The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 from a Jesuit library. There are many theories as to what this book from the 1400s contains, but no one knows whether it's a cypher text, a lost language or gibberish.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from houtof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. And they were going
to talk about one of those great history mysteries that's

(00:22):
persisted for hundreds of years, which I always love those
because you know, once it's it just remains a mystery
for x amount of time. It's just probably always going
to be a mystery. And even if it gets solved,
I think there will always be detractors, which makes it
kind of well and I it's one of those things
that I always am a little bit annoyed at the
unsolved mystery because I want to know the real story.

(00:44):
I don't know that we ever can because there will
never probably be an accepted version of the real story
by every universally accepted. Yes, there would have to be
some kind of new discovery on this one, I think so, yes.
But well, we're talking about today is a document called
the Voytage Manuscript. You may or may not have heard
of it. Some uh sort of code breaking fans have

(01:05):
have done a lot of study on it. Some historians
are really into it. But what it is is a
book that no one can read. Yes. Is it an
unknown language? Yes, most people consider it to be a
cipher text of some sort. Perhaps, um, it could be that.
It could also be nonsense. Uh. There are the outliers

(01:28):
that like to say Aliens brought it, but there's some
scientific evidence that that is not really the case. Um.
So for some basic background on it. It's actually named
after a fairly modern person, Wilfred Voynage, who was an
anti Korean bookseller that acquired the text in um. He
was a Polish American and he found it in a

(01:49):
Jesuit library near Rome and purchased it there. Two forty
pages long and written an unknown text. It's kind of
pretty and loopy to look at. It is a very curly,
it's flowing script. It's very pretty, um and colorful. Yes,
it's currently house that um Yale, and we'll talk about
that a little bit later. But they have this great

(02:11):
descriptor in their page about it, where it says it
is drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades
of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red. And it just
sounds so sweet and quaint the way they describe it
as and when you look at it it's both quaint
and weird because it's illustrated throughout. There are a hundred
and thirteen unidentified plant species drawn in there, astronomical and

(02:34):
astrological drawings. There are basically drawings of some sort of
like the botanical slash scientific variety on almost every page
of the thing. Um, some of which is not immediately
recognizable as no there. That's one of the ways that
people have tried to approach it, is by identifying some
of the plant life that's drawn in it and trying

(02:55):
to backwards engineer that way, but that hasn't really panned out. Um.
There are also some interesting female nudes in it. Yes, Uh,
it's interesting. I looked at some of these pictures and
I couldn't tell. They all have swollen abdomens. But I
can't tell if it's trying to depict pregnancy or just
the more sort of round body type that has been
popular throughout history at certain points. It's a little bit

(03:18):
hard to know for sure. When I love the Yale
description of it, miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens,
immersed or waiting in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting
tubes and capsules. Yeah, I think that's part of what
has caused people to want to attribute it to alien origin.

(03:39):
It is a little bit it's odd, it's a little
bit freaky. It's odd, and just from that description brings
up sort of connotations of weird fertility, something strangeness. Yeah,
people being strung together. It's it's a little bit weird.
There are also nine cosmological medallions and they're many of
those are huge, and they're drawn across um folded folio

(04:02):
pages and in some cases they may be depicting geographical elements,
but it's not, again always clear. We haven't cracked this.
And then medicinal herbs and roots, which are considered separate
from the plant species, and there's no byline. No, we
don't know who wrote it, which is part of the mystery.

(04:24):
So it is currently housed at Yale University in the
UH I believe it's pronounced by Nicki Rare Book and
Manuscript Library and it's listed as MS four oh eighty.
There's a pretty cool page at Yale that that gives
more information about it, and we will link to it
from the show notes we have started doing with this podcast.
You would like to have a look at more detail

(04:46):
about what it looks like it was in there. Yeah,
they did a wonderful job of breaking down and describing
really every element of the book um from a you know,
an unbiased, pretty neutral standpoint, just kind of I once
worked in a library as doing acquisitions and cataloging assistance.
So they're perfect basically, is what I'm saying. They're cataloging

(05:09):
um is like an ideal version that you would catalog
something that you don't understand, right it is. It is
a very fascinating read. There is also linked from there
a chemical analysis of the book itself and what the
pages are made of and what the anks are made of. Yeah,
which is what kind of uh squelches any of those
alien origin theories. Right, they're identified elements from our planet. Yes,

(05:33):
And we have also scientifically, we being other researchers, identified
the approximately when it was created. There was a two
thousand nine University of Arizona project researchers carbon dated it
to the early half of the fifteenth century, so there's
a probability that it was written between fourteen and four

(05:54):
and fourteen thirty eight. I mean, that's the basic description
of it. So then we're kind of onto what is
this thing. I don't know, and everybody has theories, and
because it's never proven out, everyone thinks their theory might
be the right one. Um. Some people think it could
be a book of secrets, like it's alchemy or some
other secret knowledge, and that it is in fact a

(06:15):
medieval cipher text that is intended to hide and prevent
others from getting this secret knowledge. Uh. Some have even
suggested that it's actually a record of inventions and discoveries
of Roger Bacon, who was a friar and scholar in
the undreds. Um. But that theory has mostly been discounted. Yeah,
that was a very circumstantial thing of there are things

(06:37):
in here that he was interested in, so maybe he
made this and that's yeah, there's definitely a lot of
circumstantial evidence around every theory about it. The remnant of
an ancient language theory doesn't really hold a lot of water.
It's one of those things that when you hear linguist
experts and cryptographers talk about, they immediately will say, when you,

(06:59):
for sho look at it, it looks like something we
should be able to read. It looks like a text,
it looks like you know, an alphabet. But the deeper
they get into it, the more they realize they can't write.
It becomes sort of more elusive the more they study it,
which is kind of fast. And that's one of those
ideas that's pretty captivating because languages do go extinct. There
are definitely written languages that we have not been able

(07:22):
to decipher until we have found some other texts that
has led us decipher it. So I think that's one
of those ideas that has an allure to it, but
that has not really panned out. Yeah, And one of
the one of the things that kind of discounts that
theory is that normally in any language, the most common
words are normally quite short, like the repeated words. Just

(07:43):
like in English it would be you know, your articles, articles, prepositions, etcetera.
They tend to be compact, short little words, and in
this particular document, the most common words tend to be
very long and sort of complicated in comparison to the rest,
which kind of breaks the rules of language, which is
one of the things that um people who are fond

(08:06):
of the Gibberish theory like to site like this doesn't
make sense as a language. It's probably not, and people
have been trying to decrypt it since at least the
sixteen hundreds, we know, uh, even in World War Two
army codebreakers were just sort of taking a crack at
it on the side, and they couldn't make heads nor
jails of it. They couldn't really like even get you know,

(08:29):
sort of a toe hold in to be like, oh,
we think we might know we have no idea. Again,
that almost seems suspicious to me that nobody, in four
hundred plus years of trying to analyze this document could
really get any sort of positive affirmation that they were
on the right track. They all kind of end up
throwing up their hands and shaking their heads, like, I

(08:49):
don't know. Here's one of my favorites is that the
hoax theory it is uh John d in case anybody
does not recognize that name was is kind of most
miss as being the astrologer and an adviser to Queen
Elizabeth the First, and some people attribute it or want
to uh support the theory that it's actually a hoax

(09:10):
that he perpetrated. At the time, I remember hearing a
scholar on this particular text say, you know, it was
very common for just as it's common now for people
in business or people of wealth to purchase great art
to show how cultured they are. At this time, it
was similarly popular for people to have an illuminated text

(09:34):
in their home to show that they were cultured. And
so it could have been like a money making scheme,
like a book together a fake look and document that
looks like a really cool illuminated text, and we'll just
sell it to some businessman who wants people to think
he's smart. Um. I kind of love that one. And
another suspect implicated in that is Edward Kelly, who was
a hanger on in the court of Elizabeth one and

(09:55):
became very close with John D. A lot of people
dismissed him as a charlatan and a fake, but John
D reason really formed um an affinity in a close
friendship with him. One of the things that makes people
think that maybe this theory is the right one is
that there are no scratch outs or erasers and in
the whole entirety of the book, which even if you're copying,

(10:15):
if you're making a copy of something you have already
written out. Mike, I will do that sometimes if I'm
writing a letter to somebody with a pen on paper,
it will be copying out something that I've kind of
drafted on another page. Even then at some point you
make a mistake and you have to either scratch it
out or erase it. And there is none of that
at all, So it does not seem like somebody was
actually trying to make an accurate set of words on

(10:37):
the paper. Yeah, you would eventually hit something like where
you would have to get rid of it or clarify
in some way. The big proponent of the theory is
Gordon rug and he's head of the Knowledge Modeling group
at Keele University and Staffordshire, England. UH and he's done
some interesting almost um sort of computer science approaches to

(10:58):
analyzing and recreate naing similar documents where he lays out
letters on a grid and he's created this little um
like a card that you can lay on top of
the grid and it has three cutouts, and so in
that grid he's put in, you know, characters similar to
the ones in this document. And just by moving that
card around and writing out in order whatever characters happened

(11:21):
to land in your open spaces, you can create this
gibberish that looks really realistic and really like a language. UM.
And he kind of believes this supports again the the
Gibberish theory rather than it being um a cipher that's
you know, well thought out another theory. So many theories
about this there are, and I mean we could go

(11:41):
on for days and days about all of the theories.
So we're kind of hitting the high notes on this one.
There's there's a prayer book theory about, you know, in
some kind of Germanic slash romance creole do you have have?
It was like, what what has led to the idea
of the prayer But I think it's because it hasn't
ever been decrypted. It kind of holds popular already with
people that want to think it is a ciphertext and

(12:02):
that it's a prayer book of the Cather's that somehow
managed to survive the Inquisition when everything else was being burnt. Uh,
because everything else was burnt, there's nothing else to possibly
give us the key to decrypt this. So that's but
that's not a very popular one. I just thought it
was interesting UM And at one point people were even

(12:23):
kind of suspicious that Voinache himself had assembled the book
um to create a faux valuable for his antiquities collection.
But carbon dating, because the paper is from and the
inks are all dated fur their back. He would have
to really be scientifically pretty magical ultiable, right, so that

(12:44):
if he had tried to, if that had been a forgery,
it would have been a masterful forgery using information he
would not have had really at a time. And what's
really interesting is that it's um it has changed hands
quite a number of times. The first one that Will
mention is actually one of those circumstantial things so allegedly

(13:08):
owned by John D who we talked about earlier, and
it was bought from D we know, by Emperor Rudolph
the second of Germany, so the Holy Roman Emperor, for
six hundred gold ducats, which is roughly thirty dollars in
today's economy. That just makes me annoyed thinking that it
was potentially the writings of Roger Bacon. And the circumstantial

(13:31):
evidence that supports this idea or that he bought it
from D and not from someone else, is that there
are accounts that mentioned D having come into a sum
of money that's just a little bit bigger than this.
I want to say, it's like six hundred and fifteen
or six hundred and eighteen and I believe it's John
D's son that wrote some of those at least. So
it's kind of like, well, we know that it was

(13:52):
purchased for this amount around this time, and we know
that suddenly this guy had this amount of money in
his pocket at this time. That that reminds me of
one of the police procedurals and they have the person
in the room and they're like, Okay, we know this
guy bodies documents for for thirty thou dollars and you
magically have a thirty thousand dollar bank deposit. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

(14:12):
It's that is as as far as we can get
in terms of veracity with this one. Uh. And then
it appears Emperor Rudolph gave the manuscript to Jacobus horse
a key the tepanis and I may be mispronouncing any
of that um and that exchange is based on an
inscription that's visible in the document in the on folio

(14:34):
one R. But you have to read it with ultraviolet light.
So that's ink that has faded off, and that's all
that's sort of left is the chemical shadow, right. That
was one of the things that they found and documented
during the chemical analysis that we were talking about a
little bit earlier. One of the things that I read
in that analysis that I thought was pretty cool was
that an acid wash had been used on the pages,

(14:55):
possibly to bring out the vibrancy of the ink, but
that that may have been washed away other writing in
the book. Uh, so it's it's not really that that
that was written in an ink that required ultra violet
light to see at a time. It's ink that has
faded to the point that that's the only way to
see it. It's been destroyed through time and treatment through

(15:15):
the ages. Not that does not in any way support
the secret or alien theories. Uh, there's there are some
gaps in the timeline of where it's been. But we
do know that it was given to Athanasius Kircher in
sixteen sixty six by Johannes Marcus Marcia of cromelind uh.

(15:36):
And then there's another little kind of we're not sure
what happened or where the book was. We do know
that during some of these tradeoffs, people were trying to
get people to decrypt this text. So that's why we
say for more than four years people have been trying
to figure it out, and then it's suddenly it seems
said to us, because it's the first time we hear
about it again after a there are many other things happening, Yes,

(15:58):
after a gap of two hundred of its two years. Yeah,
then Voynage found it in as I said, at Jesuit
College near Rome, and then in nineteen sixty nine it
was given to the Benicky Library by an HP Krause
who had purchased it from the estate of Voynage's widow.
Uh it had passed to her and then her executor

(16:21):
ended up selling it to this person. Now we're basically
up to today. Yeah. In December eleven, a finished businessman
named vico Let Vola I may have mispronounced that claimed
that he was a prophet of God and that he
had been given divine insight into the contents of this manuscript.
Probably not true. Well, and people question his methods and

(16:45):
they of course want some backup on this, and it
never happens. He has um an associate named Arikitola who
is pretty much handling pr for him um and his
statement in an interview was that Mr love Ala said
that no, no one normal human can decode it because
there is no code or method to read this text.

(17:05):
It's a channel language of prophecy, uh, and that basically
God had told him what it meant, and that there
is no way to decrypt it. There is no cipher
for it. You just have to trust him that God
told him this. Um And he says it's a botany
journal basically, which is kind of funny that that's kind
of a mundane thing to say after God told me

(17:27):
it's a botany journal. I had a divine revelation of
this extremely ordinary thing. Yeah, and there's a website that's
maintained around him. But he really this is as Tracy
mentioned in December, and then he really hasn't gotten much
press passed then, Like nobody's really paid a whole lot
of attention to his claims anymore. So that's where it stands.

(17:48):
It's still a mystery. It's still at Yale. I think
to see it you would have to jump through some
hoops of often the case with special collections, and he
can be really difficult to get actual physical access to
the manuscript unless you have a reason to be there. Yeah,
but the good news is there are lots of scans
and photos of it online, so if you're curious about it,

(18:10):
you can really easily find pictures of it. We will
put those in our share notes also, they'll find them.
And it's interesting because it's one of those things to
me that even if it is a hoax, it's now
become really historically significant in that one just the idea
that it could be a hoax perpetrated by a fairly
famous historical figure kind of makes it interesting in and

(18:30):
of itself. Um, but also just that so many people
have spent so many years trying to decipher it and
reveal its meaning. That kind of has a meaning in
and of itself for me, Like it says a lot
about our desire to just crack unknowable things and sort
of our our persistence in doing so. So, yeah, we'll
see if there's someone who magically cracks it. I will

(18:53):
be upfront and say I tend to favor favor the
jibberish theories, but we don't know. As you said, some
other piece of evidence could come to light and all
of that will change. They would have to be sort
of a Rosetta Rosetta stone to really figure out if
it says anything, which should be awfully cool, it would

(19:14):
be both cool and sad, which is the opposite of
what I said at the beginning of Unsolved Mystery is
getting on my nerves. Yeah. That's sort of the thing
that I've noticed in doing research on this is that
even when there are pretty solid, you know, pieces of
I don't want to say evidence, but pretty solid supporting
UM concepts, uh, like the man who has been able

(19:36):
to replicate pretty similar gibberish texts, people don't really want
to accept it. There are entire message boards and online
groups surrounding this manuscript because it is so sort of
engrossing and engaging for people that love UM ciphertext and
the idea of a mystery, and it's interesting to watch
them debate. And some of them will be like, yeah,

(19:57):
I see, and his methods are sound, and that all
makes sense, but I don't believe it the end, like
they just don't want to believe it, uh, which is
it's fascinating stuff because nobody wants to kind of lose
the mystery. I think at this point, after it's after years,
it's kind of like giving up a good friend. At
that point. I believe you also have listener, male, I
surely do. Uh. This comes from our listener, Emily, and

(20:21):
she says I just finished listening to the Okeechee episode.
Did I miss something I didn't hear? You mentioned Puccini's
opera Madama Butterfly as probably the most famous and most
enduring fictionalization of the Okeechee story. In fact, and Butterfly
by David Wang was a play in nineteen eight and
then adapted into a movie. Though not an extension of
the Okeeechee story, deals with interracial relationships and exoticism. Um

(20:45):
plus spoiler alert, she says, gender bending twist. I love
that play so much. Uh. There's also Madam Butterfly by
Malcolm McLaren, a pop music opera hybrid song from THEO.
For some reason, people all over the world just love
this tragic story. There's just something about it that's so adaptable.
Whether it's the story of the clash of cultures, promising
futures and dashed hopes, or the untenable position women find

(21:08):
themselves in because of societal mores. These are stories that
endure to this day, and maybe that's why creative people
all over the world continue to draw from the Okichi
Madame Butterfly story. So here's why I didn't mention it.
There is a relationship but it's several times removed. I mean,
I thought about it when preparing for that podcast, but
I was like, uh so, Puccini's opera is actually kind

(21:31):
of more inspired by several other pieces that were inspired,
probably by the Okeechi story that we don't have hard evidence,
but it doesn't make a lot of sense. There was
one called Madame Chrysanthemum that was in eight seven, that
was French, and then there was a short story version
which was called Madame Butterfly, which was written by John

(21:52):
Luther long In, and then that version was adapted by
David Belasco into a play in nineteen hundred and play
is what inspired Puccini, because that play was not a
musical and not an opera. It was just a straight
stage production, and Puccini, really my understanding is that he
primarily used Long's novella as the primary source. So at

(22:13):
that point we're fairly where multiple levels removed from the
original story. And that's why I didn't mention it, because
it's it's a long line of lineage to get there,
but a little bit of a long walk well, and
it's often there are so many different influences on a
particular play that tracing it back to one seems a
little reductive. Yeah. Well, and uh, you know, chech a

(22:34):
sound story ends up being so much about the daughter
in many ways, which was not a part of the
Oppuchi story. And it is certainly an influencer, probably, but
I don't know that it's you know, as I said
that the line of descendency takes on so many different
elements that it's it's a little wandering. Yeah. Uh. There
is a great um Cornell professor named Arthur Grouce who

(22:55):
has written extensively about sort of the the orientalism fascinating
shin and how that kind of traces all the way
to Puccini's opera. So I recommend it. It's good reading.
I haven't read all of his work. He's written several
books on the matter, but he's the pro. Uh. If
you would like to write to us, you should do
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(23:17):
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(23:38):
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