The Voynich Manuscript, Part 2

Vantage Manuscript. We've been saying both this medieval manuscript that has fascinated UH scholars cryptographers for for decades now, or actually not just decades, for centuries, but especially since it was reintroduced to the world around nineteen twelve and has become the subject of intense interest because it is full of this text that has not been successfully decoded if it is in fact a code, or has not been translated, if it is in fact a language, accompanied with these

amazing strange illustrations of alien plants and and women bathing in these strange horns with crocodile ten drils. Is this absolutely captivating document that is in a library at Yale now and today. We wanted to go further by exploring the history of people trying to understand this document, to come up with a theory of its origin, or to explain what it says if it says anything. Yeah, So again, definitely listen to part one if you have not. Absolutely

this is definitely a part one, part two scenario. Yeah. I think you'll probably be very confused if you try to jump in in the middle here, So go back to part one first. But so I thought we should start off today by separating the different theories of of this manuscript into two basic camps. And then within these camps there will be different theories. But the two main camps, I think we should look at our signal theory and

noise theory. And so signal theory looks at the Voyage manuscript and proposes that there is some underlying meaning to the text that it could, at least in theory, actually be translated to yield a signal signal or a message. And of course it's not necessarily saying that we have understood what the messages, or that we ever will understand what the messages, but at least in theory it could

be understood. It says something that's signal theory. Noise theory, we would say, proposes that there is no underlying message. It's just gibberish, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Yeah, And and an indeed, that does cut to the chase. Either this is a document that means something or it means nothing, and and both are are kind of enthralling possibilities. One is filled with wonder and old and and gives way to all sorts of you know, conspiracy theories if you

gaze into it long enough. And the other is is kind of equally terrifying that this thing that has captivated and just and overwhelmed so many you know, intensely intelligent and in many cases that you know, very well educated individuals. They could old, but it could ultimately be a work of nonsense, that it's just you know, it's kind of like just pure chaos. And there could be multiple reasons why it could be a work of nonsense or at

least nonsense to us. And I think we'll explore these individually, But first I think we should look at some of the possibilities for understanding this document under the signal theory, the theory that it actually does say something. So what would some of these explanations be. Well, one of the big theories is that the cipher theory, the idea that the text is protected by a letter based cipher. It's a very popular approach to trying to figure out what's

going on with a vantage manuscript. Right, So the idea could be that it's something like a letter substitution system. So these characters that we don't recognize, that you know, roughly maybe fifteen to twenty five or up to thirty characters that are used to make the words in this book somehow correspond to letters in a known language, or letters in some coded language or or something like that that that there's a way of breaking the code and

it detrains and it can be retranslated into an actual language. Ye. Getting into the idea here that it could be in a code and it requires a codebook, and since we don't have the codebook, it's the cryptographers, uh, you know, a goal to try and figure out what the code might be. Oh okay, So a codebook could mean that it wouldn't even necessarily have to be a straight like letter substitution type cipher. It could just be that there are you know, like known translations of certain word forms

or something like that to other known words. Another possibility is that it's written in some form of shorthand that that we have you know, lost understanding of. There's also uh, the the idea of steganography. This is the idea that the text itself is meaningless, but key signs would indicate hidden useful information, like little details on the illustrations or the text itself, or some combination. Um. This would be kind of, like, I guess, kind of like a you know,

a cheap spy novel. Version of this is like counting the dotted eyes on a page sort of thing, and that tells you something. Sure. Yeah. Another variation that is brought up is that you could obtain the necessary info info by placing a plate um over the page with spaces in that plate to reveal the important characters. Oh yeah, okay, so this would be you know, like one of those uh uh, you know, decode or ring kinds of things. Oh no, that that actually I think is letter substitution.

There are there are codes like this like this in toys and stuff that you can buy that like, you put a plate over it's got certain holes on, and you read the letters that appear in the holes. Right. And it's my understanding that if if those plates were random enough, that in and of itself could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to crack the code. Uh

you know the vantage managecript. Sure, but then there are other theories that are less about code and that might still present to us as codes, but maybe it wasn't intended as a code. Yeah. Like a big one is that it is some form of natural language that has been forgotten in various possibilities from Eurasia have been presented. Yea. So the idea here would just be we've got no other documents written in this language or written in this uh,

in this transliteration of the language. Right. And then another idea, to come back to something we discussed in the last episode, is that it could be a constructed language, so like a language that somebody made up on purpose, like Klingon or doth Rocky, but the fifteenth century version of that right now. And now, another intriguing idea, and this was apparently presented by Jerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, that it

could be a what is what is called a glossal alia. Yeah, so this would have been essentially like a work that is a stream of consciousness, work that is created via speaking in tongues, similar to the work of Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Yeah, this would be uh, I mean you could look at it as a form of automatic writing, you know that that's so there there could be a this could be a weird transcription of spoken gloss alia like speaking in tongues, or it could be a written

version of it. Directly, it would be kind of weird if it was a transliteration of sounds made orally by gloss alia into a script that didn't exist anyway. But you can imagine it's certainly being like automatic writing of some kind of people, that the spirits are writing through my hand. And I think that would mean in this case that while it might not be meaningless to the person writing it, it would be meaningless to any reader.

So I think this would fall under the noise category right that there would be there is no way to understand what this says because there is no underlying signal, because in this case, presumably the context for the piece would be very personal and then also would probably deal a lot with personal reevaluation of the text. You know'd be it's almost like like less than a dream journal in a way, you know, where the dream is not even even taken and put into the into the form

of language, but like the dream is is in language. Yeah, it would be like if if you had a dream journal, yeah, where you never translated it into any real language, You just made notes about your dreams in random other symbols that don't mean anything to anybody else. And then, of course, another big idea is that it's simply a hoax, right,

that it doesn't mean anything. There's no encoded signals, just noise because somebody was intentionally trying to create an object that would maybe confuse people or trick them, or maybe just trick them into thinking that it did say something. Right, And if and if that is indeed the reason for the origin story of this document, then it is still succeeding. It's it's probably succeeded remarkably well, because if it is a hoax, it is still tricking people to this day.

Another idea is that if it were a hoax, if it were a completely fraudulent document, you could also make a case that it was a you know, a way to try and make a quick buck off of, you know, a cult fanboys with a lot of money, such as the Holy Roman Emperor who who purchased it, so we know it was sold to Rudolph the Second. We think around fifteen eighty six. That's when the historical records indicate.

But the carbon dating of the vellums says that this this, this parchment at least was probably produced in like the early fourteen hundreds. Now maybe maybe we think like it's possible to parchment the vellums sat around for a long

time before it was made into this document. But if you think that the creation of the pages on which it was written was sometime close to when the document was written, then it would have been written long before there was a chance to sell it to Rudolph the second, So it would be hard to imagine that it was

created specifically for that purpose. Now, one of the things is that people have tried to do various kinds of statistical analysis of the text to say, okay, does even though we can't translate it yet, does this look like a natural language? Does it look like it could somehow be decoded to or translated to a natural language? And

I would say that the answer there is inconclusive. There are pieces of evidence pointing both ways, right, Like one commonly cited weird feature of the text that really makes it look like not a natural language is the fact that in some cases words are repeated in line up to three times in a row? Is that normal for a language? Is that normal? Normal? Normal? Not really really really, I mean I don't know poetically lyrically uh shanty shanti shan. I mean we can all think of examples from songs

and poetry and writing where that's interesting. You know, something maybe said three times to to add emphasis. But I mean, I I am not I'm not the expert comment commenting on this from it's saying Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. This does remind me though, when I was a kid, sometimes I would like trying eight like documents that looked like they were you know, magical documents in another language, you know,

with weird rooms. Um. And actually I do that still sometimes, like doodling, you know in the corners of a page,

if I'm supposed to be taking notes on something. Uh. But I even even as a kid, I would I would look back at what I had done and I would realize, what this This doesn't look like language like, it doesn't like there's not enough variety in the the the signal, little signals that I've I've concocted, or something that just essentially pulled out of my head they're like, it's not matching up with what one would expect from

any kind of writing or coded writing system. Yeah, so I mentioned in the last episode there was a good article about this from two thousand eleven and skeptical inquirer by the German computer scientist Klaus Schmai who who I think he looked at a lot of the statistical qualities of the text from a cryptography point of view, and it seemed like he said, yeah, there there's evidence both ways, and we can continue to talk about some of that evidence as we go on in the episode. One interesting

claim I came across. I'm sorry that I feel like I can't evaluate whether this is a correct claim or not, but at least it's a claim that's made against the noise theory or any theory recommending an interpretation of nonsense. Is that the document uh at least appears to follow something called Ziff's law, which concerns the statistical distribution of

words and natural languages. So basically, Ziff's law claims that in any natural language, the frequency with which a word is used will be directly proportional to how how high it ranks in the ranking of most common words. So the first most common word will be used twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, and so forth. Now this isn't exactly law in like the physical or mathematical sense, but for some reason it does appear to

hold true for all or almost all natural languages. And so if and and the document appears to match this. So like if you look at it from a Ziff's law distribution, it lines up pretty close. So if the frequency count of words in this document follows this law, if that is, if that claim is correct, meaning it has a similar distribution of words to real documents in real languages. That seems to make it a little harder to believe it's just total nonsense generated but out of

somebody's head. Another thing is that different words appear with different frequencies in different sections. So remember we've got these different sections of the document, like the astrological stuff versus the herbal stuff, and so you have some words that might appear in the supposed astrological section but not in the plants section, and vice versa. This would I think be expected if these were written in a real language

with a real message, like you would have maaze. You would probably expect the words star to appear in the astrological section, but not in the plants section. So, just looking at the symbols, the frequency distribution of symbols and how they break out, and how well they resemble a real language, it seems like you can push us kind of in both directions that we don't get a clear reading from either way. From that, and then and again, this just comes back to what makes this document so mysterious.

It's so resistant to unraveling. So and a number of theories have been put put forth for the origins and the true nature of the text. Uh, you know, so much so that in when American cryptologist and computer programmer married, the Imperio composed the Voltage Manuscript and Elegant Enigma for the U. S Military, which is commissioned by the US Military Cryptography. I mean, that's a yeah, of massive state importance.

It is. Yeah. So this is not like some sort of weird you know, Area fifty one type of Shenanigan going on here. But in this uh, this paper, which is readily available online, you can find a PDF of

the full thing. She admits that she quote unwittingly retraced the steps of all my predecessors, rediscovering their sources, peating their experiments, growing excited over the same promising leads that excited them, and learning only later that all these things had already been tried and had failed, often several times. And I found that to just be very, very fitting, because this does seem to be a theme, uh is that you know, certainly in the last century. Well, it's

not hard to see why. Again, this is like it's sort of the holy grail of of of decoding, right, yeah, yes, it's the mount Everest of code breaking. If you could crack it, you'd be you would be like the hottest, you know, code cracker in the world. Yeah. And so code crackers have have tried, have taken a shot at it. Linguists have have have taken a shot at it. Various scholar all manner of scholars, amateurs, and of course outright quacks have taken taken their hand to the Vantage Manuscript.

I think we alluded to this in the last episode, but the Internet is full of people who claim to have decoded the Voltage Manuscript to the point where when we were preparing for the episode, I mean a lot of these were just like, you know, somebody in the last year or two has published a you know, a YouTube video or or an article somewhere where they're like, I did it. I cracked it. Here's the answer. And

I'm like, I don't know. Maybe one of these people actually did and it just hasn't really been analyzed or reported on yet. I have no way of knowing because I don't have an expertise obviously in the relevant fields, so I can't like evaluate it on my own. But it's funny, like there's so many people trying and claiming to have done it that you somebody could have done it and we might not even know for a while because it would just get lost in the sea of

of of all these claims. All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to discuss the possibility, uh pretty much discredited possibility that Roger Bacon actually had a hand in creating this. Thank you, all right, we're back. Time to talk about Mr Bacon. Now, you remember from the last episode the

it came with a certificate of authenticity. Originally, when rude Off the Second the Holy Roman Emperor bought this U bought the Voytage manuscript for six hundred ducats or Ducket's he it came along with a letter that said, well, by the way, Roger Bacon made this. Yeah. And according to Josephine Livingstone, who wrote a really nice piece in The New Yorker about this, actually a couple of pieces. One was kind of a follow up where she talked

about just internet fascination with the Voytage manuscript. She points out, yeah, that this does not seem to be the case though, uh though it was a kind of a popular idea for a while, or it is like repopularized and you know, well before the carbon dating actually took place. But one William Romaine new Bold, a professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He argued in favor of the Bacon origin, believing it to be an anagrammed

micrographic shorthand it required transposition, abbreviation, and microscopic notation. Yeah, his method, from what I've read, was a little over the I mean it's like he was like looking inside the characters to see little micro like strokes of ink that may have indicated actual letters or abbreviations. Of word phonemes, and so his his method of decoding it, which he

claimed was successful, was incredibly complicated. Yeah, but he claimed that he had translated, and he provided all these details like drawing it into various you know, other writings and ideas of Bacon. And he was apparently a brilliant individual. But but no one could take his solution and reproduce the same results using these methods. Right, it required so many subjective judgment calls about what he was seeing on the page in these micro notation marks, and what that

was supposed to correlate to. Yeah. Medieval medievalist John Matthews Manly, one of the the Army's chief cryptologists during World War One, conclude did that the quote decipherments were not discoveries of secret hidden of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon, but the products of new Bold's own intense enthusiasm and his learned

and ingenious subconscious. According to Schmay's article and Skeptical enquire new Bold's translation had revealed that Roger Bacon already had a telescope in the thirteenth century, predating the known invention of the telescope in the first decade of the sixteen hundreds by like centuries, and that Bacon had used this telescope to discover the spiral structure of the Andromeda galaxy.

It's just hard to believe though, that like you could generate generate text that complex, you know, just by subjective interpretations of tiny things. And then of course, as we're saying, like nobody else could could come up with the same translations based on what he had. So I don't know, it just seems like he was he was looking for the text he wanted to find, almost like like it spells like new Bold is great. Yeah, you know, another great, interesting,

insightful description of of this. Uh. This incident with new Bold comes from Terence McKenna, who wrote about the manuscript for Nosis magazine in nine eight in what is, by the way, a purely historical linguistic article that has nothing to do with any of his writings on psychedelics, although I can absolutely see why McKenna would be interested in the subject because it's this it's this manuscript that seems to sit at the intersection of primitive science and magic

and plants. Yeah. Uh, this, this particular article is you can find it online in PDF form. It's also collected in the archaic revival. It is you know, dated. It's so he was written prior to carbon dating. But he sums up the new Bold case by saying, quote, the problem with all of this was no one else could

extract the same plain text using Professor Newbold's method. It involves so many choices from pools of letters at every given point along the way that one could demonstrate that hundreds of different messages could be extract it from the same passages. Nubold died a broken man, disgraced, his career shattered. He had gone too far, and the Vontage manuscript had

claimed its first victim. Now McKenna is not actually arguing that there's a curse on the document or anything here, but I think he does get a little magic here with it. Later on, I mean time Will talks in this particular paper. He doesn't really tie it into any

of his more um you know, spiritual shamanistic ideas. It's it's ultimately pretty straightforward, though again a dated piece because when it was written, um but but but but he does touch in this on this idea of it claiming its first victim, on a pattern that one sees to

this very day in vontage research. It draws so many people in and certainly, while there are quacks and conspiracy theory makers in the mix, you also see a lot of very intelligent, educated, and disciplined people diving into the text and initially claiming victory, only to realize that they two have failed to see through its mysteries and and in some cases are kind of broken on the manuscript. Again. Yeah, mckenn i also tell I wish I could remember the

name of this, but he tells an anecdote. I don't know if this is one of the commonly circulated stories about the translation attempts, but he tells an anecdote about this one aging scholar who was in his nineties who claimed to some colleagues to have cracked the code to you know, to understand what it says. And then when somebody was trying to follow up with him about that, they were like, okay, we'll fly down to meet you. But by the time they got there, he had died

of a heart attempt. Yes, that's something he relates in the Noses piece as well. So whatever information that expert may have had, it was lost with him when they died. Well, I think the the implication is that the expert had not actually solved it and just happened to die right in time to not get found out. Certainly the more likely scenario given everything that we've discussed here. Now I

mentioned John Matthews Manly earlier, the War One Army cryptologist. Well, he ends up turning Army cryptographer William F. Friedman onto the manuscript. In William and his wife Elizabeth worked on the project for forty years. Friedman was considered one of the greatest cryptographers of his day. He and his team cracked Japan's Code Purple during World War Two, but they

were never able to figure out the manuscript either. UM, though Friedman did seem to believe that it might have been an attempt to construct an artificial or universal language. Robert S. Brumbach, also of Yale University, took a crack at it as well and produced some confusing decipherings that ultimately lead nowhere UM. But also Alan Turing apparently took a crack at it as well, the King of code breakers, and even Turing couldn't make any sense of it. Now.

Another interesting case here, in one Dr Leo Levitov presented the idea that the book was a liturgical man annual for the the Catherine religion of the Middle Ages, basically the only surviving document of the Catherine heresy, a sort of Gnostic revival movement was effectively decimated by the Alba GenZ And Crusade of the early thirteenth century, and much

of our understanding of this religion is lost. But Levitov makes the argument that it's a book of Catherine sacraments, including a euthan asia practice or perhaps in a ritualized act of suicide known as endura um, which of the illustrations is supposed to show that the bathtubs, so yeah.

He Levitov argues that we're seeing a discussion of the vantage in the vantage of endura as a right of ritual opening of the veins and a hot bath as a means of consentually ending one's life in a sacred fashion. And this ties into like ideas of the Cathy's believing like that the physical body was inherently you know, debased, and therefore like the it's part of, you know, the of ensuring that a refined soul, you know, travels beyond

this plane of being, that sort of thing. But then he also connects uh, Catholicism to the worship of the goddess Isis and he uh, you know, he believed that that it was not encrypted at all the manuscript, but it was written in this uh this you know, this this mixture of medieval Flemish and old Fringe and old High German loanwords all kind of you know, formed into this amalgamation of language. Um. But while some saw promise in Levitov's argument, there are plenty of people who had

numerous problems with it. A big one is that, uh, the enduro was definitely a thing. According to Costas Siamus in writing for the Journal Religion and Health in t. Sixteen, quote, the enduro was the prerequisite act of repentance that allowed the fallen soul to return to heaven. But pretty much everybody agrees that it was. It was basically a fast. It was not a a tool suicide or euthanasia. So another one is this whole isis connection. This doesn't pop

up anywhere else. And years later, you know, when we'd finally get some carbon dating that didn't dismissed. Uh, you know, the idea that a bacon a bacon origin was possible and certainly a pre Bacon origin of the text was equally unlikely or impossible. Yeah, I'd say that's fairly impossible, given that the vellum was not from before the early fifteenth century, unless again we're dealing with like a copy

of an earlier text, which again it doesn't necessarily look like. Now, when we look at other theories as to you know, where it came from, um, you know, they're there have been various and most of them haven't really endured. There is the interesting notion that sixteenth century occultist mathematician and cryptographer John D along with Edward Kelly, may have been involved with the manuscript in some some form or another. Now,

this is McKennis theory. He's got a complicated argument meant that that like, yes, it probably was John D and Edward Kelly who wrote this document. Yeah, yeah, McKenna did present that idea that he though he also readily admitted that it was just more you know, he's more basically a conjecture on his part, and he had he had not done rigorous work to back it up, and there were numerous potential holes in the situation. But but Kelly and and D did dabble in not dabble. They'd more

than dabble than occult practices. So I mean it's again it's speculative, but it's not hard to see somebody like John D coming up with a with a strange constructed document that's got kind of magical suggestions in it. Yeah, we have two older episodes of stuff to blew your mind about John D that will probably be running his vault episodes here in the immediate future. But yeah, he was. He was one of the most brilliant minds of his day.

He was involved in cryptography, spycraft, occultism, and mathematics. Edward Kelly has accompliced here with an it was an occult and and most agree a con man or a scoundrel of some fashion. Um it is h It's generally described that Edward Kelly's ears were both missing, uh you know, his punishment for some deed in his past. But yeah, but between the two of them, I often have sort of tried to figure out, like, what what is the energy,

what is the nature of of their collaboration? You know, they're in a way they're they're a perfect duo, but they're also kind of the strange duo where, uh, you know D, there's nobody else like him. And then he wondered, like, to what extent is uh is Kelly like taking advantage of the situation? Um? Or is he able to to actually aid D and in some of his various operations here. But again, like the interest in cryptography, was there the

interest in occultism? They also both wrote of communication with angels in the Enochian tongue um, which which we have an alphabet for, by the way, so and and it is not the aucky in language that we see in the Vonage manuscript. But certainly if you're looking for people at that time period, people who well, you know, would have been traveling in this area and have had contact with with the Holy Roman Emperor, Um, you know, these

are these are two prime suspects. Yeah, and I do think, um, maybe you were going to get to the s in a minute, But I do think it's a decent hypothesis that even if John D didn't write this, that John D was the source who brought the Voyage Manuscript to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the second Yes in the in the book by Benjamin Woolley, The Queen's Conjuror, which is biography of D that I I read a few

years back for the Stuff of your Mind episode. The author does mention that Rudolph may well have acquired the manuscript from D, but he does not entertain or dismissed the idea that D was involved in his production. But but he at least acknowledges that it's it's possible that D is the individual who sold it to the Emperor. And if that is the case, like, well then we can we can add one more step, you know, to

the beginning of the history of the book. But we still don't know where D acquired it, so the mystery remains. But John d is a fascinating individual. I mean, he is essentially not only is he the Merlin of the day, but a lot of our ideas that we associate with the mythical and fictional wizard Merlin kind of stem from D. I think it's believed that he was the inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero in the Tempest, Right, I've read that as well.

Uh So, yeah, an astounding figure, you know, to whatever degree he was involved with a vantage manuscript. Um, there's still plenty of mysterious and wonderful things about about D himself, for instance, to what extent he was involved, uh in in state craft and and and worked as a spy. Like.

There's some that argue that he was like totally a spy and that many of these occult manuscripts that he was uh, you know, peddling around and discussing occult ideas, they were essentially codes for things um and others say that, no, he was more purely on the the occultist end of

the spectrum. I I my read, and I think this has been the read of other commentators, is that it is probably somewhere in between, you know, one of these situations where you know, he was definitely fascinating with with

the occult. He was definitely and I mean he was a poly math, but being a poly math of the day and the one that traveled throughout Europe he ended up you know, and and also being a devout servant to Elizabeth the first you know, he was he was more than happy to engage in a little spycraft from

time to time. Another weird connection I believe John D is also supposed to be the inspiration for Christopher Marlowe's incarnation of Dr faust Us from from of course Dr for you know, who makes a deal with the devil to get all knowledge and you know, all earthly scientific power. And then Christopher Marlowe, who wrote the English play Dr Faustus, was also I believe involved in state often and being

a spy. I'm fascinating, all right. So there are various other um origin stories that we're not going to get into, but but just to really drive home how this is still a thing, How how people are still not, you know, not only attempting to crack the Spanish script, but claiming that they did. We should discuss two recent attempts, one extremely recent attempts h to crack it that have also

fallen short. Yeah, it seems like there's at least one claim every couple of years that gets picked up by real like news sites, and then it always kind of like, oh no, never mind. Well, in two thousand seventeen we saw just such a case. Um there was a history researcher and television writer by the name of Nicholas Gibbs, and he published it was published in the Times Literary Supplement.

He believed he'd identified quote, a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations often used in medical treatises about herbs, and this led him to illustrations in other texts, and he believed resembled those in the Wage manuscript. And so this guy. This was widely covered, in large part, of course, because it was initially published in the Times Literary Supplement. It was picked out by picked up by numerous media outlets,

including Ours Technica. So and initially at Ours Technica editor Annally knew Its wrote quote this is again before it became discredited. Quote. Gibbs concluded that it's likely the Vonage Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, But the sheer uh mondanity

of gibbs discovery makes it sound plausible. Okay, So it's always like it helps you with the claim to have decoded something if the message you decoded is not delicious.

I think it does help the other believability, because I think that's that's ultimately part of the mystery, right And the allure and danger of the mystery is that it that it is solved, is it is, It's not going to be ground baking anymore like the groundbreaking and the amazing thing about the Vonage manuscript is not that it contains something definite, but that we just have no ability to grasp what it contains. Right. You'd have to be more suspicious if it says, like, I know, the location

of the Holy Grail or something. Yeah, but okay, But after this piece came out then experts began to weigh in and knew it also wrote an excellent retraction piece, uh which you know, citing the various experts who responded to that initial Uh Times Literary Supplement paper, and the various experts concluded that while they think the text might actually turn out to be a medical treatise on women's health, like that's not impossible, but they think that his translations

were not grammatically correct, and that, according to Medical Academy of America director Lisa Fagan Davis in the Atlantic quote, if they had simply sent it to the Banecki Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat. And this is the library Yale that actually has the vantage script. I think they do wantage scholarship there right, So, um so, just I guess that's a little bit of advice out there.

If you were an editor potential of any kind of publication and you're potentially um publishing something about someone cracking the Vonage manuscript. Um, make a phone call, send an email to the Benneck Library and see if you can get somebody to to to weigh in on it before you publish. Yeah, I think that would be a smart move. Now, have there been any cases this year? Yes, into in

twenty nineteen, UM, this one prop popped up. You might have seen this headline Bristol academic cracks Vontage code solving century old mystery of a midi of medieval text. And yeah, I remember seeing this one. I want to say that it even popped up on a fairly notable like Science Release website that I use and was but then was

later removed. Dr Gerard Cheshire, research assistant at Bristol University, claimed that it was a therapeutic reference book written in a lost language called proto romance, and this article appeared on the university's website, but then was later taken down after experts chimed in and question the validity of the research.

And uh another there had I looked. There hasn't been like an additional follow up on that, but it would It would seem to be the case that this is another situation where, um, you know, someone thought they'd cracked it and they had not that they had perhaps, in the words of Mary the Imperio, you know, recreated the same steps and missteps of those that came before trying to crack the Vontage Manuscript. And of course, in addition to this, like we said, there's just a lot of

baseless speculation surrounding the manuscript. Online, it features into historical conspiracy theory. Yeah, you'll find it on in YouTube, you'll find it on various Reddit boards. Um. According to Raymond Clemens, a curator of early books and manuscripts at the Banecki Library, one of the most fun examples that they've run across is that the Vontage Manuscript is an alien is the work of an alien visitor to Earth from the Andromeda galaxy who was making notes about our planet and then

dropped their notebook before they return. But wait, why would it be notes about our planet if none of the plants can be identified? Maybe alien vision, I vision, you know, it's weird. I don't know, maybe they were. There are a lot of holes in this theory. Joe's what I'm saying, yeah, all right, we need to take one more break, but we will be right back with more. All right, we're

back now. We've talked about evidence going in both directions of people who just try to look at the text statistically or mathematically as a text and say does it look like a text in a real language, even coded in a real language, and the answer there is some indications kind of point to yes, and some indications kind

of point to know. I think one thing I wanted to look at now is something that was pointed out in that in that Skeptical Enquirer article by Klaus Schmay who was who he pointed out some interesting research from the early two thousands by the British linguist Gordon rug So I'm just gonna read this section from SMS article. Smy writes quote the British linguist Gordon Rugg is among the most reputable voytage researchers. He conducted a most interesting

cryptological experiment. For his experiment, generated a table with random combinations of characters that he used as prefixes, roots, or suffixes of new words. He positioned a quadratic stencil like the one used for encryption in the sixteenth century over the table. In this manner he obtained a sequence of letters that bore great resemblance to the text of the

Voyage Manuscript. Rugg's experiment supports the hypothesis that the manuscript is nothing but a compilation of meaningless lines and letters, which is of course the hoax hypothesis. And then Schmidt also points out a study by the Austrian physicist Andreas Shinner that also supports the idea that even though there are some things about this that do look like a text, it's possible like a real text in a real natural language. It's possible to generate a text like this without it

being based on a real language. And and Shinner's analysis I think was primarily based on the fact that there are unnatural regularities in the order of words appearing in the manuscript that don't mirror sequences of words that appear in real languages. So I don't think that completely settles it, But that's more fuel back on the on the fire of the side that says, Okay, this is just a hoax document or glossal alia or something something that somebody

made up and doesn't correlate to real words. That makes sense. But and then ultimately this, Yeah, this gives credence to just the its power to break those that that desperately

seek to find meaning in it. Like it just kind of it almost seems like it does point people to the you know, near the threshold of madness where they they make that leap and they say, I've done it, I figured it out, and and believe that they have you know, I mean, uh, none of the none of the individuals that we've we've named here, um, you know, from from the Avontage manuscripts. Uh, you know, recent history.

You know, I don't think any of them have, you know, have have been trying to pull anything over on anyone. I think they have. They've reached a point where they genuinely think they found the clue they found, you know, the missing piece that has enabled us to understand this document. Well. As satisfying as it is to solve a puzzle, it is equally maddening to work on a puzzle without solving it.

And I think that can kind of drive people. It's like it creates unreasonable incentives in the mind to toil over a puzzle or a code for so long without breaking it. Like you the desire to have broken it becomes incredibly strong. I will say this when a lesson I've taken home from all of this is friends don't let friends claim they've cracked the Vontage manuscript. That's right if you if you know somebody and they're like, hey, you know, I think I've I've translated the Vontage manuscript.

I'm going public with this tomorrow. You know, talk him down from that. Maybe maybe you know, to ask him just to settle down a little and uh and rethink before you go public with this this new translation. I just want to say, though this is not conclusive, from that interesting article by by Schmi about his conclusion, just his opinion is that it's very likely it's it's possible that it's a hoax. Of course, he thinks the author was probably an anonymous artist living in the first half

of the fourteen hundreds. Uh, and if it is actually encrypted. One thing he points to that I think is interesting is he says it's easier to encrypt a text if the encrypted text generates far more characters than the original text.

So if a fifty thousand character original document was encrypted in a way that generates a hundred and seventy thousand characters, then it's easier to see how it could still be hiding its meaning, right if there's there's tons of If there are tons of characters in there that don't code out to anything like, how do you separate the coding letters from the filler letters. So that's a possible explanation for if there is a code in there, why it

hasn't been cracked. Yet, another thing that he does find plausible is he finds it plausible that the is an artificial created language. Somebody just made up a language of their own, and that's why it doesn't translate to anything else.

Based on whatever. That also seems plausible to me. I can imagine this being I don't know, a language unique to one person who was, you know, toiling away in their turret or something in a monastery, or maybe shared by a small number of people for some kind of esoteric purpose or some kind of a cult purpose maybe, But the key being if it's an invented language rather than a code for an existing language, that would explain

why it doesn't code out well. Whatever its origins, whatever it's meaning or lack of meaning, it continues to enthrall us and perplexus and uh and i'd likely will continue to do so. I don't I do not expect that will reach the point where we need to you know, add there may be additional you know, arguments, there's some new ideas that are brought up. But I am not

expecting to see anybody crack this uh in in the future. Yeah, I will say, as much as I would like to see it cracked, my the walls of my skeptical fortress here have been fortified. And I now when I see an article, as they do tend to pop up once every year or two, an article about how somebody has cracked the Voytage manuscript, I think now I will probably conclude, Okay,

I bet that's not right. And then then another thing about it too, is like if it was cracked, the magic would be gone, like the part of the man that the whole reason we're enthralled by this document is that we don't know what it's meaning or meaninglessness really consists of. Well, it's about it's It's like how you know, the best part of a mystery is always the middle.

It's almost never the end. When you get to the end and you find out who done it, it's almost always disappointing because there's only so many ways it can go right, I'd say, Actually, though, to tie it back to the subject, one of the only example counter examples I can think of is the Name of the Rose, where the solution of the mystery is supremely satisfying. Yeah. I think there's a strong case to be made there. Yeah. Um. Interesting to the other mystery book that I mentioned, Um,

the Club Duma by Perez Roverta, also a mystery. That's the book that The Ninth Gate was based on. Uh. And It's been a while since I've seen The Ninth Gate, but I definitely remember enjoying the book. It's a fun little, uh you know, ac cult themed filler, a thriller. I've never read it. I actually check that out. How's the ending? Um? Pretty good, as I recall, Yeah, it's different from the movie again based on my my fading memory of it.

But I'd love to close out here with the one one more quote from that Terence mckinnipiece from from Mostes magazine, which I think he sums up a lot of the like the power and the you know, our fascination with this document he said, quote it is a kind of Borhesian concept that there must be somewhere an unreadable book, and perhaps this is it, the unreadable book. Hence at an idea, at the idea that the world is in information.

We have cognizance of the world by ordering all of the information we can't we come upon in relation to information that we have already accumulated through patterns. An unreadable book in a non English script with no dictionary attached

is very puzzling. We become like linguistic oysters. We secrete around it, we insist it into our metaphysics, but we don't know what it says, which always carries with it the possibility that it says something that would unhinge our conceptions of things, or that it's real message is its unreadability. It points to the otherness of the nature of information, and it is what is called in structuralism, a limit text. Certainly, the Vontage Manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism.

It is truly an occult book, one that no one can read the literal meaning of occult. Yeah, it's a mystery in the dark, absolutely all right. So there have it, the Vonage Manuscript. Obviously, we would love to hear from everybody out there, because I have you have you cracked it? I there's it's very possible we will hear from someone who believes that they have, or at the very least, perhaps you can turn us on to some other wild theories. Uh,

some of the crazier theories that we didn't get into. Uh, you know, involving it's its origin. Uh yeah, there's there are some other ones we didn't discuss. And what involving like the uh you know what, the various other like occult conspiracy theories, the Rosicrucians and stuff. McKenna talks about that. So certainly, if you have idea, have any of those ideas you want to chat with us about, uh, you

can reach out to us. In the meantime, check out more episodes of Stuff to Bow Your Mind at Stuff to Well your Mind dot com and make sure that you have subscribed to the podcast. Make sure you subscribe to Invention as well. Inventions are in our step by step journey through human techno history and you can find

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