Discover a Digitized Version of the Voynich Manuscript, “the World’s Most Mysterious E-book”

A 600-year-old manuscript—written in a script nobody has ever decod­ed, crammed with cryp­tic illus­tra­tions, its ori­gins stay­ing to today a mys­tery…. It’s not as sat­is­fy­ing a plot, say, of a Nation­al Trea­positive or Dan Brown thriller, cer­tain­ly not as action-packed as pick-your-Indi­ana Jones…. The Voyn­ich Man­u­script, named for the anti­quar­i­an who redis­cov­ered it in 1912, has a way more her­met­ic nature, some­what just like the work of Hen­ry Darg­er; it presents us with an inscrutably alien world, pieced togeth­er from hybridized motifs drawn from its con­tem­po­rary sur­spherical­ings.

The Voyn­ich Man­u­script is exclusive for hav­ing made up its personal alpha­wager whereas additionally appear­ing to be in con­ver­sa­tion with oth­er famil­iar works of the peri­od, such that it resem­bles an uncan­ny dop­pel­ganger of many a medieval textual content.

A com­par­a­tive­ly lengthy guide at 234 pages, it tough­ly divides into sev­en sec­tions, any of which is likely to be discovered on the cabinets of your aver­age 1400s Euro­pean reader—a good­ly small and rar­efied group. “Over time, Voyn­ich enthu­si­asts have giv­en every sec­tion a con­ven­tion­al identify” for its dom­i­nant imagery: “botan­i­cal, astro­nom­i­cal, cos­mo­log­i­cal, zodi­ac, bio­log­i­cal, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, and recipes.”

Schol­ars can solely spec­u­late about these cat­e­gories. The person­u­scrip­t’s ori­gins and intent have baf­fled cryp­tol­o­gists since a minimum of the seventeenth cen­tu­ry, when, notes Vox, “an alchemist described it as ‘a cer­tain rid­dle of the Sphinx.’” We are able to pre­sume, “judg­ing by its illus­tra­tions,” writes Reed John­son at The New York­er, that Voyn­ich is “a com­pendi­um of knowl­edge relat­ed to the nat­ur­al world.” However its “illus­tra­tions vary from the fan­ci­ful (legions of heavy-head­ed circulate­ers that bear no rela­tion to any earth­ly vari­ety) to the weird (bare and pos­si­bly preg­nant girls, frol­ick­ing in what seem like amuse­ment-park water­slides from the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry).”

The manuscript’s “botan­i­cal draw­ings aren’t any much less unusual: the crops look like chimeri­cal, com­bin­ing incom­pat­i­ble components from dif­fer­ent species, even dif­fer­ent king­doms.” These draw­ings led schol­ar Nicholas Gibbs to com­pare it to the Tro­tu­la, a Medieval com­pi­la­tion that “spe­cial­izes within the dis­eases and com­plaints of ladies,” as he wrote in a Occasions Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment arti­cle. It seems, accord­ing to sev­er­al Medieval man­u­script consultants who’ve stud­ied the Voyn­ich, that Gibbs’ professional­posed decod­ing could not actu­al­ly clear up the puz­zle.

The diploma of doubt ought to be sufficient to maintain us in sus­pense, and there­in lies the Voyn­ich Man­u­script’s endur­ing enchantment—it’s a black field, about which we’d all the time ask, as Sarah Zhang does, “What might be so scan­dalous, so dan­ger­ous, or so impor­tant to be writ­ten in such an uncrack­in a position cipher?” Wil­fred Voyn­ich him­self requested the identical ques­tion in 1912, believ­ing the person­u­script to be “a piece of excep­tion­al impor­tance… the textual content should be unrav­eled and the his­to­ry of the person­u­script should be traced.” Although “not an espe­cial­ly glam­orous phys­i­cal object,” Zhang observes, it has nonethe­much less tak­en on the aura of a pow­er­ful occult allure.

However perhaps it’s com­plete gib­ber­ish, a high-con­cept prac­ti­cal joke con­coct­ed by Fifteenth cen­tu­ry scribes to troll us sooner or later, know­ing we’d fill within the house of not-know­ing with probably the most fan­tas­ti­cal­ly unusual spec­u­la­tions. This can be a propo­si­tion Stephen Bax, anoth­er con­tender for a Voyn­ich solu­tion, finds laborious­ly cred­i­ble. “Why on earth would any­one waste their time cre­at­ing a hoax of this sort?,” he asks. Possibly it’s a rel­ic from an insu­lar com­mu­ni­ty of magi­cians who left no oth­er hint of them­selves. Positive­ly within the final 300 years each pos­si­ble the­o­ry has been sug­gest­ed, dis­card­ed, then picked up once more.

Must you care to take a crack at sleuthing out the Voyn­ich thriller—or simply to flick through it for curiosity’s sake—you will discover the person­u­script scanned at Yale’s Bei­necke Uncommon E-book & Man­u­script Library, which hous­es the vel­lum orig­i­nal. Or flip by means of the Inter­internet Archive’s dig­i­tal ver­sion above. Anoth­er pri­vate­ly-run website con­tains a his­to­ry and descrip­tion of the person­u­script and anno­ta­tions on the illus­tra­tions and the script, together with sev­er­al pos­si­ble tran­scrip­tions of its sym­bols professional­posed by schol­ars. Good luck!

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our website in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous E-book,” the Fifteenth-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

1,000-12 months-Outdated Illus­trat­ed Information to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Vegetation Now Dig­i­tized & Put On-line

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Defined: British Researcher Could Have Last­ly Cracked the Code

An Intro­duc­tion to the Codex Seraphini­anus, the Strangest E-book Ever Pub­lished

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian primarily based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness