The Most Mysterious Book in The World
Reflections on the Voynich Manuscript
I. Introduction
One of the few silver linings of the pandemic era, at least for me, has been the opportunity to finally get around to reading the accumulated piles of books on my shelves and nightstand. In 2020 I joked with friends that I felt like Burgess Meredith’s character in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last:” a bibliophilic bank teller with unlimited time to read a library full of books after a nuclear apocalypse. That episode’s twist ending, you might remember, is that the protagonist’s glasses fall and break, leaving him unable to read anything and without any optometrists to replace his glasses.
Fortunately, nothing remotely equivalent happened to me and books truly helped me get through tough times, especially during lockdowns. I read Dickens’ David Copperfield, like that Twilight Zone character, and Richard II, an anthology of translated Japanese Noh dramas and Bernard Malamud’s Collected Stories. As my French improved, I discovered Guy de Maupassant’s stories and Marcel Pagnol’s wonderful Provencal books. But perhaps my most memorable bookish experience of the past three years came, paradoxically, with a book I did not and could not read: the Voynich Manuscript, a true unsolved enigma.
II. The Facts of the Case
The Voynich Manuscript takes its name from the Polish rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930) who bought it from the Vatican Library in 1912; its previous owners included the 17th century Prague alchemist Georgius Barschius; the library of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor; the Jesuit Collegium Romanum (now the Pontifical Gregorian University); and the private collection of the Jesuit Superior General Peter Jan Beckx. After the death of Voynich’s widow Ethel in 1960, the manuscript was acquired by the Austrian-American rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus, who donated it to Yale University in 1969, which is where it remains.
The central fact of the Voynich Manuscript is that it is written in an unknown and as yet undeciphered language, one that has resisted four centuries of decoding attempts. Its creator and purpose remain mysterious despite many theories. Scholars have divided the Voynich manuscript into four sections based on its many illustrations, illustrations that in many cases make the problem of interpretation even more complex. The ‘herbal,’ for instance, takes up the majority of the book and at first glance seems to take after the common medieval and Renaissance book genre of the same name: illustrations of plants accompanied by texts describing their medicinal uses. The overwhelming majority of plants illustrated in the Voynich Manuscript, however, are completely imaginary, corresponding to no real world species.
The second section, the ‘astrological,’ seems to bear a closer relationship to our world, with images of suns and stars and visual references to the signs of the Zodiac.
The third, the ‘balneological’ (IE related to bathing) offers further mysteries. Its illustrations of women bathing in strangely shaped bathtubs connected by fanciful, elaborate pipes have inspired allegorical interpretations, the most common being that they represent either alchemical processes or the flow of blood and other bodily fluids between organs. The fourth section, the ‘pharmacological,’ lacks illustrations and consists of pages of starred paragraphs of text that some have tentatively labeled as ‘recipes.’
My Yale University Press edition of the Voynich Manuscript includes an essay on “Physical Findings” by a team of Yale scientists and conservationists. They conclude that the manuscript’s materials and technique are all consistent with 15th century bookmaking. Radiocarbon dating of the book’s calfskin parchment, for instance, dates it to between 1404 and 1438 with 95% probability. A chemical analysis of the book’s ink shows that the text was written with iron gall ink, which was commonly used in the 15th century. Similarly, its many illustrations were colored using common painting materials of the period, such as iron oxide, vermilion, lead white and azurite pigments.
All of these facts are consistent with an origin in early 15th century Italy, a hypothesis supported by a rare Voynich illustration that seems to reference the real world — a castle with distinctively shaped ramparts that resemble those of 14th and 15th century Italian castles.
Despite many attempts at decipherment over the past century, ‘Voynichese’ remains an unsolved mystery. There are no other documents in ‘Voynichese’ and there is no evidence to suggest that any ever existed.
III. Interpretations
The Voynich manuscript has baffled would-be readers for at least 380 years. In 1639, the manuscript’s then-owner, alchemist Georgius Barschius, sent a partial copy to the Jesuit and Renaissance man Athanasius Kircher, asking for help decoding “a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing in unknown characters” (translated by Philip Neal). Barschius proposes a possible solution:
From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls… In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value). He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany.
Voynich himself believed the book to be a coded work by the 13th century English philosopher, scholar, proto-scientist and Doctor Mirabilis Roger Bacon, who was known to use secret codes. As mentioned above, modern analysis has debunked this theory by fairly conclusively dating the manuscript to more than a century after Bacon’s death in 1292. It also rules out theories of the manuscript being a much later forgery, possibly by Voynich himself. “In the twentieth century,” the Yale conservationists write, “it would be quite difficult to find this many larger sheets of genuine medieval parchment to produce a forgery.”
As both the modern discoverer and first modern theorist of the Voynich Manuscript, Wilfrid Voynich opened a Pandora’s Box of imaginative claims and conspiracy theorizing that has never closed. Following immediately in his footsteps was the University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor William Romaine Newbold, who also attributed the manuscript to Roger Bacon. Bacon, according to Newbold, had hidden his coded message in individual pen strokes that could be seen under a microscope; Bacon’s message, as translated by Newbold, concerned his secret invention of a microscope centuries before Galileo or Leeuwenhoek. As William Sherman writes in an essay included in Yale’s Voynich Manuscript, a medieval scholar examining Newbold’s claims “found random cracks left behind by drying ink, which opened Newbold to the graver charge of seeing signs that were not there in the first place.” Undeterred by this early failure, cryptographers, conspiracy theorists and others have created a myriad of solutions to the Voynich riddle.
Was the Voynich Manuscript a coded alchemical or occult work? A late medieval hoax, intentionally written in mysterious-looking gibberish in order to attract attention (and buyers)? An elaborate disguise for a much simpler message hidden in, say, the number of words on each page? An attempt at translating and transcribing an Aztec herbal? A phonetic translation of East Asian languages by Europeans? A pre-Esperanto attempt at creating a universal language? A coded record of early scientific discoveries hitherto unknown to history? An attempt at recording a prophecy or divine revelation?
More theories have emerged in the past several years. German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig, for instance, identifies Voynichese as coded Hebrew, while Turkish-Canadian Youtubers Ahmet, Alperkan and Ozan Ardıç claim to have partially translated the text, which they identify as a phonetic rendering of Old Turkic. University of Bristol researcher Dr. Gerard Cheshire also claims to have translated the manuscript, in his case from the ‘proto-Romance’ that would later evolve into modern Romance languages. He describes his translated text as “a compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings concerning matters of the female mind, of the body, of reproduction, of parenting and of the heart.” (Medieval scholars, noting the lack of any evidence of a medieval ‘proto-Romance’ language, have dismissed Cheshire’s claims, while his own university has distanced itself from him.)
None of these theories or claims of translation have attracted widespread approval; the case remains open.
IV. Libraries of Babel
Walker Percy once suggested, only half in jest, that instead of Homo sapiens, our species should be called Homo symbolificus, ‘man the symbol-monger.’ Our digital world involves even more symbol-mongering than the one Percy (1916-1990) lived in; from looking over at the clock first thing in the morning to checking text messages one last time before going to bed, receiving, interpreting and sending written, spoken, texted, printed, broadcasted, podcasted and emailed symbols takes up the majority of our waking hours. This almost constant use and exchange of symbols, Percy writes, would strike a Martian visitor as the most singular and most characteristic aspect of human behavior.
An encounter with the Voynich Manuscript short-circuits this automatic process. It is not just a book written in a language one does not speak, or in now-dead hieroglyphics or cuneiform known only to a small group of academic specialists. It remains opaque to every speaker of every language on planet earth, and in doing so forces us to consider the book as not just a receptacle of textual meaning but also as a physical object. Its central paradox — that of an unreadable book — gives us a new and perhaps otherwise unavailable perspective on books and language.
First, as a likely product of 15th century Europe, the Voynich Manuscript comes from a time and place of mass illiteracy and, through its opacity, reminds us that this was the rule, not the exception, in most places for most of history. Scanning its lines of unreadable text gives us some inner glimpse of how strange, how semi-magical writing must have seemed in an overwhelmingly illiterate society, as well as how frustrating being outside that small, literate circle must have been.
Before the printing press, a book was a handcrafted objet d’art, a rare luxury item. Your local public library is a treasury almost unimaginable to a medieval scholastic, and the omnipresence of books in homes of all social classes an almost unimaginably utopian development to, say, Roger Bacon. Our current abundance of books is, comparatively speaking, a historical aberration.
Second, as a completely unique, sui generis book it reminds us that our idea of a book as a published, mass-produced, publicly available product is a fairly recent development, the result of technological advances and economic development. Until Yale uploaded digital scans of the manuscript to its website, in my lifetime, the Voynich Manuscript had not been published in any real sense for its centuries of existence. It long remained one-of-a-kind, a library curio accessible only to a small few. Again, the Voynich Manuscript represents the pre-modern world of books in miniature: a world of rare, unique books, not widely available copies.
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript reminds us that other languages also escape our modern understanding. Linear A — the language of ancient Crete, of the semi-mythical Minoans — and Rongorongo — an Easter Island language that survives on a handful of carved oars and wooden tablets — both remain undeciphered, lacking the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone that would serve as a key. There are many other mysteries still to be solved.
V. Worlds
The Voynich Manuscript is not the first time I’ve looked at medieval or immediately post-medieval illuminated manuscripts on this Substack; I’ve featured quite a few medieval bestiary illustrations in the Necessary Monsters series, which I will get back to this summer. Compared to the bestiary creatures, the Voynich illustrations strike me as somewhat naive, somewhat awkward, as perhaps the work of a determined amateur rather than a professional illustrator. They seem, in other words, like examples of outsider art or l’art brut. (Rob Churchill and Gerry Kennedy first made this argument in their 2004 book The Voynich Manuscript.)
Put simply, outsider art is the art of those completely outside of the professional art world, often the art of mentally disturbed artists attempting to represent their hallucinations, obsessions and fantasy worlds. Outsider art has fascinated me since my teenage years, particularly the work of Henry Darger, probably America’s most famous outsider artist. Darger, a reclusive Chicago janitor, spent most of the twentieth century writing and illustrating an as-yet unpublished, almost unimaginably long fantasy epic set in his imaginary world, The Realms of the Unreal.
While Darger wrote The Realms of the Unreal in English, I’m intrigued by the possibility of a Voynich manuscript written in an imaginary language. One doesn’t have to look far for examples in pop culture. Oxford English professor J.R.R. Tolkien invented multiple Middle Earth languages, including several Elvish dialects complete with their alphabet, grammar and imagined history. More recently, Star Trek producers hired academic linguist Marc Okrand to create a complete Klingon language; other writers have since translated Hamlet, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol and other classics into Klingon.
Thus, the theory that most tempts my imagination posits the Voynich Manuscript as a description of an inner world — complete with that world’s flora and place in a wider cosmos — written in its language.
Of course, this theory has significant problems, as does every Voynich theory. Henry Darger worked for decades as a minimum wage hospital janitor but was nonetheless able to afford the mass-produced paper and art supplies necessary for the creation of his world. In Renaissance Europe, on the other hand, books were painstakingly handcrafted luxury objects, their production only available to a small elite. (Raymond Clemens’ preface emphasizes the labor-intensive process necessary to create parchment, a process that would have made it prohibitively expensive for most people.) Was the Voynich man an eccentric Italian nobleman or abbot with the means to turn his private world into a physical reality?
VI. Such Sphinxes
In 1666 Jan Marek Marci, who inherited the manuscript from Barschius, wrote to Kircher about the deceased’s ultimately futile efforts at cracking the code.
To his 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.(translated by Diane Echer)
Despite incredible advances in cryptography and machine learning, to say nothing of the many who’ve followed in Barschius’ footsteps, the Voynich Manuscript remains an unsolved mystery. I hope that no one solves it in my lifetime and that it remains a mystery and a wonder for generations to come. We need such sphinxes in our world.
Two things most strike me about this thing: the scale of difficulty and expense it would take to create it, and the potential hazard to the author raised by creating a potentially heterodox work. An educated person had to be the creator. An insane one would have surely been caught out by Church authorities eventually, so he had to be sane enough to conceal his activities and wealthy enough to afford them. Therefore the book must mean *something.*
I hope that it will remain a mystery as well. We need to wonder indeed.