|
The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown
contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language.
Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur
cryptographers — including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II
fame — who all failed to decipher a single word. This string of egregious failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into
the Holy Grail of historical cryptology; but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is nothing but an
elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of random symbols.
The book is named after the Russian-American book dealer Wilfrid
M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. It is presently item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book
Library of Yale University.
Description
The book has about 240 vellum pages, and gaps in the page
numbering (which apparently is later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich
acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was
applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date.
Illustrations
The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents,
but imply that the book consists of half a dozen "sections", with different style and subject matter. Except for the last
section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional
names, are:
- Herbal: each page displays one plant (sometimes two), and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of
European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner
copies of sketches seen in the pharmaceutical section (below).
- Astronomical: contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12
diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fishes for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly 30
miniature women figures, most of them naked, each holding a labeled star. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricorn, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams
are on fold-out pages.
- Biological: a dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small nude women bathing in pools or
tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear
crowns.
- Cosmological: more circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has fold-outs; one of them spans
six pages and contains some sort of map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and possibly a volcano.
- Pharmaceutical: many labeled drawings of isolated part plants (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.
- Recipes: many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower-like (or star-like) "bullet".
The text
The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs,
sometimes with "bullets" on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood
what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated
before being put on the page.
The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other
by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether
certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would account for
virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen "weird" characters that occur only once or twice each.
Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain
characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never
follow others, some may be doubled but others can't.
Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural
languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf's law, and the word
entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of
English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the
manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations. In the
herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.
On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. In particular,
there are practically no words with more than 10 "letters". Also, the distribution of letters within the word is rather peculiar:
some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section – an
arrangement found in Arabic, but not in the Roman, Greek or
Cyrillic alphabets.
The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears
three times in a row (as if an English text contained the sequence and and and).
History
Since the manuscript's alphabet does not resemble any known script, and the text is still undeciphered, the only useful
evidence as to the book's age and origin are the illustrations—especially the dresses and hairstyles of the human figures,
and a couple of castles that are seen in the diagrams. They are all characteristically European, and based on that evidence most
experts assign the book to dates between 1450 and 1520. This estimate is supported by other secondary clues.
The earliest confirmed owner of the manuscript was a certain Georg Baresch (Georgius Barschius in Latin),
an obscure alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresch apparently was just
as puzzled as we are today about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly
in his library" for many years. On learning that Athanasius
Kircher, a Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic
(Ethiopian) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, he sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher, which was
recently located by René
Zandbergen, is the earliest mention of the manuscript that has been found so far.
It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently he was interested enough to try to acquire the book,
which Baresch apparently refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague; who promptly sent the book to Kircher,
his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci's cover letter (1665) is still attached to the
manuscript. The letter offers the manuscript for decryption and mentions that it had once been bought by Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 gold
ducats. The letter further mentioned that at Rudolf's court it was believed that the author of the manuscript was Roger Bacon (a Franciscan friar who lived from 1214 to 1294).
There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was kept, with the rest of Kircher's
correspondence, in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the
Pontifical Gregorian University). It
probably sat there until the troops of Victor
Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of
the Church, including the library of the Collegio. According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just
before this happened many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty,
which were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich
manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order
and the University's Rector at the time. Beckx' "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country
palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Collegio
Ghisleri.
Around 1912 the Collegio Romano was apparently short of money and decided to sell (very
discreetly) some of its holdings. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name. In
1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow to another antique book dealer
H.P.Kraus. Unable to find a buyer,
Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.
Theories about authorship
Many names have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript. Here are only the most popular ones.
Roger Bacon
Marci's 1665 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had been bought by
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, who
believed its author to be Roger Bacon, a 13th century English polymath. Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgement" about this claim, it was taken quite
seriously by Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most decipherment attempts for the next
80 years. However, scholars who have looked at the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with Bacon's works have flatly denied that
possibility. One should note also that Raphael died in 1644, and the deal must have
occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's
letter.
John Dee
The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that the person who sold the Voynich manuscript to
Rudolf could only be John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of
Queen Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of
Bacon's manuscripts. Dee and his scrier (mediunic assistant) Edward Kelley lived in
Bohemia for several years where they had hoped to sell their services to the Emperor. However, Dee's meticulously kept diaries do
not mention that sale, and make it seem quite unlikely. Anyway, if the Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, the connection to
Dee may just disappear. On the other hand, Dee himself may have written it and spread the rumour that it was originally a work of
Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.
Edward Kelley
Dee's companion in Prague, Edward Kelley, was a self-styled alchemist
who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold
by means of a secret powder which he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales. As Dee's
scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a crystal ball, and had
long conversations with them—which Dee dutifully noted down. The angel's language was called Enochian, after Enoch, the Biblical father of Methuselah; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour of Heaven by angels, and
later written a book about what he saw there. Several people (see below)
have suggested that, just as Kelley invented Enochian to dupe Dee, he could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript to swindle the
Emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed alchemical expertise). However, if Roger Bacon is not the author of the
Voynich manuscript, Kelley's connection to the manuscript is just as vacuous as Dee's.
Wilfrid Voynich
Voynich was often suspected of having fabricated the Voynich manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had
the necessary knowledge and means; and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. However, the recent
discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher has all but eliminated that possibility.
Jacobus Sinapius
A photostatic reproduction of
the first page of the Voynich manuscript, taken by Voynich sometime before 1921, showed
some faint writing that had been erased. With the help of chemicals, the text could be read as the name 'Jacobj à Tepenece': that
would be Jakub Horcicky of Tepenec, in Latin Jacobus
Sinapius—a specialist in herbal medicine who was the
personal doctor of Rudolf II and curator of his botanical gardens. Voynich, and many other people after him, concluded from this
"signature" that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript before Baresch, and saw in that a confirmation of Raphael's story. Others
have suggested that Jacobus himself could be the author.
However, that writing has not yet been compared to Jacobus's signature; so it is still possible that it was written by a later
owner or librarian, and is only this person's guess as to the book's author. (In the Jesuit history books that were available to
Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who deserves a full-page entry, while, for
example, Tycho Brahe is barely mentioned.) Moreover, the chemicals applied by
Voynich have so degraded the vellum that no trace of the signature can be seen today; thus there is also the suspicion that the
signature was fabricated by Voynich in order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory.
Johannes Marci
Johannes Marci met Kircher when he led a delegation
from Charles University to Rome in 1638; and over the next 27 years, the two scholars
exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist side
of the University to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum college in Prague. In spite of
those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has
therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the
Voynich manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher.
Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this task; and Kircher, a "Dr. Know-It-All" who is today
remembered more by his egregious mistakes than by his genuine accomplishments, was an easy target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears
some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to
Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced
one at once.
It is worth noting that the only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch
(1639), and two by Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence
between Marci and Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the Voynich manuscript "cover
letter". However, Marci's secret grudge against the Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to
become a Jesuit, and shortly before his death in 1667 he was granted honorary membership in
their Order.
Raphael Mnishovsky
Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci
who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer
(among many other things), and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was
uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript
as a practical demonstration of said cipher—and made poor Baresch his unwitting "guinea pig". After Kircher published his
book on Coptic, Raphael (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him would be a much better trophy than stumping
Baresch, and convinced the alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger Bacon story to motivate Baresch.
Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However, there is no
definite evidence for this theory.
Anthony Ascham
Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong
said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple
alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author
Anthony Ascham, whose works
include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling an herbal,
the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where the author of A Little Herbal would have obtained such
literary and cryptographic knowledge.
Theories about contents and purpose
The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about
the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. Here are only a few of them:
Herbal
The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to
identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed.
Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal"
pictures that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of these, except that missing parts were completed
with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to
the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
Sunflowers
Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin.
However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is
not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family
— which includes the common daisy, chamomile, and many other
species from all over the world.
Alchemy
The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds.
However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by
specific images (eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed, etc.) or standard textual symbols (circle with cross, etc.); and none
of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.
Alchemical herbal
Sergio Toresella, an
expert on ancient herbals, pointed out that the Voynich manuscript could be an alchemical
herbal—which actually had nothing to do with alchemy, but was a bogus herbal with invented pictures, that a quack
doctor would carry around just to impress his clients. Apparently there was a small cottage industry of such books somewhere in
northern Italy, just at the right epoch. However, those books are quite different from the Voynich manuscript in style and
format; and they were all written in plain language.
Astrological herbal
Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures
common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly
showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European
or otherwise).
Microscopes and telescopes
A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have
interpreted as a picture of a galaxy, which could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an
early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin. However, the resemblance is rather questionable: on close
inspection, the central part of the "galaxy" looks rather like a pool of water.
Multiple authors
Prescott Currier, a US
Navy cryptographer who worked with the manuscript in the 1970s, observed that the pages
of the "herbal" section could be separated into two sets, A and B, with distinctive statistical properties and
apparently different handwritings. He concluded that the Voynich manuscript was the work of two or more authors who used different dialects or spelling conventions, but who shared the same script. However, recent studies have questioned this
conclusion. A handwriting expert who examined the book saw only one hand in the whole manuscript. Also, when all sections are
examined, one sees a more gradual transition, with herbal A and herbal B at opposite ends. Thus, Prescott's
observations could simply be the result of the herbal sections being written in two widely separated epochs.
Theories about the language
Many theories have been advanced as for the nature of the Voynich manuscript "language". Here is a partial list:
Letter-based cipher
According to this theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, that was intentionally
rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of
some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters.
This has been the working hypothesis for most decipherment attempts in the 20th century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. Simple substitution ciphers can be excluded, because they are very easy to
crack; so decipherment efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic ciphers, invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the popular
Vigenère cipher, which could have been strengthened by the use of
nulls and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks, etc. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted
before encryption. There have been several claims of decipherment along these lines, but none has been widely accepted —
chiefly because the proposed decipherment algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that they could extract a meaningful
text from any random string of symbols.
The main argument for this theory is that the use of a weird alphabet by a European author can hardly be explained except as
an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly
coincides with the birth of cryptography as a systematic discipline.
Against this theory is the observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the "natural" statistical features
that are seen in the Voynich manuscript, such as Zipf's law. Also, although
polyalphabetic ciphers were invented about 1467, variants only became popular in the
16th century, somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich
manuscript.
Codebook cipher
According to this theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would be actually codes to be
looked up in a dictionary or codebook. The main evidence for this theory
is that the internal structure and length distribution of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based
ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.
Steganography
This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in
inconspicuous details—e.g. the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called
steganography, is very old, and was described e.g. by Johannes Trithemius in 1499.
Some people suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan
grille of some sort. This theory is hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to crack. An argument against it is that using a cipher-looking cover text
defeats the main purpose of steganography, which is to hide the very existence of the secret message.
Some people have suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are
indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich
manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.
Exotic natural language
The linguist Jacques Guy once
suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is indeed similar to that of many language families of
East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly
Tai (Thai,
Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the "words" (smallest language units with definite meaning) have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns.
This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously
difficult for Western visitors; which motivated the invention of several phonetic
scripts, mostly with Latin letters but sometimes with invented alphabets.
Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries
who could have done it—even before Marco Polo's 13th century voyage, but especially after Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The
Voynich manuscript author could also be a native from East Asia living in Europe, or educated at a European mission.
The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text
which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese
texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western
syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general weirdness of the illustrations. Another possible hint are two large
red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, upside down and badly copied. Also, the
apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of
the Chinese agricultural calendar (jié qì). The main
argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find any
clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.
In his book Solution of the Voynich manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of
Isis, Leo Levitov makes the
case for the manuscript being a special script,
- “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.”
The language, he asserts, is a highly polyglot form of medieval Flemish with many borrowed Old French and Old High German
words.
According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was none other than the assisted suicide ritual famously associated with the Cathar
faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to
represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent
the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection; the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm
bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.
This theory is questioned on several grounds. One incongruity is that the Cathar
faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism, and not in any
way associated with Isis. Another is that this theory places the book's origins in the
twelfth or thirteenth century, which is considerably older than even the adherents to the Roger Bacon theory believe. Levitov
offered no evidence beyond his translation for this assertion.
Constructed language
The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to independently arrive at the conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the plain—specifically, a
philosophical one. In languages of this class, the vocabulary is organized according to a category system, so that the
general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters. For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the category of colors, and any word beginning with those letters would name a
color: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an extreme version of the book classification scheme used by many
libraries — in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for Greek and Latin, PC for
Romance languages, etc..)
This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668). In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes;
as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes — for example, all plant names
would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature
of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich
manuscript; and, moreover, known examples of philosophical languages are rather late (17th century).
Hoax
The bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words) and the suspicious contents of its
illustrations (such as the chimeric plants) have led many people to conclude that the manuscript may in fact be a hoax.
In 2003, computer
scientist Gordon Rugg showed
that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems,
and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a
Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, and was apparently used by Edward
Kelley to fabricate his Enochian "language". However, the pseudo-texts
generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments do not have the same words and frequencies as the Voynich manuscript; its resemblance to
"Voynichese" is only visual, not quantitative. Since one can produce random gibberish that resembles English (or any other
language) to a similar extent, these experiments are not yet convincing.
Voynich manuscript influence on popular culture
A number of items in popular culture appear to have been influenced, at least in part, by the Voynich manuscript.
- The dangerous grimoire called the Necronomicon, appears in H. P. Lovecraft's
Cthulhu Mythos fantasy.
While Lovecraft likely created the Necronomicon without knowledge of the Voynich manuscript, Colin Wilson published a short story in 1969
called "The Return of the Lloigor" wherein a character discovers that the Voynich manuscript is an incomplete copy of the
grimoire. Since then, the fictional Necronomicon has been repeatedly identified with this real mystery by other
authors.
- The Codex Seraphinianus is a modern work of art
created in the style of the Voynich manuscript.
- The plot of Il Romanzo Di Nostradamus, by author Valerio Evangelisti features the Voynich manuscript as a work of black magic, against
which the famous French astrologer Nostradamus will fight all his life.
- In the computer game "Broken Sword 3", the Voynich manuscript is translated by a hacker, who is then killed by the
Neo-Templars because it contained information on spots on earth that have a "Geo Energy".
References
Books
- M. E. D'Imperio, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. National Security Agency/Central Security Service (1978)
ISBN 0894120387.
- Robert S. Brumbaugh, The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich 'Roger Bacon' Cipher Manuscript (1978).
- Leo Levitov, Solution of the Voynich Manuscript (1987)
- John Stojko, Letters to God's Eye (1978) ISBN 0533041813.
- Mario M. Perez-Ruiz, El Manuscrito Voynich (2003)
- Genny Kennedy, Rob Churchill, Voynich Manuscript (2004) ISBN 075285996X.
External links
|