A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script nobody has ever decoded, crammed with cryptic illustrations, its origins staying to today a mystery…. It’s not as satisfying a plot, say, of a National Treacertain or Dan Brown thriller, certainly not as action-packed as pick-your-Indiana Jones…. The Voynich Manuscript, named for the antiquarian who rediscovered it in 1912, has a way more hermetic nature, somewhat just like the work of Henry Darger; it presents us with an inscrutably alien world, pieced together from hybridized motifs drawn from its contemporary sursphericalings.
The Voynich Manuscript is exclusive for having made up its personal alphaguess whereas additionally appearing to be in conversation with other familiar works of the period, such that it resembles an uncanny doppelganger of many a medieval textual content.
A comparatively lengthy ebook at 234 pages, it toughly divides into seven sections, any of which may be discovered on the cabinets of your average 1400s European reader—a goodly small and rarefied group. “Over time, Voynich enthusiasts have given every section a conventional identify” for its dominant imagery: “botanical, astronomical, cosmological, zodiac, biological, pharmaceutical, and recipes.”
Scholars can solely speculate about these categories. The personuscript’s origins and intent have baffled cryptologists since no less than the seventeenth century, when, notes Vox, “an alchemist described it as ‘a certain riddle of the Sphinx.’” We are able to presume, “judging by its illustrations,” writes Reed Johnson at The New Yorker, that Voynich is “a compendium of knowledge related to the natural world.” However its “illustrations vary from the fanciful (legions of heavy-headed movementers that bear no relation to any earthly variety) to the weird (bare and possibly pregnant girls, frolicking in what appear to be amusement-park waterslides from the fifteenth century).”
The manuscript’s “botanical drawings aren’t any much less unusual: the crops seem like chimerical, combining incompatible elements from different species, even different kingdoms.” These drawings led scholar Nicholas Gibbs to compare it to the Trotula, a Medieval compilation that “specializes within the diseases and complaints of girls,” as he wrote in a Occasions Literary Supplement article. It seems, according to several Medieval manuscript consultants who’ve studied the Voynich, that Gibbs’ professionalposed decoding might not actually clear up the puzzle.
The diploma of doubt ought to be sufficient to maintain us in suspense, and therein lies the Voynich Manuscript’s enduring enchantment—it’s a black field, about which we’d at all times ask, as Sarah Zhang does, “What could possibly be so scandalous, so dangerous, or so important to be written in such an uncrackin a position cipher?” Wilfred Voynich himself requested the identical question in 1912, believing the personuscript to be “a piece of exceptional importance… the textual content have to be unraveled and the history of the personuscript have to be traced.” Although “not an especially glamorous physical object,” Zhang observes, it has nonethemuch less taken on the aura of a powerful occult allure.
However perhaps it’s complete gibberish, a high-concept practical joke concocted by Fifteenth century scribes to troll us sooner or later, knowing we’d fill within the house of not-knowing with essentially the most fantastically unusual speculations. This can be a proposition Stephen Bax, another contender for a Voynich solution, finds arduously credible. “Why on earth would anyone waste their time creating a hoax of this sort?,” he asks. Perhaps it’s a relic from an insular community of magicians who left no other hint of themselves. Certainly within the final 300 years each possible theory has been suggested, discarded, then picked up once more.
Do you have to care to take a crack at sleuthing out the Voynich thriller—or simply to flick through it for curiosity’s sake—you could find the personuscript scanned at Yale’s Beinecke Uncommon Guide & Manuscript Library, which houses the vellum original. Or flip by way of the Interinternet Archive’s digital version above. Another privately-run website contains a history and description of the personuscript and annotations on the illustrations and the script, together with several possible transcriptions of its symbols professionalposed by scholars. Good luck!
Observe: An earlier version of this publish appeared on our website in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a author and musician based mostly in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
