I was watching “The Most” on the History Channel, and it mentioned this as the most mysterious document, or something like that. Apparently, it’s a book with strange writing that no one can decipher and weird drawings and diagrams.
The Voynich Manuscript, which I found on a Yahoo search.
Couldn’t it just be some ramblings of a madman?
According to The Museum of Hoaxes Website,
“It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher. It is thought that the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft might have used the Voynich manuscript as the model for the fictional work, The Necronomicon, which he refers to in many of his stories.”
A 235 page hoax - whoever it was must have been mighty bored…
Boredom? Or monomaniacal obsession?
The Book of Mormon is twice as long, and the Urnatia Book is 2100 pages long. Both are crackpot fabrications with significant doses of embellished plagiarism. The Voynich Manuscript could easily be something similar.
AFAIK, the Voynich Manuscript wasn’t even brought to the world’s attention until some years after Lovecraft died…
UnuMondo
I too was watching “The Most” and saw this - yesterday morning while I was getting ready for work (perhaps the day before.) I made a mental note to look it up when I got to work - and promplty forgot. I’m glad you posted. Thanks to those who have posted interesting links too.
No, according to this page, it was displayed at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1915. This, of course, need not mean that Lovecraft knew of it.
(My nagging doubt about this very detailed account of the manuscript’s provenance is that it depends on accepting that the letter to Kircher and the signature of de Tepenec are genuine. I assume that this has been checked, because otherwise the provenance could only be securely traced back to the mid-nineteenth century.)
It could be an elaborate hoax or incredible crypto. One alternative I’ve seen is that a few heavily repeated “clusters” of characters in the manuscript might actually be misinterpreted single characters.
If one looks at a passage as written in the hand of the “gothic” era, for example, it is possible to mistake “minimum” for “numium” or for “nunmumi”, for “nunununun” or for many other combinations because of the style of lettering.
I don’t see why everyone’s so quick to dismiss it as a hoax.
There’s a huge. critical piece of information that is missing, that must be discovered before the Voynich Manuscript can be decyphered:
What language is the fucking thing written in?
Not necessarily a hoax. Some people believe it could have been written in order to be sold for a big price to some wealthy and gullible person interested in mystical writtings.
Wo, that’s the plan I’ve been looking for!
I must be confused but what you are descibing is a hoax is it not?
It’s impossible to prove that it isn’t written in an unknown artificial language, but scholars have established it definitely is not an encoded version of any known language nor does it follow the pattern of any known language, natural or artificial.
The most likely explanation is that it is a hoax. Someone invented an artificial alphabet and faked a real appearing book with it by writing out semi-random combinations of letters. Emperor Rudolph II was a well-known “wealthy and gullible person interested in mystical writtings” so there was a ready market for whoever could fake one.
Circumstantial evidence connects it with John Dee who traveled to Prague about the time the manuscript surfaced there in the 1680s. Dee was there to work on alchemical projects sponsored by Emperor Rudolph II; it was Rudolph who first brought the Voynich Manuscript into the light of history by purchasing it from an unknown person for the kingly sum of 600 gold ducats. John Dee wrote that he had been given a gift of 620 ducats in Prague. Hmmm…! Dee was a master cryptographer who worked for British Intelligence and in fact had studied and written about the sort of cryptography that went into making the VMS.
Feel free to argue whether the Book of Mormon is a hoax or not. In Great Debates.
Duh! I meant 1580s. Sorry for the typo.
While it seems entirely possible that Lovecraft was influenced by the Voynich Manuscript in devising the Necronomicon, there seems no particular reason to suppose he would have needed it for inspiration. The idea of The Necronomicon drew on an already well-established tradition in horror literature that there exists somewhere a forbidden and incredibly dangerous occult book. This tradition, in turn, draws on the Medieval tradition of the grimoire–various real-life texts such as The Key of Solomon which purported to give the inside dope on summoning demons and the like.
Lovecraft wrote a short history of The Necronomicon in which he suggested that Robert W. Chambers, who wrote several horror stories in the 1890s dealing with a dread volume called The Yellow Book, was inspired by The Necronomicon. This was an amusing piece of circular logic, and there seems no reason to suppose that Lovecraft did not have his tongue firmly in cheek when he wrote this. In fact, The Yellow Book was likely one of the literary devices which inspired Lovecraft to invent The Necronomicon.
Interestingly, The Yellow Book was not a grimoire, but a play, one about things so disurbing and subversive that it was known to drive people who read it mad. Because of its dangerous nature, Chambers could, of course, only quote very brief snippets from it. It was apparently about some sort of fairy tale kingdom called Carcosa, and a dread character called The King in Yellow.
There was already a well-established practice among horror story writers of borrowing from and alluding to one another before Lovecraft started the so-called “Chthulhu Mythos” to which Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard and others (including Stephen King) have made contributions over the years. For instance, Chambrs evidently got the name “Carcosa” and several others he used from the writings of Ambrose Bierce. In at least one story Bierce had a character who is something of an expert on occult lore cite a nonexistent occult book as authority for a claim.
Happily, nobody yet in this thread has claimed that The Necronomicon is real. One can find any number of sites on the Web which claim this, sometimes with apparent sincerity. One expects a fair number of these are people who think The Blair Witch Project was an actual documentary.
There is an old classic cartoon which shows a group of cavemen. One is sitting on the shoulders of his companion, and a third caveman, in turn, is sitting on his shoulders. This third caveman is painting on the ceiling of their cave. The caption is something such as: “This way they’ll think we were giants, or else we had invented the ladder”.
From time-to-time people really do make or do something just to be enigmatic and yank the chains of whoever is going to stumble on it in the future. Hence, perhaps, The Piltdown Man hoax, and the numerous instances in the history of archeology in which anomalous objects have been found, such as Chinese porcelain in Ireland or a Roman coin in a dig at an ancient Native American site.
It does not seem inconceivable that The Voynich Manuscript could be something similar: a purposely nonsensical book created by an eccentric who was amused by the idea that it would confound people in the future. I don’t know if it is impossible that it wasn’t produced with the idea that it would confound people in the creator’s own time; is it conceivable that a hoaxer could have tried to sell an authentic manuscript from the land of the elves?
Another thought: while The Voynich Manuscript and The Necronomicon may have no particular connection, it strikes me that the manuscript seems similar in some ways to The Book of Sand, described in the fantasy story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges. It is an indecypherable book in an unknown language illustrated with obscure line drawings. It has an infinite number of pages.
Originally posted by Little Nemo:
I’m not sure it’s that simple. The possibility of encryption clouds the issue. For example, any known language encrypted with a random keystream will produce random cyphertext. There is no way even in theory to determine if that cyphertext is an encryption of “any known language” or just a random text stream. I don’t understand how this statement could be established with any certainty.
Possible, but the statistical analyses of the text indicate that this would have to be a very sophisticated process if done mechanically. The Voynich text is far from random, indeed it contains more redundancy than most languages. On the other hand, it doesn’t contain much long or medium range repetition - the high redundancy relates largely to allowable letter combinations. For example, the first letter pairs of the Voynich “words” show low entropy, indicating a limited selection of allowable combinations. (We have this in English of course - “q” must be followed by “u”, no words begin with “ck”, “rd”, “np” etc. but many begin with “th”. In Voynich, the restrictions are greater.) The third letters are as unpredictable as the second, and the fourth letters show high entropy. A semi-random character generator such as biased dice would not give these results.
The Voynich text shows language-like features. It obeys “Zipf’s law of word frequencies”, an empirical observation that word frequency is a power law of word rank with exponent -1, which holds for practically all natural languages.
What does all this mean? Producing this mechanically with 17th century technology would have been practically impossible. It would also have been unneccessary in the production of a fake.
This may be over-analysis. We have to consider, if you wanted to produce 235 pages of gibberish that looked like it meant something in the 17th century, the easiest way would be to sit down and write it. Like “Jabbawocky”, or the terrible poetry of the Vogons, a human being can write semi-nonsense that appears to have rules of spelling and word-length and grammar. Quite what your mental state would be after 200 pages of it I don’t know, but Guinastastia’s suggestion of the ramblings of a madman might not be far from the truth. Add some crude encryption to skew the statistics, and you’d have a fine riddle. Personally though, I find it more satisfying and quite plausible to believe that it does mean something.
