The Voynich Manuscript

It might be the world’s most mysterious book: a medieval manuscript filled with unidentifiable drawings, written in a secret language so complex that even the world’s best code breakers can’t crack it. It’s obsessed everyone from scholars to conspiracy theorists. What is the Voynich Manuscript? And who wrote it? Thank you to our experts who contributed to this episode: Sami Jarroush, Lisa Fagin Davis, Amory Sivertson, Devin Fitzgerald, Michael Lapointe, and Scotty Roberts. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow History’s Greatest Mysteries to never miss an episode! History’s Greatest Mysteries is a History Channel Original Podcast, brought to you by Rewind Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Rewind Studios Originals, Hidden History and Government That Doesn’t Suck, wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Social Instagram: @RewindStudios https://www.instagram.com/rewindstudiosTikTok: @RewindStudios https://www.tiktok.com/@rewindstudios Episode Sponsor: Switch your home and auto insurance to Progressive and see if you could save without having to cut down on the things you love. Interested? Get your quote today at Progressive.com https://www. Progressive.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And now a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Today, a mysterious medieval book written in a secret language so complex that even the world's best code breakers can't crack it.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  No one has been able to translate or read a single word, a single letter.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Known as the Voynich manuscript, it's obsessed everyone from scholars to conspiracy theorists.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  They sincerely believe that this book has something monumental to share.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Now we'll uncover the top theories surrounding the origins of this cryptic text.

• 0:46Speaker 03

  Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual for the practice of alchemy.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  The Voynich manuscript is written in Glacialalia, which is the language of tongues. Has he pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in history?

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Can modern technology finally unlock its impenetrable code?

• 1:07Speaker 03

  It's the first definitive answer we have about this book in 400 years.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  What is the Voynich manuscript?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, the Voynich manuscript.

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• 2:44Speaker 00

  Frascatti, Italy, 1912. Just outside Rome, famed Polish-American rare bookseller Wilfrid Voynich enters a centuries-old Jesuit college.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Voynich operates what is probably the world's largest rare books business at the time. He's got this incredible knack for digging up the most valuable and the most sought-after manuscripts on the planet. His collection is worth millions.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Voynich hopes his next great find is here.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  The Jesuits need funds to support their college, so what they decide to do is they decide to sell some of their most ancient texts very discreetly. Voynich negotiates a shrewd deal, as always, and he adds 30 more books to his collection, which he will try to sell for a significant profit back at his shop in London.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  One book in particular stands out.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  As with all of his purchases, Voynich looks for elaborate bindings, beautiful books, heavily illustrated illuminated manuscripts, early printed books, really things, luxurious objects. But among them, his eye is caught by what he later called an ugly duck leg.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  This particular manuscript is small. It's only about 9 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches, and it's bound in goat skin. It's about 230 pages long, but there is some evidence that some of the pages are missing. Also, some pages are foldable sheets of varying size. And this book is filled with lines upon lines of neatly handwritten text and elaborate drawings. But here's the thing, none of it makes any sense. There are a couple hundred detailed drawings of plant species, none of which can be identified. There are astrological drawings of constellations that don't even exist. There's a section where nude pregnant

• 4:47Speaker 02

  women are engaging in these baths and rituals with these seemingly interconnected tubes. And then there are these strange hybrids, these plants with human organs. And some of these plants even sprout disembodied heads. It's, needless to say, it's wild, but it's also indecipherable. And as for that lovely handwritten text, the entire thing is written in a language that no one has ever seen before. There are very clear and obvious words and letters, but they're totally unrecognizable. So Voynich assumes that this is some type of code.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  In addition to experience with codes, Voynich speaks Polish, Russian, and English fluently, and has a working knowledge of 15 other languages.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  He was born to a noble family in the Russian Empire. He was educated at three of the top universities. And then he basically becomes an anti-Czarist revolutionary. He's arrested, he's sent to a Siberian prison, he escapes the prison, and then he heads to London, where he continues his revolutionary activities for a while, before a friend of his at the British Museum suggested he get into the rare book trade.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Voynich knows everything there is to know about rare books. He's connected to all the top literary scholars. He knows multiple languages. He knows all about codes and code breaking from his years as a Russian revolutionary. The point is, if anyone is going to be able to make sense out of this manuscript, it's going to be Wilfrid Voynich.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Voynich spent years trying to decipher the code, really the rest of his life. And he reaches out to all of the top code breakers at the time to help, and none of them can crack it. He sticks with it because he has a hunch that this might be the most valuable book he's ever encountered. And if he can figure this out, it could be worth millions.

• 6:46Speaker 05

  Based on the materials used to create the book, the parchment, the style of ink, Voynich thinks it's going to date to the 13th century. So while he can't decipher the words, the images of plants and other sorts of natural phenomena lead him to conclude that it's probably some sort of guide to a field that used to be called natural philosophy. And before there were modern scientists, this is how people described the study of nature in the physical universe. From Aristotle to Isaac Newton, all of these early scientists were actually natural philosophers.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  So because of that date and the contents of the actual manuscript, Voynich thinks this is some sort of secret manual for the practice of alchemy. Alchemy is this philosophical, part-science, part-magic practice that emerged in medieval Europe in the 12th century. And its practitioners tried to purify certain materials, so turn lead into gold, and to cure diseases. Now, none of this stuff actually worked, but it was strongly believed in, and it was written about for centuries.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Alchemists' real objective is perfection of the soul. And they'll do this by creating something called the magnum opus, or great work, which was the philosopher's stone, a mythical substance that was said to be able to grant immortality, among other things.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  According to Voynich, there's only one early alchemist brilliant enough to have produced this book.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Almost no one in Europe was creating alchemy textbooks at the time. They were just translating older works. So Voynich thinks this is Roger Bacon.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Introducing theory number one. The theory is Roger Bacon's secret alchemy guide.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  Voynich believes the book is written in code because he believes that whoever wrote it needed to keep something secret.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Roger Bacon, today, he's incredibly well-respected. He's known as one of the early pioneers of the scientific method. He was the first person in Europe to record the formula for gunpowder. But here's the problem. He's also a monk and a modest member of the clergy. And the church doesn't take too kindly to some of his more out-there alchemy practices.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  In fact, some of Bacon's contemporaries accuse him of being a wizard.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  He has an automated mechanical clockwork head that he talks to and consults with. And like all alchemists, he's also obsessed with forging the philosopher's stone and granting immortality. But in the church, only God can grant eternal life. So these are some very dangerous heretical ideas that Bacon is toying with, right under the watchful eye of his Franciscan superiors. But Bacon's not entirely a crackpot.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  He thinks that there's a way to bring the church and science together. Not everyone agrees with him.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  He thinks these ideas can complement each other. They don't have to be antagonists.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  It's very fortunate for Bacon that he has the protection of a very high-placed patron and intellectual correspondent, the Pope, Clement the Fourth.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  But when Pope Clement dies in 1268, Roger Bacon's protection is gone, and within a decade, he's arrested.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Bacon is eventually allowed to return to his studies, but he never puts forth any more of these so-called heretical texts. He mostly sticks to theological writing.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Unless, of course, he continued his alchemy research in secret and wrote it all into a coded book.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  So if Voynich is right, and this manuscript can be definitively affiliated with Roger Bacon, suddenly the manuscript itself would be worth untold amounts of money.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  First, Voynich must prove Bacon truly authored the manuscript.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Even though Voynich can't crack the code, he does find a letter dated back to 1665 that's written by a very important Czech scientist and doctor named Jan Merek Marchi. He says he has a coded book that fits precisely this description, and he's giving it to his friend, a renowned codebreaker, Athanasius Kircher. Marchi also gives a little bit of history on the book. He says it was bought by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II of Germany about 100 years prior, sometime in the late 1500s, for a large sum of gold. The letter mentions Roger Bacon by name as the potential author in the late 1200s.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  How did the book go from Bacon to Emperor Rudolph?

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Wilfred Voynich thinks the connection is Dr. John Dee. Dr. Dee was born in 1527. He's a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and he's an avid astrologer and an occult scientist who studies cipher. And from a young age, he has access to a lot of Roger Bacon manuscripts.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  An accomplished cryptologist himself, Dee tries to decode the manuscript, but fails.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Eventually, John Dee brings the manuscript to Prague, where Emperor Rudolph would buy it from him for 600 ducats, or roughly $100,000 today. So Voynich has this fervent belief that Roger Bacon wrote this book, but all the evidence is circumstantial at this point. If Voynich wants the world to believe that this is a Bacon original and make a fortune, he's got to decode this thing once and for all.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Voynich showcases the book at exhibitions and lecture tours with the hope that somebody can figure it out. And of course, he's getting fame and publicity all the while and hoping to make a sale.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  He's trying to sell it for $100,000, which would be the most anyone had ever gotten for an old manuscript ever in history.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Other top codebreakers are trying to decipher the book as well. For example, you've got William Friedman, the man who is responsible for breaking the Japanese code purple during World War II. He's also one of the founders of the NSA, one of its chief cryptologists. He spent 30 years trying before declaring that cracking the manuscript's code was impossible.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, Voynich dies in 1930 before he can solve the mystery.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  When Voynich dies, he leaves the book to his wife Ethel, who lives until 1960. And then after a couple of short-term owners, the book ends up at the Yale Library in 1969, where it remains today. It's an artifact that, to this day, captures the public's imagination because it's both intriguing and infuriating. I mean, we can see it, we can touch it. We know this thing exists. It's not a figment of anyone's imagination, except no one knows exactly what it is. It remains pure mystery. And once we have the advent of the internet, that mystery explodes.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  When Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library posts scanned pages of the manuscript online in 2004, the book gains even more attention.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Suddenly, the Voynich manuscript is world famous. It's attracting millions more people who want to figure it out. Every year brings multiple major news stories about potential breakthroughs.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  One of the biggest breakthroughs occurs in 2009 at the University of Arizona.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Researchers realize that while the language of the book might be impossible to understand, the book's physical materials aren't. They can be analyzed.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  The 234 pages of the book are made up of calfskin parchment, and because they are organic in nature, they can be radiocarbon dated. This is obviously a big deal. This is a chance to finally get some answers that have eluded scholars for generations. They take samples from several sections of the book just to be sure.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  But the results aren't what anyone anticipated.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Remember, Wilfred Voynich thought this was a 13th-century text by Roger Bacon, but the pages date back to the early 15th century, so about 140 years after Roger Bacon's death. And just like that, the primary theory behind this strange book is shot down. But this is still fantastic news. It's probably the first definitive answer we have about this book in over 400 years. So now that the parchment's been dated, scholars want to keep the momentum going.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  So Voynich's hypothesis that this was a 13th-century book led him to research what possible authors there could have been in the 13th century to write an alchemical text, and that led him to Roger Bacon.

• 15:22Speaker 05

  With this new dating of the manuscript, scholars do the same thing again. They wonder, in the 1400s, who's known to be an author and illustrator? Who's writing in code? Who has an interest in science and alchemy? And they think, who could have written the book?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  In 2017, one researcher announces she might know the answer, bringing us to theory number two. It was Leonardo da Vinci's first code.

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• 17:04Speaker 03

  Could this book actually have been written by none other than Leonardo da Vinci?

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Dr. Edith Sherwood is a retired biomedical scientist. And these days, she's fascinated by the Voynich manuscript, and she's spent countless hours studying it. And according to her, there's only one European author in the 1400s that fits the bill.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  In 2002, she publishes an article comparing the manuscript to the notebooks and other works of Leonardo da Vinci. So then, all of a sudden, she has this new evidence of the carbon dating. So now she really is convinced she's on to something, and she spends more time researching the manuscript. 15 years later, she publishes a new article in much greater detail. And the evidence she finds is actually pretty compelling.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Sherwood starts with a detailed handwriting analysis.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Both the anonymous author of the Voynich manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci use a type of writing that's called humanist minuscule script. It's a style that was developed in Italy in the early 1400s. It's different than a lot of what was being written at the time. Most scholarly texts were written in something called Gothic script, or black letter. And it's a pretty obvious difference when you look at them side by side. And not a lot of people were writing like this, but Leonardo da Vinci was.

• 18:26Speaker 05

  Not only that, but Leonardo da Vinci and the author of the Voynich manuscript have a lot of features that are very similar. Neither writes with capital letters, neither punctuates, there are no line breaks or paragraph breaks. And also, they never connect their letters.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Dr. Sherwood then turns her attention to the manuscript's drawings.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  So we all know that Leonardo da Vinci was... He's an okay artist, to put it mildly. No, obviously, he's great. All you have to do is look at his works like the Mona Lisa, which show off his otherworldly talent. But in his notebooks, they're just full of these crude drawings and studies.

• 19:03Speaker 06

  Of course, no one would suggest that the illustrations in the Voynich manuscript rise to the level of Da Vinci's greatest works or mature works. Nevertheless, there are some similarities.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  But one thing that was very hard to do in the 15th century when drawing and writing was to create perfect circles. Without modern drafting equipment, only really, really talented artists could create a perfect circle only using pen and ink. But Da Vinci could, and so could the author of the Voynich manuscript.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Dr. Sherwood believes one page of circular drawings provides the best clue of all.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  There's an astrological chart representing the sign of Aries, with 15 nude women sitting in birthing tubs. The women appear to be pregnant, and in one of the tubs, there's a baby, and that mother no longer appears to be pregnant. The woman is holding a striped string with a star on the end, but all the other women are holding plain strings. According to Dr. Sherwood, this page is a birth record.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Aries the ram represents the month of April, and because of the 15 women, she believes that this birth took place on April 15. And the woman holding the baby is positioned roughly at 10 o'clock. And guess what? Leonardo da Vinci was born just around 10:00 p.m. on April 15, 1452.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  And of course, the final clue is that the manuscript is written in code. And Leonardo da Vinci famously wrote his notebooks in code throughout his adult life. And he typically used a mirror image code that also sometimes combined or separated certain words.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Could the Voynich manuscript be Da Vinci's first coded notebook?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  The mystery might be even bigger than that. I mean, was Leonardo da Vinci writing in code to hide some great secrets of alchemy that he had discovered, or medical cures? Is the legacy of history's greatest genius even greater than we thought? Until it's deciphered, we just won't know.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  For over 100 years, people have speculated on what the Voynich manuscript is and who created it. After successfully carbon dating the book's parchment to the 15th century, researchers seek other technology to help understand it.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Dating the book is a huge breakthrough, but of course, that still can't help us determine what it is. We know the approximate date of its creation, but that's really about it.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  There's really only one way to fully understand this book, and that's to decode the writing, to figure out what language this is, what cipher they used, and start to translate it.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, it's a code no human has ever been able to crack, but could there be another way?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  In 2016, some computing scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada start doing something incredible with the Voynich manuscript. They work with artificial intelligence, and they realize, hey, maybe our AI computer can finally decipher this text where others have failed.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  The project is led by Professor Greg Kondrak.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Their exact field of study is called natural language processing. So it combines computer science and linguistics and artificial intelligence. And the goal is to improve interactions between computers and human language.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Basically, their ultimate goal is to create a computer that you could give any document in any language in the history of mankind. And that computer would be able to recognize it and understand and analyze it.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  With the right inputs, the computer might even be able to decipher a complicated code in an unidentified language.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  It is a challenge, but the computer is programmed to recognize any and all patterns and compare them with known languages. And it can do this thousands and thousands of times faster than a human can. So it's worth a shot.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Kondrak starts by entering samples of 400 different languages.

• 23:11Speaker 06

  The AI goes to work comparing the Voynich manuscript to other languages. It looks at individual characters. It looks at groups of words. It looks at how often they're repeated and in what combinations, all the little nuances that could determine what language this was written in.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  They honestly don't know if this is going to work, because this computer is not designed to read the Voynich manuscript. However, they work on it for weeks and weeks, and after a while, lo and behold, the computer gives them an answer. According to the artificial intelligence at the University of Alberta in Canada, the Voynich manuscript is in Hebrew.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  So that's theory number three. It's an ancient Hebrew text.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  There had been speculation for quite some time that the Voynich manuscript wasn't written in a European language, because had it been written in Italian or Greek or Latin, somebody more than likely would have figured it out by now. And the researchers actually went into this thinking, maybe the manuscript was written in Arabic, but Hebrew presents an intriguing possibility.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Even if they've discovered the language of origin, the book may take years to translate.

• 24:26Speaker 06

  The team thinks that not only was it written in Hebrew, it was written as an alphogram. An alphogram is a way of coding language in which you present the letters of a word in alphabetical order. So for instance, the alphogram of the word "cat" would be "act". The problem, of course, is that "act" also is the alphogram for the word "act", so you can see the challenges here.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Compounding those challenges is the fact that Hebrew isn't typically written with vowels. So researchers are left with the painstaking task of going word by word, swapping in the Hebrew letters, and then rearranging those letters for it to make some sort of sense.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Slowly, the team makes progress.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Once you think you've figured out a word, you move on to the next word. But if those two words don't make sense together, then you have to go back to the first word and try again. So far, they think they've come up with three grammatical phrases.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  "She made recommendations to the priest", "man of the house", and "me and people".

• 25:30Speaker 06

  Unfortunately, this AI was never designed to spend its existence studying the mysteries of the Voynich manuscript. So the University of Alberta team only brings its research so far. All they know is they think the book was written in Hebrew, but we still don't know what it says.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Then, in 2017, another researcher picks up where the Canadians left off.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  There's a German Egyptologist named Rainer Hannig, and he also thinks the book is in Hebrew. And he spends three years studying it, and he makes some progress in translating it. And he publishes his findings in 2020. Hannig manages to translate a number of paragraphs on multiple pages. And according to his findings, it looks like the Voynich manuscript might be a book of prophecy.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  On one particular page, according to Hannig, it says, "Drink carefully in elixir that delivers the mind. The elixir allows you to speak prophecy and counteract false prophets, but do not speak about the elixir."

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Which is theory number four: the manuscript is a Hebrew book of prophecy.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  For quite a while now, there have been two separate schools of thought about the Voynich manuscript. The first one, which is also the most popular, is what if it's an encoded version of a known language? There are a growing number of people who think that could be entirely wrong.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  For many decades, countless code breakers and scholars have tried and failed to decipher the mysterious Voynich manuscript. Then in 2009, researchers posed a radical new question: what if the book isn't written in code at all?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Since at least the 1500s, people have assumed the Voynich manuscript is encoded. But recently, a new question has been introduced. What if the reason no one's been able to crack the code is because it isn't a code at all? What if it's an actual language, but a language that's not human? Think about what it takes to create a code, especially one so complex that it defies translation for centuries. So first, you have to think about what you want to write, and then you have to convert it into code, letter by letter, word by word. If you look at the case of another famous code, the Zodiac Killer,

• 28:03Speaker 03

  look at how the symbols are arranged, spaced out and separate from each other. Because Zodiac had to stop and think every step of the way, each letter sits on its own. But in the Voynich manuscript, it really looks like the author was writing continuously. The writing is tightly formed. It flows evenly from letter to letter. It's a swift and continuous movement of the pen. They didn't have to stop and think about anything. So some say even the most ingenious human couldn't have pulled this off while coming up with an unsolvable code.

• 28:38Speaker 07

  If someone is writing in this continuous style, it's obviously a language they understood. And that has some theorists thinking, what if that language is extraterrestrial?

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Giving us otherworldly theory number five: that it's an alien journal.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Did an alien create the Voynich manuscript? There are some exciting precedents for this.

• 29:03Speaker 07

  Erich von Däniken, well-known for his book "Chariots of the Gods", puts this theory forward in his book in 1968. And in that book, von Däniken asserts that many of our ancient technologies were created by aliens, such as Stonehenge, Punta Puku, all of these other places, Easter Island, that we did not have the technology to create, so it needed alien assistance. He also cites a bunch of literary examples.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  There's an early world map known as the Piri Rees map. And von Däniken describes it as showing the Earth as it would be seen from space, which of course is an impossible viewpoint in 1513 when the map was made.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  When von Däniken applies the same logic to the Voynich manuscript, he believes he's finally unlocked its mysterious origin.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  In his 2009 book, "History is Wrong", von Däniken goes into great detail about his theory about the Voynich manuscript. He believes that it was written by an alien astronaut who was stranded on Earth in the 1400s and spent the rest of his life on planet Earth recording his observations in the Voynich manuscript.

• 30:21Speaker 07

  Even though we don't understand the written language, the illustrations seem to indicate that there was a crude understanding, perhaps riddled with inaccuracies. Could it be that this alien astronaut, in cataloguing these things, was writing about things, drawing pictures of things he didn't know anything about? Are we being observed and studied by somebody else out there?

• 30:45Speaker 03

  The alien theory is obviously pretty out there, but the concept that the book is written in its own language instead of a code, that definitely could be possible. And in fact, there's another really well-documented phenomenon that this could be. In 2004, the British researchers Jerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill publish a book on the Voynich manuscript.

• 31:06Speaker 07

  The theory they put forth is that the Voynich manuscript is written in glacialalia, which is the speaking of tongues or the language of tongues. In this case, the writing in tongues.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  There are thousands of examples of this, catalogued from antiquity to the present. And it typically presents the same way. A person generates unintelligible words that appear to be a language but can't be understood. And in many cases, this is thought to happen while the person is possessed. Could that be what's happening in Voynich?

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Raising the possibility of theory number six: it was the work of a possessed author.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  Kennedy and Churchill are the first to notice a potential parallel between the Voynich manuscript and the work of the 12th-century German saint Hildegard von Binyan. She wrote hundreds of pages in a language known as lingua ignota, or the unknown language. She had her own script. She had her own vocabulary. Both manuscripts contain perplexing illustrations, so you can see why the comparison suggests itself.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Hildegard claims she was recording visions that she was receiving, thought to be from the divine.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Kennedy and Churchill suggest the same phenomenon could have afflicted the Voynich author, causing what is known as automatic or possessed writing.

• 32:32Speaker 07

  Historically, Judeo-Christianity expresses possession as being a real thing, from demonic to angelic possessions. Jesus has many examples of him driving out demons. For many years, the Catholic Church tried to downplay possession, but now, in current times especially, they admit that it exists, that it is out there, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of exorcisms performed every month.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Of course, there will probably never be any way to prove this theory. But it just goes to show how the Voynich manuscript has captured everybody's imagination. The possibilities are literally endless.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  If it turns out the book wasn't written in code, it wasn't written by an alien, it wasn't written by an angel, a demon, it wasn't written by someone suffering from mental illness, we may never be able to find out what it says. Maybe this mystery is truly unsolvable.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  One of history's most infamous books is a manuscript that no one can understand. But that hasn't stopped people from trying.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  After all this time, no one can read it, no one can understand it. We all want to believe that the manuscript has meaning. Someone spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of resources writing it, drawing on it. The Voynich manuscript must have a purpose. How could it not?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  And that's why so many people have dedicated their lives trying to solve this so-called Voynich code, because they sincerely and firmly believe that this book has something monumental to share. There's got to be some sort of amazing secret it wants to let us know.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  But what if the answer is something much more surprising?

• 34:25Speaker 02

  As researchers have hit dead end after dead end after dead end, trying to find patterns, substitutions, translations, languages of origin, there's this one burning question that's just sitting in the back of their minds. No one wants to admit it out loud, but what if they're just wasting their time?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  In April 2007, Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner completes his own computer analysis of the Voynich manuscript. Like everyone else, he's been looking for patterns that might crack the code. But instead, his findings show that the statistical properties of the text are most consistent with meaningless gibberish.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  If Schinner is correct, then a lot of people have spent a lot of time on a wild goose chase.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  That's theory number seven: it's a fake.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  In some ways, a hoax might be the easiest explanation. But if so, I mean, wow, what a hoax.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Still, hoax or not, we're still trying to find proof of what this book is, not just more speculation. So is there any way to prove that this book could have been faked?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  The material, the parchment on which the manuscript has been written, is carbon dated to the early 15th century. You can't fake that. The parchment is 600 years old. Somebody in the early 15th century created the manuscript, just gibberish. It would be extremely difficult to identify who that was.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  But there is one person with a possible motive.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  We're talking about none other than Wilfred Voynich himself.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  For starters, Voynich has a financial motive. Think about this. Remember, he was going around the world trying to convince everybody that he's found a long-lost encoded alchemy guide written by Roger Bacon, which of course, he wants to sell for quite a lot of money.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Supporters of the hoax theory also cite the book's complete lack of provenance.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  People begin to realize, wait, there's actually no written evidence that proves the existence of the Voynich manuscript before Wilfred Voynich.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Remember, Voynich offers proof in the form of a 17th century letter that he's found. But if you actually read the letter, all it really says is that there's this mysterious book that we can't seem to figure out, and that it was written by Roger Bacon. It doesn't mention any details specific to the Voynich manuscript. There's no proof that they're even talking about the same book.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  In fact, some say maybe Voynich found the letter, and then he made the book so that he could claim it was the lost Bacon manuscript they're referring to.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Additionally, Voynich's story seems to change over the years.

• 37:17Speaker 06

  In 1912, he says he got it in a castle in Southern Europe. In 1915, he says that the castle was in Austria. When Voynich's wife Ethel dies in 1960, a letter is discovered, only to be opened posthumously, that says that he actually found the manuscript in the Jesuit order in Friscati, Italy.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  It all adds up to suspicious behavior. And one has to ask, is Wilfred Voynich just this celebrated and respected antiquities dealer? Or has he pulled off one of the single greatest hoaxes in history? If it's a fake, it's an incredible fake. For starters, it uses materials from the 1400s. It's got all of these writings, and drawings, and charts, and diagrams. It has different-sized pages that fold out in every which way. It would take a genius-level expert in antique books to pull this off.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  And some think that genius is none other than Wilfred Voynich himself.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  To some, it's not a question of how could it be Voynich? It's more a question of how could it not be Voynich? At some point between 1908 and 1911, Voynich finds a letter by Jan Marek Marchi that talks about an encoded Roger Bacon manuscript. Then, perhaps, he sets about forging a fake one.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  The problem with this hoax theory, and it's the one that a lot of people cite, is that it's nearly impossible for anyone in the modern day to have access to a lot of these ancient parchments, and inks, and other materials to create such a thing.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  But is it possible Voynich did?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Shortly before the appearance of the manuscript, Voynich purchases the entire collection of the Libreria Franciscina in Italy. It's a private collection that consists of over half a million books, pamphlets, maps, and other manuscripts. And we can't say for sure, but it is likely that among that treasure trove of materials that he purchased was a large amount of blank 15th-century parchment.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  In any ancient library, you're going to find blank parchment, whether it's sewn into a complete book, or some kind of a blank notebook, or empty parchment that just happens to be sitting around. Many books and manuscripts have blank pages at the beginning or at the end, another place where you can find ancient blank parchment.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  This would have been a jackpot for Voynich, and from that moment on, he probably had everything he needed to pull this off.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  What about the ink?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  In addition to being a Polish revolutionary, a Siberian prison escapee, and one of the world's premier rare book dealers, Voynich also has a training in chemistry from when he was a student at the University of Moscow. In his restoration work on his own collections, he sometimes uses that work to create inks and pigments to restore books and manuscripts.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  He may have also had some help, because it turns out he had a covert friendship with a famous British secret agent by the name of Sidney Riley, who's also known as the Ace of Spies. Riley allegedly goes into the British Museum library and takes out a book that's called Some Observations on Ancient Inks.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  So according to this theory, Voynich finds the letter, buys the parchment, creates the inks and the pigments, forges the book, and there you have it.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  If the manuscript is a forgery, it didn't turn out the way Voynich hoped.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  The crazy thing is, if Voynich was trying to create a Roger Bacon masterpiece to sell, he failed. Voynich was never able to sell the book.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  The problem is, he created too good of a puzzle. Everyone got so wrapped up in the story, in cracking the code and deciphering it, that they started finding patterns that Voynich never intended, clues that weren't there. People didn't want to buy the thing, they wanted to solve it.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  But Wilfred Voynich did successfully sell at least one forgery that we know of. It's called the Columbus Miniature. It's a painting of Columbus landing in the New World, which was made by an anonymous Spanish forger in the 1800s, and he sold it to the British Museum. Whether he did this knowingly, we're not entirely sure, but at least there is some precedent for Voynich selling a fake.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Despite this evidence, most scholars still believe the Voynich manuscript is a genuine 15th-century article.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  The book has been tested and retested. It's been studied using some of the most advanced scientific techniques, none of which even existed when Voynich was alive. So could he have made a forgery that good in the 1910s? Maybe. But is it likely? Probably not.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Besides, where's the fun in that? Where's the mystery? Where's the history? We're not all clamoring over this book and studying it piece by piece because we want it to be a fake. We want it to be a revelation, the greatest code of all time, which, when unlocked, will reveal the greatest secrets of the universe.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  In 2016, Yale University's Beinecke Library scanned all 234 pages of the Voynich manuscript, making it easily available to anyone who wants to take a crack at solving the 600-year-old puzzle. Thanks so much for listening to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Join us next time for a deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.