The Voynich Manuscript

I have something of a new fascination.

A year and a half ago, during the sad and loathsome days of a closing college, I taught an English class called Language, Grammar, and Society. We ended up creating our own language. It was incomprehensible to anyone but us. We wrote messages with it in"tapestries," including all manner of weird art.

I wish I would have known about the Voynich Manuscript during that class.

I found out about the manuscript while sifting through The New Yorker, finding this excellent article by Reed Johnson. Ever since, I've been hooked as the strange book seems to be this "perfect storm" of subjects that fascinate me.

It is a book written in a thus far indecipherable language, save for a paltry few words in Latin.

An exact date for the manuscript is difficult to ascertain, but the vellum has been carbon dated to the early 15th century, 1401-1438. It likely came from what is now Italy and the book gets its name from Wilfrid Voynich, a rare book dealer who bought the manuscript in 1912.

It gets weirder.

There are illustrations inserted through out the unreadable text. They depict bizarre plants and flowers found nowhere in nature. There are glyphs that resemble zodiac or occult symbols, there are diagrams of what appear to be constellations or positions of planets, and there are strange creatures, a few resembling dragons.

This thing makes both Yellow Submarine and Naked Lunch look lucid. Given my tastes, I hope you know, gentle ESE reader, that I mean no disrespect to those works of art by any means. I'm simply saying they are not the most...accessible of creations. Nevertheless, I ask myself the same questions after reading any text:

Who wrote this?
Why did they write it?
What is their primary message?

One possibility is it is a guide to herbs and herbal remedies. Another is that it is a late Renaissance grimoire, composed by someone who fancied him or herself a sorcerer, an alchemist, or another such variety of occultist. Looking over the pages, I can't shake a gut-level similarity I sense between this book and the Malleus Maleficarum, a guide for hunting witches (really it's a book designed to persecute and even execute women), a text I taught at my previous college. As fabricated as that book was, so too might the Voynich be a hoax, In fact, there are those who blame Voynich himself, saying he created the book Why write it in code? Perhaps so that the occult author's secret spells would remain known only to the author. One should also consider the very real threat such an author would faced at that time in Europe. If this writer were truly practicing a faith other than Catholicism, they would no doubt be called a witch and dealt with customarily. The book's meaning may be deliberately obfuscated out of self-preservation.

Note the cross in the left hand of the upper, naked woman. Lord only knows what's raining down on the second woman.

All the secrecy and danger, of course, begs the question: why write it down in the first place? Why would you want to take the chance of getting caught with something so heretical during such times?

Then again, perhaps it's not really "code." Is it possible that somehow this really is in a language hitherto un-encountered in human history? Even if it was read and written...maybe even spoken...among a small group of people, do we still consider a language? Several times there have been claims from someone who "cracked" the case, but each call of triumph seems to result in no soap. I guess even Alan Turing was unable to decipher its meaning. So many, many questions...

Seriously...why would someone write this book? It's one of those things that by all logic it should not exist, and yet there it is. I suppose that's one of the reasons that lends at least a few camps to believe it's likely a hoax, a sort of highbrow prank.

I'm surprised Dan Brown hasn't jumped on this one. Maybe that's his next mega-buck fluff in the pike.

Speaking of the conspiracy-minded, I've come across a few comments from those who, and you knew this was coming, believe the book to be of alien origin. Or at least inspired by otherworldly visitation. The plants look weird because they are, indeed, not of this Earth. They are from Mars. The language is unreadable to our eyes because it was not created by humans. It is Martian. This all plays nicely into the theory that, however misguided, states that humanity originated on Mars and migrated to Earth in the dimmest moments of the past.

All great stories...but that's about it.

As I said, I'm a newbie to the Voynich Manuscript. As such, I'm afraid I don't have much to offer that would be insightful. I can, however, assure you I will be reading more and posting more.

For the moment, I really like this theory from XKCD:

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