From the Vault: The Voynich Manuscript, Part 2

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 9/5/2019)

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Episode Transcript

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 to go into the old vault. Uh. This time
we're following up the episode that played last Saturday, so
we're bringing you The Voyage Manuscript, Part two. This was
originally published on September nineteen. We hope you enjoy Welcome

(00:27):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey, you welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two
of our exploration of the Voyage Manuscript or the Vantage Manuscript.
We've been saying both this medieval manuscript that his fascinated

(00:51):
UH scholars cryptographers for for decades now, or actually not
just decades, for centuries, but especially since it was reintroduced
to the world around nineteen twelve and has become the
subject of intense interest because it is full of this
text that has not been successfully decoded if it is
in fact a code, or has not been translated, if

(01:13):
it is in fact a language, accompanied with these amazing,
strange illustrations of alien plants and and women bathing in
these strange horns with crocodile ten drils. Is this absolutely
captivating document that is in a library at Yale now
and today we wanted to go further by exploring the

(01:35):
history of people trying to understand this document, to come
up with a theory of its origin, or to explain
what it says, if it says anything. Yeah, So again,
definitely listen to part one if you have not. Absolutely
this is definitely a part one part two scenario. Yeah,
I think you'll probably be very confused if you try
to jump in in the middle here, So go back
to part one first. But so I thought we should

(01:57):
start off today by separating the different theories of of
this manuscript into two basic camps, and then within these
camps there will be different theories. But the two main camps,
I think we should look at our signal theory and
noise theory. And so signal theory looks at the Voyage

(02:18):
manuscript and proposes that there is some underlying meaning to
the text that it could, at least in theory, actually
be translated to yield a signal signal or a message.
And of course it's not necessarily saying that we have
understood what the messages, or that we ever will understand
what the messages. But at least in theory it could
be understood. It says something that's signal theory. Noise theory,

(02:42):
we would say, proposes that there is no underlying message.
It's just gibberish, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Yeah, and and
and indeed that does cut to the chase. Either this
is a document that means something or it means nothing,
and and both are are kind of enthralling possibilities and
is filled with wonder and old and and gives way

(03:03):
to all sorts of you know, conspiracy theories if you
gaze into it long enough. And the other is is
kind of equally terrifying that this thing that has captivated
and just in overwhelmed so many you know, intensely intelligent
and in many cases that you know, very well educated individuals.
They could old, but they could ultimately be a work
of nonsense. That it's just you know, it's kind of

(03:25):
like just pure chaos. And there could be multiple reasons
why it could be a work of nonsense, or at
least nonsense to us. And I think we'll explore these individually.
But first I think we should look at some of
the possibilities for understanding this document under the signal theory,
the theory that it actually does say something. So what
would some of these explanations be. Well, one of the
big theories is that the cipher theory, the idea that

(03:48):
the text is protected by a letter based cipher. Uh.
It's a very popular approach to trying to figure out
what's going on with a vantage manuscript. Right, So the
idea could be that it's something like a letter substitution system. Right.
So these characters that we don't recognize, that you know,
roughly maybe fifteen to twenty five or up to thirty
characters that are used to make the words in this

(04:10):
book somehow correspond to letters in a known language, or
letters in some coded language or or something like that.
That that that there's a way of breaking the code
and it de tran and it can be retranslated into
a an actual language. Getting into the idea here that
it could be in a code and it requires a codebook.

(04:32):
And since we don't have the codebook, it's the cryptographers, uh,
you know, a goal to try and figure out what
the code might be. Oh, Okay, So a codebook could
mean that it wouldn't even necessarily have to be a
straight like letter substitution type cipher. It could just be
that there are you know, like known translations of certain
word forms or something like that to other known words.

(04:55):
Another possibility is that it's written in some form of
shorthand that that we have you know, lost understanding of.
There's also, uh, the the idea of steganography. This is
the idea that the text itself is meaningless, but key
signs would indicate hidden useful information, like little details on

(05:17):
the illustrations or the text itself or some combination. Um.
This would be kind of like, I guess, kind of
like a you know, a cheap spy novel. Version of
this is like counting the dotted eyes on a page
sort of thing, and that tells you something. Sure. Yeah.
Another variation that is brought up is that you could
obtain the necessary info info by placing a plate um

(05:39):
over the page with spaces in that plate to reveal
the important characters. Oh yeah, okay, so this would be
you know, like one of those uh uh, you know,
decode or ring kinds of things. Oh no, that that
actually I think it has letter substitution. There are there
are codes like this like this, and toys and stuff
that you can buy that like you put a plate

(05:59):
over it's got certain holes on any read the letters
that appear in the holes, right, And it's my understanding
that if if those plates were random enough, that in
and of itself could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to crack the code. Uh you know the Vantage manuscript. Sure,
But then there are other theories that are less about
code and that might still present to us as codes,

(06:20):
but maybe it wasn't intended as a code. Yeah. Like
a big one is that it is some form of
natural language that has been forgotten in various possibilities from
Eurasia have been presented. Yeah, So the idea here would
just be we've got no other documents written in this
language or written in this uh, in this transliteration of
the language. Right. And then another idea, to come back

(06:42):
to something we discussed in the last episode, is that
it could be a constructed language, so like a language
that somebody made up on purpose, like Klingon or doth Rocky,
but the fifteenth century version of that right now, and
now another intriguing idea and This was apparently presented by
Jerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill that it could be a

(07:04):
what is what is called a gloss a alia. Yeah,
so this would have been essentially like a work that
is a stream of consciousness work that is created via
speaking in tongues, similar to the work of Christianistic Hildegard
of Bingen. Yeah, this would be uh. I mean you
could look at it as a form of automatic writing,

(07:25):
you know that. That's so there. There could be a
this could be a weird transcription of spoken gloss a
alia like speaking in tongues, or it could be a
written version of it. Directly, it would be kind of
weird if it was a transliteration of sounds made orally
by gloss a alia into a script that didn't exist anyway.

(07:45):
But you can imagine it's certainly being like automatic writing
of some kind. People that the spirits are writing through
my hand. And I think that would mean in this
case that while it might not be meaningless to the
person writing it, it would be meaningless to any re eater.
So I think this would fall under the noise category right,
that there would be there is no way to understand

(08:06):
what this says because there is no underlying signal because
in this case, presumably the context for the piece would
be very personal and then also would probably deal a
lot with personal reevaluation of the text. You know, it's
almost like look less than a dream journal in a way,
you know, where the dream is not even even taken

(08:28):
and put into the into the form of language, but
like the dream is is in language. Yeah, it would
be like if if you had a dream journal, yeah,
where you never translated it into any real language, You
just made notes about your dreams in random other symbols
that don't mean anything to anybody else. And then, of course,
another big idea is that it's simply a hoax, right,

(08:50):
that it doesn't mean anything. There's no encoded signals, just
noise because somebody was intentionally trying to create an object
that would maybe confuse people or trick them, or maybe
just trick them into thinking that it did say something. Right,
And if and if that is indeed the reason for
the origin story of this document, then it is still succeeding.

(09:12):
It's it has probably succeeded remarkably well, because if it
is a hoax, it is still tricking people to this day.
Another idea is that if it were a hoax, if
it were a completely fraudulent document, you could also make
a case that it was a you know, a way
to try and make a quick buck off of you know,
a cult fanboys with a lot of money, such as

(09:33):
the Holy Roman Emperor who who purchased it. So we
know it was sold to Rudolph the Second, we think
around fifteen eighty six, that's when the historical records indicate.
But the carbon dating of the vellum says that this
this this parchment at least was probably produced in like
the early fourteen hundreds. Now maybe maybe we think like
it's possible to parchment the vellums sat around for a

(09:55):
long time before it was made into this document. But
if you think that the creation of the pages on
which it was written was sometime close to when the
document was written, then it would have been written long
before there was a chance to sell it to Rudolph
the Second, So it would be hard to imagine that
it was created specifically for that purpose. Now, one of
the things is that people have tried to do various

(10:16):
kinds of statistical analysis of the text to say, okay,
does even though we can't translate it yet does this
look like a natural language? Does it look like it
could somehow be decoded to or translated to a natural language?
And I would say that the answer there is inconclusive.
There are pieces of evidence pointing both ways, right, Like

(10:38):
one commonly cited weird feature of the text that really
makes it look like not a natural language is the
fact that in some cases words are repeated in line
up to three times in a row. Is that normal
for a language? Is that normal? Normal? Normal? Not really
really really, I mean, I don't know poetically uh recally

(11:01):
uh shanti shan shan. I mean, we can all think
of examples from songs and poetry and writing where that's interesting,
you know, there's something maybe said three times to uh,
to add emphasis. But I mean, I I am not
I'm not the expert comment commenting on this from It's
saying Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. This does remind me though, when

(11:21):
I was a kid sometimes I would like try and
create like documents that looked like they were, you know,
magical documents in another language, you know, with weird rooms. Um.
And actually I do that still, sometimes, like doodling, you know,
in the corners of a page. If I'm supposed to
be taking notes on something. Uh but I even even
as a kid, I would I would look back at
what I had done and I would realize, what this

(11:43):
This doesn't look like language like, it doesn't like there's
not enough variety in the these the signal, the little
signals that I've I've concocted or something I just essentially
pulled out of my head. They're like, it's not matching
up with what one would expect from any kind of
writing or coded writing system. Yeah. So I mentioned in
the last episode there was a good article about this

(12:03):
from two thousand eleven and skeptical inquirer by the German
computer scientist Klaus schmi who who I think he looked
at a lot of the statistical qualities of the text
from a cryptography point of view, and it seemed like
he said, yeah, there there's evidence both ways, and we
can continue to talk about some of that evidence as
we go on in the episodes. One interesting claim I

(12:26):
came across. I'm sorry that I feel like I can't
evaluate whether this is a correct claim or not, but
at least it's a claim that's made against the noise
theory or any theory recommending an interpretation of nonsense is
that the document uh at least appears to follow something
called Ziff's law, which concerns the statistical distribution of words

(12:48):
and natural languages. So basically, Ziff's law claims that in
any natural language, the frequency with which a word is
used will be directly proportional to how how high it
ranks in the ranking of most common words. So the
first most common word will be used twice as often
as the second most common word, three times as often
as the third most common word, and so forth. Now

(13:10):
this isn't exactly law in like the physical or mathematical sense,
but if for some reason it does appear to hold
true for all or almost all natural languages, and so
if and and, the document appears to match this So
like if you look at it from a Zif's law distribution,
it lines up pretty close. So if the frequency count
of words in this document follows this law, if that is,

(13:33):
if that claim is correct, meaning it has a similar
distribution of words to real documents in real languages. That
seems to make it a little harder to believe it's
just total nonsense generated but out of somebody's head. Another
thing is that different words appear with different frequencies in
different sections. So remember we've got these different sections of
the document, like the astrological stuff versus the herbal stuff,

(13:56):
and so you have some words that might appear in
the supposed astrological section but not in the plants section,
and vice versa. This would I think be expected if
these were written in a real language with a real message,
like you would image, you would probably expect the words
star to appear in the astrological section but not in
the plants section. So just looking at the symbols, the

(14:18):
frequency distribution of symbols and how they break out, and
how well they resemble a real language, it seems like
it can push us kind of in both directions that
we don't get a clear reading from either way. From that,
and and again this just comes back to the what
makes this document so mysterious, It's so resistant to unraveling.

(14:40):
So and a number of theories have been put forth
for the origins and the true nature of the text. Uh,
you know, so much so that in when an American
cryptologist and computer programmer married, the Imperio composed the Vontage
Manuscript and Elegant Enigma for the U. S Military, because
by the US military cryptography, I mean, that's a of

(15:03):
massive state importance, it is. Yeah, so this is not
like some sort of weird, you know, Area fifty one
type of Shenanigan going on here. But in this, uh,
this paper, which is readily available online you can find
a PDF of the full thing, she admits that she
quote unwittingly retraced the steps of all my predecessors, rediscovering
their sources, repeating their experiments, growing excited over the same

(15:27):
promising leads that excited them, and learning only later that
all these things had already been tried and had failed,
often several times. And I found that to just be very,
very fitting, because this does seem to be a theme,
uh is that you know, certainly in the last century.
Well it's not hard to see why. Again, this is
like it's sort of the holy grail of of of decoding, right, Yeah, yes,

(15:52):
it's the mount everest of code breaking. If you could
crack it, you'd be you'd be like the hottest, you know,
code cracker in the world. Yeah, And so crackers have
have tried to have taken a shot at it. Linguists
have have have taken a shot at it, various scholar
all manner of scholars, amateurs, and of course outright quacks
that have taken taking their hand to the Vantage manuscript.

(16:14):
I think we alluded to this in the last episode,
but the internet is full of people who claim to
have decoded the Voytage manuscript to the point where when
we were preparing for the episode, I mean a lot
of these were just like, you know, somebody in the
last year or two has published a you know, a
YouTube video or or an article somewhere where they're like,
I did it. I cracked it. Here's the answer. And

(16:35):
I'm like, I don't know. Maybe one of these people
actually did and it just hasn't really been analyzed or
reported on yet. I have no way of knowing because
I don't have an expertise obviously in the relevant fields,
so I can't like evaluate it on my own. But
it's funny, like there's so many people trying and claiming
to have done it that you somebody could have done
it and we might not even know for a while

(16:56):
because it would just get lost in the sea of
of of all these claims. Yeah, all right, on that note,
we're gonna take a quick break when we come back.
We're going to discuss the possibility, um pretty much discredited
possibility that Roger Bacon actually had a hand in creating this.
Than all right, we're back. Time to talk about Mr Bacon. Now,

(17:18):
you remember from the last episode the it came with
a certificate of authenticity. Originally when Rudolph the Second, the
Holy Roman Emperor bought this, uh bought the Voytage manuscript
for six hundred ducats or Ducket's he it came along
with a letter that said, well, by the way, Roger
Bacon made this. Yeah. And according to Josephine Livingstone, who

(17:38):
wrote a really nice piece in The New Yorker about this,
actually a couple of pieces. One was kind of the
follow up where she talked about just internet fascination of
the Voytage manuscript. She points out, yeah, that this does
not seem to be the case though, uh, though it
was kind of a popular idea for a while or
its like repopularized and you know, well before the carbon

(17:58):
dating actually took play. But one William Romaine Newbold, a
professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
He argued in favor of the Bacon origin, believing it
to be an anagrammed micrographic shorthand required transposition, abbreviation, and

(18:20):
microscopic notation. Yeah. His method, from what I've read, was
a little over the end. I mean, it's like he
was like looking inside the characters to see little micro
like strokes of ink that may have indicated actual letters
or abbreviations of word phonemes. And so his his method

(18:44):
of decoding it, which he claimed was successful, was incredibly complicated. Yeah.
But he claimed that he had translated, and he provided
all these details like drawing it into various you know,
other writings and ideas of Bacon. Uh. And he was
apparently a brilliant individual. But but no one could take
his solution and reproduce the same results using these methods, right,

(19:06):
it required so many subjective judgment calls about what he
was seeing on the page in these micro notation marks
and what that was supposed to correlate to. Yeah. Medieval
medievalist John Matthews Manly, one of the Army's chief cryptologists
during World War One, concluded that the quote decipherments were

(19:26):
not discoveries of secret hidden of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon,
but the products of new Bold's own intense enthusiasm and
his learned and ingenious subconscious. According to Schmay's article and
Skeptical Inquire, new Bold's translation had revealed that Roger Bacon
already had a telescope in the thirteenth century, predating the

(19:47):
known invention of the telescope in the first decade of
the sixteen hundreds by like centuries, and that Bacon had
used this telescope to discover the spiral structure of the
Andromeda galaxy. It's just hard to believe though, that like
you could generate generate text that complex, you know, just
by subjective interpretations of tiny things. And then of course,

(20:08):
as we're saying, like nobody else could could come up
with the same translations based on what he had. So
I don't know, it just seems like he was he
was looking for the text he wanted to find, almost
like like it spells like new Bold is great. Yeah,
you know. Another great, interesting, insightful description of of this, uh,

(20:29):
this incident with new Bold comes from Terence mckinna oh, yeah,
who wrote about the manuscript for Noses magazine in Night
and what he is, by the way, a purely historical
linguistic article that has nothing to do with any of
his writings on psychedelics. Although I can absolutely see why
McKenna would be interested in this subject because it's this.
It's this manuscript that seems to sit at the intersection

(20:51):
of primitive science and magic and plants. Yeah. Uh, this,
this particular article is that you can find it online
and PDF form. It's also collected in the Art Kick Revival.
It is, you know, dated, It's so he was written
prior to carbon dating. But he sums up the new
Bold case by saying, quote, the problem with all of
this was no one else could extract the same plain

(21:13):
text using Professor Newbold's method. It involves so many choices
from pools of letters at every given point along the
way that one could demonstrate that hundreds of different messages
could be extracted from the same passages. New Bold died
a broken man, disgraced, his career shattered. He had gone
too far in the vantage manuscript had claimed its first victim.

(21:35):
Now McKenna is not actually arguing that there's a curse
on the document or anything here, but I think he
does get a little magic here with it. Later on,
I mean a kind will of his talks in this
particular paper, he doesn't really tie it into any of
his more um you know, spiritual shamanistic ideas. It's it's

(21:57):
ultimately pretty straightforward, though again a dated because when it
was written. Um but but but but he does touch
in this on this idea of that claiming its first
victim on a pattern that one sees to this very
day in vantage research. It draws so many people in
and certainly, while there are quacks and conspiracy theory makers
in the mix, you also see a lot of very intelligent,

(22:19):
educated and disciplined people diving into the text and initially
claiming victory, only to realize that they two have failed
to see through its mysteries and and in some cases
are kind of broken on the manuscript. Again, Yeah, mckenn
I also tell I wish I could remember the name
of this, but he tells an anecdote. I don't know
if this is one of the commonly circulated stories about
the translation attempts, but he tells an anecdote about this

(22:42):
one aging scholar who was in his nineties who claimed
to some colleagues to have cracked the code to you know,
to understand what it says and then when somebody was
trying to follow up with him about that, they were like, okay,
we'll fly down to meet you. But by the time
they got there, he had died of a heart attempt. Yes, yes,
that's something here. It's in the noses piece as well.
So whatever information that UH expert may have had, it

(23:05):
was lost with them when they died. Well, I think
the the implication is that the expert had not actually
solved it and just happened to die right in time
to not get found out. Certainly the more likely scenario
given everything that we've discussed here. Now I mentioned John
Matthews Manly earlier, the War One Army cryptologist. Well, he

(23:25):
ends up turning Army cryptographer William F. Friedman onto the manuscript.
In William and his wife Elizabeth worked on the project
for forty years. Freedman was considered one of the greatest
cryptographers of his day. He and his team cracked Japan's
Code Purple during World War Two, but they were never
able to figure out that the manuscript either um though

(23:47):
Freedman did seem to believe that it might have been
an attempt to construct an artificial or universal language. Robert S. Brumbach,
also of Yale University, took a crack at it as
well and produced some confusing decipherings that ultimately lead nowhere um.
But also Alan Turing apparently took a crack at it

(24:08):
as well, the King of code Breakers, and even Turing
couldn't make any sense of it. Now another interesting case here.
In seven one, Dr Leo levit Levitov presented the idea
that the book was a liturgical manual for the the
Catherine religion of the Middle Ages, basically the only surviving

(24:29):
document of the Cather heresy, a sort of Gnostic revival
movement was effectively decimated by the Alba, Genzi and Crusade
of the early thirteenth century, and much of our understanding
of this religion is lost. But Levitov makes the argument
that it's a book of Catherine sacraments, including a youth
and asia practice or perhaps in a ritualized act of

(24:52):
suicide known as endura um, with which of the illustrations
is supposed to show that the bathtubs so yeah. He
Levitav argues that we're seeing a discussion of the vantage
in the vantage of Endeira as a right of ritual
opening of the veins and a hot bath as a
means of consentually ending one's life in a sacred fashion.

(25:13):
And this ties into like ideas of the Catholis believing
like that the physical body was inherently you know, debased
and therefore like the it's part of uh, you know,
the of ensuring that a refined soul, you know, travels
beyond this plane of being, that sort of thing. But
then he also connects uh Catholism to the worship of
the goddess Isis and he uh, you know, he believed

(25:36):
that that it was not encrypted at all the manuscript,
but it was written in this uh this you know,
this this mixture of medieval Flemish and old Fringe and
old High German Loan words, all kind of you know,
formed into this amalgamation of language. Um. But while some
saw promise in Levitov's argument, there were plenty of people

(25:59):
who had numerous problems with it. A big one is
that the induro was definitely a thing. According to Coasta Siamus,
in writing for the journal Religion in Health in twos sixteen, quote,
the enduro was the prerequisite act of repentance that allowed
the fallen soul to return to heaven. But pretty much
everybody agrees that it was. It was basically a fast.

(26:23):
It was not a ritual suicide or Euthanasiah. So another
one is this whole isis connection. This doesn't pop up
anywhere else. And years later, you know, when we'd finally
get some carbon dating that dismissed. Uh, you know, the
idea that a bacon a bacon origin was possible, and
certainly a pre bacon origin of the text was equally

(26:44):
unlikely or impossible. Yeah, I'd say that's fairly impossible, given
that the vellum was not from before the early fifteenth century,
unless again we're dealing with like a copy of an
earlier text, which again it doesn't necessarily look like. Now,
when we look at other theories as to you know,
where it came from, um, you know they're there, have

(27:05):
been various and most of them haven't really endured. There
is the interesting notion that sixteenth century occultist mathematician and
cryptographer John d along with Edward Kelly, may have been
involved with the manuscript in some some form or another. Now,
this is mckinnis theory. He's got a complicated argument that

(27:25):
that like, yes, it probably was John D and Edward
Kelly who wrote this document. Yeah, yeah, Mickey McKenna did
present that idea that he though he also readily admitted
that it was just more, you know more basically a
conjecture on his part, and he he had he had
not done a rigorous work to back it up, and
there were numerous potential holes in the situation. But but

(27:48):
Kelly and and D did dabble in not dabble. They
had more than dabble than occult practices. So I mean,
it's again, it's speculative, but it's not hard to see
somebody like John D coming up with a with a
strange constructed document that's got kind of magical suggestions in it. Yeah,
we have two older episodes of stuff to bule your

(28:08):
mind about John D that will probably be running his
vault episodes here in the immediate future. But yeah, he was.
He was one of the most brilliant minds of his day.
He was involved in cryptography, spycraft, occultism, and mathematics. Edward
Kelly has accomplished here with an It was an occultist
and and most agree a con man or a scoundrel
of some fashion. Um it is it's generally described that

(28:32):
Edward Kelly's ears were both missing, uh you know, his
punishment for some deed in his past. But yeah, but
between the two of them, I I often have sort
of tried to figure out, like what what is the energy?
What is the nature of of their collaboration? You know,
they're in a way they're they're a perfect duo, but
they're also kind of the strange duo where uh, you

(28:55):
know d there's nobody else like him. And then you wondered, like,
to what extent is uh is Kelly like taking advantage
of the situation um? Or is he able to to
actually an a d and in some of his various
operations here? But again, like the interest in cryptography, was
there the interest in occultism? They also both wrote of
communication with angels in the Enochian tongue um, which which

(29:20):
we have an alph of that for by the way,
and it is not the Enochian language that we see
in the Vonage manuscript. But certainly if you're looking for
people at that time period, people who you know would
have been traveling in this area and have had contact
with with the Holy Roman emperor um, you know, these
are these are two prime suspects. Yeah, and I do think, um,

(29:44):
maybe you were going to get to the s in
a minute, But I do think it's a decent hypothesis
that even if John D didn't write this, that John
D was the source who brought the Voytage manuscript to
the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second. Yes. In in
the book by Benjamin Woolley, The Queen's Conjuror, which is
biography of D that I I read a few years

(30:06):
back for the Stuff of your Mind episode, the author
does mention that Rudolph may well have acquired the manuscript
from D, but he does not entertain or dismissed the
idea that D was involved in his production. But but
he at least acknowledges that it's it's possible that D
is the individual who sold it to the emperor. And
if that is the case, like well then we can

(30:27):
we can add one more step, you know, to the
beginning of the history of the book. But we still
don't know where D acquired it, so the mystery remains.
But John D is a fascinating individual. I mean, he
is is essentially not only is he the Merlin of
the day, but a lot of our ideas that we
associate with the mythical and fictional wizard uh Merlin kind

(30:50):
of stem from d I think it's believed that he
was the inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero in the Tempest, Right,
I've read that as well. Uh So, yeah, an astounding figure,
you know, to whatever degree he was involved with a
vantage manuscript. Um, there's still plenty of mysterious and wonderful
things about about the himself. For instance, to what extent

(31:11):
he was involved, uh in in statecraft and and and
worked as a spy. Like. There's some that argue that
he was like totally a spy and that many of
these occult manuscripts that he was uh, you know, peddling
around and discussing in occult ideas, they were essentially codes
for things um and others say that, no, he was
more purely on the the occultist end of the spectrum.

(31:32):
I My read, and I think this has been the
read of other commentators, is that it's probably somewhere in between,
you know, one of these situations where you know, he
was definitely fascinating with with the occult. He was definitely
and he was a poly math, but being a poly
math of the day and the one that that traveled
throughout Europe he ended up, you know, and and also

(31:54):
being a devout servant to Elizabeth the first you know
he was, he was more than happy to engage in
a little spycraft from time to time. Another weird connection.
I believe John d is also supposed to be the
inspiration for Christopher Marlowe's incarnation of Dr faust Us from
from of course Dr you know, who makes a deal
with the devil to get all knowledge and you know,

(32:15):
all earthly scientific power. And then Christopher Marlowe, who wrote
the English play Dr faust Us, was also I believe
involved in state craft and being a spy. Fascinating, all right,
So there are various other um origin stories that we're
not going to get into, but but just to really
drive home how this is still a thing, How how

(32:36):
people are still not, you know, not only attempting to
crack but claiming that they did, we should discuss two
recent attempts, one extremely recent attempts to crack it that
have also fallen short. Yeah, it seems like there's at
least one claim every couple of years that gets picked
up by real like news sites and then it always

(32:56):
kind of like, oh no, never mind. Well, in two
thousands seven, team we saw just such a case. Um.
There was a history researcher and television writer by the
name of Nicholas Gibbs, and he published it was published
in The Times Literary Supplement. Uh. He believed he'd identified
quote a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations often used

(33:18):
in medical treatises about herbs, and this led him to
illustrations in other texts, and he believed resemble those in
the Vonage manuscript. And so this guy. This was widely covered,
in large part, of course, because it was initially published
in The Times Literary Supplement, was picked out by picked
up by numerous media outlets, including UH, Ours Technica SO
and initially at Ours Technica editor Annalie Knewitz wrote quote

(33:41):
this is again before it became discredited. Quote. Gibbs concluded
that it's likely the Vontage Manuscript was a customized book,
possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine.
Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in,
but the sheer uh mondanity of gibbs discovery makes it
sound plausible. Okay, so it's always like it helps you

(34:02):
with the claim to have decoded something. If the message
you decoded is not delicious, I think it does help
the other believability because I think that's that's ultimately part
of the mystery, right, And the allure and danger of
the mystery is that if that it is solved, is
it is, it's not going to be ground baking anymore
like the groundbreaking. And the amazing thing about the Vontage
manuscript is not that it contains something definite, but that

(34:23):
we just have no ability to grasp what it contains. Right,
You'd have to be more suspicious if it says, like
I know the location of the Holy Grail or something. Yeah,
but okay. But after this piece came out then experts
began to weigh in and knew it also wrote an
excellent retraction piece, UH which you know, citing the various
experts who responded to that initial Uh Times Literary Supplement paper,

(34:48):
and the various experts concluded that while they think the
text might actually turn out to be a medical treatise
on women's health, like that's not impossible, but they think
that his translations were not grammatically correct and it according
to Medical Academy of America director Lisa Fagan Davis in
the Atlantic quote, if they had simply sent it to
the Banecki Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat.

(35:11):
And this is the library Yale that actually has the
Vontagey script. I think they do WANTAGE scholarship there right, So,
um so, just I guess that's a little bit of
advice out there. If you were an editor potential of
any kind of publication and you're potentially um publishing something
about someone cracking the Vonage manuscript, Um, make a phone call,
send an email to the Bnecki Library and see if

(35:33):
you can get somebody to to to weigh in on
it before you publish. Yeah. I think that would be
a smart move. Now, have there been any cases this year? Yes,
into in twenty nineteen, um, this one prop popped up.
You might have seen this headline Bristol academic cracks Vontage code,
solving century old mystery of a midie of medieval text.
And yeah, I remember seeing this one. I want to

(35:55):
say that it even popped up on a fairly notable
like Science Release website that I use and was but
then was later removed. Dr Gerard Cheshire, research assistant at
Bristol University, claimed that it was a therapeutic reference book
written in a lost language called proto Romance, and this
article appeared on the university's website, but then was later

(36:17):
taken down after experts chimed in and question the validity
of the research and uh another there had I looked.
There hasn't been like an additional follow up on that,
but it would it would seem to be the case
that it is another situation where, um, you know, someone
thought they'd cracked it and they had not that they

(36:37):
had perhaps, in the words of Mary the Imperio, you know,
recreated the same steps and missteps of those that came
before trying to crack the Vantage manuscript. And of course,
in addition to this, like we said, there's just a
lot of baseless speculation surrounding the manuscript. Online. It features
into historical conspiracy theory. Yeah, you'll find it on the YouTube,

(36:58):
you'll find it on various Reddit words. Um. According to
Raymond Clemens, a curator of early books and manuscripts at
the Banecky Library, one of the most fun examples that
they've run across is that the Vontage manuscript is an
alien is the work of an alien visitor to Earth
from the Andromeda galaxy who was making notes about our

(37:19):
planet and then dropped their notebook before they return. But wait,
why would it be notes about our planet if none
of the plants can be identified? Maybe the alien vision
I vision, you know, it's weird. I don't know, you know,
maybe they were. There are a lot of holes in
this theory, Joe's what I'm saying. Yeah, all right, we
need to take one more break, but we will be

(37:39):
right back with more where we're back now, We've talked
about evidence going in both directions of people who just
try to look at the text statistically or mathematically as
a text and say, does it look like a text
in a real language, even coded in a real language,
and the answer there is some indications kind of point

(38:01):
to yes, and some indications kind of point to know.
I think one thing I wanted to look at now
is something that was pointed out in that in that
Skeptical Inquirer article by Klaus Schmay who was who he
pointed out some interesting research from the early two thousands
by the British linguist Gordon Rugg. So I'm just going
to read this section from MS article, smy writes quote

(38:22):
the British linguist Gordon Rugg is among the most reputable
voytage researchers. He conducted a most interesting cryptological experiment. For
his experiment, Rugg generated a table with random combinations of
characters that he used as prefixes, roots, or suffixes of
new words. He positioned a quadratic stencil, like the one

(38:43):
used for encryption in the sixteenth century over the table.
In this manner, he obtained a sequence of letters that
bore great resemblance to the text of the Voyage manuscript.
Rugg's experiment supports the hypothesis that the manuscript is nothing
but a compilation of meaningless line and letters, which is
of course the hoax hypothesis. And then Schmidt also points

(39:05):
out a study by the Austrian physicist Andreas Shinner that
also supports the idea that even though there are some
things about this that do look like a text, it's possible,
like a real text and a real natural language, it's
possible to generate a text like this without it being
based on a real language. And and Shinner's analysis, I

(39:25):
think was primarily based on the fact that there are
unnatural regularities in the order of words appearing in the
manuscript that don't mirror sequences of words that appear in
real languages. So I don't think that completely settles it.
But that's more fuel back on the on the fire
of the side that says, Okay, this is just a

(39:45):
hoax document or glossal alia or something something that somebody
made up and doesn't correlate to real words. That makes sense.
But and then ultimately this, yeah, this gives credence to
just the its power to break those that that desperately
to find meaning in it. Like it just kind of
it almost seems like it does point people to the
you know, near the threshold of madness where they they

(40:08):
make that leap and they say I've done it, I
figured it out, and and believe that they have you know,
I mean, uh, none of the none of the individuals
that we've we've named here, um you know, from from
the Avontage manuscripts, uh, you know, recent history. You know.
I don't think any of them have, you know, have
been trying to pull anything over on anyone. I think
they have. They've reached a point where they genuinely think

(40:31):
they found the clue they found, you know, the missing
piece that has enabled us to understand this document. Well.
As satisfying as it is to solve a puzzle, it
is equally maddening to work on a puzzle without solving it.
And I think that can kind of drive people like
it creates unreasonable incentives in the mind to toil over

(40:53):
a puzzle or a code for so long without breaking it.
Like you, the desire to have broken it becomes incredibly strong.
I will say this one lesson I've taken home from
all of this is friends. Don't let friends claim they've
cracked the Vontage manuscript. That's right if you if you
know somebody and they're like, hey, you know, I think
I've I've translated the Vontage manuscript. I'm going public with

(41:15):
this tomorrow, you know, talk him down from that. Maybe
maybe you know, to ask him just to settle down
a little and uh and rethink before you go public
with this this new translation. I just want to say,
though this is not conclusive, from that interesting article by
by Schmi about his conclusion, just his opinion is that
it's very likely, it's it's possible that it's a hoax.

(41:38):
Of course, he thinks the author was probably an anonymous
artist living in the first half of the fourteen hundreds. Uh,
and if it is actually encrypted. One thing he points
to that I think is interesting is he says it's
easier to encrypt a text if the encrypted text generates
far more characters than the original text. So if a
fifty thousand character original document was in ripted in a

(42:00):
way that generates a hundred and seventy thousand characters, then
it's easier to see how it could still be hiding
its meaning, right if there's there's tons of if there
are tons of characters in there that don't code out
to anything, like, how do you separate the coding letters
from the filler letters. So that's a possible explanation for
if there is a code in there, why it hasn't
been cracked. Yet, another thing that he does find plausible

(42:22):
is he finds it plausible that this is an artificial
created language. Somebody just made up a language of their own,
and that's why it doesn't translate to anything else based
on whatever. That also seems plausible to me. I can
imagine this being I don't know, a language unique to
one person who was you know, toiling away in their
turret or something in a monastery, or maybe shared by

(42:45):
a small number of people for some kind of esoteric
purpose or some kind of a cult purpose maybe, But
the key being if it's an invented language rather than
a code for an existing language, that would explain why
it doesn't code out whatever it's origins, whatever it's meaning
or lack of meaning, it continues to enthrall us and

(43:06):
perplexus and uh and I'd likely will continue to do so.
I don't I do not expect that we will reach
the point where we need to you know, add there
may be additional you know, arguments, there's some new ideas
that are brought up. But I am not expecting to
see anybody cracked this uh in in the future. Yeah,
I will say, as much as I would like to

(43:27):
see it cracked, my the walls of my skeptical fortress
here have been fortified. And I now when I see
an article, as they do tend to pop up once
every year or two, an article about how somebody has
cracked the Voyage manuscript, I think now I will probably conclude, Okay,
I bet that's not right, right, and then then I'll

(43:48):
go another thing about it too, is like if it
was cracked, the magic would be gone, like the part
of the man that the whole reason we're enthralled by
this document is that we don't know what it's meaning
or meaninglessness really consists of. Well, it's about it's It's
like how you know, the best part of a mystery
is always the middle. It's almost never the end. When
you get to the end and you find out who

(44:08):
done it, it's almost always disappointing. Yeah, because there're only
so many ways it can go right, I'd say. Actually, though,
to tie it back to the subject, one of the
only example counter examples I can think of is the
Name of the Rose, where the solution of the mystery
is supremely satisfying. Yeah. Yeah, I think that there's a
strong case to be made there. Yeah. Um. Interesting to

(44:29):
the other mystery book that I mentioned, um, The Club
Dumb by Perez Roverta, also a mystery. That's the book
that The Ninth Gate was based on. Uh. And It's
been a while since I've seen The Ninth Gate, but
I definitely remember enjoying the book. It's a fun little uh,
you know, a cult themed filler, a thriller, I've never
read it. I actually check that out. How's the ending

(44:51):
um pretty good as I recall, Yeah, it's different from
the movie again based on my my fading memory of it.
But I'd love to clo Is out here with the one.
One more quote from that Terence mckinnipie's from from Moses Magazine,
which I think he sums up a lot of the
like the power and the you know, our fascination with

(45:12):
this document, he said, quote it is a kind of
Borhesian concept that there must be somewhere an unreadable book,
and perhaps this is it. The unreadable book hints at
an idea, at the idea that the world is in information.
We have cognizance of the world by ordering all of
the information we can't we come upon in relation to

(45:34):
information that we have already accumulated through patterns. An unreadable
book in a non English script with no dictionary attached
is very puzzling. We become like linguistic oysters. We secrete
around it, we insisted into our metaphysics, but we don't
know what it says, which always carries with it the

(45:54):
possibility that it says something that would unhinge our conceptions
of things. Or that it's real message is its unreadability.
It points to the otherness of the nature of information,
and it's what is called in structuralism, a limit text.
Certainly the Vontage Manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism.
It is truly an occult book, one that no one

(46:16):
can read the literal meaning of a cult. Yeah's it's
a mystery in the dark. Absolutely, all right, So there
you have it, the Vontage Manuscript. Obviously we would love
to hear from everybody out there because if you have
you cracked it. I there's it's very possible we will
hear from someone who believes that they have or at
the very least, perhaps you can turn us on to

(46:38):
some other wild theories. Uh, some of the crazier theories
that we didn't get into, uh you know, involving it's
its origin. Uh yeah, there's there are some other ones
we didn't discuss. And what involving like the uh you
know what, the various other like a cult, conspiracy theories,
the Rosicrucians and stuff. McKenna talks about that. So certainly,

(46:59):
if you have I do you have any of those
ideas who want to chat with us about you can
reach out to us in the meantime. Check out more
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind at stuff to
bow your Mind dot com and make sure that you
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Invention as well. Invention is our our step by step
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(47:21):
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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, to show us your code,
your your method of decoding the Voytage manuscript, you can

(47:42):
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