The
UNEXPLAINED

Mysteries of Mind Space and Time

A script full of secrets

Above; two pages from what has been described as 'the most mysterious manuscript in the world'. Ever since 1912, when New York antique book dealer Wilfred M. Voynich (right) acquired the volume, experts have been using the methods of modern cryptology to try to unravel its secrets with no success

For centuries, scholars have been trying to unlock the secrets of a small book known as the Voynich manuscript which, they believe, presages the findings of modern science. FRANK SMYTH tells its remarkable story

LATE IN 1912, a New York antique book-seller named Wilfred M. Voynich arrived back in his native city from a visit to Europe with a small, carefully wrapped manuscript in his possession. It had thick vellum covers that had broken away from the 204 vellum leaves at the spine - although Voynich calculated that originally it had held 28 extra pages, now missing. Its size was large quarto, measuring about 6 inches by 9 inches (15 centimetres by 22 centimetres), and the text, closely written in flowing black ink script, was illustrated by over 400 minute drawings in blood red, blue, yellow, brown and violent green.

George Boole
Above: the 19th-century mathematician George Boole. He invented a system of symbolic logic (inset) that, some experts thought, might be similar to that employed in the Voynich manuscript

The illustrations showed curious whorls and intestine-like tubes, naked female figures, stars and constellations, and hundreds of strange-looking plants. The vellum, style of script and known history of the manuscript indicated to Voynich that it was medieval in origin, and the many botanical specimens indicated it might he an herbal -a text-book, part scientific, part magical, showing the medical and mystical qualities of plants and their preparation. But this was simply conjecture, for the script was written in a language that Voynich could not recogmse: although the text could clearly be broken down into 'words' whose characters were half familiar, it made no sense. Voynich could only assume that they were written either in a little-known language or dialect, or in code.

Practising black magic

Although Voynich was not a cryptologist, he did know something, in an oblique way, of symbolism. His father-in-law had been Professor George Boole, the English mathematician who had been one of the first to use mathematical symbolism to express logical processes, and had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on modern symbolic logic. Voynich also knew that there was strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that the author of the bizarre work in his possession had been Roger Bacon, a 13th-century Franciscan moril, who had combined the study of philosophy, mathematics and practical physics with alchemy. Perhaps Bacon had, 600 years before Boole, succeeded in inventing a system of symbolic logic; or perhaps he had simply devised a cipher in order to cover up his researches into the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life - thus avoiding a charge of practising black magic which, in medieval times, often led to death.

With these intriguing speculations in mind, Voynich began to sound out the academic world for a solution, having dozens of copies made of the document and circulating them to any specialist who felt that he could help. With each copy, Voynich sent an account of what he knew of the manuscript.

Roger Bacon

Above: Roger Bacon (1214-1294) who, it has been suggested, was the author of the Voynich manuscript Above: the Jesuit Collegium Romanum in Rome, where the Voynich manuscript lay undisturbed for two and a half centuries before being transferred to the library of Mondragone College

He had bought it, for an undisclosed sum, early in 1912, after coming across it in the library of Mondragone College, a Jesuit establishment in Frascati, Italy. Before arriving there, it had lain in the Jesuit Collegium Romanum for about 250 years, in the archives in which it had been lodged by a celebrated 17th-century Jesuit scholar and cryptologer named Athanasius Kircher, who had tried but failed to unlock its secrets.

According to a letter dated 19 August 1666, Kircher had received the book from his former pupil Joannes Marcus Macci, rector of the University of Prague, and it had formed part of the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II until his death in 1612. Rudolf had, to all intents and purposes, allowed the Jesuits to rule his kingdoms of Hungary, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, preferring to devote his time to the patronage of the sciences and pseudo-sciences. His particular interests were botany and astronomy, and he created an elaborate botanical garden and built an observatory at Benatky, near Prague, for the exiled Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and his then assistant Johannes Kepler, who was later to name his 'Rudolphine Tables' after his former patron.

But Rudolf's own interests lay in the direction of alchemy, and he spent a great deal of time and money in setting up an alchemical laboratory to which he invited alchemists from all over Europe; one of them,Johannes de Tepenecz, was later discovered to have signed his name on a margin of Voynich's manuscript. Another more famous was Dr John Dee,who spent the years between 1584 and 1588 at Rudolf's court as a secret agent of Queen Elizabeth I. It seemed possible that it was Dee who first brought the manuscript to Prague.
Dee had survived imprisonment at the hands of Queen Mary in 1555,charged with witchcraft,to become a favourite of her half sister Elizabeth. The necromantic experiments he conducted with his assistant Edward Kelley smack of chicanery,but he had a deep and genuine knowledge of alchemical theory and practice,as well as astrology,astronomy,mathematics,geography and celestial navigation - one of his obsessions was finding the North-West pasage to India - but above all else,he was a cloak-and-dagger spy. He had experimented with the invention of ciphers ,and had studied existing codes on behalf of his chief,Lord Burghley.

Dee also deeply admired the work of Roger Bacon and collected many of his manuscripts. He had many things in common with the Franciscan monk; both men were ,for example,intrigued by secret writing. In any event,it appears that it was Dr Dee who presented Rudolf II with the Voynich manuscript,telling him it was Roger Bacon's work. Sir Thomas Browne - inventor of the English word "cryptography"-claimed that Dr Dee's son Arthur had spoken to him about a 'book containing nothing but hieroglyphicks, which book his father bestowed much time upon, but I could not hear that he could make it out'.

Right; one of the intricate -and extraordinarily confusing pages of the Voynich manuscript

Where did the Voynich manuscript come from? When scholars traced its history, it appeared that a well-known Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher (above) had tried - but failed - to unlock its secrets during the 17th century. Kircher had received the manuscript from a former pupil of his, who was then rector of the University of Prague - and before that, the book had been in the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II(above right) until his death in 1612

This, then, was the background to the problem that Voynich presented to the academic world in 1912 - one that was destined to throw many a European and American high table into uproar, for though the groups of letters and 'words' looked at first glance tantalisingly simple, 'like old friends whose names are on the tip of one's tongue', as one writer put it, they were not. Philologists sought in vain for any trace of a known language, and then carried out all the known methods used for reading lost languages -without result. Cryptanalysts, including a specialist from the Bibliotheque Nationale who had worked with 15th-century alchemical ciphers, struggled and gave up. In 1917 the manuscript even captured the attention of the cryptological section of the United States Military Intelligence Division - MI-8.

MI-8 was headed by a brilliant young director, Herbert Osborne Yardley, who was later to become a legend in the world ofcodebreaking, and his equally brilliant assistant, Captain John M. Manly, Ph.D., who had been, before the war, head of the department of English at Chicago University. In 1917 Manly was working on the so-called Witzke cryptogram, a 424-letter code that he cracked in three days to reveal the identity of Lothar Witzke, a German secret agent operating from Mexico. But after a long struggle with the Voynich manuscript, he too gave up, along with his boss Yardley, referring to the text as 'the most mysterious manuscript in the world'.

Edward Kelley Right: Dr John Dee (1527-1608), mathematician and astrologer who, in addition to more orthodox scientific activities, conducted necromantic experiments with the occultist and alchemist Edward Kelley (Left). Dee spent four years at the court of Rudolf II, as a secret agent for Elizabeth I. Given his interest in the occult and the curious, it seems possibie that Dee brought the Voynich script to Rudolf's court John Dee

The pictures accompanying the text were equally baffling. One obvious procedure seemed to be for botanists to identify the plants depicted and then use their names to decode the captions accompanying them; the trouble was that most of the plants and shrubs were invented, and the names of those that were not made no sense cryptographically. Astronomers thought that they recognised such celestial signposts as Aldebaran, the Andromeda nebula, and the Hyades, but then lost their way again in a whirl of imaginary galaxies. Bacon authorities studied the manuscript with an eye to concurrences, while the professor of anatomy at Harvard tried to make sense of the apparent physiological diagrams - all to no avail.

Below; another page from the Voynich manuscript, showing mysterious star maps and zodiacs

For one man, however, the Voynich manuscript had become an obsession. Professor William Romaine Newbold, a specialist in philosophy and medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania - a linguist and, like Manly, a cryptographer who lent his services to the US Navy Department - began work on the text in 1919. His processes were hugely complex; beginning by examining the writing under a magnifying glass, he found a secondary, microscopic text embodied in the characters - a form, he thought, of shorthand. Using code-breaking techniques, he was able to reduce this to a 17-letter Roman key, and with this worked his way through six different 'translations' each leading on to the other, He then 'anagrammed' the sixth text to produce a final 'plaintext' - the solution - in Latin.

Inset: this illustration, which appears to show women bathing in green ink, is typical of the manuscript's mysterious drawings

Main picture: an example of the script in which the Voynich manuscript is written. At first glance, the letters and 'words' seem familiar - 'like old friends whose names are on the tip of one's tongue', as one writer commented. So far, however, they have resisted all attempts at decipherment

In April 1921 he called a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and announced his interim findings to an astonished and finally impressed audience. In his opinion the work was indeed that of Roger Bacon, who had encoded it to avoid the charge of 'novelty' in his thinking. Bacon was known to have been the inventor of the magnifying glass, and had speculated on the possibility of microscopes and telescopes long before they were invented. But, claimed Professor Newbold, the Voynich manuscript proved that Bacon had actually constructed a compound microscope, and had used it to study and describe germ cells, ova, spermatozoa, and organic life in general. Not only that, but he had also built a powerful reflecting telescope with which he had studied star systems unknown in his day.

Below: Professor William Romaine Newbold, a specialist in philosophy and medieval history who, in 1921, made the startling announcement that he had succeeded in breaking the code of the Voynich manuscript

Professor Newbold was a man of considerable reputation and, sensational though they were, his findings seemed sound. Only a small number of the academics who gathered to listen to him had any grasp of cryptology, but the 'discoveries' he had made appeared to make sense; for instance, a leading physiologist considered that one drawing and its caption described the epithelial cells and their cilia - cells that line the bronchial and Fallopian tubes to assist the passage of mucus and eggs - to a magnification of 75. John Manly, out of his major's uniform and back at his chair at Chicago University, preferred to keep an open mind but wrote a review for Harper's Magazine that was, if anything, favourable to Newbold. There were very few dissenting voices after this first exposition.

For a further five years, until his death in 1926, Newbold continued his cryptanalysis of the Voynich manuscript, working closely with a friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent, and it was Professor Kent who edited Newbold's findings into final form in 1928 under the title The cipher of Roger Bacon.

John Manly had, of course, kept a constant interest in the work in progress, and with the publication he was able to see Newbold's working methods at first hand and test them for himself. A genuine admirer of Newbold, he was deeply dismayed at what he found and, after checking his own results with, among other people, former colleagues at MI-8, he published a 47-page article in a '93' edition of Speculum magazine - a closely reasoned analysis that made the dead professor's work seem completely worthless.

Could further research reveal the true meaning of the Voynich manuscript? See page 1418        Mysterious 500


Reproduced from THE UNEXPLAINED p1381