Crypto Corner: The book no one can read

 This piece begins with my childhood reading, which is probably going to be the same for most people. Back then, I was an especially avid reader of books of actual or posited “mysteries”. Whether it was UFOs, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, poltergeists, Easter Island heads or the Flying Dutchman, I would have run across some book that had retold it breathlessly. It must have been sometime in that vast data dump of legendry and misinformation that I first encountered reports of something a bit different. It was told, and frequently illustrated, that there was an old book written in an unknown language and a form of writing nobody could identify, illustrated with strange pictures that included plants that science only discovered with the exploration of the Americas. Then it was usually said that scholars, linguists and even expert codebreakers had all studied the book, but never succeeded in finding its meaning. That is probably no more or less than most of the western world has heard of the Voynich Manuscript.

That particular bubble took longer than usual to burst. I continued to run across mentions of the matter well into high school and college. I learned that there were any number of distinguished minds who had applied themselves to the problem, typically just long enough to get a few plausible snatches out of a passage of the text. I found out more about the illustrations, which turned out to include some risqué bits that were probably censored from the books I pored over in the school library. I even confirmed there are a few drawings that look at least a little like a sunflower, which was not “discovered” until Columbus returned to the Americas.

Then I returned to the subject a few years back, through a very thorough lay-scholarly book, and found a rather dismaying turn of events. Growing numbers of researchers were arguing that it was a hoax, not in the sense that it was the fabrication of a modern mind (a suspicion largely ruled out when carbon dating was applied), but that its creator, whatever the date and place, had created it simply to fool others with the prefabricated mystery of a pseudomystical, perhaps pseudoscientific tome, with the most likely motive being simple profit. In this light, even the potential objections- above all the elaborateness and sheer length of the manuscript- fall all too well into place. Why not go to the extra effort for the incentive of extra money? Why not fill a book with random or wholly meaningless text and pictures, if it convinced a wealthy patron there must be something to it?

Meanwhile, I was already coming to my own conclusion, so readily I thought of a key example by the time it was mentioned in the book. The closest genuine counterparts to the manuscript were from the realm of what would now be called “contactees”: Self-styled mystics, mediums, channelers and others who claim to be able to speak for gods, angels, ancient ancestors, aliens and other entities. Such characters have a long history of presenting language, writing and whole ecologies for the otherworldly entities. Given this context, the “hoax” hypothesis fails or at least falls behind, but mostly because proponents have somewhat misapplied the term. The kind of characters that crop up are eccentrics, waifs and mental patients rather than polished charlatans, though they are certainly not above willful deception. More importantly, their behavior invariably starts long before the prospect of monetary or  any other gain materializes, if it ever does. Most unsettlingly, many have freely gone to misfortune, imprisonment and even death still churning out reams of nonsense. I find this in particular an all too believable fate for the author of the manuscript.

Of course, these possibilities have not been wholly lost on scholars. Much discussion has already focused on the scenario of a “constructed” language. Interestingly, this has also lent strength to certain suggestions that the manuscript had more than one author, perhaps a group or small community who went along with the venture. However, the main insight to emerge is just how little chance anyone else would have of unravelling the meaning (if any) without the cooperation of the responsible party. In that respect, the problems posed are akin to that of the Japanese who faced the Navaho code talkers. It would be relatively easy to study the characteristics of an unknown or invented language, but this would mainly be a matter of assessing the knowledge and overall sophistication of the creator(s). To really make progress would require a “Rosetta Stone” of known meaning, which in itself implies a level of consideration and good faith that cannot be assumed from the evidence at hand.

An incidental lesson from these cases is that true randomization was beyond the reach of pre-industrial humanity. Charismatics who consciously or unconsciously try to pass off babble as the tongues of angels simply fall into repetition. Those who rig wheels, Ouija boards and the like (which have been discussed in connection with the “hoax” hypothesis) eventually inject their semiconscious minds into the operation. Meanwhile, most of our cast hover at the intersection of semiconscious creativity and deliberate invention, building up the speech of their constructed world from whatever knowledge they have. In practice, even undistinguished individuals (like the well-studied case I had in mind) have impressed the unwary. It is genuinely daunting to consider what might come from an accomplished scholar well-versed in languages. (Tolkien might come close.) This too might account for the manuscript, though I doubt it.

In all the efforts to decipher the manuscript, surprisingly little attention has gone to the simplest question of all: Who wrote the damn thing? Much of the discussion has centered on the early conjecture that it was a work of Roger Bacon, but in hindsight this was a dead end long before modern testing proved the manuscript was written well after his time. As an advocate of free and scientific inquiry, the last thing Bacon would have done was bury his learning in an encoded manuscript. The only part he would have had in such a scheme would have been to mock the obsession of his peers with the occult and “hidden” knowledge, which would make a disconcerting amount of sense if other developments did not preclude it. The other chief suspects are John Dee and Edward Kelley, a pair of mystics who may have possessed the manuscript at one point. However, I judge their role late and tangential. If anything, I would suspect them of inventing the Bacon canard to make the manuscript more marketable, but that would simply reaffirm that the manuscript itself was beyond their power to change or control.

What I have found most interesting is the further information to emerge on the handling of the manuscript. Famously, the pages of the manuscript were numbered by at least one other hand. The numbers show several pages to be missing, and there is ample evidence that the manuscript had been rebound out of its original order and perhaps even partly copied before the numbering occurred. It is also clear that the cover was replaced at least once.  Most intriguingly, several correspondences have been preserved or recovered both with the book and separate from it, including a letter about its contents addressed to Athanasius Kircher, a 17^th-century antiquarian and self-promoter who vainly claimed to have deciphered hieroglyphs. Ironically, these records refer to the manuscript in mystified terms little different than our own, to the point of being flatteringly presented as “sphinxes” to Kircher.

To me, it is these outwardly reassuring developments that are the most unnerving part of the tale. It has reminded me of a science fiction story titled “As Never Was” by the forgotten master P. Schuyler Miller. That story is about a knife brought back from a distant future, made from an untraceable and irreproducible material. Yet it already bears evidence of a long history, complete with a replacement handle that is itself worn with use. Then there is an extra detail that becomes a point in the now fairly predictable plot, still done well enough that I won’t reveal it here. (Thankfully, it is now available in an ebook.) The overarching theme of the story and the reason it is so memorable is the crushing nature of futility, of literally doing what has already been done. That is the feeling I get looking at the history of Voynich scholarship.

One more thing to be overlooked in all this is that it would have been singularly difficult to create something like the Voynich manuscript in secret. To begin with, it was certainly beyond the means of the peasantry or the truly homeless. The world before the printing press was not one where anyone could doodle away at any project they chose. It took skilled labor and leisure time to create a book; just obtaining paper was a nontrivial expense. The further time and labor of producing anything close to the complexity of the Voynich manuscript would easily magnify the expense tenfold. There would have to be notes, tables, rough drafts, and perhaps a theoretical Rosetta Stone that could have explained it all.  It must be further considered that even if the manuscript was originally intended to be intelligible, other parties could have been quite willing to obscure or destroy key records and evidence just to perpetuate a sense of mystery.

This brings us to my most depressing and unavoidable suspicion: No matter when or by whom the manuscript was written, there must have been someone who knew something. This is the foremost reason I reject the “hoax” hypothesis as such. If someone had manufactured the manuscript for mere profit, there would have been someone ready to expose it, if only to humiliate any patron who had already paid for the final product. On the other hand, consider the likely outcome if my line of thinking is correct. Sooner or later, someone could and should have revealed or figured out the true origin of the book, whether it was a crazed nobleman, a mystic with the time and means to write, or a band of monks simply trying to fill their spare time.  After that, all concerned might just as well have set the matter aside in embarrassed silence, yet the manuscript would still remain, ready to attract and deceive another generation. Such is the allure of mystery, even when the mystery is only there because nobody wanted it to be solved.

For links, I highly recommend The Voynich Manuscript by Rob Churchill and Gerry Kennedy. A great deal of good material is also available at Cipher Mysteries.  While I'm at it, here's the link for the P. Schuyler Miller ebook.