The Voynich Manuscript: An Intriguing Mystery in Codicology

The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most famous mysteries in ancient codicology or paleography. This illustrated manuscript, authored by an unknown writer and written in an undeciphered alphabet, takes its name from Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it from a Jesuit community in Frascati, near Rome, in 1912. It is currently housed at Yale University Library in the USA.

This manuscript was referenced as early as 1639 in a letter from Georg Baresch, an alchemist in Prague, to Athanasius Kircher, an encyclopedia-minded Jesuit. The letter reveals that it once belonged to Rudolf II, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. This naive and mystical emperor, who had a confused mind, was born in Vienna in 1552 and died in Prague in 1612, having paid six hundred ducats for the manuscript from an anonymous individual—typical of his behavior.

Radiocarbon dating of the parchment, made from vellum, has established limits between 1404 and 1438. A thorough study of the ink confirmed that the pigments are consistent with the era in question.

It remains unclear whether the manuscript is a herbarium, an alchemical treatise, or a hoax. It stands as one of the greatest mysteries of contemporary cryptography.

Characteristics of the Text

The codex consists of 234 pages, measuring 15 cm wide and 23 cm high. According to pagination, 13 folios are missing, having been absent even when Voynich acquired the manuscript. An goose quill was used to write the text and outline the figures forming the illuminations.

The text is written left to right, with visible paragraphs but no punctuation. The fluidity in the order and direction of the strokes that make up the letters suggests that the scribe understood what they were writing, although they were not a professional, as evident in the cramped line spacing. Consequently, the text was not written letter by letter, ruling out encryption.

The total count of glyphs in the text is estimated at around 170,000, composed of one or two strokes. The manuscript appears to use 20 to 30 script signs, though a dozen rare characters can be found sporadically.

The text exhibits characteristics typical of natural languages, including Zipf’s law (calculating word frequency) and the entropy of each word, averaging 10 bits, similar to texts in English or Latin.

Conversely, the manuscript diverges from European languages: there are no words shorter than three letters or longer than ten. The placement of letters within words is unusual for Europe, with certain characters occurring only at the beginning, others in the middle, and yet others at the end. This arrangement is similar to the Aramaic alphabet and its descendants—Arabic and Hebrew—but has no precedent in Greek, Latin, or Cyrillic alphabets. Some words appear consecutively three times, while others differ by a single letter with an unusual frequency. A gradual evolution in style is noted across different folios without an obvious reason for it.

The Illustrations

As the alphabet is unknown and the text undeciphered, exploring the illustrations is the only way to approach its origin. The robes, hairstyles, and two castles are distinctly identifiable and characteristic of Europe. After analyzing all these elements, experts have dated the book between 1450 and 1520. Nearly all pages contain illustrations, except for the last section, which is entirely text.

Six sections can be identified within the book, referred to as:

• Herbarium: 130 pages featuring 126 plants, presented in the style of the time.
• Astronomy: 34 pages, 26 of which contain drawings. Diagrams of celestial bodies, such as suns, moons, and stars, indicate the author discussed astrology or astronomy. 12 diagrams feature symbols of zodiac constellations, each surrounded by 30 female figures, mostly nude, holding a labeled star.
• Biology or Balneology: 19 pages with 28 drawings depicting nude women, some crowned, bathing in pools or swimming through a network of complex tubing resembling organs.
• Cosmology: 4 pages with incomprehensible meanings, which include fold-out sections. One fold-out consists of six pages with maps of nine islands interconnected by paths noting castles and a volcano.
• Pharmacology: 34 pages contain labeled drawings of plants. The figures depict various plant parts (root, leaf, etc.) alongside containers for pharmaceuticals. Text is sparse, resembling a guide for pharmacists preparing recipes!
• Recipes: 23 pages comprising 324 short and dense paragraphs.

Initial impressions suggest references to medieval medicine. The plants in the herbarium have rarely been identified (a violet pansy and a fern), as most are hybrids: roots from one species, stems from another, and leaves from a third. Furthermore, no one has managed to interpret the illustrations from an astrological perspective.

The relationship to alchemy, as known in that era, seems certain. However, it is not an alchemical book; rather, it represents the “elixir of long life,” a medieval recipe to create the Philosopher’s Stone. The fluids of young virgins yield “vital humors” that are collected and brewed with rare or unknown plants, with the optimal astrological position being essential for successfully crafting this elixir of long life…

Semantics and Linguistics

We know nothing about the language used, if it truly is a language, the speaker, or the encoding, if any exists! Under these conditions, deciphering or decrypting the manuscript is challenging.

Countless attempts have been made, all of which have failed. Even American cryptologist William Friedman, who cracked Japanese codes during the war, struggled with it. The implications are clear: no encoding, no encryption, no cipher… Otherwise, a talented scholar like Friedman would have undoubtedly found something, especially since he did not work alone but had a robust team experienced in such tasks. So? Could it be an exotic natural language? Having cracked the Japanese code, Friedman and his team considered this possibility but arrived at nothing. Furthermore, nothing indicates any connection to East Asia in the manuscript, which describes Europeans from a very specific period!

In January 2014, linguist Stephen Bax (who learned Arabic in Iraq) shared the status of his research on the manuscript. He employed the comparative linguistics method of Egyptologist Champollion, managing to decipher 14 letters. By comparing the plants in the herbarium with known comparable species in Europe and the East, he discovered that juniper is written as “oror” in the manuscript, corresponding to “a’ra’r” in Arabic. Thus, he achieved both the Voynich word translation and its pronunciation. Continuing his work on a plant called centaury, he successfully deciphered the Voynich word “kantairon” using the same method.

This initial step toward something concrete is promising but requires further exploration. Some have suspected a Middle Eastern origin for the manuscript’s author due to the letter placements within words. Conversely, the text is read left to right, as in all Indo-European languages. This raises the idea of a script invented by someone possessing both cultures: European Christian and Middle Eastern Islamic. This, of course, makes decryption more complicated.

However, we cannot overlook the peculiar characteristics of the manuscript’s text (duplication or triplication of words) and the bizarre content of its illustrations (the hybrid plants), which hint at a hoax—or perhaps a fraud.

British psychologist and linguist Gordon Rugg, a professor at Keele University (near Manchester), developed this idea. He demonstrated that the techniques of the time (i.e., the 15th century) could allow scholars with a strong mathematical background to create a text with certain statistical properties matching those of the manuscript… but not all!

It is worth noting that forgers Edward Kelley and John Dee invented Enochian, purported to be the language of angels with its own alphabet! This occurred in the sixteenth century, at the court of Rudolf II, as previously mentioned… They sold their manuscript to him for 600 gold ducats…

The fact that no linguist or cryptographer has been able to decipher the Voynich Manuscript to date suggests that the possibility of forgery cannot be dismissed. This is the most challenging hypothesis to accept for puzzle enthusiasts…

What if both possibilities converge? A sort of half-hoax created by a learned “Moor” who came to live in the West? Or by a “cultured Westerner” who spent many years in Arab lands? This would explain the encountered difficulties: mixing one (or more) Semitic language with entirely invented characters that signify nothing! I believe that this direction warrants investigation.

As for identifying the author! For all the reasons mentioned above, unless we find a written record somewhere, we must abandon this hope…