The Voynich Manuscript

July 27th 1962 York City FL voyage right-wing musician dies at her home at 450 West 24th Street aged 96 best known for her 1897 debut novel the gadfly she left behind no children or close relatives having outlived her husband by three decades in accordance with her will her body was cremated and her ashes scattered over Central Park her remaining possessions fell to her friend and companion and nil with whom she had shared her apartment for the last third of her life but amongst these possessions there was one item that stood out over the last 30 years it's fated toward both mrs. Voynich and her husband before her so much so this has remained sealed within a bank vault throughout much of this time it comprised of a small manuscript bound in a plain brown cover the born either title nor a name inside it was tucked a letter the envelope of which contained a message written in Ethel's handwriting its text reads as follows concerning the cypher manuscript not to be open until after my death and then only by AM nil or one of a responsible person in place of her at first glance the manuscript in question appeared unimportant barely larger than a modern paperback agen where had reduced it to a sorry condition it's plain cover hung limp and battered whilst the part from within was faded from centuries of age in places burrowing insects had dug small holes through its leaves whilst its edges bore labels stretch marks and other blemishes left by its prior owners yet despite its lackluster outer appearance the manuscript was unique beneath its drab cover lay page after page you've meticulously drafted writing transcribed in an unknown language along with these writings laid dozens of bizarre and often unidentifiable sketches which in turn had been gruffly dogged with paints of red green yellow and blue it was this combination of unreadable text and strange imagery the compelled F for husband the bookseller and former revolutionary Wilfred M Voynich to keep the manuscript with in his possession for so long for the rest of his life he would attempt to decode it hoping that by doing so he might entice a buyer to pay the astronomical sum he demanded between fo and himself the manuscript remained in the voyagers possession for over half a century yet within a year of Ethel's death its new owner would sell it on for a small fortune the buyer in turn hoped to resell it at a profit but as with the voyagers before him this goal eluded him by the end of the decade he had given up in 1969 he donated the book to Yale University where it has remained the object of study by linguists and cryptographers alike the arrival of the internet in the late 90s would bring the manuscript to the attention of the general public and over the last two decades interest in its contents has only increased in that time large numbers of conspiracy theories have grown up around it whilst dozens of more reputable observers have volunteered their own conclusions as to its content and origin in 2019 alone two more academics have come forward with claims of having solved the manuscript that their findings have been met with dismissal by the wider Voynich community despite these repudiation 's interest in the manuscript only continues to increase as observers both serious and casual attempt to answer just one question what does the Voynich manuscript say you [Music] for nearly 600 years the Voynich manuscript has lain undeciphered in that time both amateurs and professional cryptographers alike have attempted to decode this strange language that lies within during its long history it has drawn the attention of Renaissance alchemists turn-of-the-century revolutionaries and leading cryptographers of both world wars throughout this time its cipher has remained stubbornly intact resisting both traditional code breaking efforts and sophisticated computer analysis alike so what is the Voynich manuscript on face value it appears as a small medieval Codex containing around 240 pages whilst perhaps another 30 and now lost these pages have roughly sorted into 18 choirs and are covered in carefully plotted text illustrations also appear in large quantities route manuscript and several folios contain fold-out pages for this purpose these illustrations are in turn coated in pates of blue red yellow and green which are often crudely applied and whilst the text itself remains undeciphered these illustrations can be used to sort the manuscript into distinct sections it opens with an extensive botanical section consisting of detailed drawings of plants and herbs this section comprises a third of the entire manuscript and is split into several parts indicating that the current order of folios differs from the original the second and third sections of the manuscript focus on cosmology and astrology as indicated by the presence of recognizable zodiac symbols along of detailed astrological charts the is the fourth section of the manuscript that has baffled scholars the most here repeated drawings are shown of naked women bathing in strange intestine like baths which are in turn filled of an unknown green fluid no exact analog to these bathing arrangements has yet been demonstrated the next section includes more images of herbs along with what resembled traditional storage vessels used in medieval Europe the manuscript concludes with an extended block of text known to scholars as the recipes section in addition to these illustrations the manuscript is listed throughout with other bizarre imagery on one folio a small image of a dragon can be seen feeding on the leaves of a herb on another what appears to be a sketch of a corpse can be found in the bottom corner whilst the largest foldout contains images of a castle hidden within its diagrams a more mundane example can be found in the margin of the final page of the manuscript were a small image of a goat rests above that of a naked woman in recent years the manuscripts undergone sophisticated computational analysis in hopes of unlocking the text along with detailed forensic examination whilst none of these efforts has succeeded in decoding its contents the latter has shed some light on its earliest owners combined with new documents that have come to light over the last few decades it is now possible for us to compose a relatively coherent history of the manuscript yet the main questions remain unsolved what does the text of the manuscript say and who was the elusive writer behind its construction the continuing levels of interest in a manuscript make it likely that these questions will be answered one day presuming that a real document lies behind the text until then if we wish to understand the potential origins of the manuscript and why has retained such enduring interest over the years we must first examine its of an equally bizarre history and before we can do that we must delve back into the world of ancient cryptography and see what might have inspired someone to such a manuscript in the first place you since the dawn of civilization people and States alike have sought to hide their secrets over the last four millennia countless methods have been employed in this pursuit the Greek historian Herodotus outlines one of the earliest known accounts of the use of hidden messages where in a tablet covered in wax is used to smuggle details to the Spartans of a planned invasion by the Persian King Xerxes in ancient China messages were written on small portions of fine silk which were then coated in wax and swallowed by their prospective messenger it is in parallel to this practice of hidden messages known as steganography that another method of concealing messages was developed this approach can be traced back almost 4000 years to the time of ancient Egypt here in the town of menator Khufu basic hieroglyphic transformations were developed that served to hide the details of certain religious texts with the aim of increasing their mystery and arcane properties this quasi cryptography proved short-lived but centuries later the idea would reappear in Mesopotamia the world's oldest known incitement appears on a small cuneiform tablet dating from around 1500 BC found on the banks of the river Tigris it contains an insight fir'd formula for pottery glaze professional secret that its owner would have guarded jealously in ancient India the art of cryptography or secret writing was developed enough that it is mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit treatise the artha sastra along with in the famous erotic work the Kama Sutra here it is listed as one of the sixty-four arts or yogurt that women should know and practice in the ancient Greek poem The Iliad the only reference to writing is to an insightful tablet meant to ensure the death of its bearer upon its delivery in a more historical example the Greeks were also responsible for the first known system of military cryptography known as the Scytale this method was developed by the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War and consisted of a secret message written onto parchment that had been wrapped around a wooden staff when the parchment was unwound the disconnected letters would become unintelligible only regaining their coherency if wrapped around a staff of the same thickness Rowman field commanders would also imply ciphers to conceal their messages in his lives of the twelve Caesars the writer Suetonius details a cipher used by Julius Caesar himself wherein each letter of the alphabet was substituted for that free letters down in post Roman times the scholars of the Islamic caliphates were developed these ciphers further in 815 ad the Abbasid caliph al Mamoon established a center for translation in Baghdad fueling the pursuit of both secular and religious knowledge it was amongst this rush to acquire knowledge that the first major breakthrough in the art of code-breaking was made in the midnight century Abu Yussef Alcon D also known as the father of Arab philosophy discovered that variations in letter frequency could be exploited to break ciphers throughout the same time Western cryptography remained comparatively limited during the early Middle Ages most Western Critter graphic work comprised of monastic studies of in cyclamens contained within the biblical Old Testament the o is known Western work on cryptography wasn't composed until the 13th century when the philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon composed an epistle on the secret workings of art and the nullity of magic this manuscript detailed seven methods for encrypting a message and included the caution that a man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way the one which will conceal it from the vulgar over the next two centuries the use of ciphers were grow increasingly common in Western Europe Italy in particular became a hotbed of cryptographic development as competing city-states attempted to outmaneuver their neighbors by the 15th century ambassadors and diplomats would pass in ciphered messages to their respective heads of state us early alchemists and scientists would commonly incite for their work materials who disguised their ideas perhaps the most famous example of this can be found in the work books of Leonardo da Vinci which are in ciphered against casual eyes by a combination of mirror writing and abbreviations it is amongst this backdrop of secrecy and professional jealousy that we find what for a long time was considered the only mention of the Voynich manuscript prior to the 20th century it occurs in the form of a letter sent in 1665 by the bohemian doctor an alchemist yan merrick mercy to the Jesuits scholar and poem of Athanasius Kircher this letter remained within the manuscript for the next two and a half centuries and was stoven its cover when it came into Wilfrid Voynich his possession in it marci states that he is sending Kircher and in ciphered manuscript left to him by a late friend if we are to believe marci then this manuscript had been the object of obsessive and ultimately failed study by its late owner who had previously sent copies of the manuscript to Kircher for study after stating that he believed only Kircher would be capable deciphering the text he also passes on information he claims to receive from one doctor Raphael that the manuscript once belonged to the late emperor rudolf ii who he claimed paid the princely sum of six hundred ducats to acquire it Raphael also related to him the claim that the manuscript was composed by non over and the previously mentioned Roger Bacon a claim on which Marcy declines to pass judgment this letter apparently went without reply from Kircher despite the existence of two follow-up letters sent on Marcy's behalf by a colleague Godfried Kiner until the late 90s this letter formed the core of knowledge on the early history of the Voynich manuscript between them they pinpoint their likely locations of the manuscript at this time first in 17th century Bohemia then at the Collegio Romano in Rome where Kircher taught and conducted research until his death indeed it is knowledge of this second location that has allowed researcher to track the manuscript all the way to its current location but this letter leaves open several questions who was the previous owner that Marcy mentions if the manuscript had indeed belong to rudolf ii then how had this philia owner acquired it and what previously led rudolf to seek it out and crucially is there any truth to the claim that Roger Bacon was the author behind the manuscript well thanks to a number of discoveries over the last two decades we can now answer most of these questions let's start with the identity of the earlier owner mentioned in Marcy's letter for a long time it was theorized that this owner was a man by the name of George s barcia's a minor Alchemist who had served as a legal official at the Prague Court of Justice indeed it was known that after his death sometime before 1665 he had left his alchemical collection and library to his friend Marcy were likely also inherited the manuscript at this point however this Fred wasn't for he confirmed until 1999 when coaches for correspondence was published online included amongst this correspondence was a letter that had indeed been written by barcia's dating from the 12th of April 1639 the letter is written in a tone that its translator thought Neil described as self-important and pompous in it bash is compliments Kershaw on his recent publication of a dictionary of the Coptic language only to rapidly switch to outlining his difficulties in decoding a manuscript in his possession he goes on to detail the manuscript at some length with the description he provides closely matching that of the Voynich manuscript quote from the pictures of herbes of which there are great many in the Codex and of varied images stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism it is my guess that the whole thing is medical the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls throughout the remainder of the letter he expounds on his theories as to what it may contain and begs Kircher to apply himself to its solution in aid of this barcia's also seems to have enclosed partial copies he had made at the manuscript noting that he had done the same in prior correspondence with Kircher perhaps unsurprisingly given a lightest tone Kirchen never seems to have replied the copies of the manuscript made by barcia's and now lost and until recently the same was assumed to be true of bashers his earlier attempt at contacting Kircher however in the late 2000s czech historian Joseph smolka discovered that cursor had in fact replied to barcia's as previous inquiries which were passed to him by the mathematician Fyodor Metis it was his return latitude emeritus that likely sparked barcia's his second attempt at correspondence which came only six weeks after coach's reply in this letter kocha replies somewhat coolly that the manuscript would take no great work of genius on his behalf to decipher but that he was busy with far more pressing tasks this response is perhaps to be expected given what we know of coach's life simply put at this time Kircher was indisputably the preeminent scholar of his day pursuing a wide range of interests included pioneering studies into Egyptian hieroglyphics microbiology geology and fossils structure over the course of his life he also maintained a wide-ranging correspondence with important rulers of the time including the Holy Roman emperors Ferdinand the second and third along with several popes as such he like who would have considered an unsolicited cypher posed to him by an obscure bohemian alchemists to be of low priority Kircher may also been motivated by his known distaste for alchemy and its practitioners though Marcy did his best to assure Kircher of barcia's as good intentions in a letter of his own sent a year later furthermore from the date of barcia sirs letter we now know the likely reason for him refusing to send the manuscript to kurtter at this time as their correspondence took place in the final stages of the 30 Years War thirty years war was up to that point the most damaging conflict in European history its origins lay in the mid-sixteenth century emergence of the Protestant Reformation which by the early 17th century had spread throughout much of the Holy Roman Empire throughout this time religious tension had slowly built up between the Catholic and Protestant Prince's or successive emperors pursued policies of benign neglect hostilities had already broken out by 1618 but the true flashpoint for the war came a year later when the new holy roman emperor ferdinand ii a devout catholic attempted to enforce religious uniformity throughout the empire the result of all this was a war that would eventually pull in most of Europe's leading powers and that led to widespread violence famine and a general collapse of order throughout most of Germany this collapse in order is perhaps what bashes himself refers to when he states it would be unwise to commit the book itself to a journey so long and full of perils by 1665 however the situation in Europe had stabilized and it seems Marcy was more than happy to dispatch the manuscript on the long journey from Prague to Kircher in Rome so we now have the identity of the mysterious owner that Marcy refers to in his letter but how exactly did this barcia's come into the possession of the Voynich manuscript if we accept the words of this dr. raphael that it once belonged to the emperor rudolf ii and how exactly did it come to be owned by a comparatively minor official well to answer these questions we must start by examining rudolf himself and what factors may have led him to first purchase the Voynich manuscript only Tolo it fall into the hands of an unknown alchemists born in 1552 rudolf ii was at the moment of his birth the heir to one of history's greatest dynasties as a member of the powerful Habsburg family he was directly in line to inherit the lands of Bohemia Hungary Croatia and Austria was also a prime candidate for the imperial throne itself but despite his high birth Rudolf seems to have been a melancholy child a characteristic likely enhanced by peers of estrangement between his parents Archduke Maximilian of Austria and arched @just Maria of Spain life was complicated further for Rudolf when at the age of 11 he was sent to be educated in Spain then ruled by his uncle thought the second these years in the highly conservative Spanish Court would prove formative for Rudolf instilling in him a manner that contempor is described as aloof and secretive in 1571 is father Maximilian now the Holy Roman Emperor would recall him to Vienna where he was made Co ruler in his father's realms five years later Maximilian died suddenly of a heart complaint and the 24 year old Rudolf succeeded him as Emperor on paper his father's death now made rudolph the most powerful man on the continent ruling over most of central europe in reality however is afford to remained unquestioned only in his hereditary domains of austria bohemia and the western parts of Hungary and Croatia elsewhere in the Empire his authority was far less certain in Germany his power had to compete with that of the regional princes whilst in the kingdom of Italy the power of the Emperor had been curtailed since the early 15th century when it came to the exercise of power however Rudolf seems to have had little interest basing himself out of Prague he spent most of his reign neglecting state affairs instead focusing his attention on scholarly pursuits over the course of these pursuits he would collect a circle of male favorites whilst also making repeated purchases of books on alchemy and occultism often paying far more than the six hundred ducats he has claimed to have spent on the Voynich manuscript luckily for us the ledgers in which these purchases were recorded still exists though they're careful study has not yet revealed any purchase that matches the Voynich manuscript however it should be noted that these Ledger's do not contain the large numbers of our chemical works that Rudolf is known to possessed and amongst which manuscript is likely to have been housed many of the entries in these Ledger's also refer to multiple volumes and it remains possible that the manuscript was purchased at this time as part of a larger collection in addition there is another piece of evidence found within the Voynich manuscript itself that ties it more directly to rudolph it appears in the form of a badly faded signature written in the bottom margin of the first folio so faded was this signature and it initially went unnoticed by Wilfrid Voynich upon his acquisition of the manuscript it wasn't until sometime after 1914 that he was able to enhance it with the application of an unknown chemical this signature was further enhanced by ultraviolet viewing in the late 2000s and has now been confirmed to be that of one yak verse halt chicha date a panic an early 16th century alchemist of some repute after receiving a Jesuit back to education in chemistry or chicha was sent to the Clemente M in Prague where he quickly made a name for himself as a talented pharmacist by 1607 his fame had grown such that he was called to the court of rudolf ii who named him imperial chemist here Howe teaches true rise began as he rapidly became a favorite of the reclusive emperor in 1609 he is traditionally considered to have cured rudolf of a grave but unspecified illness an act for which he was rewarded the noble title day a panic we also know that it was around this time he acquired the Voynich manuscript perhaps as a gift from his patron upon receiving the manuscript or chicha promptly signed his name inside the first page an act he is known to have performed for each book that came into his possession after this the manuscript presumably remained in his possession until his death in 1622 when it passed to Bash's by uncertain means the result of all this is that we now have a rough chronology of the Voynich manuscript earliest owners after being purchased by rudolf ii at some unspecified point in his reign was then either gifted or fell into the possession of his favorite yacouba's hall teacher after hot teachers death the manuscript made its way into the hands of Baris though exactly how remains uncertain upon his own death sometime in the mid 17th century barcia's in turn left the manuscript and the rest of his effects to Marcy until this point the manuscript seems to have remained with him Prague but Marcy would change this when in 1665 he sent the manuscript to Kircher in Rome from the tone of two later letters sent on Marcy's behalf by his friend Gottfried Kiner we can deduce that the manuscript made the journey unscathed however there is no evidence that Kircher made any further attempts to decode it and that likely remained untouched in his library until his own death in 1680 from here we enter a period of uncertainty for the Voynich manuscript over the next two centuries its whereabouts are only vaguely known while specific owners are difficult to come by one thing we can say for certain however is that with the deaths of bashes Marcy and Kircher the first serious attempts to decode the manuscript came to an end from this point onwards there is no knowledge of any attempt to decode the manuscript nor would there be for more than 200 years before we explore this period let us first consider the other end of the timeline with the discovery of these earlier letters it might have been hoped that they would hold some clue as their manuscripts origins but when it comes to who sold the manuscript to Rudolf the trail falls cold as detailed before the only known reference to its purchase comes to us from Marcy's 1665 letter by the way of a man he identifies as one dr. Raphael this man has since been identified as dr. Raphael me rosovsky who served at the Czech language tutor to Ferdinand the 3rd and who would have been familiar with Marcy from the Prague High Court where they both worked as officials during the early 17th century it is this Raphael that provided the first known claim of Roger Bacon's authorship a claim that Marcy may have repeated in his letter in order to entice coach's interest this is because by the 17th century Roger Bacon's reputation had changed dramatically among scholars originally a philosopher and natural scientist whose work had covered a wide range of interests by the early modern period bacon had been recast as a magician and a holder of secret knowledge during this time he was most famous for his association with a story of a brazen head which had supposedly created using mechanical or even necromantic powers according to the story this head could answer any questions asked of it with its speech being powered by what was described as an effusion of vapors this claim of Roger Bacon's ownership would have a significant effect on the early 20th century attempts to decipher the manuscript and would remain a widely accepted theory than many decades afterwards as enticing as this claim is it is dr. Raphael's of the claim that is of interest to us here according to Marcy Raphael told him that Rudolph purchased the manuscript from an unnamed messenger over the years a number of proposals have been put forward unto this person's identity the most popular theory by far is that the manuscript was delivered to Rudolf by the English occultist and philosopher John Dee who visited Prague in the 1580s and was at one point thought to have corresponded with the Emperor an alternative but similar hypothesis instead placed ownership of the manuscript on Dee's colleague Edward Kelly who accompanied him to Prague and with whom he collaborated during his magical studies Kelly was an occultist and self declared media with a habit of making outlandish claims regarding his our chemical abilities and whose ears had previously been cropped for forgery as a result of his presence alongside Dee some scholars have theorized that the Voynich manuscript is nothing more than an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the to which they supposedly crafted to resemble a medieval manuscript then fooled the emperor into purchasing as enticing as it is there are problems of this theory we now know that these links were far less developed with the emperor than had previously been supposed in fact during their time in Prague D is known to have made a poor impression on the famously stiff rudolph whose patronage he failed to secure furthermore there is no mention of the transaction indies famously detailed Diaries nor indeed is there any reference the manuscript itself other scholars have also pointed to the possession by d of 630 ducats upon his leaving prague along with reminiscences by DS son alpha of his father owning a book of hieroglyphics during his days in prague however a more thorough reading of DS diaries shows that he actually had an excess of 2,000 ducats in his possession at this time with the 630 ducats being a sum he handed over to his rival in front of witnesses in addition a hieroglyphic manuscript owned by d has since been located known as the book of soy ger it consists of a 16th century treatise on magic and contains 36 large tables of letters that d was unable to decipher this manuscript was considered lost until the mid-90s when two copies of the manuscript were discovered in the british museum the text of this manuscript has since been published and thanks to the work of researcher Jim reeds its ciphers broken nonetheless suspicion has remained on Edward Kelly who successfully secured Rudolph's patronage in 1590 at which point he dispensed with thee despite these suspicions recent forensic evidence as effects we ruled out a 16th century origin point for the manuscript for the moment we are left with a likely but unsatisfying explanation put forward by Voynich scholars dr. rafael Pinker and dr. Rene's an Bergen that the Voynich manuscript likely sat in some German or Italian monastery until it was noticed and picked up by one of Rudolph's emissaries so for the moment we have hit a dead end in tracing the origins of the Voynich manuscript became at the menu script on the other end of our timeline after coach's death well as mentioned before this is where things become a little vague we know that after his death coach's library and archives were housed at the Collegio Romano in Rome over time many of his former books and manuscripts would be split up amongst other collections but despite this scholars are confident the Voynich manuscript remained at the Collegium the main evidence for this location is again found within the binding of the manuscript itself originally the manuscript was bound onto a series of wooden boards as was the style of most medieval manuscripts however between 1824 and 1870 large numbers of the manuscripts held at the Collegium were rebound it appears that the Voynich manuscript was no exception as its current part from binding strongly resembles that of the other items within the collection the missing page of the manuscript may also have been lost at this time aside from this rebinding the manuscript seems to have gone as little interest in the two centuries that followed coach's death going largely unnoticed within the Collegium library it may have remained this way if it wasn't for a drastic change in the political landscape of Italy a change that would soon break the power of the Jesuits in Rome in the decades leading up to the 1870s European politics have been characterized by an upswell of national movement after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 the victorious great powers met at the Congress of Vienna where they attempted to revert Europe to estate resembling that prior to the French Revolution Italy was no exception and it was soon returned to the patchwork of states that had been comprised of prior to the 1790s however one of the side effects of Napoleon's Italian conquests with the increasing emergence of an Italian national identity which in turn fueled political groups set on unification by the 1860s these groups have become full-scale revolutionary movements and over the next decade a series of independence wars would result in a unified country under the leadership of King Victor Emmanuel ii of sardinia piedmont these wars culminated in 1870 with the fall of the city of rome two italian forces a move which ended is in poor power of the Pope the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano are amongst the first fill the wrath of the New Kingdom of Italy in 1873 its buildings and library were Sakurai's by the new authorities along with all of the Society's other possessions at this point the Voynich manuscript could easily have fallen into the hands of the Italian government however the Jessup's were able to exploit a loophole that allowed them to save a portion of their collection by attaching slips of paper bearing the name of the Jesuit general to the top of as many manuscripts as possible they ensured that these volumes would be treated as his own private library and thus avoid confiscation after this the exact location of the manuscript becomes unclear it was most likely part of a collection of classical manuscript moved out of Rome at this time who is most likely repository we netted a billet ellonija in Castel Gandolfo this however would change sometime after 1903 when the Jesuit Order inted negotiations to sell the collection to the Vatican as with the Italian government before it the Voynich manuscript could have easily disappeared into the Vatican archives where it may have remained unknown to this day but whatever the manuscripts presumed fate at this point its sale would be interrupted by the intervention perhaps the managed its most colorful owner his road to ownership of the manuscript was a complicated one but through the publicity courted the manuscript would soon be brought to worldwide attention [Music] born in 1865 in the lethwei nian town of Tel che then part of the Russian Empire Mikhail hab that voyage gave every indication of being a gifted child throughout the course of his earlier life he would study law and in chemistry and the universities of Warsaw st. Petersburg and Moscow the last of which he would graduate from in 1884 alongside his studies he was also increasingly drawn into the Polish nationalist movement after graduating in 1884 Voynich returned to Warsaw where he joined the social revolutionary party proletariat by 1886 the Zara's police caught up with him whereupon he was arrested and exiled to Siberia despite its hardships this period of Exile proved to be a valuable period of study for Voynich a later described it as his second University in 1890 however he escaped from siberia later claiming to have fled first to Mongolia and China before finally reaching Hamburg five months later there he would barter his few remaining possessions including his waistcoat and his glasses in return for passage to England arriving in London in October 1894 niche soon found his position much improved adopting the name of Ivan Cal chefs key he quickly integrated into the Polish exile community here he became part of the inner circle have one Sergey Crafton ski one of the leading opponents of the Czarist regime better known by his alias Stempniak krichinsky would introduce voyage to the world of books owned by making him the business manager of the Russian Free Press fund which published revolutionary propaganda throughout Russia was also through Stempniak that Voynich made his entrance into the highest circles of English society where he would meet his future wife the novelist Ethel ball within a few years however Voynich was drifting away from the revolutionary cause this estrangement came about through disagreements with other members of the fund which Czarist secret police reports from the time note were fueled by varnishes own rude and overbearing behavior soon these disagreements had become irreconcilable in 1894 Voynich resigned from the fund after which he seems to abandon active participation in the revolutionary calls instead he focuses efforts on a new venture building on his experience as a bookseller he swiftly moved into the antiquarian book trade in 1894 he was able to set up a shop of his own on Soho Square likely funding the venture using the profits that effort was now bringing in through her career as a popular novelist from here Voynich would quickly build a reputation as one of the leading members of his trade the key to his success became his regular buying trips to the continent where he was able to obtain large numbers of manuscripts at a discount price over the next 10 years his business would expand rapidly in 1902 he and Ethel were married after ten years of living together as husband and wife two years later or in each successfully applying for British citizenship whereupon he adopted the first name of Wilfred by 1905 he was able to move his shop to larger premises on Shaftesbury Avenue where he adopted as his device an image of a cat playing with a mouse recollections by contemporaries from this time paint a vivid portrait of Voynich as a habitual chain-smoker liable to suddenly explode in anger at his employees only to immediately apologize an attempt to placate his target with an invitation to lunch by the early 1900's boy niches success had led to a change in his business practice shifting his attentions away from the cheaper items with which he had built his success he instead turned his focus towards high end of luminate and manuscripts it is somewhere around this time that he became aware of the collection of documents the jesuits order was in the process of selling to the Vatican and somehow managed to insert himself into this negotiating process little is known about what these negotiations entailed other than that they were conducted in intense secrecy finally after nine years of bargaining Voynich was allowed to purchase several items from the collection amongst these items listed quite simply as a miscellaneous 15th century manuscript was the enigma to which he would one day lend his name over the next decade the cipher manuscript became the focus of voyagers fascination throughout this time he gradually sold off the other manuscripts in the collection earning a small fortune for his patients of these documents he came to refer to the cipher manuscript as the ugly duckling believing that his decipherment would transform it into a high-demand item he was aided in this conclusion by his discovery of Marcy's original letter to Kircher tucked into the manuscripts cover which contained dr. Rafael's claims that the manuscript had been written by Roger Bacon focusing on this information warned it would suggest the 13th century origin for the manuscript a point that would be accepted uncritically by scholars for decades to come in aid of establishing this fact Voynich reached out to one William remain newbould who at the time was professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania newbold was equally fascinated by the manuscript and in 1919 he began the first serious attempt to decipher its text since Johan Massey sent the manuscript to Kircher over 250 years prior by 1921 Newbold had produced what he believed to be the key to unlocking the manuscript that same year he in voyage presented a provisional reconstruction of the manuscript to a meeting of the American Philosophical Society where they endorsed the theory of Roger Bacon's authorship a nationwide lecture tour would soon follow during which new board expounded on his decipherment and briefly guarded himself a modicum of fame over the businessman Voynich also sought to maximize the manuscripts public profile during this time by now he had grown convinced that the manuscript held secrets of world shattering importance as shown by comments he made to an interviewer from the New York Times quote when the time comes I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of 20th century Sciences end quote despite this publicity the manuscript failed to entice buyers like we do to the hundred thousand dollar price tag that Voynich demanded moreover new boards decipherment claims so boldly stated at the time would soon come under serious scrutiny by the wider academic community towards the end of his life even Voynich must have known that new balls decipherment was a false one by this time however he had larger concerns to manage as his business was beginning to run into difficulties [Music] you after the outbreak of World War one in 1914 when it should found himself unable to make the regular visits to the continent that his business required and in order to compensate he had switched much of his focus to the American antiquities market that same year he opened a second store in New York and after a rocky start this new source of trade began to pay dividends after the end of the war in 1918 Voynich returned to his itinerant lifestyle shuttling regularly between the US and Europe around the same time his wife f4 settled down in New York from which point onwards she and her husband seemed to have led separate lives Voyager's business affairs and personal life stead came to be managed by his secretary a woman by the name of an nil who had also cohabit with Ethel after her husband's death this state of affairs continued successfully for much of the next decade however in the late 1920s the antiquities trade would be hit hard by the sudden onset of the Great Depression Voyager sales quickly ground to a halt and the company's growing debt forced him to Stonewall his creditors increasingly urgent demands for repayment these problems were only complicated further by his growing ill health which was exacerbated by a combination of his heavy smoking and the chronic tuberculosis that he contracted in the Czarist prisons decades prior despite these hardships Voyager's interest in the cipher manuscript remained as strong as ever in the final year of his life he even made special arrangements regarding its future in his will he appointed a five-member committee to oversee its future sale in which he included both Ethel and ham nil alongside free academic advisors these arrangements prove timely as in 1929 when it would be stricken by a bout of pneumonia whilst visiting England on March 19 1930 Wilfred McHale Voynich passed away aged 64 four months later f'l wrote the letter that was found enclosed with the manuscript after her death in it she outlined the known history of the manuscript and the circumstances under which her husband had acquired it after writing on the envelope that it should only be opened after her death she deposited bophit in the manuscript in a safe deposit box on Fifth Avenue upon his death Wilfrid Voynich his estate was split between f4 Voynich and Han nil who had remained companions for the remainder of Ethel's life in order to save at least some of Voynich his business they decided to wind down the London store afterwards they continued to manage the New York store with moderate success for the rest of Ethel's life for the next three decades fo nan would also remain the primary custodians of the cypher manuscript under the condition stipulated in Voynich as well the manuscript could only be sold to a public institution to whom its enormous price tag would likely have been daunting as a result of this the cypher manuscript remain within the bank vault until Ethel's death in 1960 after which an nil inherited her share in the manuscript the next year she finally succeeded where the Voyageurs could not selling the manuscript though for less than a quarter of the original $100,000 price later that same year and nil passed away at the age of 67 the new buyer was an Austrian book dealer by the name of hands Pete Krause who had long been fascinated by the Voynich manuscript in order to acquire it he pledged a half share in any future profit generated by the manuscript along with a down payment of twenty four thousand five hundred dollars perhaps with recouping this sum in mind he advertised the manuscript for sale in his catalogue one hundred had the princely sum of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to his surprise there were no buyers quote I felt like Voynich who had held the manuscript for such a long time dozens of scholars wanted to see it others asked for photos institutions asked to have it on loan I had to decline all such requests to preserve its commercial value there were no buyers end quote Krauss would spend the next seven years attempting to sell the manuscript a task he would ultimately find impossible by 1969 he had given up that year he donated the manuscript to Benecke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale University where it has remained the center of study for the last 50 years so after all this long and storied history what might the manuscript actually say we've covered the early efforts of both bashes and Johan Massey to decipher its text along with their failed attempts to engage a ferocious Kircher in that pursuit but what of modern efforts in that regard as William Sherman states in his 2016 essay the Voynich manuscript has attracted an extraordinary range of scholar adventurers over the last century often these adventurers have been amateurs more interested in conspiracy theories than actual decryption but along the way the manuscript has also attracted serious cryptographically interest often by the greatest minds of their day let's start with the earliest of these efforts that of William newbold in the 1920s as we detailed before he presented a draft translation of the manuscript alongside Voynich in 1921 where he confirmed his belief in Roger Bacon's alpha ship on its face new bells translation lied on a combination of a medieval cypher known to have been used in Bacon's alchemical manuscripts new board also convinced himself that this scythe was supplemented by a far more complicated system one that relied on widespread use of letter transposition anagrams and microscopic notation upon its initial announcement this system received sympathetic treatment by John Matthews manly a renowned medievalist working at the University of Chicago at that time manly was considered one of the world's premier code breakers having served as a US Army cryptographer during World War one however after new boards death his working papers were published prompting manley to take a more detailed look in the late 1920s he would change his position writing a scathing critique of new boards decipherment in a series of articles printed in both popular periodicals and academic journals quote I could not believe that a man with intelligence enough to construct so complicated Seifer who construct one that could not be trusted to convey his messages inevitably and unmistakably that absolute sources of interpretation was one of the first essentials of a good cipher and that inasmuch as experience has shown even a group of less than 50 letters can be arranged in several thousand different ways all forming intelligible human speech end quote this critique successfully discredited new bold proposed translation however this failure on new boards behalf would bear fruit in the decades ahead during the early stages of his critique of new boards work manly reached out to a colleague to help confirm his assessment this colleague was William F Friedman dubbed the world's greatest code breaker by historian David Kahn Friedman had served as the US Army's top code breaker during World War one and in 1925 manly puts him in direct contact with Wilfrid Voynich as we have so many before him Friedman was intrigued by the manuscript over the next 40 years he would undertake an intermittent study of its contents one that was marked by frustration in 1939 this study was interrupted by the outbreak of World War two during which Friedman formed a group of 16 US cryptologists with the goal of breaking the Japanese war codes by the end of 1940 the code was cracked and Friedman's team were free to devote their time to less urgent projects in 1944 he initiated what is still considered the most professional attempt at deciphering the manuscript known to Voynich scholars as the first study group but despite the wealth of expertise on hand no breakthrough was made and in 1946 Friedman and the rest of his team word immobilized Friedman would spend the rest of his life attempts to set up a second study group but ultimately his attempts would fail by the end of his life he had abandoned the idea of the Voynich manuscript being a cipher at all and after his death his final conclusion was revealed in an essay to the journal theological quarterly quote the Voynich manuscript was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori kind end quote despite Friedman's disillusionment with the manuscript of the scholars continued to work on it around the same time as Friedman a scholar named Theodore Peterson from the Catholic University of America obtained a photostatic copy of the manuscript from Ethel Voynich using this copy he combined a full transcript to the manuscripts alphabet in 1944 though crucially this remained unpublished until after his death another partial transcription was produced during this time by cryptologist Prescott courier in 1976 it was courier who also produced the first furrow computer analysis of the manuscript demonstrating what he claimed were two separate languages within the manuscript the 1970s would also bring a range of outlandish claims regarding the manuscripts content in 1978 John Stojko announced that he had broken the manuscript cipher if we are to believe his claims then the Voynich manuscript is actually a Ukrainian text devoted to Slavic theology with its illustrations being unrelated to the text a decade later Leo levitoff would come forward with a simile fantastical claim according to his translation that manuscript is written in a modified form of Flemish and contains the sole surviving document of the Cathars a persecutor Christian sect that existed between the 12th and the 14th century unsurprisingly both translations were swiftly condemned by the larger voyage community except for these claims cryptographic interest in the manuscript had begun to wane by the late 1980s however a new invention would soon lead to a dramatic revival of interest in the manuscript and lo a new generation of cryptologists to tackle its secrets this same invention known as the Internet would also spread knowledge of the manuscript to a wider audience than ever before in 1991 a computer specialist in crypto analyst by the name of James gyoji set up the email discussion list Voynich at Rand dot-org being joined in the endeavour by cryptography specialist James reeds and Michael row using Korea's earlier transliteration the three of them produced an electronic version of the manuscript which was made publicly available a year later Friedman's own transcription was discovered and in 1996 researchers Gabriel andini and Renee's and Bergen initiated the European Voynich manuscript transcription project this project developed a new transliteration alphabet for the manuscript known as evey a which made the text pronounceable in English for the first time by the end of the 1990s Xan Burgin London and the Brazilian researcher by the name of Hogg a stole fee would also start to delve into the historical background of the manuscript collaborating with translator Philip Neel it was there you successfully unearthed Kercher's later letters eventually their findings outgrew the mailing list and in 2004 ranae's and bergen set up a website to document them www that voyage but I knew this website remains to this day the most complete online repository on the topic so here we end the winding road of attempts to decipher the Voynich manuscript beyond this point theories and hypotheses regarding the manuscripts content multiplied almost exponentially and it would be impossible to document them all here the reality however is that no widely accepted translation of the whole text has been produced and that for the moment we are no closer to cracking the manuscript cipher than its earliest owners were three centuries ago but putting this vast multitude of theories aside what can we definitively say about its origins thanks to modern forensic techniques the answer is more than might be expected let's start with the materials at the manuscript itself as we mentioned before the Voynich manuscript is written on medieval parchment this would have been made by soaking animal skins in a bath of lime after which the skins would have been stretched out and scraped with a knife until they were smooth in 2009 four small sections of this parchment were sent to the accelerator mass spectrometry lab at the University of Arizona where they underwent carbon-14 dating all four samples gave matching results with 95% certainty we now know that the parchment of the Voynich manuscript originates somewhere between 1404 and 1438 this finding is important for three reasons firstly it allows us to definitively eliminate the possibility of Roger Bacon's authorship and it also casts further doubt on the involvement of either John D or Edward Kelly it also makes it less likely that the manuscript was a fraud perpetrated by Voynich himself as it would've been extremely difficult to gather such a quantity of matching medieval parchment with which to fashion such a fraud most importantly however it gives us a rough time frame for the manuscripts creation information that may one day prove the key to fill in the missing holes in his history but despite these findings we still can't narrow down the exact origin point of the manuscript by this point it had been long conjectured that the Voynich manuscript had a southern European origin point due to one of the illustrations hidden within the bottom portion of what has been termed the rosette fold-out here a drawing of a castle is visible with a strange series of Swallowtail battlements which resembled those of northern Italian castles of the 14th and 15th centuries this illustration was enough for some researchers suggest a northern Italian origin point during the 15th century goatskin was the primary material used for manufacturing parchment in this region and to confirm whether this was the material used to produce the Voynich manuscript amino acid sequencing work was conducted at the University of York here 10 separate samples of the meniscus parchment all gave the same conclusive answer the Voynich manuscript is written on calf skin now unlike goat skin calf skin was widely used as a writing material throughout most of Europe unless it cannot be used to narrow down the manuscripts parchment to one particular origin point unfortunately for us the additional forensic data that has been gleaned from the manuscript does little to alter this situation the text of the manuscript has been determined to have been written in iron gall ink it was commonly used throughout Europe during both the Middle Ages and Renaissance multispectral imaging work has similarly failed to uncover any hints in the pigments of the illustrations themselves for the moment all that we can say with certainty is that the manuscript was likely created somewhere in northern Europe during the early 15th century that we cannot rule out that the text itself could have been composed later so what might the Voynich manuscript actually say well the answer is probably a disappointing one from the nature of its illustrations it seems likely that the Voynich manuscript is a simple medical work book likely created by a 15th century practitioner hoping to protect the secrets of his trade he wrote them down in a language of his own devising never realizing that in doing so he was creating one of the great mysteries of human history this theory is a mundane one but thanks to a new discovery all indications are that it is correct I chose to omit this piece of evidence earlier but there is in fact one small portion of the Voynich manuscript that many scholars agree has been translated and it supports this theory this text appears as a note at the very end of the manuscript on folio 116 v according to your hands Albus who presented the solution on the centenary of voyagers original purchase of the manuscript this section is written in a combination of abbreviated Latin and medieval German and outlines a traditional wound plaster made from goat's liver this conclusion is supported by the presence of a small drawing of a goat in the margin next the text though it should be noted that not all scholars agree with this translation crucially this section also contains two characters from the main voyage text though this translation has yet to result in the decoding of the main text but as mundane as the manuscripts content may prove to be this hasn't stopped it from capturing the popular imagination to this day the Voynich manuscript remains one of vales most popular online attractions with a digital version of the manuscript accounting for eleven percent of traffic to its digital library in popular culture the manuscript has also inspired a multitude of fantasy and science fiction novels along with popular TV shows and even symphony orchestras in a late 1970s the artist Luigi Serafini was inspired by the manuscript to produce his own cipher document known as the Codex Serra Phinehas it to contains a large number of surreal and often fantastical imagery alongside copious amounts of false writing with all of this continuing interest it seems likely that the Voynich manuscript will one day be cracked and its secrets divulged upon the world until then it remains one of the Holy Grails of cryptography and a powerful symbol of knowledge hidden in plain sight [Music] [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 1,206,468

Rating: 4.8331666 out of 5

Keywords: History, Documentary, Voynich Manuscript, Voynich, Mystery, Weird, Secret, puzzle, conspiracy, Lucas King, Histocrat, John Dee, Edward Kelley, Rudolf II, Emperor, Holy Roman Empire, Italy, cipher, codebreaking, Athanasius Kircher, Napoleon, Egypt, babylon, Leonardo Da Vinci, Abbasids, WWI, World War 1, WWII, World War II, Congress of Vienna, Unification, Bohemia, Russian Empire

Id: UZEHBkBlalc

Length: 69min 44sec (4184 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019