If you’ve ever picked up a book, and found it’s full of surreal plants, unknown diagrams,
zodiac rings, and a language which is completely undecipherable, you’re likely looking at a copy
of the Voynich manuscript: the book that nobody can translate. This medieval text,
which has been dated to the early 15th century, is one of the most mysterious books ever written,
as even after hundreds of years, no one has been able to definitively decode it… So for
this entry into the archive, we’ll take a look at this bizarre book, and see what we can learn about
its history and possible meaning. The name of the manuscript comes from Wilfrid Voynic, a Polish
book collector with very cool spectacles who first discovered the book at a college in Italy in 1912.
He was understandably baffled by the bizarre language and images within — and countless
experts have been trying to make sense of it ever since. Today, the original copy is stored at the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. If you were to open the manuscript,
you’d find that the first section of the mysterious text is dedicated almost entirely to
plants. Most of these bizarre florae aren’t ones you’d ever find in nature, and instead seem either
completely made up, or impossible hybrids of existing plants — with the roots of one species
attached to the stem of another, with the flowers of a third. Only a few drawings can actually be
matched with real plant species — namely the wild pansy and a variation of maidenhair fern.
But that’s about all we’ve got. But it’s not just that plant drawings within the manuscript that
are mysterious. There are also strange cosmic wheels and astrological symbols decorating many
of the pages, some of them with stylized suns or stars. These diagrams seem related to astrology or
zodiac constellations, although many of them don’t match up with familiar models. Astrology did play
a role in plant gathering and medical procedures during the period in which the manuscript was
likely written, so that could be a connection to the first section of the book — but it’s hard
to deduce too much beyond that. Aside from some pretty weird art of people bathing in giant tubs
I’m just going to skip over, the third section of the book has some art of what might be alchemical
equipment, but as is the case with the zodiac wheels, a lot of the art has little resemblance
to common alchemical equipment and symbols of the time. So, what’s going on here? Well, with most
other books you’d just read the words and figure out what’s going on, but that’s easier said than
done with the Voynich Manuscript. The script it’s written in is completely unknown. There are some
theories that’s because it’s been put through a cypher or code by the original author — scrambled
up to a degree which makes it difficult to unravel. A lot of effort has been expended to
try and crack it, including recent work with AI, but despite decades of trying, most experts agree
the majority of the book remains unreadable. If it’s not in code, it’s also possible the strange
alphabet is an attempt to write down some spoken dialect that had no established writing system.
If this is the case, the text is completely unique, and therefore almost impossible to
decipher. Another distinct possibility is that the book is filled with nonsense, and
was designed to mess with people, but we’ll come back to that concept in a moment… For now — if
we can’t understand the images or the language — do we at least have some idea where it came from?
Once again, there are a lot of unknowns. There’s a letter from the sixteenth century which suggests
it was once owned by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and was then passed on to his personal doctor
Jacobus Sinapius, then to antique collector Georg Baresch, then to Bohemian doctor Jan Marek Marci,
then to scholar Athanasius Kircher, then to priest Peter Jan Beckx, who placed it in the collection
where Voynich purchased it. Basically, the book’s been all over. As for who the original author was,
some have theorized it might have been 13th friar Roger Bacon, or 15th Italian engineer Giovanni
Fontana, who created some surreal artwork which does look somewhat similar. Others have theorized
the whole thing is a more modern hoax, and was possibly even fabricated by Voynich.
Recent radiocarbon dating of the parchment more or less rules this possibility out, however, as all
tests have shown the book is almost certainly from at least the early 15th century. But
regardless of who the author is, perhaps the most important question is why? Why write this at all?
It’s possible this is a genuine medical text, or something even stranger… but it’s not impossible
the whole purpose of the book was to frustrate future generations. Even if the manuscript
isn’t a modern hoax, that doesn’t rule out the possibility it’s the medieval era equivalent
of a prank. We sometimes think of past societies as serious, but medieval art is often ridiculous
and seems designed to confound… so it’s a distinct possibility the Voynich manuscript was made for a
similar purpose. In any case, it’s a fascinating and mysterious book. There’s additional research
that has been done over the years, and I’d encourage you to delve in if you’re
interested—or even take a crack at unraveling the mystery. And as always, thanks for watching.
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