Thinking Sideways: The Voynich Manuscript

gonna do it. We've also gotten a lot of listener requests for longer shows, so just keep in mind, this is what you asked for. It is going to be a long one because ladies and gentlemen, what we're gonna talk about today is we're gonna talk about the Voyage Manuscript. And a lot of people have probably heard of the manuscript, but we're gonna we're gonna go through all of the details and you're gonna be really surprised at how much

there is. Uh To give it a basic overviews, the Voyage Manuscript is a book which is written in an unknown language and it's full of illustrations or maybe a known language, but we don't know what it is, but an unknown alphabet, that's possible. That's possible. Sorry, that's okay, let's strange code. Let's start with the history and talk about the book first. Probably the simplest place is probably

the beginning, the best place, Okay, the book itself. It's called the Voytage Manuscript because it was purchased by a man named Wilfred Voynage in nineve But it's been around for several hundred years, and we know some of the history, or people guests at some of the history, and well, I'll just dive right into the history. Somewhere between sixteen hundred to sixteen ten, it's believed that the book was

owned by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second. And this this would by the way, be well over a hundred years after it was created. Well, according to the theories that of the age of creation. Yes, so this is this is a partial history passed through a lot of famous hands. It has. From there it left the Emperor Rudolph the Second's hand and was owned but theoretically by his imperial distiller Um banned by the name of

Jacobus two Pensk's, which is an easy namesake. It ends in a seas, so I think I I nailed that between sixteen thirty to sixteen forty five. They think that a German Bohemian alchemist named Joey George Barresh owned it. Sixteen sixty five, it's believed that it was owned by Johannus Marcus Marci of kron Land. Yeah, wherever that is. Yeah, I tried to that that might actually be a store or not a country. Yeah, I went to the local chron Land. Yeah, yeah, he actually it was I read

about this. He was friends with George Barresh, and when Bresh died he willed the book to Marcy of kron Land. Yeah, and apparently he was friends with with Mr Kirscher, and Borresch had actually been in correspondence with Kersher because he thought, you felt that Kersher had had he had the smarts to actually decipher break this code. You're right, I remember reading that Kersher he was a very bright guy anyway.

But but so he actually he actually hand copied sections of the books of the book and wrote to alan As Kersher twice with these and asking him for his input. And Kersher wanted the book itself so you can look at it and and but Rash was never willing to

do that. But then when he died, he willed it to his friend Johanness marci And of kron Land the store, and he willed to him, who almost immediately gave it to Kirsher because he felt like Kirscher was the only guy who would be able to make hatcher tails out of it. That's okay. That that explains the gaps that I couldn't couldn't quite pin down Kirsher, Yeah, and wound up and wind with it. I guess it was destiny. Yeah, destiny For the next couple of centuries. We're talking two

d fifty plus years. We don't know where it was. It's believed that the Jesuits had it and that they moved it around Europe from place to place. Why or how is unknown. Well, they're pretty good at keeping records at saying we don't know if this is important or not, but it looks like might be, so we're going to just hang on to it. I just put in the back corner. Yeah, that's one of those thing. I can imagine myself just rooting around my basement two boxes and like, oh,

there is it. Wouldn't believe I was. I was down in my basement the other day this last weekend doing a little house cleaning and getting and going to stuff, and I found stuff I'd totally forgotten I ever owned. Yeah, it's like, oh wow, that's the joy of having a basement. Yeah, let's see from there. As we said, nineteen twelve, Wilfred Voyage purchases the book. We don't know where he gets it from, or I don't know. I know he purchased it, but I don't remember exactly where. I believe he bought

it in Italy, did he? Yeah, I'll run with that because I can't remember exactly where. When he died he gave it to He I believe, willed it to his wife Ethel, who then gave it to a woman named an Nil, who then sold it in nineteen sixty one to a man by the name of HP Krause. In nineteen s the Nine Crowds donated to Yale University's Binicky Rare Book and Manuscript Library. So Yale has it. So Yale has it today. They still have it today for now. Yeah.

So that's and that's where it is. That's where they're they've done a great job of getting good photos of it and making it available to everybody. But it's a several year old, hundred year old text, so we don't want everybody leafing through it kind of but it is. But I think it is available if you go in and your researcher of any kind. I know they've made it available to certain forensic scientists. They have you've got to have the credentials to prove that you can get

to it. You and I couldn't just walk in there and we have the credentials. The thing about it, I've looked at their photographs of the book online and it's very clear and you know, you can really great. Yeah, they've done a really good job, high detail and everything. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. All right. So we've talked about the history that we think we know that we're fairly that we yeah, we're fairly sure. People believe they figured it out.

Folks have tried to pinpoint where it might have and when it might have been made, and some of that they've done based on characteristics that are in the text itself. Let me just run through some of that. Uh. So, it has what they referred to as a upright handwriting style that's reminiscent of Carolinian minuscule, which evidently was in use from eight hundred to twel hundred. Or it's uh, there,

there's another it's it's Italian. How do you say that? Show? Okay, which I guess is called the Humanist hand, which was from fourteen to fifteen hundred, and the radio the carbon dating kind of puts it in that range as well. People have also said that the drawings have parallel hatching, and hatching is when you you draw a series of lines to infer shading, which is similar to you know, one of the first guys that really did a lot

of that is Da Vinci. If you look at a lot of old drawings, that's how he gave depth and shadows. You cross hatch in there. So people think that it could have been from his arrow, which would have been if it was made in Germany or that style came out, it would have been in Germany and around fourteen ten. If it was made in Florence it would have been fourteen forty, or if it was after fourteen fifty, then it could have been anywhere, because that style had gone

across Europe. It had gone viral. Yes, but so that's a pretty good solid like you know, sixty year seven year old window, right. Yeah. For for the cross hatching, yes, and for that that uh kind of matches with the hands for the Italian Yeah, for the Italian hands handwriting style, yes, it does. But we've also got some things some people who have owned the book have made notes on it and in the margin, and that handwriting seems to be

done in the style of the fifteenth century. So we're looking at the four hundreds and there's some of the other notes that are written on it, and this is primarily notes that are in the zodiac section. That style of handwriting. People have pointed to say is from the southwest of France, so there's a lot of different places that it could have been just based on basic facts.

So it's it's kind of hard to figure out. So it's a it's a it's a manuscript, and so it's like a book, yes, right, And it's um nine point three inches by six point four inches by two inches, right, so it's two inches thick thick, so not a big book though that's like a huge but it's not like one of those massive things you think about from life, which is because you look at the pictures and they

look really big. They do, Yeah, exactly, it's kind of blown up, but it's a little book, but it's it's hundreds of vellum pages, and vellum's pretty thin paper material. It's kind of see through almost a little bit too. So it's possible for there to be a lot of pages in a small amount of space, i e. Like old books, old bibles, things like that. You see it on a paper like that. Paper is valuable, so you gotta you gotta use as much of it as possible. Yeah,

and you know, make it as condensed as possible. So they're collected into eighteen what are called choirs, which are those little like fold like folded areas. Right. You know, when you look at a traditionally bound book, you know, if you look at it from the top, you notice that you have sections. Yeah, and those are folded over and stitched together and stitched together in one big book. Yeah. Those are the choirs, right, each one of them, each

one of those sections. Yeah. So depending on how some of the pages are folded or things like that, or how you count them, I guess it's about two and forty pages in total. Um. There's some numbering in the right hand corners of the right hand pages is which pretty much everybody agrees was done by somebody who owned it. So this is one of those people who after the fact owned Yeah, it wasn't done by the person who did it, but who was kind of maybe archiving it.

You know, they owned it. They were like, hey, we should probably number these pages. It might be they kept dropping the book and all the choirs would fall a party didn't. Yeah, he started. Yeah, so they are numbered one through a hundred and sixteen, but there's some number gaps, so people think that it's it's probably more like two hundred and seventy two pages originally altogether. Yeah, because there are there are missing pages and we don't know what's

supposed to be on them, right. And then Wilford Vointage, as we mentioned before, acquired the manuscript in nineteen twelve, and there's there's a lot of strong evidence that all all the different choirs have been kind of reordered, rearranging it the way they thought it should go. Understanding how that that's correct? Yeah, yeah, I mean you know that or that again. You know, you drop a book and you're like, I don't remember where everything goes I'm just

going to shove it back in. You know, it's been around for so long, it's it's quite possible it's been rebound several times since kind of fall apart. So interestingly, know if there's missing stuff, you know, and since it used to be in the hands of the Pope, it would be kind of cool to go through the Vaticans all their archives and see if the missing pages are there of similarities the Vatican. Dear Vatican, this is you've heard of us? Surely Pope frances his favorite podcast. Yeah.

Um So, anyways, back to the the story, um So, based on modern analysis, we pretty much know that it was written by a quill pen with iron gall ink for the text and the figure outlines, and then colored paint kind of like watercolor color paint. It's color was applied to the figures. Um And the book has been carbon dated to the early fifteenth century, so the early four hundreds. So that kind of corresponds with what we were talking

about with the history I bit as well. Okay, so I'm sure you guys want to know about the text itself. So it's it's clearly written from left to right. Uh, and so it's got a pretty pretty straight left margin and kind of a ragged right margin, which is what is to be expected, So that gives it's just probably more likely European than Semitic and origin. Some of the longer sections are broken into paragraphs, and some of them actually have bullet points that they're shaped like stars or flowers,

and there's no punctuation. And I've noticed as myself going through the text, it's like there's no obvious punctuation in there unless certain characters represent a period, but then we'd be seeing them consistently, and I'm not seeing that pattern. There's no indications of errors or corrections, so there's no no words that have been crossed out, there's no you know how you you do that little thing where you write the word above and there's a little va pointing

up to go. None of that going on. And and for as long as this text is, that's amazing. But I feel like that a lot. It happened a lot in those days, but you just like wrote it, and rewrote it, used the papers like write. I mean, yeah, I don't know how quickly Vellum absorbs in either, but from modern Vellum sucks inc in pretty quickly. Now, I don't know about you know, four years ago, how it was. I know that it pulls it in pretty quick. Yeah, well,

the old timing stuff. I was just wondering if the ink takes a while to soak in, and if you have to have a moment to wipe it off, if you make a mistake and then rewrite it, you might be able to blot it up. But I think you see that you'd see the Yeah, books back then were all handwritten. They didn't have the printing press writing. And I think often you see books that didn't have I mean, some of them did have mistakes in them, but some

of them didn't. And I think that's one of the intriguing things about this manuscript is that, you know, assuming that it is a real text, it may be suggests that there are other versions of it, or there were other versions. Yeah. I was gonna say, to have written it enough time just that you didn't make any errors anymore. Back in the day when monks would write the Bibles and they would eat, just sit down and make the same page over and over and over, you had to

write that thing a lot of times. But here's what I'll tell you is that having a job in which I often write the same thing over and over and over again. It's always like the fiftieth time that you make a mistake, right, It's never like the first time, because you're like on it, you're like the right way, you're really paying attention. And then it's like after you feel like you've written enough times that you like you have it is when you make the mistakes you get comfortable. Yeah,

you can do the cut and paste. Yeah, that's what I did in my job, a lot of boiler plate in my reports. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, okay, back to the text I do to you all the time, so no worries. So anyway, no indications of errors or corrections, and that might be significant. I'll talk about that later, but I'll hold you all a suspense for now. We're gonna talk about that after the commercial. Uh So, they're over a hundred and seventy thousand letters in this text.

They call them lifts that and there are thirty five thousand words of varying length in there, from a couple of letters to about ten. They're very simple pen strokes for the most part, so the words seem to follow like a phonological or orthographic law. This is linguistic stuff that I have a hazy understanding of it, meaning that certain characters appear in each word, like vowels. For example. You can't write an English letter without a word without a vowel, so so some vowels are going to just

have to be there. Uh. Some characters never follow others, Some always follow others. There's been a couple of in that I've noticed just from perusing the text, and always seem to go together. There's like Q in a year. There's yeah, exactly in this text there there are two letters. Then they might just be a single character too, but it looks like an L and an F, and they always follow each other, and so probably as it could

just be a single character. I don't know. But so the characters seem fairly simple, though I think you know right there they they are in one way, but in not another way. Yes, yeah, so anyway characters. Some characters always follow some characters and never follow other characters. Some can be doubled or tripled even, but others not. Some words only occur in certain sections, and some occur throughout the manuscript. And I've noticed as too, even though I

haven't read the whole thing. I spotted. I've sort of hopped around a little bit and looked at various pages, and I've noticed some words that appear a lot in some sections and not in others. So and it maybe possibly has something to do with the subject matter of the section. I'm not really sure. There aren't a lot of repetitions among the labels that are attached to the illustrations.

The illustrations themselves, even though there's much repetition in the text itself, there's not in the labels, which suggests that they're actually labels. Probably. Yeah, so, and and as Joe was kind of saying, there are different sections, they're actually six to print sections, and this is what we we've defined it as six sections. Yeah, they're fair I think, you know, as Joe is saying, there, they are fairly distinct,

at least with the illustrations. Um. And I think that's you know, the one thing that we can kind of know about this manuscript is we don't know what the words say anything like that, but we can look and say, oh, the drawings in this kind of group are all the same.

So we're going to say this is a section. So the six sections, there's an herbal section that has drawings of plants, uh, most of which are like really unidentifiable or kind of almost like impressionistic paint drawings of that because of the coloring, the way that it's coloring, but that they're also kind of straft yeah, stylized. I think

it's probably the best. Okay, it could be that it was they were drawn by somebody who couldn't draw, which would be interesting because it would mean there are multiple artists because some of the other drawings are like really good, really great. Then there's the astronomical section, which has illustrations

of the sun, moon, stars, and zodiac symbols. The so called biological section, which is kind of the most interesting and fascinating one because it's um got some weird kind of anatomical drawings with small female human figures populating systems of tubes and transporting green liquid from place to place. They also have a lot of Christian symbology mixed in

with them, and they look really European. And then we have the cosmological section, with mostly circular drawings that are kind of they've they're they're so far they're unexplained to me. It looks a lot like video game maps, right, like different worlds in a video game map, and they're like there's bridges in between some of them but not others, and they're all kind of circular and weird. I don't

know if that's just what it looks like to me. Uh. There's the pharmaceutical section, which is it's called that because it has drawings of containers which often have small plant parts like leaves or roots next to the containers. And recipe section, which consists mostly of like lots of short paragraphs um that have like weird star drawings in the margin. So it's definitely worth the time to go out and take a look at the pictures, indeed, and and they're

they're they're fascinating. I think we might have mentioned this already. But they believe that the color was added to the illustrations later on, and the research points out that they believe that they only had four I think it's four colors available, So every time there's a blue, it's the same blue, whether it's it's thinner or stronger, make it lighter or darker, but it's always the same blue or

the same green. So they didn't have a whole lot of colors available, which makes sense because you have to mix. You had to mix color by hand at that point, the same berries exactly, and it's not easy to make, so you use all of it and you just make as much as you need. You know. One of the things about the drawings and everything, it kind of makes me wonder is that, as you know, paper was probably

pretty scarce back in those days. I sort of wonder if somebody somebody was like making these sketches, somebody else came along and needed some paper to write on and just and just basically rode around these around these drawings. It was completely unrelated. And and then you know, somebody else came along later and did a little color and treated them like coloring books. I mean, it's always possible. Anything is possible when it comes to the voltage manuscribed,

it really is. And that's one of that, just as in the side. You know, we talked about the history before, but it's amazing how long people have been puzzling over this thing. Some of the people that like like Mr Marcy that we talked about earlier, that wouldn't turn it over to what's his name, Mr Kirch, Mr Kirshner or Mr Kerscher Uh, he spent twenty years trying to figure this thing out. People currently have spent longer. Yeah, and

it is perplexing. And the illustrations are interesting because typically there's one illustration per page, and as Joe was alluding to, it takes up the majority of the page. And if if we look at the plant one specifically, it's typically the entire plant from route to tips. So it's maybe they have a flower drawn here there that's kind of a highlight section, but most of it is just that one plant and then and that's why people believe that

they're the text is about those plants. Some of the other the other illustrations of the women that you were talking about before, a little more perplexing. I think the worse the really good explanation for that. I know we're going to get to Yes, we got to get to the series later. Let's let's let's talk really fast going through this description period. Yeah, because I know what people want to hear is all these jazzy, cool theories and

then they want us to solve this mystery. Well, that, my friends, is kind of the basic description of the Voytage manuscript. Again, I strongly encourage you to go look at pictures if you haven't already or look at more pictures.

Sure they're doing it right now because it's it's you can't describe it, and it's it is worth it to find the sites that have a lots of the images and be high quality versions, because if you look at them in say a news article, because there's been a lot of news articles about it lately, it doesn't do a justice. It's when you get one of those ones that you can zoom in multiple times and really see the detail. But that's why it really kind of gets in.

It's really intriguing at that point. Wait, this isn't just some crudely drawn thing. There's actually some decent detail in. There's really interesting stuff that obviously we all puzzled over it. But it's really interesting nonetheless. But it is that time, as always, where were going to everybody's favorite part, which theories,

And I've got the first theory, let's hear it. So our very first theory is that the Voytage Manuscript was written by Leonardo da Vinci in a private language, none other than Leonardo da Vinci as well, start off with the top work our way down from there, I gotta say from the start, though, that Leo was a better artist. Yes, okay. So here's here's the thing. People think, the folks that subscribe to this theory, they believe that da Vinci wrote this when he was a very young man, maybe a

teenager or just starting his career. But he hadn't really developed his system of of drawing. So this is very early on. So it's it's kind of it would be like looking somebody who was in a cubist movement, but looking at their early works when they were trying to figure out how to draw in a Cubist way. It's not as developed as the rest of his work. You just arend it out. I did. I totally aren't heerd it out. I can't help it. Da Vinci was known

for writing in semi coded ways. He made what is you may have heard of mirror script, and what it is is that if you took a piece of writing and you held it into against the mirror right now, you can't read it, But if you wrote it as if it was that mirror image, it looks like utter gibberish. Think about it. You write most people right, and they're writing tips to one side. The letters flow to the right.

In English, typically so if you were to start writing it from right to left and everything go to the other direction, we should qualify. It's not just English, it's anything that uses the European. Yes, European uses the Orian alphabet. Yes, I believe that's the proper phrase. But but at speaking of his mirror script, so did da Vinci use a mirror or did he simply learn how to write backwards? He learned how to write backwards, so he perfected it

so that he was writing it the wrong way. He was also known for writing with his right hand, but he was initially a Southpa. He was a lefty, and in that time if you wrote with your left hand, you were it was a sign of the devil, and anybody who wanted to write left handed learned to write

with their right hand. He rebelled against that later in his life and started and went back to using his left This theory which is primarily advocated by Edith Sherwood, she believes that this was something that he did when he was first learning to use to write with his right hand. How young is she saying that he would have been, I mean late teens, early twenties. The impression I got the thing that I The problem I have with this theory is that, first of all, the drawings

don't look like Leonardo Divinsion, you know. I mean, you can say, well, it was an early version of him, but they The thing about artists is it always kind of looks like that person. You tend to have a style. There's inherent things. Particularly in that time in his life,

he would have been much more advanced than this. It's also been pointed out that because of the cross hatching that is used, some of the hatching believe that it was he wrote it with his right hand, and he drew it with his left, and the hatching flows in the direction that he would have done it with his left hand, which is from right to left. He would have gone up or down, but it would have been done. It's done at that angle, whereas if I if I sit down and do hatching with mine, it's gonna float

towards the upper right hand corner. And this seems to flow towards the upper left hand corner, which so she says, he wrote it with his right hand, So that's why the script doesn't match most of his notes. It also doesn't have as many It does have similar flourishes that he wrote, which a flourish is you can cross your tea or twelve year old girls love crossing their teeth and drawing a line up and putting a little heart

at the end. That would be a flourish. Yes, those those kind of things are anything that is beyond what is needed to make it a little prettier. Is an easy way to think of what a flourishes for. Uh, this whole theory, I agree, there are holes in the theory. Um. Here's here's what I really really found to be. The issue is, Okay, I could see that maybe he invented a language. The drawings don't match. But let's just say he was goofing around. Okay, so he was just doing

it a different style. He was with the pen in his mouth. Maybe. But the problem is DaVinci was known for drawing little things into his drawings, and there was

little codes, evidently that he would put in. And once people start grabbing this, they start seeing what they want in the images in the illustrations, and suddenly it's there's little spikes off the edge of a leaf and suddenly people, oh, you see that that spells LEO if you connect the edges, and it's it's it's seeing what you want to say.

And that's that's where at first I thought this was like, Wow, this is really cool, this kind of makes sense, and then it just all and when he shambles off and you know it, it makes sense for me. When we look at the like the Maidens in the Bath, for instance, I can see how somebody could say this artist evolved into Leonardo da Vinci. The plant stuff, though, is really what trips me up, because it's really awful. I mean, just to put it bluntly, it's it's very crude, right,

there's no perspective or anything like that. So unless we're saying, yeah, da Vinci did this when he was like seven years old and then came back and wrote it when he was twenty, I'm not buying it. I'm just not. There's so many plant drawings in here that it's about that, right, I don't know. Well, here's here's the other thing is that da Vinci left behind a lot of paperwork, lots of drawings, lots of writings. Yeah, he's prolific, not one, you know. So if he had invented a private language,

he wouldn't have let it go to waste. A lot of his papers, would there would be stuff around there? So yeah, well that's why there's examples of his mirror script, because he did a bunch of his notes and he had if he had mirror a script, why would he, I mean, if he had this, why would he do mirror scripts? Exactly? Your script might have been easier. And let me also, I'll defend it for a second. Let's

say that he made this up. He made this this secret language of his own, this written language, and then he realized, I want to send a letter to Antonio, but Antonio doesn't know this language, so he can't read it. Whereas if he sends it to Antonio and it's written a mirror script, Antonio knows to just hold it against a mirror and read what's in the mirror. And that's much simpler for other people that you're corresponding to people

to that. But you know, if you really want to encrypt something, and Leonardo was not that dumb, he knew that. He knew that, you know, he, I mean, he knew that that's the most easily crackable cipher and you know, of all time. So if he was truly interested in keeping secrets from people other than just maybe he just learned how to write backwards just for a novelty kind of thing. I kind of think it might have been.

It's something to it. He probably did it on a whim to entertain himself and then just kept running with it because he was a bit obsessive. He really would. It seems like basically things he came up with in some of his writings, he would just keep working at it, which is why he came up with some very phenomenal things. But I think a lot of geniuses had that obsessive part of their personality. Yeah, and so, yeah, but he did some good stuff. Well anyway, let me let me

talk about another theory, which is that it's a cipher. Yeah. Ciphers are fun. Yeah yeah, But I'm not the one that came up with this theory. This guy came up with what I think is probably one of the most bizarre encryption algorithms of all times. So this guy, his name was William Newbold. He's a professor of philosophy at

the University of Pennsylvania. He cracked this code uh, which involves anagrams of characters uh, and he found the character is not actually not actually in the words of the letters themselves, but in fluctuations or variations in the in the edges of the ink and the letters. So by finding a little so byre finding little wavy, little wavy things in the letters, by looking at them through magnifying glasses. Wait, so let me let me make sure I I because this one was weird. I read it and I thought

I got it. But you have a better handle on it than I do. So if I were to take a felt tip pen and just draw a line on a sheet of paper, and the ink is gonna bleed out, and it's gonna go gonna do it irregularly, right, And so you're saying, he then looked at that irregular edge, and that's how he deciphered it. Apparently, that's my understanding of how it works. And uh, and then and then

so there's information contained, apparently in those little irregularities. And then he converted that information into into letters, which were themselves anagrams, which had to be rearranged at the form coherent message for for what two and seventy two pages. Yeah, well it wasn't that. It wasn't a hundred seventy thousand characters anagram now, but there was an anagrams between ten letters, and so it's like as an encryption uh techniques, I

can't think of anything more unreliable, yeah, or difficult. So it's bizarre. But there are other people who have thought about I mean, there are people all over the web who believe that this is actually a cipher um. There was a guy named John Manley wrote a critical paper about new Bold's theory, and he did go he did point out, as I just did, at the unreliability of anagramming for cryptography is just you know, it just totally

shoots a hole in the whole thing. Nobody, nobody does ciphers with anagrams, right, I mean, like that's not that's not a real thing. That's the thing you do when you're like in second grade anything. You're cool. If you're actually trying to communicate information to somebody, you don't just rely on Oh you're gonna be able to totally rearrange these words into the al right word, particularly in a

language like English, but in other languages too. If you have I think, if you have like a friend who's like, you know, and you're both totally really genius is at anagrams, and some people are not me, but some people are then I suppose you could actually communicate doing that, but you know, for most of us, it's not gonna work. Yeah, okay, that's enough. So as far as it being a cipher, if it is a cipher, it can only be one

kind of cipher, and that is a substitution cipher. Because if you look at this page, this is from page seventy five of the manuscript, if you look at the two words that I've underlined, they're identical. Correct, there's three of them on this one page. Yeah, alright, So if it's anything other than a substitution cipher, then it's say, if it's some really sophisticated kind of cipher, then the odds are that, say an eight letter word are going

to be translated by the sophisticated. Say it's say it's a one time pad, that the encoded tex is going to be the exact same word, especially three times on a page. Uh, Statistically, that's just not possible. Or it's possible, but it's like infinitesimally small odds of that happening. Unless it's a name. Unless it's a name, like it's the

name of a city or something like that. Yeah, well, I don't think in this particular case it is on that particular But so anyway, Uh, the as you guys know, I don't know if we've mentioned it before or not. The n s A actually had their hands on this think for a while, and they were they were they actually noodle it around, tried to make some sense of this, and they were not able to. But if you look at this, that word has to be since the word appears more than once, this can only be a simple

substitution cipher. And so for our listeners who don't know, and you should know if you've been listening to us, but I'll tell you whatever, it's a word where a letter or a symbol represented is represented by another letter or symbol. So so in other words, A would be D, B would be F, C would be x, D would be M like that. So it's not not in any sort of pattern. And then you substitute those letters whenever

you substitute one for the other. Uh. And so if the s A add their hands on this, and it quite obviously as a substitution cipher, if it is a cipher at all, then they would have cracked it in about three minutes. Not no, not three minutes thirty seconds. Yeah, yeah, so did you have some big brains are really into that stuff. Yeah, so it cannot be a cipher as far as I can tell. Okay, well, we'll move on

to our next theory. Yeah, this is pretty exciting. Actually, yeah, well what would you what would you title this theory? I would title this theory Stephen Backs has solved the mystery. Okay, well we we were lucky enough to do an interview about this with a gentleman who has been in the news lately by the name of Stephen Backs. But let's

let's dr Backs introduce himself. Yeah, okay, my names Stephen Backs, and I'm a professor of applied linguistics in the University of Bedfordshire in England, and my particular interest in the Voyage Manuscript is to try and decode it from a

linguistic point of view. And others have looked at it from a historical point of view or looking at the pictures and so on, but I'm particularly interested in looking at the language and the script and trying as best as I can to make a start on decoding it because the problem with the manuscript so far has been that since it was written around about perhaps fourteen thirty. No one's been able to decode anything of the script or understand anything of the language. So that's the angle

that I'm taking. Really, So doctor Backs has obviously done a lot of research on the manuscript. Highly qualified guys, very qualified, I would say, almost as qualified as us, maybe a little bit more. We can be gracious on this one, very very gracious, but I did. It was really interesting to find out what got doctor Backs to first start looking at the manuscript. It was kind of

like a random happens. Yeah. Well, well, Leah, Well, I was listening to the radio about two years ago, almost exactly two years ago, and there was a really interesting program about John d and they think he might have been the model for the character Prospero in Shakespeare's Played the ten fest a kind of mystical, strange wizard like figure,

and he was really interesting. He tried hard to speak with angels and communicate with angels, had a large library of different books, and it was thought at one time that he might have owned this manuscript and then sold it on to the Emperor Rudolph the Second, who was the Holy Roman Emperor. Because we know pretty sure it did belong to the Emperor at one time, but it's now thought that actually John D didn't have much to

do with it. But I got into it by looking at John D, listening to program on the radio, looking at Wikipedia, as of course we all do, and then finding the voyage the Voyage manuscript from that and thought, wow, this has got some really interesting signs and symbols, some of them looking a little bit like Arabic at us because I studied Arabic for so many years, that really intrigued me, and that kind of got me going on it. Really.

As we were talking to Dr Backs, what I really wanted to kind of key in on was what exactly was it in the text that jumped out at him that he first started looking at working one kind of his aha moment, Right, Yeah, it's exactly right, his aha moment. That's that's the important piece. That's the first piece of

the puzzle. Yeah, I mean, the very first one was I found a pattern which seems to be the repetition of of what looked like a R a R. And that kind of pattern in the manuscript is quite race. I thought, well, that might be a borrowing and it seemed to me to be alongside the plant, which I knew to be was called the our plant in Arabic, which is the junifer plant. So it struck me that

it might actually be the name of that plant. Now I'm not entirely sure that that's that's correct anymore, but that kind of got me started on looking for the plant, and particularly the first word on each plant page, because in many evil manuscripts that's usually where the name of the plant was. The first word was the name of it.

So then I started to look at other ones. And besides that, there's a really interesting picture on page sixty eight of the manuscript which has a big circle in the middle, and it has a face of the moon, but the rather sad, gloomy face actually drawn on a beautiful little picture. The top left hand corner there are seven stars which people reckon are probably the plier. These

the seven sisters in the constellation of Taurus. So I took somebody else's idea which said that the word alongside these seven stars might be the word taurus, and basically I split it up into the letters, like thinking, the first one is probably a tough, the second one probably an add the third one could be a work sound because of the old form of Taurus's tower, would the third the fourth phone will be a ruh and that

kind of way. Then comparing that with other words and other names of the plants, it seems to me that there were some patterns going on which would help to lead us to a fuller decoding later. But I should just empathize that at the moment, it's still provisional and it's still very very small. Me when I tell people I've deciphered ten words of a thirty five thousand word manuscripts all off their chair. But the point is, nobody's

ever done any before at all. So both even one word, if you can say with confidence, and that's kind of something. The key thing from from my point of view is to look for proper names, and that's partly because previous analyzes of language, for example, the discipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was the way

that they did it. They looked for proper names, like the pharaohs Rameses or Cleopatra, and once I thought they'd found them, they worked out each letter for example, Kirk Clay or partly they worked out each letter and the sound related to it, and so they built up a system of sounds and signs, and then from that they went on to find out that in fact that particular language was related to Coptic, so that they started with

proper names. And I thought it would be useful to try the same approach with the Voyage manuscript, and people have tried similar things before. But I think partly my background in other Oriental languages such as Arabic and other languages with different scripts gave me a kind of handle on which I think helped me to get make some progress on it. No, you don't have a Roserto stone here? Well, no,

I mean that would be the beauty of it. But unfortunately we don't have any other manuscript or any other text of any sort with the same letters and symbols as the Voyage Manuscript, which is one reason why it's so fascinating. It's the only texts in the world which has these letters and symbols. But it has a lot of them. I mean, there are thirty or five thousand words in the text, but we can't read any of them,

so it's very frustrating as well. And so we asked dr Backs about some theories that perhaps the language that is in the document, in the manuscript is the written alphabet of the written language of a in extinct language. And here's what you have to say, Well, the extinct thing.

I didn't actually say that. I mean, what I suggest is that the script might has definitely become extinct because no one else has used the script, but that the language underneath, the language underneath could well be a language that has has modern descendants, or could be a fully fully existent modern language. Um. I mean, if you take, let's take an example of Armenian, let's imagine that it

might be Armenian. Well, you then say to yourself, why if it was the language was Armenian, why would they write it in a different script when they're a fully formed Armenian script they could have used. So, in other words, it must be some group of people who had to divide the script for themselves because there wasn't a script

already there for them. And some people have suggested interestingly that it might be a Romani, the kind of gypsy language which also has interesting Indian roots, because obviously the Romany tribes are supposed to have come from Indian migrated across Asia into Europe. And that's quite an intriguing idea.

I'm not saying I believe that either, but it's intriguing because of course they are a group who didn't have their own script, who would have had to develop their own script if they wanted to encode all of this knowledge that they had. And then arguably you could argue they might have been that group might have been suppressed or died out, and their knowledge and their script died out with them. But yet still we have the Romani language around which which we could use to interpret it,

and that does actually have a bearing with the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Eventually, Egyptian hieroglyphs were shown to encode the Coptic language, which existed but had been suppressed for many decades and didn't have its own writing system. So there are kind of parallels which make you think it could be something like that. So one of the places that we ran across Dr Backs, he's kind of all over the internet right now, was his Reddit am a that he did ask me anything.

And one of the theories that was floated in this was that it may have been written by this Italian explorer Nickelodeon Conti and his Indian wife and children. He was Italian, his wife was Indian, and the flourishes look a little Hindy to me. You know, I really liked this theory, so I asked Dr Backs about it, and he had something kind of interesting to say. Yeah, I like that theory too. I mean, I like the idea that it's kind of made by like a family or

I really like that idea. But the problem is that if we jumped too quickly to identify an author, we tend to block out other possibilities. And I think, you know, the the idea of your your your kind of podcast being thinking sideways, you know, I think we've got to kind of keep our minds open and be aware of all kinds of possible things. But I do like that

ticular idea about the county idea. I mean, a lot of people assume it was written in Italy because it was found in Italy and because some of the script looked a little bit kind of Latin. But my personal idea that it was probably a little bit further east than that, and I would, you know, be looking in the area of kind of Turkey, the Caucussus, Western Asia, that kind of thing, but it does have. The thing is if you look at the pictures that are a

lot of the pictures very European in their style. There lots of European female figures, there's some European clothing in there, there's some interesting European looking buildings and stuff. But when we say European, it could equally be kind of Near

Eastern Turkish, Armenian, George and that kind of area. So I think that's kind of more likely than a purely European origin, mainly because the words that I've brought I've managed to identify seem to have more of a kind of Near Eastern, as you said, Arabic Persian basis, rather than, for example, a Latin basis, So that's kind of where I would kind of go for it at the moment. Obviously, Daubeck has invested two years of research into this. He's not just going to let it drop. So he is

going to continue to look into the manuscript. But he's got some really creative ideas and how to keep doing that research, and how to get some help with that research.

As I said, I've got my my website with Stephen backs dot net, which is I'm making it more into a forum for people to come and give their ideas of and so we've got the kind of areas for people to look at the plants and give their ideas, areas to look at the stars, and some really interesting contributions now about the star names in the manuscript, and I think that's a good next source for information where we could actually go and try and I mean again,

typically in those days and also now a huge number of the star names that we we have come from Arabic originally, and that I think could be a good source. I don't think that the names and the one Witch manuscript are directly from Arabic, but I think many of them may well be derived from Arabic. So again that could be another source of helping to identify maybe some new letters and new sounds and so on. So that's I think it's a really exciting area to But my

problem is I'm very ignorant about plants. I'm very ignorant. I need I need a lot more people to kind of chip in and help with their knowledge and say no, that's that's a good idea, that's rubbish, and so on.

It's crowdsourcing is a great way to go about solving problems like I mean, you know, you get a lot of people who basically so you know, maybe this is crazy, but maybe x Y and said, he said, well, you know, all ideas are on the table, we might as well look at them, and even if you know you think it's crazy, let's put it in the pot and see

where we can go from there. Okay, at this point, we've gone on quite a bit, quite a bit of time, and I'm sure most of you, if not all of you, have too peace, and we're only halfway done exactly, and so we're going to have a short intermission for your convenience, and we're back. So this next theory, Doctor Backs actually directed us towards. Thanks Dr Backs. Thanks Dr Back, very nice of him. He directed us to a article in a magazine now periodical. I think it is called the

Chronica Horticulture. It's Latin, and the article is called Biological Section of the Voyage Manuscript, a textbook of medieval plant physiology. Question marks, question mark physiology. So this theory goes well, Okay, this theory is put forth by two doctors, doctor Tias and Tias. I think they're married, but they might be siblings. I gotta be honest, I don't know. I couldn't tell there they have the same last name. It may actually just be a coincidence. They just might have the last

name last name doctor's tias. Can I say that doctor's tias. The doctor's tias have doctor and his companion. It's a theory. Thank you for the nerd reference. It's a theory based on the plants too, just like doctor Backs's theory. But they their goal is not to decipher the words, but to tell us what the manuscript, or at least the section of manuscript is about a textbook of medieval plant physiology.

They claim that you can't actually identify any of the images by the plants, which, sorry, doctor Backs, is kind of true. They are hard to identify it. Again, this is something we talked about, is the illustrative quality or accuracy. It's yeah, they're they're very it's simplistic and it's hard. You know, the fifteenth century plants were a little different back then. We don't really they were kind of misshapen

and had no perspective. No, but we don't know where they're from, right, so we can't even say, like, well, plants in this area at this time were these were kind of like, well, in Europe in the maybe fifteen century, the plants were kind end of maybe this and these are the ones that we know we're in vaguely kind of looks like this one. So it might be that one. Right,

So they say that's that's what's not important. They want to talk about the theory to explain the nude women in the green tubs um and the tia theory is totally radically different. It claims that this explains how plants get their nutrition. So this is this is truly and I know the name said this, but this is truly a biological plant physiology brook So this is saying how nutrients go from the roots to the tips. Yeah, so so bear with me, right as as I'm sure most

of you know, right because you passed second grade. Plants. Plants get their nutrition from the sun and the ground, right from the air, and from the air, most of it is through water, nutrient rich water that they suck up through their roots and then kind of digest using the song. That's like the most simplistic way that I

can describe what happens the whole thing. Yeah, he hasn't he has suggests that since this idea would have been really new in the fifteenth century, this manuscript was developed to kind of explain it to people. That makes sense, Yeah, except they sort of slipped and wrote in the language nobody just so that maybe the manuscript was meant to and I'm quoting here delight entertained and instruct the reader, and the women would have represented the souls of the plant.

Now you might be wondering why so many souls per plant, because it would ostensibly be one plant per page. Right, So Aristotle actually has a really good answer for this. He said, you know, way before this manuscript was ever made, plants or chicks, that plants have a lot of different souls. What he said was that when you cut a human or animal in half, they die because they only have one soul. So you cut their soul in half. Their

souled eyes. But wait a second, has anybody ever tried rooting a human being to see if you can actually? You know, good question. We should probably try that next week. Yeah, anybody want a volunteer, No, I think we'll get to find an outside volunteer for this one. Okay, So we'll just go with the theory that when you cut a human in half, they probably die right normally, But when you cut a plant into half or many different segments,

it'll live for a while or forever, sometimes forever. Sometimes they can kind of regenerate, you know, your replant it cutting cutting and replant it and it becomes a new thing. So it follows by ancient kind of theory that that plant must have many souls. You look super angry and confused. I'm confused. I'm I'm following this. This is not in my wheelhouse follow kind of think ancient times. And that's

that's where I'm having the difficulty. Ha. Yes, I'm following the logic you're such a higher being's it's it's such a different mode of thinking. As an allegorical depiction of how the plant works. The problem I would have with this is like, for example, the one one that I can think of, where there's this plant like structure and his green and there's all these naked women. But if you you know, going and they're not, it appears from the picture that they're not going up the plant from

the soil to the top of the plant. It appears that they're sliding down a water slide into a pool. At the bottom. They're going in the wrong direction. The souls might be going a wrong direction, but the water might not be. But but again I think, Joe, I think you're having a bit the same issue I am is that we understand that and a plant and a biological perspective that everything rises from the roots up, whereas they may not have had that perspective, and so they

viewed it as going down or circulations. Yeah, it could have been a circulatory system. So the other thing about this t S series, they talk a lot about the large amount of Christian religious imagery through the manuscript Um. They point specifically to again the biological section with these women. A lot of them are holding what can kind of be identified as rosaries. There's one woman holding what is clearly across um and they've looked at illuminations, are really

closely at. One of the sources they cite is if you look really closely at the head of us of one of the sunflowers, there's a cross in it. You know, Okay, I gotta I I need to stop you there, because this is the same thing that I had an issue with with this being something by da Vinci. And remember I said, people thought they saw his name written in things in kind of a hidden way. I looked at that image and it's happenstance to me that it looks like a cross. You have to infer the cross into

that plan. Whereas if I was drawing that and I knew how the seeds were going to radiate out, to me, the easiest ways to draw the X and the y axis of circles to make the seed pattern and then just fill in the holes as you go around working your way out, So that I have an issue with that. Also, you know, it also could have been a plus sign

the plant map. Yeah, I mean, so it is fairly indisputable, however, that these the women often are have these kind of religious symbols, and I think their theory is is that this is the time in history where Christianity is kind of on the rise, and it's kind of a turbulent time for Christianity. True, and that this could really easily

be interpreted as like a pagan something. I think, you know, they're kind of where they end their theory is that so these people put these Christian religious things in there so that people wouldn't it wasn't yeah, so people would know it wasn't pagan, but well no, it was just

it was just educational manual. So so, but but you said that they said that it may have been a pagan manual or were they saying that it might have been a mistaken for a pagan manual that the author and illustrator wanted to ensure that nobody would ever look at this and be like, this is obviously pagan witchcraft, so that they were not pagan, that they were a Christian and they were like, hey, don't worry, guys, this

is totally Christians. Is totally legit, totally legit, above board. Well, actually, if you're putting naked women and then you probably want to, I can have some crosses and rosaries to yeah, totally, just to just to cover yourself. Yeah, well there was, but there was that nudity in in art and illustration was not a frowned upon thing at that time. The human form and that that you know, females were always represented in that man There were there were no naked

bike rides. That was kind of like beyond the pale yes that was that was pushing on the paintings. Yeah, so that's kind of the TS theory. It's interesting it only addresses that one little section. That's the problem is it only addresses one section of the whole thing. Yeah, I mean as opposed to course they don't they're not

required to you by law. The astrological section, you know, the astrological sections are I guess at that point the only sections that they don't really address, right, because it does address the biologic illuminations, right, pharmaceutical and the pharmaceutical stuff as well, so it just doesn't address the star stuff and and and that gives it some credence. I I can understand the theory. I understand it better now that you've explained it to me, because when I read it,

I didn't get it. You're welcome, but thank you, But I still I have qualms with it. And it's the same thing Joe said, because it's really focused in one and I again, as I said before, I think that people see what they want to say. Yeah, And I can tell you that one of the doctor's tias is apparently an accomplished watercolorist in plant life. And they are both plant professors basically the people. Neither of them is,

but they're both. They're both biologic doctors. Biologic doctors yep, biologists. Biologists the word I was looking for, thank you. So there. Neither of them are linguistic professors, which is why they avoid Well it makes sense. I don't know if you know this, but have they basically focused on the drawings and not really paid a lot of attention to the text itself. Yeah, they focused entirely on the drawings, and I as far as I can tell, they are no

longer researching and are no longer interested in researching. Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of it's kind of a hair puller. You know, a lot of you know, this paper that I read was published in I think two thousand two or something like that, and it's, as I can tell, the last time, that's the only thing they

ever published about it. So interesting theory. Our next theory is the Nueva Spana theory or New Spain theory, and New Spain New Spain is when the Spanish came to the New World and they started taking over and conquering. They took over Mexico a little bit after that. A little bit after that, Yeah, and then they also started

taking over parts of the continental US. Well to them, that was they named it all New Spain, New York basically, yeah, or New Amsterdam is it's it's called but yes, So that is what Nueva Espania means is New Spain, and that's the area that references in and New Spain really took up a lot of the center of the current United States, so it's a very huge area. So this the Nueva Spania theory is put out by two gentlemen.

We've got Dr Arthur Tucker and Mr Rexford Talbert, and I had some brief email correspondence with Dr Tucker and he was kind enough to send me their their research and their writing. You get a condensed format, but there's a lot to it, but let me kind of kind of boiled down what their theory is. What these two gentlemen decided to do was, rather than try to decipher the next right off, they did something similar to what the doctor's tias did, which is they focused on the illustrations.

They wanted to try and figure out if they could pinpoint those illustrations to specific plants, and they didn't just focus on Europe. They went they looked at plants that were known and had been discovered across all of the known world at that time, and we're talking the mid fifteen hundreds what they found and and and they when they when I say the mid hundreds, that's when they think the manuscript was first quote unquote discovered. It happened

in the well. They're they're basing it off of plants that they knew were in the fifteen mid hundred range. And that's and that's based on some other writings, which I'll get to in just a second. But what they did is they looked at the plans and one of the ones that they found was called the Soap Plant. They matched up the illustration in the description the illustration to other books that were put out in this time range. The soap Plant is depicted in the fIF fifty two

Codex Cruise batter Nous of Mexico. And I might have mangled that pronunciation, but it's a book that came out of Mexico at that time, and it evidently is considered the first medical text that was ever written in the New World, and that was written by Spanish in the Spanish. Yes, yes, And they took that and they said, wait, we've got these illustrations from that region of the world. Seemed to match this one plant let's try and match it to others, which is not a bad way to do it, you know.

Let's not look like I can't understand what the writing is. So let me see if I know what the pictures are. That's how kids learn how to read, right. It really is still working on that. According to their research, they have identified thirty seven plants, six animals, and one mineral in the manuscript to the America's How did they identify the mineral, That's what I'm curious about. I'm not exactly

positive how they came to that conclusion. To be honest, I read their research, but it's a little above my pay grade, and so I didn't quite understand everything. This whole thing is above but don't worry. But anyway, these plants were depicted in other writings from post conquest Mexico and North America. So they're saying, well, we see these and we see those, so we kind of draw the two together and say that it must have come out of that region of the world. Are they saying then

that plants in the New World are blobbier and lack perspective? No, But I guess my question would be that the female figures right, not to like drive too hard on this, but they're very clearly very European, and it's kind of

Western European. It's not what you see. The illustration style of Mexico and North America at that time when the Spanish had come was very different, different, and that even just the illustration style of that time in Spain was totally You don't see naked women from Spain in this period. In fact, you see like really covered in black clothing,

very like morose women from Spain in this period. So I wonder if they have a theory to kind of reconciles not forget it well, in that exactly it, because you've got to remember that there's multiple cultures that have been conquered, and they have different beliefs, and they have a different way of doing things, and it may have been this weird melting pot and and here's here's something that they write because they do try to address the text. They don't try and crack it, but they do try

and address it. And I'm gonna, yeah, let me read this directly. Here. A search of the surviving coduses and manuscripts from Nueva Espana in the sixteenth century reveals the calligraphy of the Voytage manuscript to be similar to the Codex Assuna, which is fifteen sixty three to fifteen sixty six evidently was written in Mexico City. Loanwords for the plant and animal names have been identified from the classical And again I'm gonna apologize on the pronouncea. How is

that again? Nah? Yes, that the Spanish, the Tino and mixed texts, which are all different cultures in that area. So they they're kind of to me, it sounds like it's we're melting them all together. Everybody's together in the styles are all kind of shifting together similarly. I've gotta I gotta say that I took a look at the Codex Alsuna and I didn't think the calligraphy was all that similar. It's not. And this is the issue. It's the same thing again. I don't mean to beat a

dead horse here, but we go back to Da Vinci. Yeah, the style is the same, but everybody kind of used the same kind of writing implement which forces you to write in a similar manner, but they're not the same. I don't know. I kind of like the theory that like it's another relic of the Aztecs. And that's that's kind of where this point they I never saw them come out directly and say this is an Aztec language derivative, but you really kind of get that sense the way

they write about that. Again, the Codex a Sooner was written by Spanish and by my Spaniards, correct by Aztecs, right, And so you know these guys actually took the trouble to to learn this, this ancient written language of the Aztecs before they murdered him. Well, but if you think about not not every Aztec would have been killed, some of them would have escaped, either as slaves or free people. You've then got a job, and they pass this on

to their children. You've got to hang onto your cultures, as every every culture does, teach it to your children, so it doesn't go away. And some of that might have bled true. I gotta tell you. I looked at some of the some of the alphabets and of the additionous people's like the Maya, the Mayan's, the all Man and the Aztecs, and they were basically they didn't seem

to have a written alphabet so much as hieroglyphics. And so I mean I don't know that there's any evidence that's that any of the indigenous cultures here had any kind of writing system like this, But I got to be honest, I think one of the most compelling theories in terms of who might have written this is that it was, you know, like a slave language or like a gypsy roving caravan language, because it's it just kind of fits the parameters right with the language that's trying

to be actively trying to be not what a lot of people are writing. Then it's meant to be a private language, but that it's written for a lot of people, but that it was a group of people that could have very easily been integrated into a different culture or died out. I think that's a very interesting idea. It is that you know, you know what with that theory, the problem I have with it is that there would be other remnants of this language around and instead of

just this one thing. And so that's why I find out a little hard to believe. But that's also the hard part about history, and especially areas that are a lot of turmoil during history. Think about all the relics from the past that had been burned and destroyed, have been burned. Yeah, I mean these things, you know, we people gather, Oh my gosh, these are all the same. We've got a house and we've got to protect them. And then somebody drops a lamp and the whole thing

goes up and smoke. So it could be that they had collected all this stuff and somebody was writing it and they it was the Inner Library Loan of the Aztec World, and they sent it to somebody else, and then the entire library goes up in flames, and here's

the one surviving copy of it. But you know, actually, you know, one thing I could conceive of is that imagine an ancient surviving text from somewhere, something, something that's really really old, and somebody like a monk along about the fourteen fifteenth century, finds it and it's kind of crumbling and he thanks. You know, I've got nothing else

going on in I lift in my life. So you know, maybe what I'll do is I'm going to copy this whole thing over, even though I don't even quite understand it, copy the whole thing over, and just so it's preserved for posterity, you know, And so maybe that maybe if this thing is actually real, which again I'm not buying into that entirely, but maybe if it is, maybe it actually dates back a lot further and somebody basically made hand copy of it, and that's the one we have.

So we're looking at a flawed copy, is what you're saying. No, it might, it might. It might be a meticulous copy. But it's a copy. So that means that number one and it's not going to be precise. It's not that it's not gonna be a xerox. Yeah, and it could be potentially thousands, that's what I'm saying. It's it's something that could be much much older than the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Interesting, And that's that's a good theory. I

hadn't even thought about that before. I only thought about just now. Well, while while we're on crazy theories, I have one because I feel like a little bit of a looney theory. It's a good one. Yeah, I like. I like the loony lunacy of it. This one, however, I shouldn't. I shouldn't be cruel, right, I should be, but a little bit. Yeah, let's have it. There's a guy, what's the guy's name, vicolat Vola. That's a crazy name,

it's pretty crazy. Yeah, So he thinks that the Voytage manuscript details the spontaneous creation of d n A through the use of sound or a direct line from God. Not making fun of keep going because this is where he gets well. So basically he thinks that this manuscript is not something to be deciphered. It is something to read and pray on and channel prophecy directly from God. So he says it's religious text basically, Yeah, so more than a religious text. It sounds like it's kind of

like the ark of the cabinet. It's actually channel's enormous energies. Right, you know, I guess how I would how I describe it as like when people speak in tongues, that it's like written in tongues almost, and that like you could read it and pray on it and meditate on it, and if you were the special kind of chosen person by God, he would come down to you and say, oh, yeah,

this is what it means. He's actually using this method, has deciphered someone was for some of it for us, and I will read to you what he says it is. This is verbatim, and again he deciphered this. How just to praying on it and go okay, because he's one of the worthy people. You know. I gotta say that's a pretty cool and sacrament system. It's like unbreakable. Okay. So the name of a flower its heart of fire. It makes the skin beautiful when made an ointment, the

oil is pressed from the buds. The ointment is used for the wrinkles. It is suitable for the kidneys and the head, as the flower prevents inflammations. It is antibiotic. Plant is ten centimeters in its height. It grows hot and dry slants. The plant is bright green by its color. And it's in Ethiopia. In somewhere in Ethiopia. You're welcome everyone. Well, you know, actually I've got some wrinkles. I'm going to Ethiopia. I guess. You know. The thing is is like believe

what you want. But it's like, how hard is it to believe somebody who says, well, I am the only person who can decide. Through through the years, there's been a lot of Charlatans that have come forward and said they had the translation. And I'm not going to pitch a stone at this guy, but he seems to be part of that camp. To me, that's that's that's kind of mostly it just seems too convenient, Yeah, especially for

something that's so popular. The thing that I know about people who act really receive prophecies is that they don't go around screaming about it, and they don't speak in the way that this guy is speaking, which is like, I'm so much better than you, I know everything, and this is so there's a little arrogance in there that

you don't appreciate arrogance. Yeah, I think that, like, you know, if you, okay, find whatever you're going to receive a prophecy from God, sure I should come with a little humility because don't say you're the greatest person in the world exactly, because I leave that to your your followers to do. And I've now set up a website where you can donate at because I know, and if I've got a direct line to God, I don't want to

piss God off. And you know, queer that whole deal, you know, So I'm gonna I'm gonna totally be you know, humble about the whole thing. I don't know, it's just a weird Yeah, that situation, that's a really incoherent theory. What about what about the lizard people. Dr Backs suggested this theory. Yeah, yeah, he suggested this theory. Yeah, that there's like subterranean lizard people. What do you think? Do you want to let him tell it? Yeah, let's let's

have this. He had a pretty good take on it. Yeah, okay, well a recent one. I actually appeared on Coast to Coast Radio on US Radio a few nights ago, and someone emailed me and suggested that they're convinced that the manuscript was written by lizards, lizards from having inside living inside the earth. Yeah, now that was me just kidding. Now, I said to them, I hope not, because that means that we may be we may be somebody's lunch quite soon. But that that was That was one idea which I

haven't seen before. Okay, well, so much for the lizard people. So next theory is that it's a hoax. There's a couple of a couple of different theories out there. One is that Voyage himself wrote this, created this entire thing, and made up that he bought it somewhere in Italy. And I think that's kind of unbelievable because never one why would anybody bother? But never But more importantly the age of the materials. Did he happen to stumble across

some vellum and some ink that was like five years old? Yeah, I remember back had a pretty interesting take on this. We're illuminating. Let's let's go to him. A few years ago. The Yale Library which owns the manuscript now, and they got some people from the University of Arizona to look

at the vellum and study it. So they took very tiny samples of the velom from different parts of the manuscript, and they analyze them and found that they're very consistent in their dating to round about four four thirty, with a certain range, of course, but definitely it's fifteenth century, and that throughout a lot of the other series. There were theories that it was made in the seventeenth century, or that it was a twentieth century hoax and so on.

But unless somebody kept a large amount of expensive vellum for hundreds of years without using it, which seems a bit unlikely, I reckon it's a fifteenth century manuscript. And also the ink, and I've analyzed the ink and that's all entirely consistent with that date. That no kind of modern chemicals, innocent song. So it seems to me that's one of the few things we can be pretty sure about it. It's the fifteenth century manuscript. Another theory is

that it was a hoax by Roger Bacon. Sir Roger Bacon, was he, sir? Well he was a night, wasn't he. I think so, yes, Sir Roger Bacon. Uh. Some people have theorized that it was created by Roger Bacon. Bacon, as you know, it's one of the original fathers of the scientific method, and Voyage himself believed that Bacon wrote the book and only Bacon would have the capability of doing so. The problem with this theory is that Bacon died in twelve nine, which is long before the Board

the book was created. Yeah, so that unless somebody was copying his work like you would suggested, it could have been Bacon. Somebody could have copied, but it wasn't Bacon. Yeah, it wasn't Bacon. I'll tell you why. Well, yeah, right, Bacon didn't do it. Somebody. It could have been a hoax. Somebody could have done it. Somebody could have done this

as a hoax. The reason I don't think it was a hoax is this, if previously I mentioned page seventy five, and I found other pages that have some some recurring words. So there's a word on here that I'll call golf C C eight G. So if you look at it, look at the actually yeah, yeah, yeah, um, So this is what I was talking about that recurred a couple of times in the page that you wouldn't expect to

in any sort of space. Right. Well, on the same page, this word appears like about nineteen times, and I was noticing that, and small variations on the word I've underlined them in different the word itself of an alige in origin, and the variations i've an aligned in green. And so I have a look. Yeah, so it looks it looks a bit like there's the the a, but also maybe it's like a ce, but maybe it's like two seeds. So it's a question of like, yeah, is this a

small variation. It's it's just bad handwriting, variations in handwriting, because they're all slightly different. But it looks to me like just differences in handwriting. So the word the word appears like many, many, many times on this page, and

sometimes it appears one right after the other. Uh. And so if you're trying to concoct a convincing hoax, especially if you're Sir Roger Back and a smart guy, then you're not going to do something as stupid as this unless you have utter contempt for your the people you're trying to fool. Uh. And I think it goes for pretty much any hoaxter that you're not going to repeat the word forty times on a single paget looks really well. And I and I know Joe and I briefly discussed

this is. I see in the words that you've pointed out some similarities, but they're they're not entical to me. And when I look at them, let's say, let's just call it. The last three characters are seemed to be relatively consistent with the small variants, but let's just call them consistent. But I don't see that that means it's the same word. To me, it's the same thing as

having I N G at the end of something. So I am seeing being believing those all in in the same I guess for me to like take Joe side on this, the first part looks really really similar. In words, there's just the middle like one or two letters depending on the word that are a little different. And I think that, like, okay, so right, believing twelve times in a row, it's not going to look these. No, it's

not gonna look identical. You're right. So that's what I think we're seeing is small handwriting variations and when and I I know that that you're looking at these and some of these I'm looking at the same page as you are, and I don't think that they are identical. And and let me just just explain why is if you look at words that are written in an older handwriting or even type setting style, you can see, let's say, the letter F, there's what's known as a ligature where

two letters are joined. So if you have an F F, it can be just right lower case, lower case, right next to each other, or there's a ligature where the fs are actually connected to make what looks like one character, but it is one character in a type setting personally,

but they're they're two different. Some of those look like the cross of what we're saying is the F of golf sometimes too seems to be short and contained, sometimes seems to come across the L. And I don't disagree that maybe that is just handwriting, but to me, in a way. I almost wonder if they are different and distinct characters. I'm not just I'm not, you know, disavowing what you're saying. I just I see intricacies in the letter forms that I don't know mean that they're the same.

But you're writing it's hard to say. It is hard to say that I have just drawn on this. Do you know how much that's worth? I collection, I've been going over with a highlighter. I'm gonna mail it back to them. The way that the author forms the a kind of it's kind of like two CS and I just drew on their Joe's looking at it. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's like I think that that's

just handwriting. Like this one here, for example, there's two cs, but they're sort of like the second sea is drawn. It's so close it almost looks like the one character. But I think they're two se us. This is not and this is why this has been going on for at least a hundred years that we know of for sure. If not therefore, yeah, I know exactly. But but but what I'm saying is that, like as far as the hoax thing goes, the fact that this same word, and

it appears to me to be the same word. Let's let's accept but okay, well i'm let's but you know, let's just accept that if you're doing a hoax, you're not going to do words that look exactly look look very very similar to the word right next to them, over and over again in your text. You're not going to do that because you want to you want to have a really convincing hoax, you know, So this is

not the way to do it. So obviously these are these people were either very incompetent hoaxters or it was not a hoax. Alright, well, so much for the hoax. We've conclusively proven it's not a hoax. And so well, not exactly because I mean, actually, if you're a hoaxter, you're probably you're probably kind of convincing. Your readers are lazy. You're not going to get that from the page. And that's just Gonn glanced at it. Look at the pictures,

especially the naked bodies, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, so that's the blah blah blah. We shouldn't know that the words that we were just talking about are literally right next to a pool with a bunch of naked women in Yeah, so onto our next theory. The next theory is it's just gibberish. Gordon Rugg a British psychologist, and says that there's a case that it might just

be entirely made up and just gibberish. He published a paper in two thousand four saying that it's a hoax most likely, and he had come up with the system that used uses a grill of words. Basically, so he's got three tables side by side, uh prefix, root, suffix, and then a piece of cardboard that's got three little

rectangles cut in it. You move this thing around on there, and wherever you light upon you've got three, you know, one or two characters for the prefix and maybe three for the root and one or two for the suffix. You just copy those down ontoor manuscript and then move it, copying the next set down, copying the next set down.

You can get up. You can come up with a gibberish system that is very consistent and kind of convincing, and so that and uh so, basically he made up gibberish language to prove that though this looks like regular language, it's just who or it could be it's a it's a uh. He He also named the suspect, which is Edward Kelly was a con artist. Yeah, yeah he uh. If you're one of our listeners, you might want to do a Google on this. There's a language that Edward

Kelly and this other guy created. Andrea Schinner I believe was him. Uh. They created a language they called Enokian, which is spelled e n O c h I A n He was. He was close friends with Queen Elizabeth the first Yeah, just throw that, yeah, and okay and so and Okian is uh if there's there's a wicky

on it and you can read all about it. It doesn't the characters don't look like this, but it's it's entirely conceivable that this guy maybe could have made up another bogus language besides the nokiin so, but besides fraud. I mean, we're back into the fraud thing again. Another theory is that it's gibberish because it was just basically somebody who was autistic did this, and so some of somebody was just like just sat down and you know, maybe from a wealthier family. So they actually had some

envelopment ink for him to write with. So if you're a peasant, you probably don't have that. And h or maybe he was an autistic monk and he just wrote a lot of gibberish and drew a lot of weird drawings and stuff. And I think that the autistic based on my based on my looking at some of these pages. And I'm gonna show you guys another one here on page seventy five, we saw the recurrence of a particular word in my opinion and Devon's I think, many times.

And you get along to page eighty, it's another one who randers it randomly selected and the word of the day on that one is one that I called gulf a g O L F A W and that appears many many times on this page. Uh. The other one, golf c C A G appears on here too, but it seems to not appear quite as much. Yeah, which would suggest to me as somebody who is possibly artistic and somebody who's a little ow c D. He'll fixate on a set of characters and reproduce us over and

over again until another one comes along. It catches sort of catches his interest and he starts writing those. I can see that that that makes sense and it's not. And we've seen things like that and you know today, yeah, yeah, and and the fact and the fact of the matter is is that I can't think of any comprehensible language, any language that we know about, that would have this kind of repetition in it. This is not I don't

believe that this is language. I think it's gibberish. And and and so I'm basically what I'm putting forth is the autistic month month theory. Yeah, I can see that,

and I'm not going to disparage that at all. What I do wonder, though, is if we look at this, some people have said, well, this is a scientific manual of some kind, and have you have any of you ever cracked open a biology book and you'll see the Latin name followed with the derivative that's more of a general name, and you'll see that word every couple of words in there. You know, it's the genus blah blah blah, genus blah blah blah, genus blah blah blah, genus in

different variants. So I almost wonder if it's let's just say it was the soap plant, because that was in the New Spain theory is it's the soap plant something something soap plants plural, and then something something soap planting. I don't know, I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but I could see why that repetition might be in there for that one, because they're referencing it's specifically over and over.

And I know that what people prescribe as the names of the plants on the pages aren't the words that you're pulling out. But I'm just I'm kind of I'm looking at it. I'm wondering if maybe that's a possible reason for this frequency that you're seeing. To further that, right, if we're going to take like the Latin name of a plant, somewhat in that Latin names of plants, are

this word repeated, this word right, like brutus, brutus or something. Obviously, that's so that would help explain why I'd be like in succession. I honestly like just throw that out there. Don't know where I land on this theory. Somewhere between the two of you. Well, I gotta tell I'm gonna tell you, I have not had a chance to review um a huge amount of this manuscript. I'll probably look at some more of it. I'm not going to devote my life to it. I haven't had that much time.

So I went out and basically randomly pick some pages and just started looking at looking at stuff and looking at patterns, and I started noticing repetition in the world, and and and so I would encourage our listeners to go out and look at page seventy five and page a D and look at look for the repetition, but also look at other pages, but also look at other pages and tell us what you think. Tell us what

you think about about the theory. See if you find a similar sort of pattern of repetition of words over and over again, which would kind of support the theory that I think. And there's a true crowdsourcing here to support my theory that this was some person with O c D or a person with autism who was sat down in a little room somewhere with some vellom and some ink and just did his thing, just obsessed over, just kept doing. And yeah, and so uh, there is

another theory. This is uh. This is also from page seventy five. There's a four letter grouping that appears repeatedly also in some of the words that we've talked about, like saying golf c C h G for the first four letters of that word, which really do look too to my eyes like golf, geo lf. They really do appear many many times in that pain. I can just imagine ancient plaid shorts. Yeah, for you know, as we saw recently pbr shorts. Yeah. So anyway, take a look

at that, telling what you think. Uh, would you agree that it appears there a lot? Oh? Yeah, but I guess for me, there are a lot of languages in this world that instead of doing like I n G like we do, right, do a prefix like that's possible to it? Doesn't Arabic do something like that. It's it's a suffix in Arabic. Uh No, anyway, But if you look at it, though, it does look like golf, which leads me to believe that this was actually a text

written by and a medieval golf pro plans to avoid. Yeah, exactly. And and and in this particular spot, he's got the naked chicks on the on the golf green. Do you see that it's green and they're naked. Yeah. Yeah, that's how you distract your rivals at the game. Yeah, So it's a medieval golf bro. So do we have any other theories? We do? Another one? We do? We do? We have? I think we have one more. It's just the one more left, which is opening the gates to

crazy town. We talked about the lizard people a little bit. Well, a lot of people are putting forth that they think that this is a book written in an alien language by an alien people who have left it for us to teach us one. I don't know. I you know what, I gotta be honest with you. I am so glad that our listeners like that we hate the alien theories. Yeah,

here's here's the thing about the alien theory. And this this I actually this is pretty interesting when you get it into is it the I think it's the cosmological section where there's kind of what seems to be almost like celestial bodies. Well, there's illustrations that appear to be the Milky Way galaxy, the spiral of the Milky Way,

and they also appear to be the Andromeda galaxy. And and the thing is we can because we have the technological capability Havelogy have the technology to look at these galaxies. We can see what they look like. The problem is is that if this was written in the early to mid four hundreds, we didn't have the technology to see that. We know, the telescope to be able to focus on a galaxy that is so far away, or to have something that can see our own galaxy, we didn't have that.

I mean the regular telescope using lenses that came about in the sixteen hundreds about right, I think even earlier than that. But I mean, but it wasn't such a high quality that you could you could see a blob. Yeah, exactly at the time that this was written, people were already looking at Andromeda and had already been noted. But yeah, you couldn't make out the spiral arms, right, we didn't. We couldn't clear, we couldn't get the clarity. So that's

where people say, well, we didn't. We couldn't see it that well to note all that detail to then draw and record that, which means that somebody else was out there and able to see that. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean Galileo was around in like the late fifteen hundreds. I guess I don't know how accurate carbon dating is. I don't know how sure we are about this stuff. That is like that's within a hundred years. I feel

like that's maybe within the margin of error. But now, Galileo and I don't think I ever ever made out the spiral arms of Andromeda. He personally probably not. But but that's that's I don't think. Yeah, that's fair, yea. But also, who's to say I am apparently playing Devil's advocate on this one today? Are apparently who's to say that that wasn't just like a artistic license exactly, somebody just made up a spiral so the spiral um and

I missed this particular port, this particular illustration. Is it a spiral s seen from above or is it as sort of an oblique angle? It's from above, yeah exactly, it's from above, yeah exactly. So it could very easily be people again seeing what they want to see and applying it to what we now know, yeah exactly. And so the Aliens might have shared with us the Andromeda or you know, are we also live in a spiral galaxy, and so the Aliens might that might be a depiction

of our own galaxy. You know, Devon, just tell up a picture of it to me. This is obviously a garden. It's obviously it looks a bit like a labyrinth. It's a plan for a garden. Okay, no galaxy, never mind ancient landscape architect. It might have been that the Aliens came down to us and basically bought brought us tributes

of shrubbery. That this looks like, Hey, I just pulled up another picture of it, of course, but I maintain that it looks a lot like a video game map of the world, or like like I don't know, like a blueprint for buildings or something. I mean, you know, it could be a lot of things. You kind of say, oh, it's stars, but again it's something where you don't know what the hell of the text is describing. I can

make it anything I want. This is why I like the approach that dr Backs is taking someone because he's trying to figure out the word, because he figure out what they are. He has been presented right with so many different theories about like, oh, maybe this person wrote it, maybe it's about this, and he keeps saying, that's very interesting.

But I'm going to approach the text linguistically. A smart move because you can say, yes, the minute you say this is about biology, you start to decode the text and it's about biology because you can make it be whatever you want it to be. So again, that's why I think like his approach is really the most interesting and probably the the best that we have right now. Yeah, though, dr backs, if you're listening, please look at page We spend too much more time on this. I'm a little

disturbed by what I see there. Yeah, and I feel kind of bad about this. I've been pretty busy lately and I didn't have time to start attacking this until pretty recently. And if I had more time, I would have been looking at more pages to find more of this stuff. But that's what our listeners for. They're going to go out and do this, and that's what the last couple of hundred years of people trying to figure it out before you have also been doing. So there's

a ton of legwork already done for us. Yeah. Does anybody else have any last minute theories to to put out on this one before we put it to bed pod people? No? No, no, no, let's say perfect spheres the Tyler. No, it's definitely not him. So which, Joey, what do you believe that it's? Yeah? I think that it's gibberish written by an autistic person most likely. Okay, Devin, how about how about you? Where do you follow that?

I honestly don't fall anywhere on this. I think that you know, as I was just saying that Dr Facts's approach is kind of probably the most solid approach, is that you just kind of have to say, uh, but let's see if we can decipher the text. Although I do like the theory that was floated in the A M A that it was this like family that wrote this thing. They're all really smart. It has kind of HINDI flares. It might have been Italian, but of me says,

I don't know, got it? Well? I I also really I like the direction that Dr Max is going, and it seems the most solid and concrete. I also appreciate the different approach that Dr Tucker took with the way of a Spana that seems to have some credence. I see holes in it, but I see holes in just about everything that's done, and so I I unfortunately I'm not I'm not settled on one particular theory. I see things that I like that are promising, and that's as

far as I'm willing to go. Yeah, all right, Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you have any theories. I'm sure you do, then we would love to hear from you. There's if you want to see any of the research that we've got, and we'll put up a bunch of this research. There's a lot of it. Yeah, seventeen hours later we're done recording, we will put up a bunch of the links. Those links are gonna be on our website as always. That is going to be Thinking Sideways

podcast dot com. You can listen to the episodes while you're on the website. I know a lot of people are doing that, and then some people like to download them and a lot of people go to iTunes to get those. If you're on iTunes, go ahead and take the time to subscribe, leave this comment and rating if you get the chance. A lot of folks are leaving

comments on the website as well, which is fantastic. You can always get us on stitchers, so if you don't have the time to go to the you don't not able to get the website, and you use stitcher for many mobile device, you can stream the episodes right there. We're on Facebook, so you can find us. You can like us at the suggestion of a listener. We recently created a Facebook group for our listeners to get together and chat about stories stuff like that, which seems to

slowly be building a little momentum. So it's starting to gain some momentum. It a little slow right now, but it's brand that's that's exactly the problem. A lot of people okay, now, yes, now they know um. And if you want to go ahead and tell us your theories, you can just write us an email. That email address is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. We try to respond pretty pretty quickly. Yeah, we try to stay up on topic. Usually it's an intern, but he loves

the idea of an intern. But now we do try to get back to everybody as quickly as possible. And I know there's a few folks who probably haven't gotten a reply yet. That's I apologize. We've just been a little swamped with this story. But we will get to Yeah, we all have jobs. Yeah there's that so yeah. But that having been said, that is the mystery of the Voyantage Manuscript. It's a lot of information. Thank you everybody

for staying with us for the whole time. It's a lot I understand, but hopefully you've got some of the things that you hadn't heard before, because that's what we're trying to do, is get you as many as we can. Definitely, I feel like I feel like we should put an East dragon for all the people who made it to this point. That's a good point. We're awesome, and so are you. That's a good one. Verified or were all right? Ladies and gentlemen, Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you

next week. And you're special, just so special.