nine. Basically,
it is like an artist's attempt to create a new
voyage manuscript type document. It's got a constructed language, lots

(23:11):
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 weird alien showers, and then at the at the

(23:32):
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. Yeah, And
I think this breaks down into multiple sort of subsections,
like there it is believed that there're some parts of
it are supposed to be pharmaceutical, like they depict the

(23:52):
creation of medicines and storage and viols, and other parts
appear to be about cooking or something. Yeah, so it's
just as mysteri is 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, and the book is is just
so unique in its style. It does not seem to

(24:14):
have any true surviving peers. It is not cleanly fit
with late medieval alchemical texts, because certainly there were 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
hygiene and medicine and cooking all at the same time,
that's a weird combination of subjects, I would say, Actually,

(24:37):
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, And if you were the
type of individual that either wrote or contributed to the
writing of a book, you likely had a lot to

(24:58):
say about various topics or a lot to crib from
earlier encyclopedias, and 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 the ancient wisdom of Scipio Africanus. Yeah, I mean

(25:19):
it comes back to a quote from burn Burno 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 voyage manuscript like it. It does seem to be
this singular thing that's left out. That's you know, that's

(25:42):
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.
Of course, to be clear, many books of the past
were lost, many languages were lost, Whole cultures have perished.

(26:02):
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,

(26:23):
Dante is 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, you know, the cultural context, any symbols that
are trotted out, or the religious context. Yes, uh, in

(26:47):
a similar 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, textual 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,

(27:08):
like we are not 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 Vontage manuscript is appropriate. But

(27:30):
but we'll get back to that, right. 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 or the Vantage Manuscript. From that article I
mentioned earlier by from two thousand eleven and Skeptical Inquirer
by the German computer scientists Claus Schmi, I thought it
made quite a few good points, and one of the

(27:53):
most interesting points that 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 Voytage manuscript.
And this is pretty strange for a document produced by hand.
Think about it. Could you write out a document of

(28:14):
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 that you could just do it without any mistakes,
or it would have to be something where mistakes didn't matter,

(28:36):
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
documents were handwritten instead of produced by a printing press

(28:57):
or a computer. Yeah, it took a lot of time
to make these, took a lot of skill, and paper
was expensive. Ink was expensive. Ultimately, if you had to
cross out of words, you crossed out of work. And
humans are imperfect copying machines. Now, again, we don't know
whether the voindage manuscript is an original document and that's
like the original copy from the author, or it's a

(29:18):
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. Yeah. So so this would this
would seem to argue for the idea that this was,

(29:40):
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 people have tried to source the book by

(30:02):
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 believe 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 says that this is just it's speculation,

(30:23):
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, right, But it does seem to be

(30:46):
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 likely you are to
see things. It's certainly encourages the conspue oratorial cast of
mind or the well, I don't know. Again, there's a
nice way to frame that, in a in a bad

(31:06):
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,

(31:27):
to go back to the Rosetta stone. 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

(31:49):
I mean, if you take this principle of 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.

(32:12):
You know, that that kind of thing where you can
find connections if you are determined to find connections, no
matter how tenuous the link. Anyway, So to get back
to uh, a few of these observations that I noted
from Schmid's analysis. One is that the clothing and hairstyles
worn by the people in the illustrations in the voyage
manuscript seem to date the document to Europe in the

(32:35):
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. A. Schmidt
points out that the average word length in the document

(32:56):
is 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

(33:17):
argues 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, Schmai 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.

(33:41):
So what 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 you know, relatively
sure of. Okay, alright, we're back, all right. So, as
we've mentioned before, we don't know who created the Voantage Manuscript.

(34:03):
That is one 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 some point in history this document just
shows up and and I guess that's where we should
dive in. So we're going to dive in in the
sixteenth century. Right, the year is fifty six, and this

(34:26):
is when the 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 ecentric monarch. Monarchy tends
to invite eccentricity, and uh and but but this is
an individual who's very interested in the occult, in alchemy

(34:47):
and kept a great library, 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. Ye.
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. So the this document shows

(35:12):
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 cats. I think it's gonna be duckets. Duckets.
I like thinking doct do cats? Yeah, well I always

(35:34):
I always think ducketts. So six hundred, six hundred gold
anyway to put it more like dungeons and dragons 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 Franciscan Friar who lived twelve nineteen through twelve two roughly,

(35:57):
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 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
and the Renaissance period, there was a significant amount of
blurring between the lines of science and magic. People who

(36:20):
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
ways he was an early advocate of what would become
the scientific methodism. Yeah. The on the other hand, you know,

(36:41):
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 of occult interest. Now
we've already mentioned that modern scholars do not think that
the Vointage Manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, and it
also seems almost conclusively argued against by the carbon dating

(37:03):
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
believability there. But in anyway, yeah, pretty pretty much nobody

(37:24):
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 Roll Roman Emperor.
So it would 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 wrote this.
You can easily see how attaching the name of a

(37:45):
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 reditor. Definitely,
he's on the case, but but nobody was able to

(38:06):
figure it out. You know, it alluded experts of the time,
just as it has always alluded to experts. So he
it ends up being passed on uh to a botanist
by the name of jacob Um Horriki. I think the
Latin name would be uh Jacobus Sinapius. But it was
passed on to a botanist essentially because it does contain

(38:28):
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 Athanaceous Kircher,

(38:48):
who lives sixteen two through sixtight. 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

(39:09):
hieroglyphics in the in the Coptic languages. 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 Manage Manuscript. So

(39:32):
presumably it perplexed him, just as it 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 I would think that maybe another reason would be

(39:56):
if he could not figure it out, Like 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.

(40:17):
Now you can 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
centuries before you know, we encountered cling On or doth
Racki or any of the or Esperanto. So it would

(40:40):
be fun 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
an engine pod dot com. Uh, you can subscribe wherever
you subscribe to your podcast. It is uh, it is
human Techno His Street, One invention at a time. All right,

(41:02):
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, just south of Rome,

(41:24):
and it remains there for something like two hundred and
fifty years. Though according to Livingstone, the book quote appears
to have bounced around Prague for a while. In sixty nine,
a person named uh Barcius described it as a is
quote a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of
writing and unknown characters unquote, and guests that quote the

(41:46):
whole thing is medical unquote. The book's historical trail vanishes
in sixteen seventy up until the time that Vantage 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 it shows up
with the guy actually named Voyage, yet another fascinating weird
individual to enter into the history. And we haven't even

(42:08):
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 Voynage, Yeah,
who lived eighteen sixty five through nineteen thirty And yeah,
he publishes the entire library and uh and it ends

(42:28):
up being moved to America. And this of course includes
the book that would take his name. 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 was devised by Roger Bacon

(42:49):
just to bring Roger Bacon back into everything. And he
even apparently sold a forgery to the British Museum at
one point, though perhaps by accident. Yeah, there there are
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

(43:10):
escaped to England at some point and became a book collector.
In that h that Josephine Livingstone article, she talks about
this story that he would he would delight in showing
off his wounds to people, and he would like lift
his shirt up and he would say here by sword,
here by bullet. But yeah, so Voinice is a really

(43:33):
interesting guy. And at one point in hyping his manuscript,
this is also quoted in 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 speaks

(43:54):
to a certain kind of attitude that documents like this
inspire and other historical mystery reads all kinds of things,
you know, the anti kate through 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
it's not fully solved at the time people are looking

(44:16):
at it, it tends to to make people want to
go toward these almost conspiracy 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,

(44:38):
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 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

(44:58):
to things in the modern world that are perhaps inferior
to ways of dealing with things 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 in
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

(45:21):
understand about the world yet. And there are things, particularly
details from the past, details from history, 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 to

(45:41):
a middle position here between the sort of the condescending
modern idea that looks at the 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.

(46:04):
There wasn't an Atlantis where they had flying cars and
stuff like that. It's more like that 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,

(46:25):
you know, the classic construction of the Pyramids example. It's like, no,
it doesn't mean that they had like alien technology. 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

(46:47):
present and past, Like the past is an enemy to
be defeated in our attempt to understand it, and they
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 be overcome.
Maybe it's part of the colonial legacy, or maybe it's
because of Indiana Jones, you know, with uh, you know,

(47:07):
this idea of somebody like like physically combating the past
in order to acquire 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.

(47:28):
All right, Well, we gotta get back to what happened
to the Voytage manuscript, all right. So it was in
Vonic's possession, and then he dies and it passes to
his widow, Ethel, and he died in nineteen thirty, yes,
nine thirty, and then it passes from Ethel to a
close friend who then sells the book to an anti
antique book dealer by the name of hands P. Krauss

(47:48):
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, 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.

(48:10):
I don't know. I mean he ends up donating it
to get Yale University in nine nine. So without without
knowing the details of a cross myself, 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.

(48:34):
It does not belong in the hands of you know,
a rare occult book. It doesn't need to be in
another rare book dealers antique stash. It needs to be
with a 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

(48:54):
decrypt it, which in some ways are similar jobs, or
people trying to to figure out what it 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

(49:17):
these various attempts to unravel the manuscript. In the meantime,
you can check out other episodes of Stuff Toblew Your
Mind at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You
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(49:42):
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(50:03):
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(50:26):
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