The Voynich Manuscript, Part 1

intriguing kind of riddle. Why can't the book in question be read? So we instantly can think to some of like the tricks of riddles. Right, Well, perhaps the book does not exist. You cannot read a non existent fictional book such as your hey, Luis Borges, the Book of sand or a thorough Perez rovertas the Book of Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows. These are books that exist within stories or within other works that have no reality in our world. Likewise, you cannot read a book

that no longer exists. You know, a book that has become lost, such as you know, the various destroyed Maya Codices or aristotle Second Book of Poetics, which, of course the major plot point in burto Echo is the Name of the Rose. But no, the book that we're talking about here, it is real and it definitely exists. So that might lead you to the next like level of of contemplation here. Okay, Well, perhaps this book cannot be

read because it is forbidden. You know, some powerful librarian or clerk keeps it hidden, perhaps alongside the Ark of the Covenant or something. Right, Okay, so like that same Aristotle text, but in the Name of the Rose, right, yeah, where where somebody just preventing you from viewing it and reading it. No, that's not the case with this book, because plenty of p wooll have attempted to read it

and still attempt to. Any serious scholar, can you know, they can actually travel to its physical location and and go through the you know, the necessary of paperwork one presumes, can examine it physically, and you, you, the listener, can even attempt to read it on the internet, or you can you can acquire a printed fac simile, many of which are very nice to understand. Okay, I got one. Well, there are a lot of texts from the ancient world

that only exist in some incredibly degraded format. Right. So there we have evidence that a book existed, but you you can't make out what's on the page anymore. Maybe there's only a scrap of it left, right, it's been destroyed, or it's been or perhaps you know, it's been scraped away and other things have been printed on top of it. But nope, that's not the case with this book. It's it's actually quite well preserved for a centuries old manuscript. Okay,

here's one. Maybe you can't read it because it's not made of language. Ah, that's that's a that's a clever, clever guest picture book or something. Yeah, But at the book actually contains quite a bit of text, okay, And so that that leads us to the next level of a contemplation here. Okay, then the text must be in a language that is forgotten, or a nonsensical representation of language, or perhaps what appears to be language is actually a code for something else. Okay. So there is a book.

You can look at it, there is text in it, but for some reason you can't make sense of the text. Right, And in this we are getting to like the heart of many of the discussions surrounding the book we're going to be discussing today. This book is written in a language or code or some other manner of textual form that no one at least no one living or no one that has lived in the in the previous centuries,

is capable of understanding. In fact, while various people have claimed to have cracked it, or translated it, or figured out some or all of its secrets, we can state with a fair amount of certainty as of this recording, and probably of you know, for you know, the duration, for the shelf life of this episode, no one has been able to read this book at least not for many many centuries at least as far as we know.

And unless one of these people on like YouTube or read it is onto something and nobody has really uh nobody's given them credit yet. Yeah, where somebody has figured it out but decided not to share it with anyone, which is generally not the case. Generally, there are plenty of people even today that are claiming to have some theory as to h you know, that they have some angles some in that's going to allow them to uh,

you know, to crack this nut. So what we're talking about today is a real manuscript that exists in the world. Some of you may well have heard of it. It's actually, I think if you go back, it's something that listeners have requested us to cover in the past. I don't know if we've got to request recently, but in the years I've been on the show, I know people have written to us asking like, hey, what's your take on it?

And it is a manuscript known as the Voytage Manuscript or the I've also heard it pronounced Vonage, but I think we'll say Voytage v O y n I c H.

All right, well, let's just describe it to everyone. For starters, we should just drive home that again, you can look up a copy of this, it's what it's a bit readily available on what our archive dot organ exactly, and not only you can you should Well we'll talk more about the contents of it in a minute, but maybe we should start with just the base physical reality of what this codex is. It's in the form of a codex, right, so it's not a scroll. It's like a you know,

a folding book with pages that you can leave through. Yeah, it's a roughly seven by ten inches, not a huge tone, right, not huge. So a lot of these older books you think of as being this big thing that you put up on a lectern and you open the giant uh cover of it that may be made of wood or whatever, and you leave through the huge pages with their illuminations. But no, this is a little thing, maybe to be

cradled in a wizard's knobby fingers. Uh. The precise dimensions I was reading are it's like twenty three point five meters by sixteen point two centimeters and about five centimeters thick. So it's a little yeah, and that's what What was the page count some of some of the neighborhood of two forty seventy Yeah, it's so the number of pages existing today. I've seen a couple of different counts of

two forty or two forty six pages. I think that might be depending on what types of leafs you're counting on the edges. But it's believed that some original pages of this manuscript are lost. It may originally have had around two hundred and seventy pages or so, but we don't know for sure. And these pages are made of parchment specifically of vellum, which was a common medieval writing material. Parchment means a prepared version of an animal skin that

was used for writing vellums. Specifically, I think it's calf skin, so these are calf skin pages with ink writing on them. Also about the pages in this book, we should note that in the format we have it today, some pages appear to be out of order. So I think at

some point this manuscript was not fully bound. It's bound now, but I think it has been through different binding over the ages, and at some point it looks like some pages got shuffled out of order, and the version we have it now has pages that look like they're from the wrong section in which they're currently placed. So that's just just how it is as we have it. It's probably due to some owner throughout the centuries making an

error and rearranging them when the pages became loose. The text in the book is closely written and freerunning alphabetic script. The number of letters, Uh, one source I was looking at said nineteen to twenty eight letters. I don't know if you found a different figure. Yeah, I've seen several different estimates of like fifteen to twenty five or estimates of thirty letters. I think it's difficult because there are some symbols in there which could be copies of the

same letter you've already seen, or could be slightly different letters. Uh, And it's hard to tell if you're not working with a known alphabet, right, And that's part of it is that like these for the most part, don't seem to have real counterparts and European letter systems. Um. You know, at first glance, it looks like like just standard texts that should relate to some European language. But upon closer

inspection and things become more difficult. The letters have a lot of fascinating loops and yeah, like they're they're full of these uh, these knots and lassos. And then the illustrations, of course, which have already alluded to, they has all these these strange line drawings that have been colored in with watercolors, and they consist of you know, plants, possible astrological drawings, weird illustrations of naked women, uh seeming debay

their shower and what might be giant plants or other things. Well, we'll get more into what the illustrations represent later on. Um. Now it was it's written in ink. I think it has watercolors in it. Yeah, the watercolors definitely to color the illustrations. But then the ink itself I read was a brown ink, and it seems to have been like an inexpensive inc of the time. So nothing particularly notable. Okay, now we've already mentioned that it is not a readable document.

It is in a language. If it is a language, the language is unknown. Yes, sometimes called voia cheese, which is just a modern appellation because we don't know what it is. Yeah, and uh, it's something like a hundred and seventy thousand characters in the book. Some you know, we already talked about the number of alphabetic characters, maybe somewhere in the range of thirty uh, depending on what

you define as being a distinct alphabetic character. And then roughly what thirty five thousand strings of characters of varying length, which can be interpreted as words. These are usually thought of as words, whether by the you know, cryptographers who look at this, there are something like thirty five thousand or like thirty seven thousand words, and they might not correlate to real words. Now where you will where will you find this book? Now? Well, you'll find it in

the United States. Yes, we'll get into the history of the book that brought it to the United States, but it is currently housed at the banecky Rare Book Whom at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah, so it's in a library at Yale and it is open to being looked at by scholars. I remember I read a couple of sources talking about how later in his life Umberto Echo went to view it personally. Yeah, he was visiting the library.

It's the only book in the library that he asked to view, and you can find it the photos of him Burto Echo reading or well looking at the book. And of course it's a perfect thing for Umberto Echo to show interest in. If you've read The Name of the Rose, you know his love for mysterious manuscripts of unknown medieval origin. And that gets to one of the real mysteries of this text. This text is one of the great standing mysteries of I don't know, I guess,

of medievalism, of of linguistics, of cryptography. It's just this wonderful enigma that's still out there. And part of the enigma is we don't know its actual origin. We we pick up with it in history at a certain point where we we know we're at first a i'ved and was recorded, but we don't know who made it, or how why they made it, or how they made it. Right. Yeah, for the longest there was also no carbon dating of

the book, so estimates used to range. You know, usually people were saying fifteenth century, so uh, some were saying thirteenth century. And I think there's a reason for that because it was originally attributed to the English monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, you know, of course, considered by many to be one of the fathers of modern science. And since Roger Bacon lived in the thirteenth century, if he had written it, this would place its origin in the

thirteenth century. But I don't think any modern scholars actually believe Roger Bacon wrote it, and later radio carbon dating would prove that right. And we'll get back to the

Roger Bacon connection in a bit. But yeah, in two thousand nine, the vellum that it's printed on was carbon dated to the University of Arizona, and it was carbon dated to the early fifteenth century, so fourteen o four to fourteen thirty eight roughly, and So one note on how carbon date works, of course, is that carbon dating is used to date things that were at some point alive or at some point had carbon from carbon dioxide

in the atmosphere fixed into them. Because a certain because a certain known proportion of this carbon is radioactive, it decays at a known rate. So therefore you can tell basically if it comes from a thing that was once alive, when did the thing that it was made out of die? Right, when did it stop incorporating new gas from the atmosphere

into itself. So you could say that it could have been no earlier than this time that the document was produced, but it could possibly have been later that the document was produced, just as long as the vellum was actually this old. Yeah, it kind of depends on how long the vellum was sitting on the shelf. Right. Also, it's bound in goat skin, though it also seems to have once had a wooden cover based on some of the details in the manuscript. Yeah, I think it's a different

binding over the centuries. Now. There used to be some theories this was a modern forgery, maybe by the very book collector it's now named after, who will discuss later on. But that really seems unlikely now, given that it has been carbon dated to the fifteenth century. Right now, in terms of the author, well, that's part of the unknown origins.

Nobody signed it. Yeah, handwriting analysis has suggested as few as two or many or as many as eight writers, which of course I wouldn't really be that uncommon for a you know, a book of this time period. Okay, but at least the illustrations are signed. Right now, nobody knows who made the illustrations. Uh, you know, the origin is ultimately unknown. And when it comes to you know, copies, this, this is it. This is the one copy of the

Voyage Manuscript. Now we mentioned, of course that Voytage that what we call it now is the Voyage Manuscript, and that name comes from a modern person, not from you know, a medieval person. So what this book was originally called was well, we don't know, unknown, Yeah, I mean, it's had various sort of catalog numbers along the way, but he knows what will come back to. Voytage refers to Wilfred Michael Vonage. Uh, and it dates back to nineteen twelve.

So given the history of the book, uh cause it's it's it's current name is relatively recent. I think maybe we should take a quick break and when we come back we can discuss more of the mystery of this fascinating text. Alright, we're back. So we're talking today about the Voyage Manuscript, a classic enigmatic text to believe now to be from the fifteenth century or so due to carbon dating. But we don't know who wrote it. We

don't know where it came from. We just know it's sort of shows up at one point in history and then trades hands for a while until it resurfaced around nineteen twelve. Now, if you have never browsed through this book, do yourself a favor and just pause the episode and go do that. Now, a scan of it is of course, you know, obviously not if you're driving or whatever. But then just get the audio pot. Oh would that'd be great? An audio version of the point, Yeah, amazing, we gotta

cash in on that. But so that you can look it up on the internet, there's a full scan of it that's hosted on archive dot org. You can flip all the way through the book. I would say it is almost a necessary experience, just the same way that if you have the means, you should try to travel and like expand your mind through seeing other cultures. If you have the Internet, you should try to expand your

mind through this esoteric document. Yeah, I mean really, this stuff like this is the reason we have the Internet. That's the one on the benefits of the Internet is being able to you know, a document like this can be accessed by everybody. Yeah, now there are a few things we can't if we're gonna be chasing the mystery of who created this document? Can it be translated? What does it mean? We should look at a few other

facts about the text itself. So it's in a script that is clearly written from left to right and from top to bottom, so much like English or like many other European languages. But not all languages are like this. Arabic is not like this, Rudu farci. I mean, there are a bunch of examples of languages that go from the right to the left, so it is probably not drawing from that kind of tradition unless they just switched

it for no reason. No. Another fact that might seem interesting to us about the text is that there are no punctuation marks, But it turns out that's not necessarily all that interesting. Given the time from which it comes, because it's extremely common in older documents in many languages

for their not to be punctuation. Another thing is that there are no chapter markings or subheadings, but based on the illustrations, it's clear that there are sections that appear to be about different subjects if they're about anything, and I think maybe we should talk about some of those different sections of the manuscript to try to help us understand it as well. The first half of the book is the the herbal section, and it's full of botanical illustrations.

You could say that, yeah, I mean, they clearly are supposed to be plants, but we should stress that while some of the illustrations of plans look kind of like plants you would recognize, I'm not necessarily saying they are illustrations of real plants, but they at least look like terrestrial plants. Some of these illustrations do not look like terrestrial plants. Some look like green ice snakes from the methane likes of Titan, or like strange constricter caterpillars from

the heart of a comet. That truly weird alien drawings, things that are sort of green and look like they have leaves, but also have what looked like tentacles or eyeballs. Yeah, they are. They are strange to be held. And this is the most normal section of the script. Yeah, it is so. The German computer scientist Klaus Schmi who wrote a two thousand eleven article for Skeptical Enquirer about the Voyage Manuscript. I'm gonna refer back to that article quite

a few times. But but he was writing about this section, and he writes that none of the illustrations of plants in the document have been conclusively identified by botanists, so nobody has been able to look that and say, yep, that is definitely a geranium. One theory by the botanist Hugh O'Neill claimed to have identified two of the illustrations as the sunflower and the capsicum plant, And of course capsicum is a genus of plants in the night shade

family that produced peppers. Peppers are great, right, Except peppers are not European, so both of these plants did not spread to Europe until after contact with the America's which would date the document a little bit later. But there is not a general consensus that O'Neill's identification of these illustrations is correct. It's just not clear at all that these are actually drawings of sunflowers and pepper plants. So

generally the botanical section is big old question marks. Some of them look like they could be real plants, but there's none you can point to. There there are none you can point to and say, yep, we know what that is. Well, this trend kind of continues in the next section, which is the astrological section, which is full of circular illustrations that are often interpreted as being perhaps

astra logical in nature. But as as pointed out by Josephine Livingstone in her New York Or article The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Vantage Manuscript, of which I'll also refer back to, she says that to call this section astrological is generous, yes, because it doesn't. Now, there are illustrations in it that do seem to correlate to classic astrological imagery, but then again there are depictions of like astronomical objects

that don't appear to correlate to anything. For about eight or nine years now, I should just say I've had a page of the Voytage manuscript pinned up on the backboard of my desk at work. I don't see it as much now because now it's under the raised part of my desk. Um. But it's a it's a page

from what is believed to be the astrological section. Specifically, it's a page that just has a bunch of concentric circles of these untranslatable words between megas looking dudes sitting in buckets or dunk tanks or something with stars coming out of their fingertips, and they're all ringed as if in reverence, around the figure of a prancing goat with a mouthful of green plant matter. And I figured that's a good enough metaphor, is anything for the work we do? Alright?

The next section is often referred to as the baliological section, right, and of course that refers to the study or field of bathing, which if that sounds like, wait a minute, could there be a field of that? Yeah, medieval text there were a lot of thoughts about bathing. There were thoughts about the restorative powers of certain types of waters or mineral baths and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, I mean it's you know, it's it's an important subject.

You're getting into the issues of hygiene, which of course influence overall bodily health public health, but also hygiene has has long been intertwined with our ideas of spiritual purity as well. Now you might think, okay, well, this section has got to be kind of normal because it's just

depicting people bathing, right, Bathing can't get that weird? Uh It this is maybe the weird section of all Yeah, because there are all these images of nude female figures in pools of liquid I mean, or tubs of liquid, but also possibly like large oversized flowers. And then there's tubular plumbing that suggests plants or even like viscera of some sort. Yeah, it's a very strange section of the manuscript. The writing in this part, I noticed, suddenly gets very dense.

Whereas in previous pages there might have been a large illustration of the plant and then some small, you know if some lines of text around it. Here you've got some densely packed text. And again I want to stress that some of the illustrations of the section look like they could be referring to real world objects and practices, like some appear to just show nude women bathing, maybe in mineral baths. Or in streams or in aqueducts or along waterfalls. But others show things that I don't even

know how to describe. What Like I've got an example here for Robert to look at that is it's like a woman's standing in what looks like a giant instrument horn that's growing out of something. It's the spreading horn that I think maybe it's supposed to have water flowing

in it. But then also growing out of this horn is like this alligator pod that, yeah, I don't know how to I mean, the sort of green gray brown with like holes that have water coming out of them, but like a space tentacle with shower heads like bio shower heads coming out of it, with like ridged alligator scales on its back, and and yeah, like like lotus like lotus pods that have water. Yeah, yeah, Like it almost has kind of like a Susian or even like

a gigeras quality to it. I was noticing in this section how much the Voytage Manuscript, and I think this is not an accident, how much it reminds me of another book that I've liked for years, the Codex Seraphninus, which is an entirely fictional and intentionally fictional encyclopedia created by the Italian artist Luigi Serafini in the late night teen seventies. I think it was published in nine. Basically, it is like an artist's attempt to create a new

voyage manuscript type document. It's got a constructed language, lots of alien illustrations of plants, animals, objects and processes that don't exist on Earth. It's like an encyclopedia from another world. But that is basically what the voytage manuscript sort of

appears to be. All Right, So we've had plants, We've had possible charts of the stars and so forth, we've had weird alien showers, and then at the at the end here and that this final section is what, according to Livingstone, seems to be related to practical instructions for the use of the mysterious plants from earlier. It basically

looks like it has recipes at the end. Yeah, And I think this breaks down into multiple sort of subsections, like there it is believed that there're some parts of it are supposed to be pharmaceutical, like they depict the creation of medicines and storage and viols, and other parts appear to be about cooking or something. Yeah, so it's just as mysteri is the rest of it. But yeah, but at this point you don't really encounter any illustrations.

It's more it's more textual in nature. But yeah, so this is the book, and the book is is just so unique in its style. It does not seem to have any true surviving peers. It is not cleanly fit with late medieval alchemical texts, because certainly there were other weird texts. Oh yeah, I mean that's something we should

point out. I mean, if you're thinking, well, how could a text be about plants and astrology and bathing and hygiene and medicine and cooking all at the same time, that's a weird combination of subjects, I would say, Actually, this is not unusual at all for the time it was written. There were plenty of encyclopedia type documents that collected diverse subject matter at the time, and there was a general blurring of the lines between science, medicine, magic,

and household advice. All right, And if you were the type of individual that either wrote or contributed to the writing of a book, you likely had a lot to say about various topics or a lot to crib from earlier encyclopedias, and a lot of times what you'll find in some of these medieval encyclopedias is a mixture of original observations with people like I don't know, reproducing encyclopedia entries by plenty or something and just saying like, and

here's the ancient wisdom of Scipio Africanus. Yeah, I mean it comes back to a quote from burn Burno Ecco in the name of the roads. The observation that books speak to other books, you know that translations from other books, ideas from other books. But it does not seem that there were there were a lot of books, at least books that have survived, you know, that we're speaking to the voyage manuscript like it. It does seem to be this singular thing that's left out. That's you know, that's

it doesn't really fit in with manuscripts of the period. Uh. You know, it's in many ways it's kind of like an outside context book, at least to most of those who have viewed it over the last several centuries. Um. Of course, to be clear, many books of the past were lost, many languages were lost, Whole cultures have perished. So just because it's one of a kind now does

not necessarily mean it was always one of a kind. Yeah, there could have been a whole library of voyage type books that just all got lost except for this one. And then likewise, the context of our texts are always

fading away. And that's why it's always instructive too. If you pick up, say the works of William Shakespeare or uh, you know, you pick up a copy of you know, Dante is the Divine Comedy, it generally pays off to have some sort of reference guide if unless you were just schooled, say in Dante's case, in like you know, in medieval culture and Italian politics and so forth, like you need something to help you make sense of all the references, you know, the cultural context, any symbols that

are trotted out, or the religious context. Yes, uh, in a similar case can be it can be made for the arts. You know, there are some of the stranger works of art from the past. Um, you know, they look extra strange to us because we generally don't have the same you know, textual understanding for the references and for the symbols, uh, you know, symbols and references that would have probably been known to the original intended audience, like we are not the intended audience of of those works.

And then I think, along with most theories regarding the Vontage Manuscript, you can say that we are certainly not the intended audience of it today. Um, though there's at least one I don't know, there's at least one theory that maybe supports the idea that that the way that we are reacting to the Vontage manuscript is appropriate. But

but we'll get back to that, right. We are going to go on to try to parse out the different theories that could explain its origin, all right, So I wanted to talk about a few more observations about the

Voytage Manuscript or the Vantage Manuscript. From that article I mentioned earlier by from two thousand eleven and Skeptical Inquirer by the German computer scientists Claus Schmi, I thought it made quite a few good points, and one of the most interesting points that made I don't know why this stuck out to me so much, but I I suspect will end up referring back to it. He pointed out that there are no visible corrections in the Voytage manuscript.

And this is pretty strange for a document produced by hand. Think about it. Could you write out a document of thirty five thousand words in ink with no mistakes at all, no cross throughs or scratch outs. No, I mean yeah, I mean it would certainly have. You would have to be something that was just so you know, wrote for you, that was just so uh, you know, formed in your mind that you could just do it without any mistakes, or it would have to be something where mistakes didn't matter,

such as if you were just making it all up exactly. Yeah. So I feel like this is a significant point because when you look at handwritten or hand copied documents from the ancient world, there are tons of emendations. You see, word is scratched out or cross through or or fixed. I mean this is just common at a time when documents were handwritten instead of produced by a printing press or a computer. Yeah, it took a lot of time to make these, took a lot of skill, and paper

was expensive. Ink was expensive. Ultimately, if you had to cross out of words, you crossed out of work. And humans are imperfect copying machines. Now, again, we don't know whether the voindage manuscript is an original document and that's like the original copy from the author, or it's a copy of another document. I would say this, this to me very much argues against it being a copy from another document, just because, I mean, scribes, scribes make mistakes.

You're going thirty five thousand words, You're going to make some mistakes and end up having to scratch them out and rewrite the word. Yeah. So so this would this would seem to argue for the idea that this was, if not one of a kind, like this was at least a singular piece, right, yes, Or it might go for one of the theories we'll talk about later on, the theory that there is not actually a meaning or

message in the text. But then again, there are arguments against that, so we should not get committed to that. That that endpoint. Another thing that she may points out is that people have tried to source the book by looking at the astrological imagery in it, but this hasn't

really turned up anything solid either. But a great note he has that some researchers believe to identify illustrations in the book as Andromeda like or as Andromeda fog like the galaxy Andromeda or as the PLI E d s. But again he says that this is just it's speculation, kind of like the botanical thing, you know, where somebody looks at an illustration and says, I think that could be a capsicum plant, that could be a pepper, but it's not clear enough that other scholars look at it

and say, yeah, that's definitely what it is. And this is touching on a trend that will continue to discuss. And I mean this in the in a completely non magical, non speculative way, right, But it does seem to be the case that the longer you stare at the Advantage manuscript, the longer you deal with it, the more likely you are to find connections, the more likely you are to see things. It's certainly encourages the conspue oratorial cast of

mind or the well, I don't know. Again, there's a nice way to frame that, in a in a bad way to frame that, like when when you want to make connections between things. I mean, on one hand, I feel like that's something I love doing on this show, is making a connection you might not have expected between one idea or one thing and another, right, And it's how we solve that's how we figure out so many ancient uh, you know, works of art or works of literature,

to go back to the Rosetta stone. That is how we eventually were able to do to solve the riddle of Egyptian hieroglyphics. So yeah, this is the exercise of figuring things out. But the Vontage manuscript seems remarkably resistant

to such unraveling. Well right, I mean, and it seems to encourage a perhaps unhealthy type of obsession also where I mean, if you take this principle of making connections too far, of course, where you end up is conspiracy theory world right, like you're just finding crazy coincidences between things,

or you even get into numerology. You know, oh it looks it looks like there are you know, seventeen line breaks on this page, and and that corresponds to the number of wounds on Christ in this painting or something. You know, that that kind of thing where you can find connections if you are determined to find connections, no matter how tenuous the link. Anyway, So to get back to uh, a few of these observations that I noted

from Schmid's analysis. One is that the clothing and hairstyles worn by the people in the illustrations in the voyage manuscript seem to date the document to Europe in the period of about fourteen fifty to fifteen twenty, but it's hard to be sure. But this is something that that is done with other documents sometimes, like if you look at the illustrations of people, what they're wearing, how they wear their hair, that will tend to correlate to certain

styles from certain periods in places in history. A. Schmidt points out that the average word length in the document is about four to five letters, and this doesn't help us a whole lot because that could be consistent with

a number of European languages. It just sort of makes it look like, yes, this is plausibly a language, but there there are some other things, Like one is that it has fewer recurring words uh than would appear to be expected for a natural language, And this sort of argues against the idea of the text being a simple letter substitution. But then again, maybe if it is a real language, or if it is something in code, it's not a simple letter substitution. Maybe it's a more complex

type of cipher. But ultimately, Schmai concludes that no theory has held up under scrutiny yet, which is a great place to be because now we get to discuss them absolutely. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take another break, and when we come back, we're gonna first take us to take us through the known history of the Vantage Manuscript, like when when it first occurs, and some of the key points in history that we're we're you know, relatively

sure of. Okay, alright, we're back, all right. So, as we've mentioned before, we don't know who created the Voantage Manuscript. That is one of the great mysteries. We don't know who wrote it. We don't know if it was the original, if the version we have now is the original copy, or if it's a copy of something. We don't know for sure. But some point in history this document just shows up and and I guess that's where we should dive in. So we're going to dive in in the

sixteenth century. Right, the year is fifty six, and this is when the manuscript first pops up in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second of Bohemia, who, by my most accounts, was an eccentric monarch, which is it's not hard to be an ecentric monarch. Monarchy tends to invite eccentricity, and uh and but but this is an individual who's very interested in the occult, in alchemy and kept a great library, and I've also read was was very fascinated by by giants and dwarves as well. Yeah,

he apparently collected little people. That seems like a strange kind of medieval monarch fascination. I guess Renaissance monarch here. Ye. So in many ways is weird as a weird guy, but he's also sort of the character that you would expect from a medieval monarch. So the this document shows up in his possession right and the we're not sure who sold it to him, but the the the unknown seller sold it for six hundred gold. Duckets and duckets are docts cats. I think it's gonna be duckets. Duckets.

I like thinking doct do cats? Yeah, well I always I always think ducketts. So six hundred, six hundred gold anyway to put it more like dungeons and dragons level. Now, this came with like a certificate of authenticity, right, Yeah, essentially it came with a letter stating that it was written by Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon, as we already alluded to, UH, was Franciscan Friar who lived twelve nineteen through twelve two roughly, and uh. He was also said to be a wizard.

Of course, this is kind of common with with learned individuals, and you know of that time, right like later on their stories about them, they not only were they learned, but perhaps they had powers as well well. As we've discussed on the show many times, in the medieval period and the Renaissance period, there was a significant amount of

blurring between the lines of science and magic. People who were genuinely making scientific observations about the world and about natural phenomena also sometimes believed in demonology and and just kind of like grouped all this knowledge together. Yeah, but at any rate, Bacon was an individual who in many ways he was an early advocate of what would become

the scientific methodism. Yeah. The on the other hand, you know, he was also interested in codes and secrets and uh, and certainly later on became very associated with the occult,

became sort of a focus of of occult interest. Now we've already mentioned that modern scholars do not think that the Vointage Manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, and it also seems almost conclusively argued against by the carbon dating of it, which put it in the fifteenth century, right, I mean, I guess, I mean about the only thing you could make a case for would be what if Roger Bacon had written it and this was like a copy of that text, and but then we lost all

references to the original, you know, more leaps of of believability there. But in anyway, yeah, pretty pretty much nobody is saying that Bacon had anything to do with the Vantage Manuscript other than him being cited in this letter that accompanied it on sale to the Holy Roll Roman Emperor. So it would be like if you showed up with a document and you know, it's a weird document that nobody can read, and you just said, George Washington wrote this.

You can easily see how attaching the name of a famous person to something could make the could get you more money for it. So Rudolph the Second was, you know, the type of individual who was you know, very excited to to obtain this document. He probably put some of his best minds to figuring it out, but nobody was able to crack it. He was a sixteenth century reditor. Definitely, he's on the case, but but nobody was able to figure it out. You know, it alluded experts of the time,

just as it has always alluded to experts. So he it ends up being passed on uh to a botanist by the name of jacob Um Horriki. I think the Latin name would be uh Jacobus Sinapius. But it was passed on to a botanist essentially because it does contain a number of what seemed to be botanical illustrations. And then the botanist keeps it for twenty years uh. And during this time, Rudolph himself dies in sixteen twelve, and then the book passes on to an unknown person who

keeps it for yet another twenty years. And then in the sixteen twenties, the book enters the possession of Athanaceous Kircher, who lives sixteen two through sixtight. And this is this is another just fascinating character. A German scholar and polly math who who also set out to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics at one point, and his assumptions ended up being incorrect, but he actually made some correct connections between the Egyptian

hieroglyphics in the in the Coptic languages. He also studied Chinese language as well as various artificial languages. His letters show that he was quite interested in this particular book acquired prior to obtaining it, but then five years after acquiring it, he published a Universal Study of Artificial Languages and apparently makes no mention of the Manage Manuscript. So presumably it perplexed him, just as it perplexed so many others.

That's interesting. So he's interested in this book, he's interested in artificial languages. That would make it seem like either he did not conclude that this was an artificial language, or that he had to stay silent about it for

some reason. Well, and this is just my take. I wonder I would think that maybe another reason would be if he could not figure it out, Like he didn't mention it, because who wants to be the expert on artificial languages and say, you know I couldn't crack this, well, right, he could have the Isaac Newton mentality, where you know Isaac Newton said, like, here's what I've figured out as for these other as for the cause of gravity, the underlying cause. He just said, I do not feign hypotheses.

Now you can kind of respect that. Now I do think it's something we should come back and discuss artificial languages at some point on the show, because it is is fascinating to to realize that here's this book on the study of artificial languages, and of course this is centuries before you know, we encountered cling On or doth Racki or any of the or Esperanto. So it would be fun to come back to that. Well, I've actually thought about the idea of covering artificially invented languages on

Invention on our other podcast. That would be a good one. So keep keep an eye out over there. Invention, the other podcast that we do. You can find it at an engine pod dot com. Uh, you can subscribe wherever you subscribe to your podcast. It is uh, it is human Techno His Street, One invention at a time. All right, So Athanasious Kircher, He's got the Vointage manuscript and what

happens to it? Then, well, he has it for a while, but then he becomes a Jesuit monk and he gives away all of his earthly possessions, which includes his books and so his his library, and the Vontage manuscript itself lands in the library of a Jesuit seminary, which I believe it is a Collegio Romano, just south of Rome, and it remains there for something like two hundred and fifty years. Though according to Livingstone, the book quote appears

to have bounced around Prague for a while. In sixty nine, a person named uh Barcius described it as a is quote a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing and unknown characters unquote, and guests that quote the whole thing is medical unquote. The book's historical trail vanishes in sixteen seventy up until the time that Vantage purchased it. And that's from that New Yorker article. Yes, that's from

the New Yorker piece. Okay, So then we get up to the twentieth century and this is it shows up with the guy actually named Voyage, yet another fascinating weird individual to enter into the history. And we haven't even covered some of the other weird individuals that factor into

its history. So it ends up in the sort of along with a purchase of other books in the hands of this eccentric book dealer named Wilfred Michael Voynage, Yeah, who lived eighteen sixty five through nineteen thirty And yeah, he publishes the entire library and uh and it ends up being moved to America. And this of course includes the book that would take his name. So yeah, Polish born. He's an interesting fellow to say the least. He knew.

He allegedly knew twenty different languages. Was at one point investigated by the FBI for possessing Bacon cipher, an actual cipher, for creating coded message that was devised by Roger Bacon just to bring Roger Bacon back into everything. And he even apparently sold a forgery to the British Museum at one point, though perhaps by accident. Yeah, there there are whole story. He was a very well traveled, adventuring individual. At some point, I think he was sent to a

prison in Siberia for his political activities. Uh. He somehow escaped to England at some point and became a book collector. In that h that Josephine Livingstone article, she talks about this story that he would he would delight in showing off his wounds to people, and he would like lift his shirt up and he would say here by sword, here by bullet. But yeah, so Voinice is a really

interesting guy. And at one point in hyping his manuscript, this is also quoted in in Josphine Livingstone's piece, he was talking to the times and he said, when the time comes, I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far

in advance of twentieth century science. And I think speaks to a certain kind of attitude that documents like this inspire and other historical mystery reads all kinds of things, you know, the anti kate through a mechanism or untranslated documents.

Anytime you've got this object from history that seems to contain information or learning or indicate information or learning, but it's not fully solved at the time people are looking at it, it tends to to make people want to go toward these almost conspiracy theory level ideas of like lost knowledge and and you know, like like ancient aliens kind of territory. Why do we have such a tendency

in those directions like why why is it? Why are our brains wired to go to that conclusion rather than like, oh, here's a strange document in code. Well, I mean, I guess at one level, you know, we look to the modern age and we we we had we tend to regard our current scientific, technological understanding the world is superior

to that of the past. Um, you know, by and large, I mean, certainly there are areas where and we've discussed some of these in the show, where we can point to things in the modern world that are perhaps inferior to ways of dealing with things in the past, you know, generally things that are more cultural or interpersonal. Uh. But we we tend to think, you know, when it comes to like figuring out how the world works, especially in the natural world, like today is the day, and then

never have we had a greater understanding. And yet at the same time, there are things that we do not understand about the world yet. And there are things, particularly details from the past, details from history, that we can never fully understand, you know, that are going to just remain you know, gaps essentially gaps in the fossil records

of of our literary and historical legacy. I've said this on the show before, but I remain committed to to a middle position here between the sort of the condescending modern idea that looks at the past and says ancient and medieval people's they were just stupid, they didn't know anything, versus the one on the other hand, that tends toward believing in some lost golden age, you know, ancient loss

knowledge that far surpasses our own. I think the reality is that it's not like there's an ancient lost Golden age. There wasn't an Atlantis where they had flying cars and stuff like that. It's more like that people in the past were struggling with limitations that we don't face. They had they didn't have the technology we have, but they were also incredibly smart. They were super clever and came up with amazing workarounds and methods for things using the

limited technology they have. This is what I always think about, you know, the classic construction of the Pyramids example. It's like, no, it doesn't mean that they had like alien technology. Just means that, like, these are smart people and they had to figure out how to solve big problems with limited tools.

I think also we sometimes fall into this trap of thinking thinking about the you know, our modern world's contemplation of the past is kind of a battle between the present and past, Like the past is an enemy to be defeated in our attempt to understand it, and they kind of make an adversary out of it. And I guess part of that is maybe, like you know, maybe this part of it is just found in all cultures where the past is something an enemy to be overcome.

Maybe it's part of the colonial legacy, or maybe it's because of Indiana Jones, you know, with uh, you know, this idea of somebody like like physically combating the past in order to acquire its secrets. And then if something is resistant to this assault, then it must it must have some sort of secret knowledge. It must there must be something more than like the fault cannot be our own. It must be some hidden power of the past. That's interesting.

All right, Well, we gotta get back to what happened to the Voytage manuscript, all right. So it was in Vonic's possession, and then he dies and it passes to his widow, Ethel, and he died in nineteen thirty, yes, nine thirty, and then it passes from Ethel to a close friend who then sells the book to an anti antique book dealer by the name of hands P. Krauss in nineteen sixty one. So Krauss, he tries to find a buyer for the book but cannot find a suitable buyer.

What nobody wanted it? Well, maybe not for his price. Yeah, I don't know the details. I don't know if he was maybe if he was asking too much, or he wanted to sell it to the right type of collector, I mean, who knows, but not somebody who's gonna chop it up and make make voytage manuscript sausage out of it. I don't know. I mean he ends up donating it

to get Yale University in nine nine. So without without knowing the details of a cross myself, and perhaps there's better documentation out there, you know, I would presume it was a situation of where he's like, I can't sell it to the type of client, you know, the type of purchaser I want, so I'll sell it to Yale. Or perhaps he reached the point where he's he realized like this book is is a truly fascinating historical specimen. It does not belong in the hands of you know,

a rare occult book. It doesn't need to be in another rare book dealers antique stash. It needs to be with a university. All right. Well, I guess that sort of brings us up to the modern period in which there's been an enormous amount of scholarship on the Voyage Manuscript, of people trying to both to to translate it or decrypt it, which in some ways are similar jobs, or people trying to to figure out what it means or

where it came from, who wrote it. A lot of these mysteries remain, and there have been huge, hugely interesting attempts to solve these questions over the decades. But on that note, we're actually gonna have to call this episode and return in a second episode where we'll get into these various attempts to unravel the manuscript. In the meantime, you can check out other episodes of Stuff Toblew Your

Mind at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You can also, of course find this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Wherever you do find us, make sure that you rate and review us. That really helps us out. And uh, you know, if you want to discuss this episode with other users, other listeners. There's actually a Facebook discussion group called the discussion modules stuff to Blow your Mind Discussion Module that's kind of a fun place to check out. Hey, have you subscribed to our other podcast,

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