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Voynich manuscript

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: General Literature

   The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script.
   Enlarge
   The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script.

   The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book with
   incomprehensible contents. It is thought to have been written
   approximately 400 years ago by an unknown author in an unidentified
   script and unintelligible language.

   Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object
   of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers,
   including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II
   fame (all of whom failed to decipher a single word). This string of
   failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of
   historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that
   the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of
   arbitrary symbols.

   The book is named after the Polish-American book-dealer Wilfrid M.
   Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. As of 2005, the Voynich manuscript is
   item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale
   University. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.

Description

   By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of
   16 pages each. About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the
   page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that
   several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired
   it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored
   paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a
   later date.

Illustrations

   The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents,
   but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different
   styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains
   only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The
   sections, and their conventional names, are:
   The "herbal" section of the manuscript contains illustrations of
   plants.
   Enlarge
   The "herbal" section of the manuscript contains illustrations of
   plants.
     * Herbal — each page displays one plant (sometimes two), and a few
       paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the
       time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of
       sketches seen in the pharmaceutical section (below).

     * Astronomical — contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns,
       moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series
       of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal
       constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier
       with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by
       exactly 30 miniature female figures, most of them naked, each
       holding a labeled star. The last two pages of this section (
       Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost,
       while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15
       stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.

     * Biological — a dense continuous text interspersed with figures,
       mostly showing small nude women bathing in pools or tubs connected
       by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like
       body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.

     * Cosmological — more circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature.
       This section also has fold-outs; one of them spans six pages and
       contains some sort of map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected
       by " causeways", castles, and possibly a volcano.

     * Pharmaceutical — many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (
       roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn
       along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.

     * Recipes — many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower-like (or
       star-like) "bullet".

The text

   The "biological" section of the manuscript has dense text and
   illustrations showing nude women bathing.
   Enlarge
   The "biological" section of the manuscript has dense text and
   illustrations showing nude women bathing.

   The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged
   right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes
   with " bullets" on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation.
   The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are
   written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood what he was
   writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the
   impression that each character had to be calculated before being put on
   the page.

   The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated
   from each other by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one
   or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether
   certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would
   account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen
   "weird" characters that occur only once or twice each.

   Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length.
   These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g.
   certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in
   English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but
   others may not.

   Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural
   languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf's law, and
   the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English
   or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a
   few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few
   repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the
   illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page
   occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.

   On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike
   European languages in several aspects. For example, there are
   practically no words with more than ten "letters", yet there are also
   few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within the
   word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the
   beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the
   middle section – an arrangement found in semitic languages, but not in
   the Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. (It should be noted, though,
   that the Greek sigma or the now- archaic Latin long s have a different
   form when it appears at the end of words; similarly, English
   capitalized letters, which usually appear only at the beginning of
   words, may vary dramatically from their lower-case version.)

   The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages;
   there are instances where the same common word appears up to three
   times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with
   unusual frequency.

   There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly
   Latin script. In the last page, there are four lines of writing which
   are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words
   in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the
   15th Century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.
   Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names
   of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script,
   with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the
   Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin
   script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time.

History

   The illustrations in the "biological" section are linked by a network
   of pipes.
   Enlarge
   The illustrations in the "biological" section are linked by a network
   of pipes.

   The history of the manuscript is still full of gaps, especially in its
   earliest part. Since the manuscript's alphabet does not resemble any
   known script, and the text is still undeciphered, the only useful
   evidence as to the book's age and origin are the illustrations —
   especially the dress and hairstyles of the human figures, and a couple
   of castles that are seen in the diagrams. They are all
   characteristically European, and based on that evidence most experts
   assign the book to dates between 1450 and 1520. This estimate is
   supported by other secondary clues.

   The earliest confirmed owner of the manuscript was a certain Georg
   Baresch, an obscure alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th
   century. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as we are today about
   this " Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library"
   for many years. On learning that Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar
   from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic ( Ethiopian)
   dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, he sent a sample
   copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His
   1639 letter to Kircher, which was recently located by Rene Zandbergen,
   is the earliest mention of the manuscript that has been found so far.

   It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently he
   was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch
   apparently refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death the manuscript passed
   to his friend Jan Marek Marci (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of
   Charles University in Prague; who promptly sent the book to Kircher,
   his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci's cover letter (1666) is
   still attached to the manuscript.

   There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all
   likelihood it was kept, with the rest of Kircher's correspondence, in
   the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian
   University). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor
   Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal
   States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many
   properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio.
   According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before
   this happened many books of the University's library were hastily
   transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt
   from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and
   so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex
   libris of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's
   Rector at the time.

   Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati,
   a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of
   Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Collegio
   Ghisleri.

   Around 1912 the Collegio Romano was apparently short of money and
   decided to sell (very discreetly) some of its holdings. Wilfrid Voynich
   acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his
   name. In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his
   widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (known as the author of the novel The
   Gadfly). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend,
   Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Anne Nill sold the book to another antique
   book dealer Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the
   manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

Theories about authorship

   Many names have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich
   manuscript. Following are only the most popular ones.

Roger Bacon

   Roger Bacon
   Enlarge
   Roger Bacon

   Marci's 1665 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late
   friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Emperor
   Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552–1612) for 600 ducats — around $30,800 as of
   2005. According to the letter, Rudolf (or perhaps Raphael) believed the
   author to be the Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (1214–1294).

   Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgment" about this
   claim, it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who did his best to
   confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most decipherment
   attempts for the next 80 years. However, scholars who have looked at
   the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with Bacon's works have flatly
   denied that possibility. One should note also that Raphael died in
   1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in
   1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.

John Dee

   John Dee
   Enlarge
   John Dee

   The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude
   that the person who sold the Voynich manuscript to Rudolf could only be
   John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen
   Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's
   manuscripts. This theory is also conveyed by Voynich manuscript scholar
   Gordon Rugg. Dee and his scrier ( mediumic assistant) Edward Kelley
   lived in Bohemia for several years where they had hoped to sell their
   services to the Emperor. However, Dee's meticulously kept diaries do
   not mention that sale, and make it seem quite unlikely. Anyway, if the
   Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, the connection to Dee may just
   disappear. On the other hand, Dee himself may have written it and
   spread the rumour that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes
   of later selling it.

Edward Kelley

   Edward Kelley
   Enlarge
   Edward Kelley

   Dee's companion in Prague, Edward Kelley, was a self-styled alchemist
   who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold by means of a secret
   powder which he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales. As Dee's
   scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a crystal ball,
   and had long conversations with them—which Dee dutifully noted down.
   The angel's language was called Enochian, after Enoch, the Biblical
   father of Methuselah; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour
   of Heaven by angels, and later written a book about what he saw there.
   Several people (see below) have suggested that, just as Kelley invented
   Enochian to dupe Dee, he could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript
   to swindle the Emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed
   alchemical expertise). However, if Roger Bacon is not the author of the
   Voynich manuscript, Kelley's connection to the manuscript is just as
   vacuous as Dee's.

Wilfrid Voynich

   Voynich was often suspected of having fabricated the Voynich manuscript
   himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary
   knowledge and means; and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been
   worth a fortune. However, by expert dating of the manuscript, and the
   recent discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher, that possibility has
   been eliminated.

Jacobus Sinapius

   A photostatic reproduction of the first page of the Voynich manuscript,
   taken by Voynich sometime before 1921, showed some faint writing that
   had been erased. With the help of chemicals, the text could be read as
   the name 'Jacobj `a Tepenece'. This is taken to be Jakub Horcicky of
   Tepenec, who was also known by his Latin name: Jacobus Sinapius. He was
   a specialist in herbal medicine, Rudolph II's personal physician, and
   curator of his botanical gardens. Voynich, and many other people after
   him, concluded from this "signature" that Jacobus owned the Voynich
   manuscript before Baresch, and saw in that a confirmation of Raphael's
   story. Others have suggested that Jacobus himself could be the author.

   However, that writing does not match Jacobus's signature, as found in a
   document recently located by Jan Hurich. So it is still possible that
   the writing on page f1r was added by a later owner or librarian, and is
   only this person's guess as to the book's author. (In the Jesuit
   history books that were available to Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus
   is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who deserves a
   full-page entry, while, for example, Tycho Brahe is barely mentioned.)
   Moreover, the chemicals applied by Voynich have so degraded the vellum
   that hardly a trace of the signature can be seen today; thus there is
   also the suspicion that the signature was fabricated by Voynich in
   order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory.

Jan Marci

   Jan Marci met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University
   to Rome in 1638; and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged
   many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part
   of a continuing struggle by the secularist side of the University to
   maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival
   Clementinum college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two
   universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has
   therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits
   led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the Voynich
   manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher.

   Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this
   task; and Kircher, a "Dr Know-It-All" who is today remembered more by
   his egregious mistakes than by his genuine accomplishments, was an easy
   target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that
   orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted
   an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note
   explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a
   translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced one at once.

   It is worth noting that the only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence
   are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch (1639), and two by
   Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence
   between Marci and Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the Voynich
   manuscript "cover letter". However, Marci's secret grudge against the
   Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied
   to become a Jesuit, and shortly before his death in 1667 he was granted
   honorary membership in their Order.

Raphael Mnishovsky

   Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of
   Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things),
   and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (ca.
   1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich
   manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher—and made poor
   Baresch his unwitting "guinea pig". After Kircher published his book on
   Coptic, Raphael (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him
   would be a much better trophy than stumping Baresch, and convinced the
   alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger
   Bacon story to motivate Baresch. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich
   manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However,
   there is no definite evidence for this theory.

Anthony Ascham

   Dr Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur
   cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said
   that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double
   system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong
   claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be
   written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works
   include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich
   manuscript does contain sections resembling a herbal, the main argument
   against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have
   obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge.

Multiple authors

   Prescott Currier, a US Navy cryptographer who worked with the
   manuscript in the 1970s, observed that the pages of the "herbal"
   section could be separated into two sets, A and B, with distinctive
   statistical properties and apparently different handwritings. He
   concluded that the Voynich manuscript was the work of two or more
   authors who used different dialects or spelling conventions, but who
   shared the same script. However, recent studies have questioned this
   conclusion. A handwriting expert who examined the book saw only one
   hand in the whole manuscript. Also, when all sections are examined, one
   sees a more gradual transition, with herbal A and herbal B at opposite
   ends. Thus, Prescott's observations could simply be the result of the
   herbal sections being written in two widely separated time periods.

Theories about contents and purpose

   The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript
   suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address
   topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling
   details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's
   origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was
   intended. Here are only a few of them:

Herbal

   The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but
   attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with
   the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed.
   Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair
   fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal" pictures
   that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of
   these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking
   details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of
   one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers
   from a third.

Sunflowers

   Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World
   sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing
   possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight,
   especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the
   scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other
   members of the same family — which includes the common daisy,
   chamomile, and many other species from all over the world.

Alchemy

   The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a
   connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book
   contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds.
   However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial
   language, where processes and materials are represented by specific
   images (eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed, etc.) or standard
   textual symbols (circle with cross, etc.); and none of these could be
   convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.

Alchemical herbal

   Sergio Toresella, an expert on ancient herbals, pointed out that the
   Voynich manuscript could be an alchemical herbal—which actually had
   nothing to do with alchemy, but was a bogus herbal with invented
   pictures, that a quack doctor would carry around just to impress his
   clients. Apparently there was a small cottage industry of such books
   somewhere in northern Italy, just at the right epoch. However, those
   books are quite different from the Voynich manuscript in style and
   format; and they were all written in plain language.

Astrological herbal

   Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb
   gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures common during the
   likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas
   Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and
   one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been
   able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological
   traditions (European or otherwise).

Microscopes and telescopes

   This three-page foldout from the manuscript includes a chart that
   appears astronomical.
   Enlarge
   This three-page foldout from the manuscript includes a chart that
   appears astronomical.

   A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly
   shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a
   picture of a galaxy that could only be obtained with a telescope. Other
   drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This
   would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the
   manuscript's origin. However, the resemblance is rather questionable:
   on close inspection, the central part of the "galaxy" looks rather like
   a pool of water. Some of the images also look quite like sea urchins.

Theories about the language

   Many theories have been advanced as to the nature of the Voynich
   manuscript "language". Here is a partial list:

Letter-based cipher

   According to this theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful
   text in some European language, that was intentionally rendered obscure
   by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of
   some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters.

   This has been the working hypothesis for most decipherment attempts in
   the twentieth century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers
   led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. Simple substitution
   ciphers can be excluded, because they are very easy to crack; so
   decipherment efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic ciphers,
   invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the popular
   Vigenere cipher, which could have been strengthened by the use of nulls
   and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks,
   etc. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted before
   encryption. There have been several claims of decipherment along these
   lines, but none has been widely accepted — chiefly because the proposed
   decipherment algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that
   they could extract a meaningful text from any random string of symbols.

   The main argument for this theory is that the use of a weird alphabet
   by a European author can hardly be explained except as an attempt to
   hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the
   estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of
   cryptography as a systematic discipline. Against this theory is the
   observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the
   "natural" statistical features that are seen in the Voynich manuscript,
   such as Zipf's law. Also, although polyalphabetic ciphers were invented
   about 1467, variants only became popular in the sixteenth century,
   somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich manuscript.

Codebook cipher

   According to this theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually
   be codes to be looked up in a dictionary or codebook. The main evidence
   for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution
   of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the
   time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based
   ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very
   cumbersome to write and to read.

Visual cipher

   James Finn proposed in his book Pandora's Hope (2004) that the Voynich
   manuscript is in fact visually encoded Hebrew. Once the Voynich letters
   have been correctly transcribed, using the European Voynich Alphabet
   (EVA) as a guide, many of the Voynich words can be seen as Hebrew words
   that repeat with different distortions to confuse the reader. For
   example, the word AIN from the manuscript is the Hebrew word for "eye",
   and it also appears in different distorted versions as "aiin" or
   "aiiin", to make it appear as though the words are different when in
   fact they are the same word. Other methods of visual encryption are
   used as well. The main argument for this view is that it would explain
   the lack of success that most other researchers have had in decoding
   the manuscript, because they are based on more mathematical approaches
   to the decryption. The main argument against it is that such a
   qualitative encoding places a heavy burden on the talents of the
   individual decoder, given the multiplicity of possible alternate visual
   interpretations of the same text. It would be hard to separate how much
   interpretation is of the genuine text, and how much simply reflects the
   bias of the original interpreter.

Micrography

   Following its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock
   the book's secrets (and, indeed, the first of many premature claims of
   decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of
   Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is
   meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact
   constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under
   magnification. These markings, based on ancient Greek shorthand, were
   supposed to form a second level of script that held the real content of
   the writing. Using this knowledge, Newbold claimed to have worked out
   entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use
   of a compound microscope four hundred years before Leeuwenhoek.
   However, John Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious
   flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have
   multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was
   intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging
   letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors
   alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all
   could be "read" in the microscopic markings, which in any case are
   themselves illusory. Although there is a tradition of Hebrew
   micrography, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes
   Newbold made out. Upon close study, these turn out to be mere artifacts
   of the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum, and an example of
   pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography
   theory is today disregarded.

Steganography

   This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly
   meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in
   inconspicuous details—e.g. the second letter of every word, or the
   number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography,
   is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Some
   people suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan
   grille of some sort. This theory is hard to prove or disprove, since
   stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to crack. An argument against it is
   that using a cipher-looking cover text defeats the main purpose of
   steganography, which is to hide the very existence of the secret
   message.

   Some people have suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in
   the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples
   of steganography from about that time that use letter shape ( italic
   vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high
   magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural,
   and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.

Exotic natural language

   The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript
   text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain with
   an invented alphabet. The word structure is indeed similar to that of
   many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan
   (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic ( Vietnamese, Khmer,
   etc.) and possibly Tai ( Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages,
   the " words" have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich
   structure, including tonal patterns.

   This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages
   generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for
   Western visitors; which motivated the invention of several phonetic
   scripts, mostly with Latin letters but sometimes with invented
   alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich
   manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who
   could have done it—even before Marco Polo's thirteenth century voyage,
   but especially after Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the
   Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native
   from East Asia living in Europe, or educated at a European mission.

   The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all
   statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been
   tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been
   found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same
   frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent
   lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and
   copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another
   possible hint are two large red symbols on the first page, which have
   been compared to a Chinese-style book title, upside down and badly
   copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees
   (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are
   features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (jie q`i). The main
   argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars
   at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find any clear examples of
   Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.

   In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript
   is plaintext written in the Manchu language and gave an incomplete
   translation of the first page of the manuscript .

Polyglot tongue

   In his book Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for
   the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis (1987), Leo
   Levitov declared the manuscript a plaintext transcription of a
   "polyglot oral tongue". This he defined as "a literary language which
   would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to
   whom this language could be read." His proposed decryption has three
   Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables
   that form a mixture of medieval Flemish with many borrowed Old French
   and Old High German words.

   According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was none other than the
   assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death,
   famously associated with the Cathar faith (although the reality of this
   ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are
   not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of
   the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent
   the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the
   cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The
   constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the
   stars in Isis' mantle.

   This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar faith
   is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism, and not in
   any way associated with Isis. Second, this theory places the book's
   origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is considerably
   older than even the adherents to the Roger Bacon theory believe. Third,
   the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no
   evidence beyond his translation for this theory.

Constructed language

   The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led
   William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to arrive independently at the
   conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the
   plain—specifically, a philosophical one. In languages of this class,
   the vocabulary is organized according to a category system, so that the
   general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters.
   For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the
   category of colors, and any word beginning with those letters would
   name a colour: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an
   extreme version of the book classification scheme used by many
   libraries — in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for
   Greek and Latin, PC for Romance languages, etc.)

   This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical
   Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of
   the VM by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are
   subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular
   subject would have many words with similar prefixes — for example, all
   plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all
   diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature
   of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a
   plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.

Hoax

   The bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the
   doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its
   illustrations (such as the chimeric plants), its lack of historical
   reference and persistent resistance to deciphering have led many people
   to conclude that the manuscript may be a hoax.

   In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with
   characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been
   produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which
   would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper
   overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented
   around 1550 as an encryption tool, slightly after but contemporary to
   the estimated creation of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that
   since the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments do not
   have the precise words and frequencies as the Voynich manuscript, its
   resemblance to "Voynichese" is superficial.

   The argument for authenticity is generally that the manuscript is
   simply too sophisticated to be a simple hoax. As mentioned, many
   serious linguists and historians have found much of the manuscript to
   be very complex and thought-provoking. Hoaxes, especially from this
   era, tend to be sloppy and crude. If the manuscript is a hoax, it is
   still a very elaborate one, and the question of why it was created
   remains just as unclear. Language scholars have noted that the
   manuscript shares certain word statistics ( Zipf's law) with natural
   languages that random text generally lacks. On the other hand, some
   research indicates that random text demonstrates such features as well.
   As even Rugg admits, the ability to hoax Voynich with early techniques
   does not necessarily imply that Voynich itself is a hoax. Neither is it
   impossible, even if unlikely, for random text to share some statistical
   similarity to natural languages. So neither position can be considered
   wholly dispositive.

Glossolalia

   In their book, Kennedy and Churchill hint to the possibility that the
   Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia, channeling or outsider
   art.

   If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts
   of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness,
   either due to "voices" heard, or due to his own urge. While in
   glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually
   made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts
   for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von
   Bingens' works to point out similarities between the illustrations she
   drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, and show
   parallels to the illustrations in the manuscript, namely the "streams
   of stars" found throughout, and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs"
   in the balneological section.

   The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of
   deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not
   convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. One of the
   drawbacks of this theory is that it fails to explain the deliberate
   structure of the manuscript and the carefully crafted astrological and
   botanical sections.

Influence on popular culture

   A number of items in popular culture appear to have been influenced, at
   least in part, by the Voynich manuscript.
     * The dangerous grimoire called the Necronomicon appears in H. P.
       Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos fantasy. While Lovecraft likely created
       the Necronomicon without knowledge of the Voynich manuscript, Colin
       Wilson published a short story in 1969 called "The Return of the
       Lloigor", in Arkham House's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, wherein a
       character discovers that the Voynich manuscript is an incomplete
       copy of the grimoire. Since then, the fictional Necronomicon has
       been repeatedly identified with this real mystery by other authors.
     * The Voynich manuscript is central to the plot of Brad Strickland’s
       The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost, part of the Johnny Dixon series
       begun by author John Bellairs. A manuscript markedly similar to the
       Voynich is also central in Bellairs' novel The Face In the Frost,
       where it can only be deciphered by means of obsessive
       concentration. (The novel also features a character named for Roger
       Bacon.)
     * The Codex Seraphinianus is a modern work of art created in the
       style of the Voynich manuscript.
     * The contemporary composer Hanspeter Kyburz wrote an orchestra piece
       based on the Voynich manuscript, thus reading it as a musical
       score.
     * The plot of Il Romanzo di Nostradamus by Valerio Evangelisti
       features the Voynich manuscript as a work of black magic, against
       which the famous French astrologer Nostradamus will fight all his
       life.
     * In the computer game Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, the Voynich
       manuscript is the centre of a plot involving "Neo- Templars". The
       manuscript predicts catastrophes that will happen in the near
       future, such as floods and earthquakes.
     * In the PlayStation 2 RPG Radiata Stories, the Voynich manuscript is
       one of the books in the Vareth Institute.
     * In the novel PopCo, the author Scarlett Thomas introduces basic
       cryptography through her main character's attempts to decode the
       Voynich manuscript.
     * The Japanese speedcore musical artist m1dy titled one of his more
       recent albums "Voynich Tracks".
     * The Émigré Manuscript, which appears in the popular RPG series
       Shadow Hearts is widely believed by many fans to have been inspired
       by the Voynich manuscript, due to its bizarre text, mysterious
       nature, and ties to Roger Bacon. The Koudelka manga shows some
       pages from the manuscript and has Roger himself saying that he
       merely copied it and removed some potentially dangerous parts from
       the original source.
     * In the science-fiction novels Ilium and Olympos (the 'Ilium
       duology') by Dan Simmons, the voynix are humanoid, biomechanical
       killing machines sent forward through time by an Islamic Global
       Caliphate to kill Jews after the Islamic race is wiped out by a
       virus of their own creation. The Voynich manuscript is mentioned
       during the explanation of the voynix' origin, although only as an
       eponym for the killing machines.

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