Chapter Eight: The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript
For my final post, I wanted to explore a topic that (hopefully) most people haven’t heard of; I know I hadn’t until very recently. The image above is a page from a document known as the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval text written in an unknown language that has yet to be decoded or understood. It contains lots of puzzling, strange images alongside its undecipherable text, leading to centuries of fruitless attempts at understanding its message and lots of very frustrated historians and scholars.
There are a couple of things we do know about this strange document. It carbon-dates back to around the 1300-1400’s, and is believed to have been produced in Italy or somewhere else in the Mediterranean region. It passed through the hands of a couple of owners in centuries past, then seemingly disappeared from historical records for about 250 years until 1912 when a man named Wilfred Voyich (thus the name of the document) purchased it, allegedly from a Jesuit outside Rome. The documents strange contents were released to the public in 1915, and it’s been confounding all sorts of intellectuals ever since.
There have been several hypotheses regarding the meaning and origin of the document, as well as several individuals claiming to have cracked its code, but there are no definitive answers that explain anything, really. The most sound argument, in my opinion, is that this language is simply extinct – that’s easy to believe since it doesn’t match any other recorded language in human history, but it does raise the question of why this is the only document ever written in it (at least that we know of). And why is it not written in Latin, or some other prominent historical language? Is it meant to be a language of symbols, like hieroglyphs, or is it an actual alphabet?
A lot of leading theories about the purpose of the document suggest that it’s some sort of women’s health manual, demonstrating different Pagan health or spiritual rituals and written in a relatively unknown dialect even for the time. Again, this makes logical sense, but there really is no evidence to support it other than the fact that the images kind of look that way, and other similar arguments. The document also contains what appear to be astrological symbols and celestial charts, and lots and lots and lots of naked women performing various tasks. Weird.
Some scholars and people claim that the entire document may be an elaborate hoax orchestrated by Voynich himself. I find this hard to believe; after all, the document was carbon-dated using scientific methods back several centuries, and there are historical records of other owners possessing it in the past. Also, the document is so extensive and detailed that it seems unlikely that an old man would take the time to sit down and draft it up – and for what purpose? I suppose it can’t be out-ruled as a possibility, but there are other explanations that I think make more sense and I can logically settle on as the most likely sort of answer.
Still, though, no one really knows what any of those words, symbols, or whatever they may be are trying to say – or why. Will it ever be deciphered? Is there a missing link somewhere else out there that will suddenly make everything clear? Was Voynich just a crazy and extremely dedicated old man? We probably won’t know for a really, really long time, if ever.