Hello friends! I am back and ready to get writing! This week’s history post will be a bit of a historical mystery. I’ve recently become enthralled with unexplained events and unsolved mysteries that are hidden in the depths of history, and am thrilled to be able to write about them, discuss theories, and provide insight! I would love for this to take off and interest many many people! So without further ado, let’s get started!
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but the Voynich Manuscript has been baffling the minds of historians for over a hundred years. Its origins are unknown, or at least unclear, and the contents themselves make no sense. I first heard of this in my World Civilizations class in college, but it didn’t really pique my interest until a little while ago when I listened to a great podcast about it. I had heard of the Voynich Manuscript in passing but never studied it. Now, a little disclaimer, I haven’t read all there is to read or learn about it, but it has definitely captured me, and I simply want to share the basics of “understanding” it.
ORIGINS
The Voynich Manuscript most recently surfaced in the early 1900s when Polish man Wilfred Voynich bought it from a priest in Italy. That is where it got its name. Before that, I’m not sure what it was called. At that time, Voynich owned a small bookstore where he bought and resold rare books for profit. Needless to say, this mysterious tattered book captured the bibliophile. Wilfred Voynich bought this mysterious old book without knowing anything about it. He had no idea where it really came from, let alone what it could sell for. But perhaps what he hadn’t realised was how incredibly rare this book truly was. I can picture Voynich opening this book up and flipping through the pages casually, and then realising that he had no earthly idea what the book was saying. Now, it’s important to understand that Voynich was very well educated in ancient history and language. The fact that this man didn’t know what the book was about baffled many.
Before Voynich’s possession, the Manuscript had rough origins. It is recorded that Voynich bought it from someone from the Society of Jesus in Rome, who supposedly got it from Emporer Rudolf II. How Rudolf II got it is another story, and is really just speculation. In actuality, historians have no idea where the Voynich Manuscript first came up.
So, this man Wilfred Voynich had this mysterious manuscript for many years until his death in the 1960s, and then it ended up in the library collection at Yale University. It remains at Yale to this day, and many of its pages have been scanned and uploaded to the Internet. Yale also offers a complete copy of the Manuscript upon ordering.
WHAT IS IT?
Well, in an attempt to answer the question above, nobody really knows. You see, the Voynich Manuscript is written in a language that cannot be deciphered. Theorists and historians have been stumped for decades trying to figure it out. Along with a strange and unknown language, the Manuscript contains very strange illustrations. Many are of plants or herbs that are still mysterious in that most aren’t real or distinguishable. Other illustrations are of women bathing (which I’ll touch on in the theories later in the post) and faces surrounded by the sun and moon. Many allusions to zodiac symbols have been made as well.
As I’ve already stated, the language is completely unknown, perhaps a cipher created by the author, or possibly a lost culture’s written script. Nobody really knows. The contents are totally bizarre and its purposes alien. Historians, anthropologists, cryptologists, and linguists alike have all been researching the Voynich Manuscript upon its discovery and have come to very few solutions.
THEORIES
So let’s get to the nitty-gritty. What are some of the hypotheses that researchers have come to? I’m just going to cover a few as there are hundreds of theories people have when it comes to the Voynich Manuscript, and I’ll tell you what I think as well.
Since there is really nothing known about this, researchers have attempted their best when it comes to understanding the purpose of the Manuscript. One of the first you might hear of if you looked it up is that Voynich faked all of this. However, this has practically been disproven. According to recent carbon dating research, scientists have dated the Voynich Manuscript all the way back to the 13th, and possibly 14th centuries. So that completely wipes out the possibility of it being a hoax instituted by Voynich himself. There’s no way he could have created something like that if it only surfaced about 100 years ago in popular society. Granted, carbon dating can sometimes be wrong, but when it comes to paper and ink, dating is rather reliable. From the composition of the ink itself to the makeup of the paper, the Manuscript uses nothing like we would use today. From a more creative standpoint, aging paper and ink to look like the Manuscript would be incredibly difficult.
Another theory is that the Voynich Manuscript is some kind of alchemist book. I will openly admit I know very little about alchemy as it puts me on edge. I don’t want anything to do with alchemy or divination or any witchcraft-type things. The arguments for the Manuscript being alchemist-related are fairly weak in my opinion. Others think it could be a book of magic written by the wizard Merlin. However this can be disproven in two ways: Merlin hasn’t actually ever been proven to be real, just like King Arthur. The second is that people have assumed Merlin to be real, but all “accounts” of him occur at least two centuries before the Manuscript was carbon-dated to have been written.
One of the most popular theories is that it is some kind of pharmaceutical book. I tend to lean this way for the pure fact that there are so many botanical illustrations. Not to mention the bathing women and other anatomical depictions. Now, here we’ll take a slight detour. Back when the Voynich Manuscript was supposedly written, bathing was believed to be bad for health. People thought that was how diseases spread, and therefore argued against bathing. The depictions in the book show women in tubs of green and sometimes (if I’m not mistaken) blue liquids. It appears that whatever the author was trying to prove by these illustrations that bathing was actually good for your health.
Another theory has been that the whole thing is just written in gibberish. None of it is an actual script, it’s just random symbols and letters that someone wrote down at random. This has been disproven by many linguists. How they do this is by finding repeated words. According to Zipf’s Law, something can be studied and understood by frequencies in data. For example, in this post, I’ve used many of the same words throughout, like “and,” “the,” or “manuscript.” This proves that what I’m writing isn’t a bunch of random words that don’t get used more than once. If someone is reading this who isn’t fluent in English, they will recognise the repetition of some of these words and know that I’m writing in true English. Now that I’ve explained that, all the theories that the Voynich Manuscript is just a bunch of drivel are disproven.
Now, it could be that this was written in a cipher. I think it’s probable, but I don’t really know. Researchers have attempted to translate or cipher it but to little or no avail. For example, someone could come up with a supposed solution to it by translating one page, but beyond that one page, their solution doesn’t apply to anything else in the book. Literally hundreds of people have claimed to decode the Voynich Manuscript, but most of them don’t make a lot of sense.
YOUR TURN
I’d like to turn it to you, my reader now. What do you think the Voynich Manuscript is about? Could it possibly be that an entire culture has been lost, their language with them? Or do you think it’s all a hoax created by Voynich or Emporer Rudolf II? Throwing out a bit of a spoiler for the next post, could it be the script of the supposed lost Sea People? (Hint: it's not that, they lived loooooong before the Manuscript). Let me know in the comments! Stay curious!
Here are some videos you may find interesting:
Sources:
If it was a fake, Vorynich went to a lot of trouble to produce this book.