The 600-year-old riddle of

the Voynich manuscript,

explained
The undecipherable medieval manuscript contains a code so
complex that no one has been able to crack it.
Updated
by Constance Grady@constancegrady Sep 18, 2017, 9:00am EDT
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Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

In 1912, an antiques dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a remarkable

manuscript. It wasnt gilded or beautifully illuminated, like the manuscripts with
which it was bundled, but it caught his eye nonetheless: It was in code.

It was long 234 pages filled with pictures of plants and naked women and what
appeared to be astrological diagrams, and line after line of script. And not a word of
the script was comprehensible. It wasnt in any known shorthand or variation of
medieval Latin or English or French or any other known language. The entire thing
was in code.

The fact that this was a 13th century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must
be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a
manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown, Voynich
said. Two problems presented themselves the text must be unravelled and the
history of the manuscript must be traced.

To this date, no one has successfully solved either problem.

The text that came to be known as the Voynich manuscript is now housed at Yale,
and dozens of medievalists and cryptologists study it every year. Earlier this
September, scholar Nicholas Gibbs published an article in the Times Literary
Supplement claiming to have cracked the code, only to be pooh-poohed
by medievalists across the internet.

Gibbs may have failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but he joins a long and
illustrious lineage of failures. Cryptologists across the world have tried and failed to
decode the Voynich since at least the 17th century, when an alchemist described it
as a certain riddle of the Sphinx.

Here are the questions posed by that Sphinxian riddle.

Where did the Voynich manuscript come from?

No one knows who wrote the Voynich manuscript or for what purpose, but carbon
dating places its origins between 1404 and 1438, despite Voynichs claim that it was
a 13th-century document. As far back as anyone has been able to track discussion
of the Voynich manuscript, there is no history of it existing as anything other than a
marvelous, indecipherable curiosity. It entered the historical record centuries old and
already unreadable.

The first supposed owner of the manuscript is believed to be the Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolf II, who allegedly purchased it for 600 gold ducats ($90,000 today)
sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, apparently under the belief
that the manuscript was the work of the 13th-century English alchemist Roger
Bacon. (Rudolf was passionately devoted to alchemy and the occult.) Rudolf,
however, seemed to have no luck decoding the manuscript, and it passed from hand to
hand until it ended up in Jesuit holdings in Rome, where it would remain hidden until
Voynich turned it up 300 years later.
Along the way, the manuscript paused with early cryptologists like the Jesuit
polymath Athanasius Kircher, who claimed to have decoded the Egyptian hieroglyphs
(he hadnt), but it remained unsolved. It seems to have consumed the lives of its
owners: To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, wrote the friend of one
owner after his death. He relinquished hope only with his life.

Whats in the book?

The Voynich manuscript appears to have seven separate sections. Over time,
Voynich enthusiasts have given each section a conventional name: botanical,
astronomical, cosmological, zodiac, biological, pharmaceutical, and recipes.

The first section is the botanical section, which comprises about half the manuscript
and includes pictures of herbs. Some of the herbs appear to be real plants, some of
them dont seem to exist, and a few of them are said to resemble sunflowers, which
did not exist in Europe in the 15th century (although this identification has been
questioned).

Following the botanical section is the astronomical section, with pictures of the sun,
moon, and stars; and then the cosmological section, with pictures of circular
geometric designs; and the zodiac section, which features emblems of the zodiac
signs.

The biological section is filled with illustrations of naked humans, mostly women, in a
series of tubes or baths filled with liquid. In the pharmaceutical section, illustrations
of containers are lined up next to illustrations of herbs. And in the end theres the
recipe section, with no illustrations at all: only line after line of that incomprehensible
text, each paragraph marked with a star in the margin.

So what do people think it means?

The whole thing is medical, wrote alchemist Barchius in 1639, and for most of the
Voynich manuscripts history, thats been the closest thing there is to a consensus
view about it. The plants, according to this interpretation, would be medicinal, and the
illustrations of naked women would be anatomical.

But the medical theory is far from the only interpretation thats emerged over the
years.

Early-20th-century philosopher William Romaine Newbold arguedthat Roger Bacon

really hadwritten the whole thing, and that when properly decoded, the manuscript
proved that Bacon had used both telescopes and microscopes to anticipate modern
germ theory. (The carbon dating of the manuscript that places it in the 15th century
means it is impossible the 13th-century Bacon could have written it.)

Military cryptographer William F. Friedman, who helped break Japans Purple

cipher during World War II, collaborated with his wife and fellow cryptographer
Elizebeth for years in an attempt to decode the manuscript. Ultimately, they
concluded that cracking the code was impossible, and that the Voynich MS was an
early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.

Computer scientist Gordon Rugg thinks the whole thing is a hoax, and that the
reason no one can decode the manuscript is that theres nothing to decode. Botanist
Arthur Tucker thinks it depicts Mexican plants. Physicist Andreas Schinner thinks
that it was written by an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange
mathematical algorithm in his head.

Scores of other enthusiastic would-be code breakers over the years have
created dozens of other theories, ranging from the vaguely plausible-sounding to the
extremely wild.

You may have noticed that few of the theorists Ive just named are scholars of
medieval manuscripts by profession. Thats because most medievalist scholars tend to
believe that the Voynich manuscript probably discussed medicine in some way, and
also that no theory has generated a decoded text that looks convincing, so theres no
point in speculating much further than that. But for decades, theyve been patiently
debunking wild theory after wild theory about the manuscript.

Into that atmosphere of endless wild theories, all endlessly debunked came
Nicholas Gibbs.

Whats wrong with the Gibbs theory?

Gibbs, a historical researcher and television writer, argues that the apparent code in
the Voynich manuscript is actually a series of Latin abbreviations, with each character
standing for an abbreviated word rather than a letter. Once the characters are decoded,
he claims, the manuscript becomes clear: It is an instruction manual for the health
and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society. The recipe section really is a
series of recipes for womens health, he adds, and that would have been clear to
everyone if only the manuscripts original index hadnt gone missing.

Heres the problem: The abbreviations Gibbs is proposing dont render themselves
into readable Latin. Theyre not grammatically correct, Lisa Fagin Davis, executive
director of the Medieval Academy of America, told the Atlantic. It doesnt result in
Latin that makes sense.

As for the idea that a missing index is the key to everything, Davis says, This is the
piece that really killed it for me. While theres some evidence that the manuscript is
missing pages, theres no compelling reason to think that the missing pages were an
index.

For Nick Pelling, who runs the Voynich manuscript-focused site Cipher
Mysteries, the more pressing issue is that Gibbss theory doesnt offer anything new
to the field. Gibbs, he said in a statement to Vox, has essentially cherry-picked from
various old theories that have already been debated and debunked without
contributing anything new of his own. Worse yet, his theory lacks elegance: It isnt
anchored by a throughline, but instead consists of old worked-over, half-baked
theories linked together in a halfhearted narrative. If enthusiasm could move
mountains, Pelling says of Gibbs, hed be in like a shot.

Many Voynich manuscript scholars and enthusiasts have suggested before Gibbs that
the manuscript might be a womans health manual, and that part of his theory remains
a viable possibility. But it is not a new theory, nor has it been definitively proved, and
the coded text of the manuscript remains un-decoded.

Why does anyone care about the Voynich manuscript?

So in the 600 years that the Voynich manuscript has existed, we know of no one who
has been able to read a word of it or use it to accomplish anything useful.

Yet people have devoted their lives to studying it. Kings have paid gold for it;
alchemists have pored over it; military cryptologists have sweated over it; internet
conspiracy theorists have built websites devoted to it. When Umberto Eco visited
Yales Beinecke Library in 2013, the Voynich manuscript was the only thing he
asked to see.

In part, theres the romantic thrill of the mystery: The Voynich could say anything. It
could contain astonishing secrets about the world or human nature or magic. It feels
like the beginnings of the plot in a fantasy novel that ends with the person who
decodes the Voynich manuscript being declared the rightful ruler of the kingdom.

Pelling argues that the fascination the manuscript wields has less to do with whatever
might be hidden in its code than for what we can use it to say about us. When we pore
endlessly through its ciphered text, we may or may not be getting all that close to
what the scribe who originally penned the manuscript intended to express but the
ideas that we project onto the manuscript can reveal a lot about ourselves and what we
hold to be important.

The evil beauty of the Voynich manuscript, he says, is that it holds a mirror up to
our souls.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/9/18/16290436/voynich-manuscript-explained