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The intelligent reader will judge for himself. Without
examining the facts fully and fairly, there is no way of knowing
whether vox populi is really vox dei, or merely vox asinorum.
Cyrus H. Gordon
Introduction
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The Voynich Manuscript is considered to be 'The Most Mysterious
Manuscript in the World'. To this day this medieval artifact resists all efforts at
translation.
It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable
cipher.
The manuscript is named after its discoverer, the
American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who
discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts
kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, which had been by
then turned into a Jesuit College (closed in 1953).
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The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher manuscript, sometimes attributed to Roger Bacon.
Scientific text in an unidentified language, in cipher, possibly
written in central Europe in the 15th century.
Based on the evidence of the calligraphy, the
drawings, the vellum, and the pigments, Wilfrid Voynich estimated
that the Manuscript was created in
the late 13th century. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly
235 pages. It is
written in an unknown script of which there is no known other
instance in the world. It is abundantly illustrated with awkward
coloured drawings of:
- unidentified plants;
- what seems to
be herbal recipes;
- tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs
connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts
than hydraulic contraptions;
- mysterious charts in which some have
seem astronomical objects seen through a telescope, some live cells
seen through a microscope;
- charts into which you may see a
strange calendar of zodiacal signs, populated by tiny naked people
in rubbish bins.
No one really knows the origins of the manuscript. The experts believe it is
European They believe it was written between the 15th and 17th centuries.
From a piece of paper which was once attached to the Voynich
manuscript, and which is now stored in one of the boxes belonging
with the Voynich manuscript holdings of the Beinecke library, it is
known that the manuscript once formed part of the private library of
Petrus Beckx S.J., 22nd general of the Society of Jesus.
A sample of untranslatable text from the
Voynich manuscript
There is no other example of the language in which the manual is
written.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously
reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of
which bear any relationship to any English or European letter
system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for
two different "languages" (investigated by Currier and
D'Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an
ambiguous coding scheme.
The VM is written in a language of which no other example is known to
exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously
reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of
which bear any relationship to any English or European letter
system.
Apparently, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript
deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts.
However, despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and
scholars, the book remains unread. There are some claims of
decipherment, but to date, none of these can be substantiated with a
complete translation.
History of the Voynich Manuscript
The book was bought by H. P. Kraus (a New York
book antiquarian) in 1961 for the sum of $24,500. He later valued it
at $160,000 but was unable to find a buyer. Finally he donated it to
Yale University in 1969, where it remains to date at the Beinecke
Rare Book Library with catalogue number MS 408.
It is known from a letter of Johannes Marcus Marci, rector
of the University of Prague, to Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit
scholar, dated 1666, that the manuscript was bought by Emperor
Rudolph II of Bohemia (1552-1612).
REVEREND AND DISTINGUISHED SIR, FATHER IN CHRIST:
This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I
destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into
my possession, for I was convinced it could be read by no one except
yourself.
The former owner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying
and sending you a portion of the book from which he believed you
would be able to read the remainder, but he at that time refused to
send the book itself. To its deciphering he devoted
unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send
you herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his
toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as these obey no one but their
master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long
overdue though it be, of my affection for you, and burst through its
bars, if there are any, with your wonted success.
Dr. Raphael, tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand Ill, then
King of Bohemia, told me the said book had belonged to the Emperor
Rudolph and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book
600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger
Bacon, the Englishman. On this point I suspend judgment; it is your
place to define for us what view we should take thereon, to whose
favor and kindness I unreservedly commit myself and remain,
At the command of your Reverence,
JOANNES MARCUS MARCI,
of Cronland.
PRAGUE, 19th August, 1665 (or I666).
Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II
of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of
that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a
regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers,
and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical
of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and
epitomized the liberated northern European prince. He was a patron
of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this
same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this
manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which,
translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand
dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a
manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have
been highly impressed by it.
Accompanying the manuscript was a letter that stated that it was
the work of the Englishman Roger Bacon, who flourished in the
thirteenth century and who was a noted pre-Copernican astronomer.
Only two years before the appearance of the Voynich Manuscript, John
Dee, the great English navigator, astrologer, magician, intelligence
agent, and occultist had lectured in Prague on Bacon.
The manuscript somehow passed to Jacobus de Tepenecz, the
director of Rudolph's botanical gardens (his signature is present in
folio 1r) and it is speculated that this must have happened after
1608, when Jacobus Horcicki received his title 'de Tepenecz'. Thus
1608 is the earliest definite date for the Manuscript.
Codes from the early sixteenth century onward in Europe were all
derived from The Stenographica of Johannes Trethemius, Bishop of
Sponheim, an alchemist who wrote on the encripherment of secret
messages. He had a limited number of methods, and no military,
alchemical, religious, or political code was composed by any other
means throughout a period that lasted well into the seventeenth
century. Yet the Voynich Manuscript does not appear to have any
relationship to the codes derivative of Johannes Trethemius
of Sponheim.
In 1622 and the manuscript passed to the possession of an
unidentified individual that left the book in his/her will to Marci.
Marci must have known about this manuscript before 1644, as the
information concerning the price that the Emperor paid came from Dr.
Raphael Missowski (1580-1644) (as mentioned in his letter).
Marci sent the manuscript immediately with the letter to
Athanasius Kircher (a Jesuit priest and scholar in Rome) in 1666 who
apparently also knew of it and had exchanged letters and transcribed
portions with the previous unidentified owner. Between that time and
1912 (when Voynich discovered it) it is speculated that the
manuscript may have been stored or forgotten in some library and
finally moved to the Jesuit College at the Villa Mondragone. Marci's
letter to Kircher was still attached to the manuscript when Voynich
bought it. In that letter, Marci mentioned the name of Roger Bacon
(1214-1292) as a possible author, although no conclusive evidence of
authorship is available. A possible link between Rudolph and Bacon
is John Dee (an English mathematician and astrologer, collector of
Bacon's work) who visited Rudolph's court in 1582-86.
Parts of the Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript is about 6 by 9inches. Some
believe it to be a book about alchemy. It contains the equivalent of
246 quarto pages, but may have originally contained not less than
262 pages.
There are 212 with text and drawings, 33 pages contain text only,
and the last page contains the Key. The text is written in an
enciphered script, and the drawings are colored in red, blue, brown,
yellow, and green.
The contents of the Manuscript are divided up into 5categories:
- The first and largest section contains 130 pages of plant
drawings with accompanying text, and is called the Botanical
division.
- The second contains 26 pages of drawings, obviously
astrological and astronomical in nature.
- The third section contains 4 pages of text and 28 drawings,
which would appear to be biological in nature.
- The fourth division contains 34 pages of drawings, which are pharmaceutical
in nature.
- The last section of the Manuscript contains 23pages of text
arranged in short paragraphs, each beginning with a star.
The last page (the 24th of this division) contains the Key only.
View online pages from the manuscript:
Theories about the Manuscript
To this day the Voynich Manuscript resists all efforts at
translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable
cipher. The contents and origin of the manuscript have been a matter of
continuous and stimulating debate. To name some of the possibilities
that have been discussed in the Voynich mailing list forum (modified
from a posting by Karl Kluge):
There
is an intelligible underlying text:
- in a natural language
- Latin, abbreviated Latin,
- English, German, Norse,
- Chinese (in a phonetic script),
- Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic,
- "pig Latin" and many others.
- in a fake natural language like:
- in a coded language
- in cipher (single, multi substitution, etc.)
- in an artificial language like:
- Lingua ignota (Hildegarde von Bingen, 1153/54)
- Arithmeticus nomenclator (anonymous Spanish Jesuit, 1653)
- Wilkins' (1641)
- Dalgarno's (1661)
- Beck's "Universal Character" (1657)
- Johnston's "Synthetic Language" (1641)
There is no
intelligible underlying text
- glossolalia (something like "writing in tongues")
- random (i.e. some forgery)
- psychologically "random" strings
- mechanically generated random strings
In analytic terms, there are a few particularities worth noting:
- The 2nd order entropy is too low for an European language
using a simple substitution cipher.
- The text follows roughly the 1st and 2nd Zipf's laws of word
frequencies.
- The word length distribution is different from Latin (words
tend to be shorter than Latin words).
- Correlation analysis seems to indicate that the spaces are
indeed separating "words" as in a natural language.
- There is some evidence for two different "languages"
or dialects (investigated by Currier and D'Imperio) and perhaps
more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding
scheme.
- The text has very few apparent corrections.
- The structure of words is extremely rigid.
- There are many words repetitions (up to 3 times!)
- Some characters in the "key-like sequences" do not
appear anywhere else in the manuscript.
Source: The
European Voynich Manuscript Transcription Project
Computer analysis of the Voynich Manuscript has only
deepened the mystery. One finding has been that there are two
'languages' or 'dialects' of Voynichese, which are called Voynich A
and Voynich B. The repetitiousness of the text is obvious to casual
inspection. Entropy is a numerical measure of the randomness of
text. The lower the entropy, the less random and the more
repetitious it is. The entropy of samples of Voynich text is lower
than that of most human languages; only some Polynesian languages
are as low." "Tests show that Voynich text does not have
its low h2 [second order entropy] measures solely because of a
repetitious underlying text, that is, one that often repeats the
same words and phrases. Tests also show that the low h2 measures are
probably not due to an underlying low-entropy natural language. A
verbose cipher, one which substitutes several ciphertext characters
for one plaintext character [i.e., 'fuf' for the letter 'f'], can
produce the entropy profile of Voynich text." - Dennis
Stallings
When the manuscript was first shown to expert cryptologists, they
thought that solving it would be easy as the text was composed of
"words", some of which were more frequent and occurred in
certain combinations (Kahn, 1967). This soon turned out to be a
mistake; the text could not easily be converted into Latin, English,
German or a host of other languages which might possible be at the
base of this document.
A first "solution" was announced in 1919, by William
Romaine Newbold (Newbold, 1921), who caused a sensation by claiming
that the manuscript did indeed contain the work of Roger Bacon and
that Bacon had known the use of the compound telescope and
microscope, seeing the spiral structure of the Andromeda galaxy*
(!)
only visible with modern telescopes and cell structures unknown in
the 13th Century.
What Newbold discovered in the text was absolutely astonishing—
enough to gather a lot of attention from the scientific community.
The biological drawings in the text were described asseminiferous
tubes, the microscopic cells with nuclei, and even spermatozoa.
Among the astronomical drawings were the descriptions of spiral
nebulae, a coronary eclipse, and the comet of 1273. One of the more
baffling things about this was that many of the drawings of plants,
and of the galaxies appeared to have been invented. There was no
doubt that if Bacon were the author of such a text, he must have had
some way of obtaining the information.
For instance, Newbold's translation of the caption near the
drawing of the nebula of Andromeda (which clearly shows its spiral
characteristics), gave its location by the following:
"In a concave mirror I saw a star in the form of a
snail....between the
navel of Pegasus, the girdle of Andromeda, and the head of Cassiopea".
The attempts to crack the code, however, were not over. In 1931,
Mrs. Voynich took a photostat copy of the manuscript to Catholic
University in Washington where Fr. Theodore Petersen reproduced it
photographically and started a complete hand transcription of the
manuscript, with a card index to the words, and lists of
concordances. The transcription alone was reported to have taken him
4 years. Unfortunately, it is not known what conclusion, if any, he
reached.
In 1944, Hugh O'Neill, a renowned botanist at the Catholic
University, identified various plants depicted in the manuscript as
New-World species, in particular an American sunflower and a red
pepper (O'Neill, 1944). This meant that the dating of the manuscript
should be placed after 1493, when Columbus brought the first
sunflower seeds to Europe. However, the identification is not
certain: the red pepper is coloured green and the sunflower
identification is equally contested.
Other people involved in the study of the manuscript were
prominent cryptologists such as W. Friedman and J. Tiltman, who
independently arrived at the hypothesis that the manuscript was
written in an artificial, constructed language. This was based on
the structure of the "words" as described below. Such
artificial languages were devised at least a century after the
probable date of the Voynich manuscript. Only the 'Lingua Ignota' of
Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179) predates the Voynich manuscript by
several centuries, but this language does not exhibit the structure
observed by Friedman and Tiltman, and it provides only nouns and a
few adjectives.
Friedman came to know Petersen who at some time presented his
hand transcription and other material to him. After Friedman's
death, all the material was moved to the W.F. Friedman collection of
the Marshall Foundation. Recently, electronic versions of the
transcriptions made by Friedman's groups were produced from the
typed sheets and made available on the Internet (Reeds, 1995).
Later acclaimed solutions see in the manuscript a simple
substitution cipher which can only decode isolated words (Feely,
1943), the first use of a more or less sophisticated cipher (Strong,
1945; Brumbaugh, 1977), a text in a vowel-less Ukrainian (Stojko,
1978) or the only surviving document of the Cathar movement (Levitov,
1987). No acceptable plaintext has ever been produced though.
Some interesting new insights into the manuscript were provided
in the 70's by Prescott Currier, presenting some of his results at
an informal Voynich manuscript symposium at the National Security
Agency in Washington (D'Imperio, 1978). Basing his findings on the
statistical properties of the text, he showed that the manuscript is
written in two distinct "languages" which he simply called
A and B. Each bifolio was written in one of the two, and bifolios in
the same "language" were generally grouped together. Only
in the herbal section there is a mixture of A and B folios. Based on
the characteristics of the writing, he showed that the manuscript
seems to have been written in two distinct "hands", and he
even suggested there could be as much as five or even eight
different hands. A significant feature is that the hand and language
used on each folio are fully correlated. Currier's conclusion was
that at least two people were involved in writing the Voynich
manuscript, (which he considered a point against the "hoax
theory" summarised below), although alternatively, the
manuscript could have been written by one person, in two distinct
periods.
Due to the lack of success in the decipherment, a number of
people have proposed that the manuscript is a "hoax". The
manuscript could either be a 16th century forgery, to be sold for a
hefty sum to emperor Rudolf II, who was interested in rare and
unusual items (Brumbaugh, 1977, deriving from earlier unpublished
theories), or a more recent one by W. Voynich himself (Barlow,
1986). The latter is effectively excluded both by expert dating of
the manuscript, and by the evidence of its existence prior to 1887.
One problem with the earlier hoax theory is that, as will be
shown, certain word statistics (Zipf's laws) found in the manuscript
are characteristic of natural languages. In other words, it is
unlikely that any forgery from 16th century would "by
chance" produce a text that follows Zipf's laws (first
postulated in 1935).
Since 1990, a multidisciplinary group of varying size, generally
between 100 and 200 individuals, dispersed all around the globe and
connected through the Internet, has maintained an electronic mail
forum on the decipherment of the Voynich manuscript. This has led to
a lively exchange of ideas and the definition of two main goals: a
machine readable transcription of the manuscript text and the study
of the text through numerical experiments. The following sections
relate to these issues.
Sources:
Related Link: Past
analysis and proposed solutions
_______________________________________________________
* Another interesting possibility
is that the image above is a mirror image representation of our own
galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy...
The mapping of variable stars, neutral
hydrogen radio maps and star clusters gives us our current view of
the shape of our Galaxy shown above.
This picture shows the Milky Way Galaxy with
superimposed
mirror image of the "galaxy" from the Voynich
Manuscript.
The match is not perfect, but too close to be ignored.
Copyright 2003 by World-Mysteries.com
Solution of the Voynich Manuscript
by Leo Levitov (Paperback - August 1987)
Described as the most studied and most mysterious manuscript in the
world, hundreds of scholars have attacked the Voynich manuscript.
Dr. Levitov tells how he broke the text, including his discovery of
the word ISIS, a pattern-word. A transliteration of the script
symbols is provided.
Dr. Leo Levitov, author of Solution of the Voynich Manuscript,
presents the thesis that the Voynich is nothing less then the only
surviving primary document of the " Great Heresy" that
arose in Italy and flourished in Languedoc until ruthlessly
exterminated by the Albigensian Crusade in the 1230s. The little
women in the baths who puzzled so many are for Levitov a Cathar
sacrament, the Endura,'or death by venesection [cutting a vein] in
order to bleed to death in a warm bath'. The plant drawings that
refused to resolve themselves into botanically identifiable species
are no problem for Levitov.
He stated, "There is not a single so-called botanical
illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis
symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; The
innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.
The reason it has been so difficult to decipher the Voynich
Manuscript is that it is not encrypted at all, but merely written in
a special script, and is an adaptation of a polyglot oral tongue
into a literary language which would be understandable to people who
did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read.
Specifically, a highly polyglot form of medieval Flemish with a
large number of Old French and Old High German loan words.
Many people disagree with his claims.
Some of the symbols used in the Voynich manuscript are similar to
symbols in other scripts or notations. In particular, the following similarities have been noticed:
- Alchemical Symbols
- Early Arabic Numerals
- Latin Shorthand Abbreviations
- Beneventan Script
Montaillou:
The Promised Land of Error
by Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie (Hardcover - June 1978)
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (translated by Barbara Bray), 1978, George
Braziller, Inc., New York tells about the testimony of peasants
meticulously recorded in the Inquisition Register of Jacques
Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers in Ariège. In it the Endura is
described as a suicidal fast.
"There is no resemblance here to Levitov's claim that
Catharism was the antique cult of Isis - and certainly no truth to
the picture of the Voynich nymphs' opening their veins to bleed to
death in the hot tubs!" - Dennis Stallings (private
correspondence)
The
Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon,
Virtual Reality, Ufos, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the
Goddess, and
by Terence K.
McKenna, et al (Paperback - May 1992)
The Most Mysterious Manuscript- The Voynich "Roger Bacon" Cipher Manuscript
by Robert S. Brumbaugh (Editor)
The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious late mediæval text, written
in an unknown script in an unknown language or cypher. It reads as
if written fluently, not by someone who was painfully calculating
each next character, but by someone who understood what he was
writing. It looks like a curious herbal or alchemical treatise, full
of diagrams of unknown plants, unknown constellations, and elaborate
networks of plumbing inhabited by plump, naked, crowned women. The
text seems to contain all the redundancies expected in a natural
language and then some. It can be traced back as far as the hands of
Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath, who was but the first of
many to have tried and failed to read the text.
For a time, this book was the best general overview of the history
of the Voynich Manuscript. It still is a good one, though it has
been superseded in that regard by Mary d'Imperio's -The Voynich
Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma.-
Brumbaugh proposes in this book a partial "solution"
that yields texts like ILEXER ILUS YUS PURUS POURLY ILUY YJSUUS
PURUS PLUS URICUS. These decipherments have the merit of seeming to
read like the repetitious text of the manuscript itself. He
interprets this text, though, as "The Elixir is a game, purely,
purely a pure game; and European." Even if he has deciphered
the script, no doubt you can probably think of other interpretations
on your own.
His method of reading seems to involve first turning the script
into Arabic numerals, reading those numerals as any of several
possible letters in the Latin alphabet. He got this by forcing
letters into the script based on his attempts to identify some of
the plants in the diagrams, and then attempting to extract a method
of reading the characters. His decypherments are occasionally
tantalising, but if this is the actual text behind the symbols,
there doesn't seem to be much point in further effort. The readings
appear to be flawed by the polyvalence of the script he believes he
sees.
Voynich Manuscript an Elegant Enigma- An Elegant Enigma (Cryptographic Series , No 27)
by M. E. D'Imperio, M. E. D'Amperio (Paperback
- June 1981)D'Imperio, a cryptographer, collected and summarized all previous
research on the Voynich manuscript in 1978. Sometimes dubbed the
"most mysterious manuscript in the world," the Voynich
Manuscript (VMS) was written at least 300 years ago (no one is sure
quite when) in a fantastic unknown script, in an unknown language,
by an unknown author. Given the strange illustrations (duplicated in
this book) present in the VMS, it could contain secrets of
astrology, alchemy, or ancient herbal knowledge. Now, thanks to the
internet, a concerted effort to "crack" the message has
been born, and D'Imperio's monograph has become the bible of serious
researchers and hobbyists alike. Full of references and historical
data related to the VMS, this work is a must for anyone intersted in
mysterious history and culture, alchemy, or cryptography.
Letters to God's eye - the Voynich manuscript for the first time deciphered and translated into English
by John Stojko
-
http://www.voynichinfo.com/
If you're looking for images of the Voynich Manuscript, look no
further.
All images of the Voynich Manuscript are Courtesy Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, which serves as the
current caretaker of the Voynich, known as Ms 408 in the Beinecke
Collection.
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