The Voynich Manuscript
Jan 31, 2023
“The most mysterious book in the world.”
“The Unreadable Book.”
“Voynichese.”
…These are all phrases people have used to describe a small manual that has been the cause of much speculation, wonder and even frustration over the past century. With mysterious illustrations, perplexing astronomical charts, and puzzling symbols, it’s no wonder this tome has piqued the interest of linguists, historians and scholars throughout the world. The most mystifying part of this strange book however is the utterly unintelligible language it is written in.
The Book Seller
In 1865, in what is now Lithuania, Michal Habdunk-Wojnicz was born to a noble Polish-Lithuanian family. Michal graduated with a degree in chemistry from Moscow University and worked in pharmacology by trade. In 1885, at twenty years old, Michal joined a revolutionary group called the Proletariat, which was essentially the first Polish socialist party. Just two years later, Michal was arrested by Russian Police and sentenced to work in a penal colony in Siberia. (Fun Fact: there he obtained a rough grasp on eighteen different languages. Um, Eighteen?! Sometimes I can’t even manage one. Like, do you ever just forget words? No? Just me? Okay… moving on...) Michal managed to escape the colony in June of 1890 and made his way to London by October of that year. After the death of a fellow revolutionary he had befriended in England, Michal gave up the anti-tzarist Proletariat cause, becoming a bookseller and opening his own shop in Soho Square in 1898. In 1904, Michal was naturalized as a British citizen and took for his new legal name: Wilfrid Michael Voynich. Voynich was incredibly skilled—even described as “lucky”— in finding rare and hard to obtain books.
In 1912, Voynich was able to procure a literary cache from the religious order of the Jesuits, who had been discreetly selling books from their library to the Vatican’s to help offset a financial deficit they had been facing since 1904. Among the thirty volumes Voynich purchased, he discovered a small, strange book. Upon opening it, Voynich found page after page of hand drawn pictures, zodiac symbols, charts and recipes, all written in an undecipherable alien language.
The Original Owners
The Voynich Manuscript, as this strange little book became known as after its rediscovery in 1912, was recently confirmed to have been written sometime between 1408 and 1438 (thank you carbon dating!). The first known owner of the manuscript was the Czech alchemist Georg Baresch, who lived in the 1600’s. This fact was confirmed through an uncovered letter between Baresch and a Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher in which Baresch, in an attempt to decipher the book, had asked Kircher for assistance. No response from Kircher has ever been found, but apparently the book was of value to him because he went to lengths to obtain the manuscript when Baresch passed away. Ownership before Baresch and the book’s authorship is still unconfirmed to this day. Other than Kircher’s initial possession of the book, its whereabouts for the following 200 years is unknown, but it is assumed that it was among Kircher’s library and the property of the Jesuit library until it came into Voynich’s possession in 1912.
There have been several different proposed possibilities for the author of the Voynich manuscript including an English scholar named Roger Bacon, who worked at Merton College, a court mathematician for Elizabeth I named John Dee (or perhaps his secretary Edward Kelley), or an engineer named Giovonni Fontana. Some have even suggested that the book seller, Voynich, constructed the book himself to earn fame and fortune. Each of these theories have their faults, however, and none have been concluded to be the most likely.
The Manuscript
Now for the really fun part: the Book itself!
The Voynich Manuscript is about nine inches long by six and a quarter inch wide and contains roughly 234 pages. Some of these are fold out pages, which is interesting because books written in the medieval period rarely had this feature. Its pages are made of calf skin and its current cover and binding is made of goat skin. There is evidence that its original cover was made of wood.
The book is considerably illustrated, with hand drawn pictures of plants and herbs, astrology charts, jars and bottles, symbols, zodiac signs and human figures. Although its text has yet to be deciphered, it has been pretty confidently arranged into six sections according to the drawings: Pharmaceuticals (34 pages —containing images of jars of medicines and herbs in a variety of colored liquids), astronomy and astrology (21 pages—containing images of star charts and circular diagrams of the sun and moon), botany (112 pages—containing drawings of numerous unidentifiable plants), cosmology (13 pages) and biology (20 pages), along with a section containing what are presumably recipes (22 pages). There are roughly 28 pages assumed to be missing from the book, and five pages that are unable to be sorted because they contain only text.
Throughout the past decade, scholars and code breakers alike have claimed to have deciphered the Codex, only to have their work refuted or debunked by their peers.
The manuscript is currently being held at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2020, Yale uploaded the entirety of the book to its digital database. For anyone that would like to check it out, just google “Yale University Library Digital Collections Cipher Manuscript”.
In my research, I found that Yale’s Beinecke Library has come up with their own professional description of the manuscript. And that description is that it’s definitely a book of either “magical or scientific text.” I honestly think my five-year-old could have worked that out… but, okay, we’ll take it and just say, “thank you, Yale University, for your expert analysis.”
*
So that’s the Voynich Manuscript! Man, I am such a sucker for unbreakable codes! And mystical drawings of astral charts and zodiac signs??-- well, color me hooked!! I almost don’t want it to be solved! I’m sure *they* will someday, but that just means we’ll have to do an update! 😉
Have a good day, friends, and may you someday accidently stumble upon a super rare mysterious book that people spend the next century trying to decode and ultimately name after you.
[DT]