Weird A-Z. V is for The Voynich Manuscript
This is a medieval document written in an unknown language. Author Robert Burmbaugh has dubbed it, 'the most mysterious manuscript in the world'. It contains illustrations that suggest the book is in six parts; herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes. It was probably written in central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century and is named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfred M.Voynich, who acquired it in 1912.
Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative and scientific drawings of a provincial (but lively) character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue and red. It resists all efforts at translation. Based on the evidence of the calligraphy, the drawings, the vellum and the pigments, Voynich estimated that the manuscript was created in the late 13th century.
The manuscript is small, 7 by 10 inches, but thick, running to around 240 vellum pages. It is written in an unknown script of which there is no other known instance in the world. It is abundantly illustrated with coloured drawings of unidentified plants, what seem to be herbal recipes, tiny naked woman playing in bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing, strange charts which contain astronomical objects or live cells seen through a microscope, charts with an odd calendar of zodiacal signs populated by tiny naked people in rubbish bins, and so on. From a piece of paper which was once attached to the Voynich manuscript , it is known that the manuscript once formed part of the private library of the 22nd General of the Society of Jesus or Jesuit order.
It is written in an alphabetic script, variously reckoned to have from 19 to 28 letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. There is evidence for two different 'languages' and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.
It is known that it was in the possession of Emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia (1552 - 1612) in 1586 and is now in Yale University Library. Accompanying the manuscript was a letter that stated it was the work of the Englishman Roger Bacon, who flourished in the 13th century and who was a noted per-Copernican astronomer. Only two years before the appearance of the Voynich manuscript, John Dee, the great English navigator, astrologer, magician, intelligence agent and occultist, had lectured in Prague on Bacon.
In 1987, Dr Leo Levitov wrote that the manuscript is the only surviving primary document of the Great Heresy that arose in Italy and flourished in Languedoc in France, until eliminated by the Albigensian Crusade in the 1230's. The tiny woman in baths are supposed to be partaking in a Cathar suicide ritual, the Endura, or 'death by venesection [cutting a vein] in order to bleed to death in a warm bath'.
The plant drawings are not botanically identifiable, but Levitov stated: 'There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with. The innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle. The reason it has been so difficult to decipher the Voynich manuscript is that is is not encrypted at all, but merely written in a special script, and it is an adaptation of a polyglot oral tongue into a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read. Specifically, a highly polyglot form of medieval Flemish with a large number of Old French and Old High German loan words.' His thesis is still not accepted by the academic community.
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