The 5 Most Mysterious Books Of All Time | Answers With Joe

so one day when I was in high school I was sitting in class and out of what I can only describe as mind-numbing boredom I decided I come up with a secret code this activated my brain got me started thinking about like how I could make an unbreakable code what kind of shapes could I use how could I mix it all up so that nobody could decipher it in hindsight it was pretty primitive as coats go a equaled square B equaled squiggly line and so on and so forth but at the time I thought it was brilliant I didn't know what I was gonna do with this I've had this fantasy that maybe I could come up with these secret letters that I could share with friends and nobody else could read and then I realized that I didn't really have any friends at least none that would have any interest in something like this so I finished the little cipher and was all proud of myself I folded it up put it in a book went on with my day and then later on that day I was walking down the hallway and I saw a whole group of kids you know gathered around looking at something and I joined in just to see what they were looking at and it was my cypher like my folded up piece of paper they were all looking at it trying to figure it out and guess it had fallen out of my book or something and they were all trying to figure out what the thing was what it meant who did it and I'm standing there and I'm I was too embarrassed to say that it was me so I just kind of went along with it and it kind of became this little mystery in the school for a while everybody was thinking that they were gonna be these secret notes floating around it was part of some elaborate scavenger hunt thing and I was just bored in class I bet there are still people out there that are wondering what the hell that thing was all about throughout history scholars have come across indecipherable and mysterious books that they haven't been able to figure out were they just the work of some bored teenager - or something much bigger these are the five most mysterious books of all time [Music] number five the Rohan's codex in 1838 a hungarian prince named gustav bath eonni donated his old family library in the village of rural haunts to the hungarian academy of sciences amongst the piles of old books was one particularly old book that seemed to be written in a runic language that nobody can understand they took special interest in this book because only recently they found another book called the book of Tarak which seemed to suggest that there was a much grander history for the Hungarian people and they wanted to see if this book could corroborate some of the stuff that came out of that other book so the Rohan's codex went through intense study and debate but the further people looked into it the more inscrutable it seemed to be it's written in the script that's indecipherable was 792 distinctive characters people have proposed that it's early Hungarian da Sein romanian cumin and even Hindi but none of these theories has really panned out if some of the characters resemble symbols that were engraved into cave walls once occupied by scythe Ian monks and they're still debates as to whether or not the book gets read left to right or top to bottom or anything in between and it's filled with drawings containing Christian Muslim and Hindi symbols along with pagan imagery many Hungarian scholars to this day think that it's all just a forgery perpetrated by a guy named Sam well literati Nima's who was a antiquities dealer in the 1830s who they found out had forged a lot of the things that he had sold including the book of truck he was a Hungarian nationalist who it turns out had forged a lot of these books to try to spur nationalist pride which is why the book of Tarak had this grand history of the Hungarian people in it problem with that theory is that the paper in the book has been traced back to Venice in the 1530s so that's like 300 years earlier so if you're gonna try to do something like this today you would have to find a whole stack of blank paper from 1717 good luck with that and also the book doesn't really fit his MO if you're trying to bolster you know nationalist pride with propaganda why would you make it completely unreadable and there's also nothing whatsoever tying them as to this book he actually kept notes on all of its forgeries and there's nothing in there about the Rohan's codex then there's the fact that all the records that there were haunts library where this had been kept all that time showed records of it going back to 1748 and Nimbus was born in 1796 so that's a problem so the best guess is based on just the illustrations in the book is that it's some kind of religious text with prayers and stories from the Bible with a little bit of the history of the blocki people and their fights against the Hungarians in the 11th and 12th century thrown into the mix but to this day nobody knows who wrote it how they wrote it or why number four the codex Serra phoniness a book is a collection of thoughts and ideas from a person and the reason why most of the books on this list are mysterious is because we don't know who wrote them but the codex serif in eNOS is different we know exactly who wrote it and we know exactly why but it is a weird-ass book it's written in a language that doesn't exist it's full of pictures of weird animals and plants seeming to show directions on how to do things that came right out of David Cronenberg's nightmares you'll find a horse slash grub weird anatomical weapons and people having sex and turning into an alligator like you do it's like reading a medieval manuscript from some alien world that's an unusual and unique but familiar at the same time and that's kind of the point the author's name is Luigi Serafina he was an architect and industrial designer who wrote the book really is an art project more than anything else you said he wanted to create a sense of wonder in the reader to give them the feeling of a baby looking at a book for the first time and even though it looks hundreds of years old it was actually just written in 1980 you can buy a copy on Amazon yourself I'll put a link down the description below just make sure you're sober when you read it things could go bad number three the book of soy ge' john dee was a mathematician scholar and advisor to Queen Elizabeth in 1500 England he was an interesting cat he lived in a time right in the middle of the Renaissance when the world was kind of transitioning from a world of magic and superstition to one his scientific inquiry and John Dee was the perfect embodiment of that he was a mathematician and astronomer but also was really into alchemy and the occult his advancements in mathematics helped English sailors to navigate the world but he was also obsessed with communicating with angels and he was also a major advocate for creating a National Library of England which the Queen was not all that interested in so he just built his own and its height John Dee's library had over 3,000 books and some of which let's just say a little kooky but there was one of these kooky books that he was especially fascinated it was called the book of soy ge' or the elder ayah it was a 15th century latin book on incantations magic astrology demonology in the genealogies of angels the book was written with some weird practices like reversing some words in the Hebrew Kabbalah tradition but it's mostly translatable except for the final 36 pages which were filled with tablets containing 36 rows and 36 columns containing over 46,000 Latin letters that are completely random John Dee was so convinced that this was the key to unlocking a holy language that he worked with a medium to communicate the Archangel Uriel and through the medium Uriel told him that the only person who could unlock this code was Archangel Michael who I guessing was not available at the time the angel also claimed that whoever deciphers the book would die two and a half years later so there's that but toward the end of his life while John Dee was traveling through Europe some vandals pilfered his library as if that wasn't bad enough after queen elizabeth died he fell into poverty and he had to sell the rest of it scattering all of his books to the wind the book I saw you went missing for 500 years before it turned up in 1994 in the British Library ironically the very library that he wanted to build and immediately cryptologist started working to try to crack this code in 2006 of Princeton mathematician named Jim reeds claims to have deciphered the tables using computer algorithms by discovering a six-letter seed word in each table that gives you the key to solving it I'm linking an article in the description that explains how he translated it as well as a translation that you can read yourself if you're brave enough Jim reeds is still alive so you'll you'll probably be okay probably maybe 50 50 go check it out number two the story of the Vivian girls Nathan Lerner was a landlord in Chicago in 1971 when one of his oldest tenants went into hospice due to failing health the man's name was Henry Darger he was a recluse the barely ever left his apartment except to go to church and they lived in that same place since 1930 as Nathan began the process of cleaning out this guy's apartment what he found astonished him it was a massive collection of writings that made up one book titled the story of the Vivian girls in what is known as the realms of the unreal in the gland echo and Julie nian war storm caused by the child slave rebellion it's 15 and 145 pages long spanning 15 volumes containing several hundred pages of illustrations some of them landscapes as large as 30 feet wide and he made the illustrations by cutting pictures out of magazines and tracing over them a style that many would actually pick up on after his death it's an elaborate mythology that he wrote over 60 years it takes place on a planet that the Earth revolves around is a moon the protagonists are seven daughters of Robert Vivian princesses is a Christian nation of a beyond eeeh which leads a rebellion against a civilization built on child slavery it's considered one of the longest books ever written and he did it all in secret nobody knew anything about it until his death Henry was thought to have a handful of mental conditions including Tourette's and in fact he spent some time in an insane asylum when he was young which he escaped in 1908 the entire book seems to have been spawned by his obsession with the murder of a five year old girl in 1911 in fact Darger wrote himself into the book as the protector of children his work is now featured in museums all around the country and there's actually a documentary about it called in the realms of the Unreal that's on YouTube I'll put a link down the description and of course the number one most mysterious book of all time the Voynich manuscript you can do a video about mysterious books without talking about the Voynich manuscript The Voyage manuscript may be one of the most obsessed over and studied books in history the first attempts at deciphering it were done back in 1665 it's named after Wilfrid Voynich a Polish book dealer to publish the book in 1912 we have a pretty clear record of ownership tracing it back to an alchemist in Prague named George beresch in the early 1600s though there's reason to believe it was once owned by the Emperor Rudolf a second in the late 1500s but radiocarbon dating on the parchment places the origin of the manuscript sometime between 1404 and 1438 so there's a good hundred and fifty or so years that are a complete mystery by the way this is one of the most frustrating and tantalizing things about the voyage manuscript is that we feel like we have just enough information that we think we might be able to figure it out and then we hit a brick wall okay so what is this thing it's about 240 pages of WTF that's what written in a completely incomprehensible language and featuring weird almost childlike illustrations that defy all logic this book has stumped the greatest cryptographers linguist and historians for over 600 years in fact after World War two some of the code breakers that broke the Japanese military codes took a shot at the voyage manuscript and they got nowhere with it the language in the text uses characters that have never been seen anywhere else and it looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings like vaguely European but not related any known language it features all the highlights of a real language repeated words certain characters and always follow other characters the we accuse always followed by you for example some characters only appear at the beginning of the word some the only period the middle experts say that it's written in a smooth fluid motion with no delays in between the words like you would expect with a code so they think this is a real language it's also filled with strange illustrations featuring plants some of which are familiar like a wild pansy and a maidenhair fern some are complete mysteries others feature leaves from one plant with a flower from another plan and a root systems from a totally different plant there are also pages and pages of nude women bathing in pools connected by a series of pipes and another section featuring astrological illustrations but the illustrations themselves are a mystery because when they did tests on the ink they found out this really high-quality stuff the only master painters would have had access to back in that day but if you look at the drawings they're not exactly Rembrandt and although some people have speculated that maybe it was done by a young Leonardo da Vinci that's been discredited because why he also wasn't born until a few decades after the book was made so there's that right now the consensus seems to be that it's some kind of pharmacopoeia of medical herbs and treatments from back in the day which makes sense that would explain why there are bathing women and the pages because bathing was considered a treatment for a lot of diseases back then also medical treatments were often based on your zodiac signs so a Taurus would get a different treatment from a Sagittarius for example which explains the astrological illustrations in there too and just last month of TV writer named Nicholas Gibbs claimed to have deciphered the book and saying that it's a gynecological handbook with shorthand in Latin so it's not actually a language that shorthand is what he claimed but his claims were debunked literally days later by medieval experts so the hunt goes on there's literally a mountain of research and articles and stuff to read about the Voynich manuscript out there I'm gonna put links to all that stuff down in the description below including a link to a scan of the book so you can look at it yourself if you think you're smart enough to Christ my best guess is it was just something some bored medieval kid did at school so let me know what you think where any of these books new to you did I leave out a book that you think is more mysterious than these discuss down below so no this is slightly different kind of topic for this channel but you know hey it's October Halloween's coming up thought I'd have a little fun mix things up a little bit tell me what you think as always if you like this shirt and you want one for yourself or you want to look at a whole bunch of other really fun shirt designs that we have available you can go to answers with Jo comm / shirts also thank you so so much the answer files are supporting this channel on patreon we got some new people that joined the tribe I want to call them out real quick we got Lisa Lisa Dee Ling Ivan Hagan Elrond I murdered your name I apologize William Dean Harris Andrew bard David Duffy London Neil Brooks and Darrin Nolan thank you guys so much for joining if you guys would like to see what this is all about get some behind-the-scenes access and some cool perks you can go to patreon.com/scishow answers with Joe also as always this video is brought to you by concur boy comm if you have mouth ulcers and recurring canker sores ouch you can take care of that with a daily pill works in about 6 weeks you get a 2 month risk-free trial just go to concur boy calm all right thanks again for watching like and share if you liked it and yeah let me know if you like this topic I thought this was a lot of fun if this is your first time here check out some my other videos because I do fun stuff they come back with stuff like this every Monday and hopefully if you like it subscribe because you can watch the next one all right now you guys go out there you have an eye-opening week and I will see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

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Keywords: answers with joe, 5 most mysterious books, mysterious books, voynich manuscript, rohonc codex, codex seraphinianus, Book of soyga, The story of the vivian girls, henry darger, john dee, in the realms of the unreal, mystery, what is the voynish manuscript, what does the voynich manuscript mean

Id: L-b98KA55Mw

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2017