THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT

A chemist and archeometrician from the University of Arizona, Greg Hodgins, conducted a radiocarbon analysis of the parchment on which the codexiTool tip: A codex is a notebook of sheets folded in half and sewn along the fold is written and determined that it was created between 1404 and 1438. And this is the only more or less reliable information we have to date the manuscript.

Even the name of this mysterious manuscript is indecipherable, and it is usually referred to by the name of the antiquarian and bookseller who discovered it, Wilfrid Voynich. The circumstances under which he came to possess it are not reliably known. In 1912, Voynich was sorting through the books of the Jesuit library at the Villa Mondragone (an estate in Frascati, Italy, which had long been owned by the Jesuits) and probably bought the manuscript along with thirty other documents that the Jesuits considered unimportant (for some reason!) and decided to sell.

According to another, much less sympathetic version, the former fiery Polish revolutionary—who had fought against Tsarism and was even exiled to Siberia for his activities before managing to escape—simply expropriated the precious find while on his way to Europe, taking advantage of the confusion that reigned in the order’s library. Perhaps Voynich was enchanted by the mysterious writings and strange drawings, or perhaps he was attracted by a letter written in the mid-seventeenth century by a certain Johannes MarciiThis is probably the Czech scientist, mathematician and physician Jan Marek Marci.who was attached to the manuscript. It stated that the manuscript had previously belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1575–1612), and then to the alchemist Georg Baresch (Jiří Bareš).

However, Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript that made his name famous, which he later took with him to the United States, and he valued it highly. In his will, the antiquarian stipulated that the book could only be sold after his death for $100,000 and only to a public organization, not to a private individual. When Voynich died in 1930, this was an astronomical sum, about $1,800,000 today. During his wife’s lifetime, the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich,iEthel Lilian Voynich (1864–1960) became famous for her revolutionary romantic novel The Gadfly.no one was willing to spend that kind of money. Thirty years later, after Ethel’s death, her heir, Voynich’s former secretary Anne Nill, sold the manuscript, literally violating all of the late owner’s instructions. The manuscript went to a private individual, the bookseller Hans P. Kraus, for a mere $24,500. However, Kraus did not profit from the mysterious book. After many unsuccessful attempts to sell the manuscript, he donated it to Yale University library.

We still do not know who wrote the Voynich manuscript. Johannes Marzi, who wrote a letter accompanying the manuscript, believed that one of its previous owners was Rudolf II, who was the king of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rudolf was known for his interest in the occult, alchemy, and astrology. Since the Voynich manuscript contains drawings that could easily be interpreted as astronomical and astrological symbols, the emperor is likely to have acquired such a manuscript. Marzi claimed that Rudolf II bought it for the enormous sum of 600 ducats, or two kilograms of gold.

The problem is that in the rather detailed imperial archives there is no evidence that Rudolf acquired this book, especially for such a sum of money. The manuscript appears neither in the inventories of the public imperial library nor in the ruler’s personal library. However, German scholar Stefan Guzi of the University of the Arts (Bremen) found evidence that a number of manuscripts from the collection of the famous botanist Dr Leonhard Rauwolf were sold to the emperor for 600 ducats, and the Voynich manuscript may have been among them.

In his letter, Johannes Marzi refers to an opinion held by his friend Rafael Soběhrd Mnišovský, a Bohemian lawyer, poet, and cryptographer, who considered the famous English scholar Roger BaconiRoger Bacon (c. 1214–92) was an English philosopher and naturalist, the first to propose the idea of experience as a criterion of scientific truth.to be the author of the mysterious manuscript. Wilfrid Voynich himself was enamored of this hypothesis, and he made several unsuccessful attempts to prove it.

Unfortunately, radiocarbon analysis of the parchment proves that Bacon, who lived in the thirteenth century, well before the current dating of the Voynich manuscript, could not have written it. Of course, the book we now have could be a later copy of the lost original. However, the handwriting, stable and clear, looks as if the scribe was familiar with the alphabet and understood what he was writing rather than simply copying cryptic characters.

Another argument against Bacon’s authorship is the depiction of a sunflower on one of the pages, a plant that only became known in Europe after Christopher Columbus returned from America in 1493. However, the drawings of plants in the manuscript are rather strange, full of implausible details, and their scale is not certain, making it very difficult to identify them.

According to another version, the Voynich manuscript is a forgery, created for profit by the famous astrologer, alchemist, mathematician and somewhat of a charlatan John Dee, who lived in Bohemia for several years and enjoyed Rudolf II’s patronage. Of course, John Dee, who was prone to committing fraud, could have passed off his own work as a manuscript by Roger Bacon. Besides, he had already composed a language with its own alphabet, the so-called ‘Enochian language’, supposedly spoken by angels. Why couldn’t he compose a second?

But what we must first take into account is that in the very detailed diaries of John Dee, there is no mention of selling such a manuscript to King Rudolf or receiving the gigantic sum of 600 ducats from him. Second, why did Dee not try to sell his work to Queen Elizabeth I, whom he served as personal astrologer? Elizabeth had a large collection of Roger Bacon’s manuscripts, and it is quite unlikely that she would have been so stingy not to add another valuable codex to the collection.

Another popular hypothesis is that the manuscript was forged by Wilfrid Voynich himself. After all, there must be a reason why the history of its acquisition is so obscure and confusing. The antiquarian and bookseller could well have found a stack of blank parchment, and he could have procured, or even made his own, ink from ink nuts and filled the book with any concoction of ideas. Finally, there is no evidence that the letters of Baresh and Marzi refer to this particular manuscript; they could mean any other manuscript, even one that has not been found yet. Besides, by the mid-nineteenth century, the European and American markets were literally overflowing with forgeries of medieval manuscripts, which were sometimes so good that it took many years to uncover the truth. However, this hypothesis is now considered unreliable. A frequency analysis of the text by William Bennett, Jacques Guy, Jorge Stolfi, and Gabriel Landini showed that it has a structure characteristic of natural languages. That is, it is not just a hodgepodge of incomprehensible characters, but a normal language, albeit one unknown to us.

In all likelihood, if we are ever able to read the real name of the author of the Voynich manuscript, it is unlikely that this name will be familiar to us—assuming, of course, that the name can be found in the text at all.

Interestingly, this manuscript may have had several authors, or at least copyists. Based on the illustrations, researchers have divided the manuscript into several sections. The ‘botanical’ section is reminiscent of medieval ‘herbals’ with images of plants and explanatory (we imagine!) inscriptions next to them.

The ‘astronomical’ section features circular diagrams with images of the sun, moon, and stars, as well as diagrams with traditional European zodiacal designations.

The illustrations in the ‘biological’ section show nude women bathing in ponds connected by meticulously designed pipes, some of which have the recognizable shape of certain organs of the human body, such as the uterus and ovaries.

One of the most mysterious sections is the ‘cosmological’ section. Researchers are still arguing about what its pie charts depict and what islands (or not) are shown on the six-page map that accompanies it.

In the margins of the ‘pharmaceutical’ section, we see images of apothecary vessels, and the text itself is accompanied by drawings of plant parts, presumably used in medicine.

The short paragraphs of text without illustrations are commonly referred to as the ‘recipes’ section, although, of course, we do not know if they are recipes, brief instructions on how to live, or even jokes.

The US Navy cryptanalyst Prescott H. Currier, who worked on the Voynich manuscript in the 1970s, discovered that the pages of its botanical section could be divided into two types, A and B, with each having distinct statistical properties of language and apparently different handwriting. ‘Languages’ A and B are also used in other parts of the manuscript. The biological section is written entirely in Language B. In the astronomical section, Currier found no statistical variations, and in the pharmaceutical section, Currier believed that the beginning, middle, and end are written in different ‘languages’ and handwritings. In total, the cryptanalyst counted at least four different handwritings in that section. He believed that several scribes worked on the book, using two different ‘languages’. The different handwritings were also confirmed by later research, which indicated that up to twelve people may have been involved in the creation of the manuscript.

Handwritten text is always challenging because even the same letters can be written differently in different words. Nevertheless, despite this inconsistency, it is possible to recognize such letters. Almost the entire text of the Voynich manuscript is written with an alphabet of twenty to thirty letters. In addition, there are several dozen rare or even unique symbols that probably do not belong to the alphabet, just as mathematical signs do not belong to it.

It would be a long and futile exercise to list the names of all the scholars who have tried to crack the hard nut of the Voynich manuscript. Even the first confirmed owner of this book, the Czech alchemist Georg Baresch (Jiří Bareš), copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Rome to the famous scholar and author of the Coptic dictionary Athanasius Kircher, asking for his help in deciphering it. The Jesuit scholar probably did not respond to the alchemist’s request, or simply could not help, because almost a quarter of a century later, in 1666, the next owner of the manuscript, Johannes Marzi, again asked Kircher to help decipher the manuscript. It is likely that Kircher was not the first and certainly not the last to fail at this task.

Sinclair McKay writes in The Hidden History of Code Breaking: ‘Voynich … took [the manuscript] to New York. And it was not many years after that that the Voynich manuscript was brought to the attention of William Friedman, one of America’s foremost experts in codebreaking, whose contribution to the later war against Japan would be beyond value. Friedman was long accustomed to facing alien languages and dialects with mysterious alphabets. The manuscript was a challenge that he could not turn away from. As a result, it was to perplex and beguile both him and his codebreaking wife, Elizabeth, over the course of several decades.

‘And as that war ended and the codebreakers of the US and the UK turned to face the chilly new climate of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Friedman formed an after-hours casual codebreaking club with many of his senior associates, some of whom had returned to academia. Photocopies were made of the Voynich manuscript. Efforts were made to transcribe every single character of every single word so as to begin the most rudimentary frequency analysis to see if it was possible to spot encrypted “and”s and “the”s and commonly used vowels. There were discussion groups conducted after long days of intelligence cryptanalysis.’

Unfortunately, this brilliant group of cryptographers did not succeed with the Voynich cipher either.

The main theory that Friedman’s group was working on was that the Voynich manuscript contained a meaningful text in a European language. They believed that it had been deliberately made unreadable by converting it into the alphabet of the manuscript using an algorithm that worked on individual letters called a substitution cipher. Well, Roger Bacon, long thought to be the author of the manuscript, was quite good at ciphers, and cryptography as a science was born around that time. Unfortunately, the statistical analysis of the text makes this theory unlikely.

In addition, no one has yet conclusively proven what language the cipher text was written in. For example, James Child, an Indo-European linguist who worked for the US National Security Agency, claimed in a 1976 publication in NSA Technical Journal that the text was written in a ‘hitherto-unknown north Germanic dialect’. According to German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig, it may have been a variant of Aramaic or Hebrew, which European scholars of the time knew fairly well. Friedman’s colleague John Tiltman, who not only made a major contribution to breaking Japanese codes during the Second World War but also developed a program for training deciphers, hypothesized that the language was Cornish (the Celtic language of Cornwall), that some words were written in Aztec, and that other words contained traces of medieval Latin. Another theory, which both Tiltman and Friedman worked on, was that the manuscript text was written in a planned (constructed) language, that is, an artificial language designed specifically for international communication, something like Esperanto. ‘But this still did not quite explain the mysterious words of the Voynich manuscript, for it seemed impossible to identify any form of regularity about them,’ writes Sinclair McKay.

The French linguist Jacques Guy suggested that the text of the Voynich manuscript could have been written in an ‘exotic’ natural language using an alphabet invented for that purpose. Indeed, the word structure seems similar to that found in many language families of East and Central Asia. Such languages had their own non-alphabetic scripts, and their writing systems were difficult for Europeans to understand. This led to the development of several phonetic writing systems, which were mostly based on Latin, but sometimes original alphabets were invented. Thus, the author of the Voynich manuscript could have been a merchant or missionary traveling along the Silk Road, or an East Asian native living in Europe or educated in a European mission.

So far, this theory is consistent with all the statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text, including double and triple words (which occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at about the same frequency as in the manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and the absence of syntactic features common to Western European languages (such as articles and copular verbs), as well as the obscurity of the illustrations. In addition, the division of the year into 360 days (instead of 365), grouped into fifteen-day periods, with the beginning of the year in the sign of Pisces, which the manuscript supposedly presents, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar. The main argument against this theory is that researchers (including scholars at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) have not been able to find any reliable reflection of Eastern symbolism or Eastern science in the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript.

One of the earliest claims of deciphering the manuscript was made in 1921 by William R. Newbold, a famous cryptanalyst, professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a collector of old books, who claimed that he had been able to read an entire paragraph of the manuscript by examining the tiny strokes making up the letters of the manuscript under a microscope after a long and complicated process of rearranging the letters and sifting out the ‘superfluous’ ones. However, cryptologists and historians were not impressed by his method.

In their 2004 book The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which Has Defied Interpretation for Centuries, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill point out that the manuscript may be the work of a mentally ill person and is a kind of glossolalia, that is, speech consisting of meaningless words and phrases with some signs of meaningful speech. The presence of several scribes makes this theory very doubtful: it is unlikely that several people suffering from the same mental illness would have worked together.

It is, thus, only natural that the Voynich manuscript has attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists, who are always enthusiastic about any unsolved mystery. It is hardly worth elaborating on the theories that the manuscript was produced by extraterrestrials, reptilian humanoids hiding in the Earth’s interior, or the lost civilization of Atlantis.

The main mystery of this manuscript is that it is the only one of its kind. No other book written in a similar alphabet has ever been found. For this reason, many scholars still consider the codex to be a forgery or an elaborate hoax, perhaps even a medieval one. Sinclair McKay argues against the theory that the manuscript was made by Voynich himself: ‘It is a lovely idea, but quite aside from the monumental effort involved in producing such a magnificent hoax work of postmodern art, what would have been in it for Voynich? As a rare book dealer, there were easier and more straightforward ways of making money. On top of this, the vision encapsulated in the manuscript, even down to the depiction of naked figures, seemed determinedly that of another time. It would have been tricky to fake this convincingly on such an epic 240-page scale.’

Gordon Rugg of the Keele University in the UK studied the mysterious text for ten years before publishing an article in the Cryptologia journal claiming that such a forgery would not be that difficult to produce.

‘We have known for years that the syllables are not random. What I’m saying is there are ways of producing gibberish which are not random in a statistical sense,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit like rolling loaded dice. If you roll dice that are subtly loaded, they would come up with a six more often than you would expect, but not every time.’

Using the Cardan grille, a special tool for encryption and decryption with cut-out windows through which the ciphertext was applied (some readers may have seen this in the opening credits of the Soviet Sherlock Holmes TV movies), Rugg tried to recreate a text similar to that of the codex. To do this, the researcher collected all the symbols and syllables that appeared in the manuscript in a table, having decided in advance which symbols he would consider the roots of words and which to be suffixes and prefixes. Rugg then made several cardboard grids with holes for the symbols. By moving the grids across the table and noting the resulting symbols, the researcher obtained a text that closely resembled the manuscript. Statistical analysis showed that this artificial text also conformed well to Zipf’s law, a special pattern of word distribution in natural language.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Rugg’s arguments. For example, Dr Marcelo A. Montemurro of the Open University argues that the manuscript contains a meaningful text. In an interview with New Scientist, he explained that the Voynich codex was too complex to be a mere hoax. Montemurro also found statistically significant similarities between the text in the botanical drawing section and the pharmaceutical section of the manuscript.

According to the scientist, the text and drawings have a semantic connection.

In the twentieth century, the Voynich manuscript inspired a wave of imitations, which were often quite selfless, for the sake of art, so to speak. The most famous of these is the Codex Seraphinianus, a 360-page book written and illustrated by Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini in the late 1970s. The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia of a fictional world, but, as its author claimed, the text of the book has no meaning. Serafini said that he wanted to give the reader the same feeling as a child who cannot read and who just leafs through a book looking at the pictures.

1. The Voynich Manuscript. Yale University Press, 2016.

2. McKay, Sinclair. 2023. The Hidden History of Code-Breaking: The Secret World of Cyphers, Uncrackable Codes, and Elusive Encryptions. New York: Pegasus Books.

3. D’Imperio, M. E. 1978. The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. Aegean Park Press.

4. John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. RedWheel, 2008.

5. Antonín Gindely. Rudolf II und seine Zeit, 1600–1612. Legare Street Press, 2022.

6. Codex Seraphinianus: 40th Anniversary Edition. Rizzoli, 2021.

7. Tim Conley; Stephen Cain. «Codex Seraphinianus». Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages. — Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006.