When, in 1639, the Prague citizen Georg Baresch wrote to the famous Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher that he owned a mysterious book which was written in an unknown script and profusely illustrated with pictures of plants, stars and alchemical secrets, he thought that Kircher would be able to decipher this book for him. He could not have guessed that not only was Kircher unable to do this, but that a long row of vastly more expert codebreakers were equally going to fail. The book has come down to us and even now, more than 360 years later, not a single word from its 234 pages can be understood.
Nor was Baresch the first to attempt in vain to read the MS. Before him, various scientists which the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II collected at his court may well have tried their hand.
The book is now known as the Voynich manuscript (MS), after its (re)discoverer in 1912
The Voynich Manuscript, as it is now commonly called, is one of the rarest wonders of the modern world. It is a book that quite literally should not exist. To call it a book is somewhat misleading, for it, as with most ancient manuscripts, resembles nothing of a book as we know it.
It is a collection of some 272 vellum pages (the skin of a mammal, often cow, stretched and dried to be used as a durable paper), 240 pages of which have survived the many handlings, transfers and inspections the book has encountered over the years.
The origins of the book are almost as interesting and mysterious as its contents. Many scholars believe the book was written, by quill pen and using coloured paint, at some point in the mid 15th or 16th centuries. By who is a completely different story, and the controversy over the authors identity is strongly connected to the mystery of the manuscripts contents.
The information contained in the book is largely unknown, and this is due completely, to the fact that the Voynich Manuscript is written in an entirely unknown and undecipherable language.
The surviving 240 pages, made up of some 170,000 discreet written characters or glyphs, making up 35,000 separate words, are accompanied by artfully crafted sketches and drawings, many of which are equally mysterious.
A large number of the sketches resemble known plant species, with subtle, and sometime drastic differences, others resemble complex aqueduct drawings and even anatomical type depictions of people (usually women).
The manuscript has been examined by no less than an army of cryptologists, linguists and a host of other scholars, including biblical scholars, and none of the countless hands and minds of these learned friends has ever been able to decipher a single word.
Very early on in the known existence of the book, several historians and cryptologists confirmed that the text in the manuscript is that of a learnable language, it holds with all the known rules and constructs of modern and ancient languages and quite often the sketches seem to correspond with titles and descriptions. In modern examination, most, if not all, experts continue to agree on this as fact.
Of course, with such a mysterious find in the hands of so many people, theories abound about the books origins.
The earliest known owner of the book was one Georg Barech, an obscure alchemist from Prague, in the early 17th century.
Theories content that Barech may have fabricated the book as a test for his patron. Others suggest that it was Voynich himself who fabricated both the book and the story, though evidence does exist to refute this claim.
Some claim that the book is the product of a lost middle European language, and that the book is a medical (or alchemist) instructional tome. Though some of the wilder claims cite both alien influence and even time travel.
The connection to the Society of Jesus and the Villa Mondragone might even suggest a Masonic origin to the manuscript, tying its information to the Knights Templar and the so-called secret knowledge they possessed, as passed down from King Solomon.
The truth is, no one alive has the ability to read or decipher the huge amount of information contained in this 600 (or so) year old book. It could possibly provide instructions for turning lead into gold, or it could be an interstellar gardening guide, or even still, it could be an early medieval alchemical textbook. Nonetheless, the Voynich Manuscript remains one of the oldest mysteries of modern history. Experts are in total disagreement about its origin and meaning, and thus, it will hold its place in the Yale Museum, as The Book That Shouldnt Exist. The book itself remains in Yale's rare book collection under catalog number "MS 408. and is open for examination by anyone who feels they can crack this bizarre mystery. If anyone wants to take a crack, I wish you all the best.
