There’s something impossibly intriguing about a good mystery. With an atmosphere of hushed quiet and ancient manuscripts, where forbidden knowledge and hidden secrets lay waiting to be discovered just one page away, there is perhaps no richer setting for a mystery than the literary world.
Called “the world’s most mysterious book” by many, the Voynich Manuscript has been puzzling the literary world for centuries. Though there are countless manuscripts of historical significance and intrigue that inspire theories aplenty, this particular manuscript has proven itself a mystery like no other. At the heart of the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, among the many intriguing facets of its contents and history, is one defining characteristic—no one has read it. It is, after centuries of being studied, still undeciphered.
Written by an unknown author in an unknown language, the Voynich Manuscript is a codex, or ancient manuscript in book form, that dates back to the late fifteenth century. Despite some lapses where its history becomes a bit murkier, it’s known that the Voynich Manuscript passed through some rather notable hands, including those of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. Thanks to the emperor, the manuscript’s first documented appearance in history is within Prague, where his court was, when he bought it for 600 gold ducats—over one hundred thousand of today’s dollars. Rudolf II, who was quite interested alchemy and the occult, believed that the mysterious manuscript had been written by John Dee—English alchemist, astrologer, mathematician, occultist and personal astronomer and advisor to Elizabeth I—or perhaps by Roger Bacon, another English philosopher, alchemist, and Franciscan friar. Dee’s work walked the line between scientific and magical, earning him scorn but making his name synonymous with the history of mysticism and the occult long past his own lifetime. Though there’s no evidence to support that it was written by Dee, there are some who believe the Voynich Manuscript was at least owned by him, although all evidence supporting that theory is circumstantial. Dee owned several manuscripts by Roger Bacon and might’ve also believed the Voynich Manuscript was one of Bacon’s. Dee’s son, Arthur, noted that his father owned “a booke…containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out.” It certainly sounds like the Voynich Manuscript.
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Though nothing before Emperor Rudolf II’s acquisition of the Voynich Manuscript is known for certain, its path from that point on is traceable. The emperor passed it along to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, a Bohemian pharmacist, alchemist, and personal doctor to Rudolf II. Tepenecz’s ownership is confirmed by his signature that was revealed inscribed on a page of the manuscript with ultraviolet light in more recent years. The manuscript then passed to Georg Baresch upon Tepenecz’s death in 1622, then moved on to Johannes Marcus Marci, a Bohemian doctor and scientist. Modern researchers have Marci to thank for all knowledge of the Voynich Manuscript’s trail of ownership throughout history; he wrote a letter detailing the manuscript’s history and his efforts to decipher it that he included when he gifted it to his friend Athanasius Kircher in 1666. It is this letter only that provides a trail of ownership of the manuscript. Kircher was a Jesuit scholar who was well known for deciphering hieroglyphics (he actually published a dictionary of hieroglyphics); Marci believed if anyone could decipher the manuscript’s seemingly uncrackable code, it would be Kircher. However, Kircher, like everyone else who’d gotten their hands on this manuscript, was unsuccessful.
From this point in history, around 1665, the manuscript remained in Jesuit possession, even becoming a part of the personal library of the head of the Jesuit order to avoid papal confiscation. It was eventually rediscovered by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. As the story goes, Wilfrid Voynich—a Polish American rare books dealer—was at the Jesuit College at Villa Mondragone when he was allowed to peruse their collection of manuscripts and take what he liked. Voynich found the manuscript, added it to his pile, and offered a sum of money for all of it. The college accepted without checking what he was taking, although it doesn’t seem Voynich had any reason to know what the manuscript was or to have a special reason to want it specifically.
Voynich’s acquisition of the manuscript brought modern attention to something that had largely been forgotten. Voynich was intent on selling the manuscript, but no one knew what it was or who had written it and he couldn’t find a buyer. Perhaps with the idea of increasing the indecipherable manuscript’s mystery and sense of allure for potential buyers in mind, Voynich never revealed where he acquired the manuscript. It was rumored that Voynich wrote it himself or that the manuscript held some sort of code meant to be used to spy on America, a theory that gained traction after Voynich bragged about the manuscript at a dinner party in Chicago and was reported to the FBI by another guest. With the help of some professors, he had to convince the FBI that the manuscript truly was ancient, although his own past arrest and imprisonment (and escape) for socialist activities in Siberia certainly couldn’t have helped.
Voynich never sold the manuscript. It took until the early 1960s, after his and his wife’s deaths, for his business manager to sell it. The buyer was a man named H.P. Kraus; he also planned to sell the manuscript, but couldn’t find a buyer. Realizing people didn’t want to buy it, but wanted to see it, Kraus decided to donate the Voynich Manuscript to the Beinecke Library at Yale where it has remained since its acquisition in 1969.
But what is the Voynich Manuscript, actually?
The 240-page manuscript, written in a language that is not only unknown but which has proved exceptionally difficult for experts to tie to a root language or to decipher at all, seems designed to inspire the most mystical and mysterious of conspiracy theories. It’s been described as a magical or scientific text and features pages of strange, otherworldly botanical, astrological, and biological illustrations among others. While the 55 pages of botanical illustrations at the beginning of the manuscript may look straightforward enough next to what is presumed to be their scientific descriptions, the truth of the drawings is strange and intriguing: these plants do not exist. Whatever the indecipherable words say, it’s clear that the 113 plant species seem to combine incompatible parts of different plants from different species kingdoms. While there are familiar constellations and zodiacal charts within the manuscript, there are also unfamiliar constellations. In a section presumably focused on the medieval science of bathing, the illustrations get decidedly more strange with nude female figures, many of whom look pregnant and who were drawn in a way that was unusually frank for the time, bathing in green interconnected tubes or wading in fluids. There are herbs and roots floating in jars, images of floating heads, and more oddities that only cast more mystery over the manuscript.
Theories have surrounded this manuscript since it came to light. From the time of Emperor Rudolf II to the modern day at Yale, some of the most intelligent, well-known thinkers have attempted to solve the mystery that is the Voynich Manuscript. Some have theorized that it was all a modern prank while others suggested it was a prank by John Dee and alchemist Edward Kelley as an elaborate prank of the past, but that has been thoroughly debunked by modern testing. The Voynich Manuscript is a genuine ancient manuscript, with the parchment dating back to 1408-1438 and the ink proven to be medieval. This definitive proof of the manuscript’s age rules out others who have been associated with it by hopeful theorists, including all Roger Bacon theories and even Da Vinci.
The truth of the Voynich Manuscript is that even modern experts have failed to make sense of it. The language has yet to be deciphered, the many illustrations still as strange as they must’ve appeared to the alchemists and researchers of centuries past. Who wrote the manuscript? What do its pages truly contain? While many portions of the manuscript may be nothing more than typical magical or science texts of medieval times, that doesn’t explain the pure oddity of some of the illustrations or the fact that many of them do not represent things that actually exist. Some of them are even a bit unsettling. How has the language within the manuscript never been seen in any other manuscript before? How has it evaded decipherment by not only the best minds of the medieval age, but modern experts and technology, too? And—this one is especially intriguing to me—how did this manuscript end up in the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor and why? We know the hands it passed through after the emperor acquired it, but how did such a manuscript find its way to such an important man in the first place? His interest in the occult and unusual was well known. Was it purely interest in the manuscript’s apparent indecipherability that caught his interest or did he know more about its origin and purpose than we can learn from its time with him? And why was it worth the equivalent of over $100,000 to him?
The Voynich Manuscript is a deliciously intriguing literary mystery. There is more to learn from every angle, from its unknown origin to its first arrival in history in the library of the Holy Roman Emperor to the actual contents of the manuscript itself. Whenever the answers are revealed, they are sure to be as fascinating as the mystery itself.