The Voynich Manuscript full translation watch online. A book that is impossible to read. Why has no one revealed the secret of the Voynich manuscript? Where was the manuscript written?

The article will offer a decoding of some words and symbols of the manuscript. Link to the manuscript at the end of the article.

The collection of the library of Yale University (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich manuscript ( Voynich Manuscript). There are many sites dedicated to this document on the Internet; it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript is named after its former owner - the American bookseller W. Voynich, the husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel "The Gadfly"). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 from one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. the owner of the manuscript was the then German Emperor Rudolf II. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee. The same John Dee, who was also one of the heads of intelligence. He signed his reports “Agent 007” and was the author of the “green empire” theory, which consisted of British control of Russia and North America ().

Based on the characteristics of the paper and ink, the manuscript dates back to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text in a language that, according to scientists, has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in fluent calligraphic handwriting using a quill pen and five colors of ink: green, brown, yellow, blue and red.

Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the researchers divide the text of the manuscript into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagorical.

Cryptanalysts from various intelligence agencies tried to decipher the manuscript. Unsuccessfully. The first attempts to decipher the manuscript have been known at least since the 17th century (according to Wikipedia). It was studied intensively by cryptography amateurs and cryptanalysis professionals, including British and American cryptanalysts of World War II.

Since then, a number of statements have been made about a possible decryption and a number of hypotheses have been put forward, none of which, however, has received unambiguous confirmation and recognition in the scientific community. Failures in deciphering turned the manuscript into a famous subject of cryptology, and it itself received the nickname “The Holy Grail” of cryptography.

As the author sees it, the attempts were unsuccessful because the wrong hypotheses were chosen, namely, the Russian language was not used for decryption. We tried Latin, many Western European languages, and Arabic. Everything is in vain! We checked both Chinese and Turkish... It didn’t work! Some have argued that the text is written in Polynesian languages. But there was no evidence either.
Why didn't they use Russian? But here everything is simple. Russia and Russians with their language and history should be erased from everywhere in the opinion of the collective West (). Perhaps someone guessed that the key to decryption was the Russian language, but such guesses are disadvantageous for Western “specialists,” which is why the text remained encrypted. Let's try to read the text using Russian. Let's look at a few examples.

Let's move on to the letters and words of the manuscript.
- read as "pr".

- read as "st".

Let's go to page 2 in the manuscript:

Line 5, first word as “open spaces”:

Line 1, fourth word reads “simple”:

- read as "v".

read as "sk".

Line 5, word 2:

It looks like a recipe for making herbal medicine.

Let's move on to spread 5:

“The Magus of the Magi” - that is, the main Magus.

Let's move to turn 58:

We read “right hand”:

"Rotation":

The collection of the library of Yale University (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich manuscript ( Voynich Manuscript). There are many sites dedicated to this document on the Internet; it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript is named after its former owner - the American bookseller W. Voynich, the husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel "The Gadfly"). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 from one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. the owner of the manuscript was the then German Emperor Rudolf II. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is believed to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. Based on the characteristics of the paper and ink, it dates back to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in fluent calligraphic handwriting using a quill pen and five colors of ink: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but mostly they are hieroglyphs that have not yet been found in any other book.

Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagorical. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is designed similarly. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, decorate the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiac symbols and stars. And in the medical part, there are probably recipes for treating various diseases and magical tips.

Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women and spirals of stars. Experienced cryptographers, when trying to decipher text written in unusual scripts, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they carried out a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various symbols, selecting a suitable language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic were suitable. The search continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish... In vain!

The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages ​​of Polynesia, but even here nothing came of it. Hypotheses arose about the alien origin of the text, especially since the plants do not look like those familiar to us (although they are very carefully drawn), and the spirals of stars in the 20th century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what was said in the text of the manuscript. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he supposedly created not just an artificial alphabet (there actually was one in Dee’s works, but it had nothing in common with the one used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, research has reached a dead end.

History of the manuscript.

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual similarity to any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only “clue” for determining the age of the book and its origin is the illustrations. In particular, the clothes and decoration of women, as well as a couple of castles in the diagrams. All details are typical for Europe between 1450 and 1520, so the manuscript is most often dated to this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was Georg Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague at the beginning of the 17th century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Having learned that Athanasius Kircher, a famous Jesuit scholar of the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (as was then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in modern times by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known mention of the Manuscript.

It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresch's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresch probably refused to sell it. After Bares' death, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi supposedly sent it to Kircher, his longtime friend. His 1666 cover letter is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally purchased for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who believed the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal State to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to the research of Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university employees, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also the Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, then head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

Bex's library was moved to Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati, a large palace near Rome acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the Roman College needed funds and decided to sell part of its property in the strictest secrecy. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, including the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly), to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

So, what do our contemporaries think of this manuscript?

For example, Sergei Gennadyevich Krivenkov, a candidate of biological sciences, a specialist in the field of computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdiya Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg), consider the following as a working hypothesis: the compiler is one of Dee’s rivals in intelligence activities, who encrypted, Apparently, recipes in which, as is known, there are many special abbreviations, which provide short “words” in the text. Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears... Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly composed the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious “unearthly” plants are depicted in the pictures? It turned out that they were...composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to the leaf of a lesser-known, but equally poisonous plant called hoofweed. And so it is in many other cases. As we see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants there were rose hips and nettles. But also... ginseng.

From this it was concluded that the author of the text traveled to China. Since the vast majority of plants are European, I traveled from Europe. Which influential European organization sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer is known from history - the Jesuit Order. By the way, their largest station closest to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, also first worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, pressure was put on the emperor through the papal nuncio to expel Dee). So the paths of the expert on poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then was sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well have crossed the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a word...

As soon as it became clear what many of the “herbarium” pictures meant, Sergei and Klavdia began reading the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to reveal the unusual code used by the formulator. Here we had to remember many differences both in the mentality of people of that time, and about the features of the encryption systems of that time.

In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they were not at all involved in creating purely digital keys to ciphers (there were no computers then), but very often they inserted numerous meaningless symbols (“dummies”) into the text, which generally devalued the use of frequency analysis when deciphering a manuscript. But we managed to find out what is a “dummy” and what is not. The compiler of poison recipes was no stranger to “black humor.” So, he clearly did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element reminiscent of a gallows, of course, is not readable. Numerology techniques typical of that time were also used.

Ultimately, under the picture with belladonna and hoofed grass, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on preparing a deadly poison... The abbreviations characteristic of recipes and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy here. Note that when deciphering it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the research was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography; we also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the box opened...

Of course, to fully read the entire text of the manuscript, and not its individual pages, would require the efforts of an entire team of specialists. But the “salt” here is not in the recipes, but in revealing the historical mystery.

What about star spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very harmful to health.

So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here...

And scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keeley (UK) came to the conclusion that the texts of the strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be gobbledygook. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

A mysterious 16th-century book may turn out to be elegant nonsense, says a computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan-era spy techniques to reconstruct the Voynich manuscript, which has baffled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.

Using spy technology from the time of Elizabeth the First, he was able to create a likeness of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for more than a hundred years. “I think counterfeiting is a likely explanation,” Rugg says. “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the book was made for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II by the English adventurer Edward Kelly. Other scientists consider this version plausible, but not the only one.

“Critics of this hypothesis noted that the “Voynic language” is too complex for nonsense. How could a medieval forger produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these remarkable characteristics of Voynich using a simple encoding device that existed in the 16th century. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, without any hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support a long-standing theory that the document may have been concocted by English adventurer Edward Kelly to deceive Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort from qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, we need to talk about it in a little more detail. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, it will differ from a deliberate forgery in its complex organization, noticeable to the eye and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into detailed linguistic analysis, many letters in real languages ​​occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is almost impossible to forge text with low entropy manually - and we are talking about the 16th century.

No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some existing language, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any existing language - for example, the two or three repetitions of the most common words - which supports the nonsense hypothesis. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those found in real languages. Many believe that this text is too complex to be a simple forgery - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to get it so correct.

However, as Wragg showed, such text is quite easy to create using a ciphering device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, words from which are composed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty table cells allow you to compose words of different lengths. Using syllable-table grids from the Voynich manuscript, Wragg constructed a language with many, although not all, of the manuscript's distinctive features. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of a manuscript, a scientist needs to use such a technique to recreate a fairly large passage from it. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.

It appears that attempts to decipher the text failed because the author was aware of the peculiarities of the encodings and designed the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but was not amenable to analysis. As NTR.Ru notes, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references, which are what cryptographers usually look for. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists cannot determine how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.

In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Roman Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had wide-ranging interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the manuscript text, Newbould spotted microscopic symbols of shorthand writing and began deciphering them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result was secondary text using 17 different letters. Newbould then doubled all the letters in the words except the first and last, and subjected a special substitution to words containing one of the letters “a”, “c”, “m”, “n”, “o”, “q”, “t” , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, according to a rule that he never made public.

In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to a scientific audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all time. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the discoveries of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications concern the "mystery of novae."

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of novae and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source superior to the hydrogen bomb and so simple to handle that a man of the 13th century could figure it out is precisely the secret that the solution to which our civilization does not need,” wrote physicist Jacques Bergier on this occasion. “We somehow survived, and only because we managed to contain the hydrogen bomb tests.” If there is a possibility of releasing even more energy, it is better for us not to know it or not to know it yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding supernova explosion.”

Newbould's report created a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of the methods he used to transform the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results obtained. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the manuscript's drawings probably depict epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of kilometers to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.

There were also objections. Many did not understand the method that Newbold used: people were not able to compose new messages using his method. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you know a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with its help, but also encrypt new text. Newbold is becoming increasingly vague, increasingly less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 under the title The Roger Bacon Cipher. American and English historians involved in the study of the Middle Ages treated it with more than restraint.

However, people have uncovered much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone solved this one?

According to one Manley, the reason is that “attempts at decipherment have hitherto been made on the basis of false assumptions. We actually do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language is used to encrypt it. When the correct hypotheses are developed, the cipher may appear simple and easy...”

It is interesting, based on which version stated above, the research methodology at the American National Security Agency was based. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, I can’t believe that such a serious organization was working on the book purely out of sporting interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret agency is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.

It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval rebus remains unsolved. And it is unknown whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work by one of the forerunners of modern science.

Now this one-of-a-kind creation is stored in the library of rare and rare books at Yale University and is valued at $160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone: anyone who wants to try their hand at decoding can download high-quality photocopies from the university website.

What else would I remind you of that is mysterious, well, for example, or The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

With the exception of the final part of the book, all pages have pictures. Judging by them, the book has several sections, different in style and content:

• "Botanical". Each page contains an image of one plant (sometimes two) and several paragraphs of text - a manner common in books by European herbalists of the time. Some parts of these drawings are enlarged and clearer copies of sketches from the “pharmaceutical” section.
• "Astronomical". Contains circular diagrams, some of them with the moon, sun and stars, presumably of astronomical or astrological content. One series of 12 diagrams depicts the traditional symbols of the zodiac constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier with a crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly thirty miniature female figures, most of them nude, each holding an inscribed star. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricorn, or, relatively speaking, January and February) were lost, and Aries and Taurus were divided into four paired diagrams with fifteen stars in each. Some of these charts are located on subpages.
• "Biological". Dense, continuous text flows around images of bodies, mostly naked women, bathing in ponds or streams connected by meticulously designed piping, some of the “pipes” clearly taking the shape of body organs. Some women have crowns on their heads.
• "Cosmological". Other pie charts, but of unclear meaning. This section also has subpages. One of these six-page attachments contains what appears to be a map or diagram of six “islands” connected by “causes,” with castles and possibly a volcano.
• "Pharmaceutical". Many signed drawings of plant parts with images of apothecary vessels in the margins of the pages. This section also has several paragraphs of text, possibly with recipes.
• "Prescription". The section consists of short paragraphs separated by flower-shaped (or star-shaped) notes.

Text

The text is definitely written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Long sections are divided into paragraphs, sometimes with a beginning-of-paragraph mark in the left margin. There is no usual punctuation in the manuscript. The handwriting is stable and clear, as if the alphabet was familiar to the scribe, and he understood what he was writing.

Page from the “Biological” section

The book contains more than 170,000 characters, usually separated by narrow spaces. Most characters are written with one or two simple strokes of the pen. An alphabet of 20-30 letters of the manuscript can be used to write the entire text. The exception is several dozen special characters, each of which appears in the book 1-2 times.

Wider spaces divide the text into approximately 35 thousand “words” of varying lengths. They appear to follow some phonetic or spelling rules. Some signs must appear in every word (like vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some can be doubled in a word (like two n in a word long), some don't.

Statistical analysis of the text revealed its structure, characteristic of natural languages. For example, word repetition follows Zipf's law, and vocabulary entropy (about ten bits per word) is the same as Latin and English. Some words appear only in certain sections of the book, or only on a few pages; Some words are repeated throughout the text. There are very few repetitions among about a hundred captions to the illustrations. In the Botanical section, the first word of each page appears only on that page and is possibly the name of a plant.

The text looks more monotonous (in the mathematical sense) compared to the text in the European language. There are individual examples when the same word is repeated three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter are also unusually common. The entire “lexicon” of the Voynich manuscript is smaller than the “normal” set of words of an ordinary book should be.

The illustrations in the “biological” section are connected by a network of channels

Story

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal State to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to the research of Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university employees, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also the Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, then head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

Bex's library was moved to Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in .

Guesses about authorship

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon

A 1665 cover letter from Marzi to Kircher states that, according to his deceased friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book was once purchased by Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) for 600 ducats (several thousand dollars in modern money). According to this letter, Rudolf (or perhaps Raphael) believed that the author of the book was the famous and multi-talented Franciscan monk Roger Bacon (1214-1294).

Although Marzi wrote that he “suspended his judgment” regarding the statement of Rudolf II, it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who rather agreed with him. His conviction of this greatly influenced most decipherment attempts over the next 80 years. However, researchers who studied the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with the works of Bacon strongly deny this possibility. It should also be noted that Raphael died in and the deal must have occurred before the abdication of Rudolf II in 1611 - at least 55 years before Marzi's letter.

John Dee

The suggestion that Roger Bacon was the author of the book led Voynich to conclude that the only person who could have sold the manuscript to Rudolph was John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who was also known for having a large library of Bacon's manuscripts . Dee and him scrier(an assistant medium who uses a crystal ball or other reflective object to summon spirits) Edward Kelly is related to Rudolf II in that they lived for several years in Bohemia, hoping to sell their services to the emperor. However, John Dee meticulously kept diaries where he did not mention the sale of the manuscript to Rudolf, so this transaction seems quite unlikely. One way or another, if the author of the manuscript is not Roger Bacon, then the possible connection between the history of the manuscript and John Dee is very tenuous. On the other hand, Dee himself could have written the book and spread rumors that it was Bacon's work in the hope of selling it.

Edward Kelly

Edward Kelly

Marzi's personality and knowledge were adequate for this task, and Kircher, this "Doctor I-Know-Everything", who, as we now know, was "famous" for obvious mistakes, and not for brilliant achievements, was an easy target. Indeed, Georg Baresch's letter bears a certain resemblance to a joke that the orientalist Andreas Muller once played on Athanasius Kircher. Müller fabricated a meaningless manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note that the manuscript came to him from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation of the text, and there is evidence that Kircher provided it immediately.

It is interesting to note that the only confirmation of the existence of Georg Baresch are three letters sent to Kircher: one sent by Baresch himself in 1639, the other two by Marzi (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marzi and Athanasius Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the “covering letter” of the Voynich manuscript. However, Marzi's secret hostility to the Jesuits is just a hypothesis: a devout Catholic, he himself studied to be a Jesuit and, shortly before his death in 1667, was awarded honorary membership in their order.

Rafael Mniszowski

Marzi's friend, Raphael Mnischowski, who was the supposed source of the Roger Bacon story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other occupations) and around 1618 supposedly invented a cipher that he believed was unbreakable. This led to the theory that he was the author of the Voynich manuscript, which was needed for the practical demonstration of the above-mentioned cipher - and made poor Baresh a "guinea pig." After Kircher published his book on deciphering the Coptic language, Raphael Mnischowski, according to this theory, decided that confusing Athanasius Kircher with a cunning cipher would be a much more tasty trophy than leading Bares into a dead end. To do this, he could convince Georg Baresch to ask for help from the Jesuits, that is, from Kircher. To motivate Baresch to do this, Raphael Mnischowski could have invented a story about a mysterious encrypted book by Roger Bacon. Indeed, the doubts about Raphael's story in the Voynich manuscript's cover letter may have meant that Johann Marcus Marzi suspected a lie. However, there is no clear evidence for this theory.

Anthony Askem

Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer researcher and amateur cryptographer, also attempted to decipher the manuscript. Strong believed that the solution to the manuscript lay in "a peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of numerous alphabets." Strong argued that, according to the text he deciphered, the manuscript was written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript contains sections similar to the Herbalist, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where the author of the Herbalist could have acquired such literary and cryptographic knowledge.

Theories about content and purpose

The general impression given by the remaining pages of the manuscript suggests that it was intended to serve as a pharmacopoeia or selected topics in a book of medieval or earlier medicine. However, the confusing details of the illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the content of its text, and the purpose for which it was written. Several such theories are outlined below.

Herbalistics

It is safe to say that the first part of the book is devoted to herbs, but attempts to compare them with real examples of herbs and with stylized drawings of herbs of the time have generally failed. Only a couple of plants, pansies and maidenhair fern, can be identified quite accurately. Those drawings from the "botanical" section that correspond to the sketches from the "pharmaceutical" section give the impression of being exact copies of them, but with missing parts, which are supplemented with implausible details. Indeed, many plants appear to be composite: the roots of some specimens are linked to the leaves of others and to the flowers of still others.

Sunflowers

Brumbaugh believed that one of the illustrations depicted New World sunflowers. If this were the case, it could help determine when the manuscript was written and reveal intriguing circumstances about its origin. However, the resemblance is very slight, especially when compared to actual wild specimens, and since its scale is uncertain, the plant depicted may be another member of this family, which includes dandelion, chamomile and other species throughout the world.

Alchemy

The pools and canals in the "biology" section may suggest a connection to alchemy, which might be significant if the book contained instructions for preparing medicinal elixirs and mixtures. However, alchemical books of that time were characterized by a graphic language, where processes, materials and components were depicted in the form of special pictures (eagle, frog, man in a grave, couple in bed, etc.) or standard text symbols (circle with a cross, etc. .d.). None of them can be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.

Alchemical herbalism

Sergio Toresella, an expert in paleobotany, noted that the manuscript could be an alchemical herbalism, which in fact had nothing to do with alchemy, but was a fake herbalist's book with fictitious pictures that a charlatan healer could carry with him to impress clients. Presumably, there was a network of home workshops producing such books somewhere in northern Italy, around the time the manuscript was supposedly written. However, such books differ significantly from the Voynich manuscript in style and format, and they were all written in ordinary language.

Astrological botany

However, after Newbold's death, cryptologist John Manly of the University of Chicago noted serious flaws in this theory. Each line contained in the characters of the manuscript allowed for several interpretations when deciphered, without a reliable way to identify the “correct” version among them. William Newbold's method also required rearranging the "letters" of the manuscript until a meaningful Latin text was produced. This led to the conclusion that using the Newbold method it was possible to obtain almost any desired text from the Voynich manuscript. Manley argued that these lines appeared as a result of the ink cracking as it dried on rough parchment. Currently, Newbold's theory is practically not considered when deciphering the manuscript.

Steganography

This theory is based on the assumption that the text of a book is mostly meaningless, but contains information hidden in unnoticeable details, such as the second letter of each word, the number of letters in each line, etc. A coding technique called steganography is very old and was described by Johannes Trithemius in. Some researchers suggest that the plain text was run through something like a Cardano grid. This theory is difficult to confirm or disprove, as stegotext can be difficult to crack without any clues. An argument against this theory may be that the presence of text in an incomprehensible alphabet conflicts with the purpose of steganography - hiding the very existence of any secret message.

Some researchers have suggested that meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of individual pen strokes. Indeed, there are examples of steganography from this era that use lettering (either italic or roman) to hide information. However, after examining the manuscript text at high magnification, the pen strokes appear quite natural, and much of the variation in letterform is caused by the uneven surface of the parchment.

Exotic natural language

Multilingual text

In the book “Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis” (1987), Leo Levitov ) stated that the unciphered text of the manuscript is a transcription of the "oral language of a polyglot". This is what he called “a bookish language that could be understood by people who do not understand Latin if they read what is written in this language.” He proposed a partial transcript in the form of a mixture of medieval Flemish with many loanwords from Old French and Old High German.

According to Levitov's theory, the ritual of endura was nothing more than suicide committed with someone else's help: as if such a ritual was accepted among the Cathars for people whose death is near (the actual existence of this ritual is in question). Levitov explained that the fictitious plants in the illustrations of the manuscript did not actually depict any representatives of the flora, but were secret symbols of the Cathar religion. Women in the pools, together with a bizarre system of canals, reflected the ritual of suicide itself, which, he believed, was associated with bloodletting - opening the veins and then draining the blood into the bath. Constellations that have no astronomical analogues reflected the stars on the cloak of Isis.

This theory is dubious for several reasons. One of the inconsistencies is that the Cathar faith, in a broad sense, is Christian Gnosticism, which is in no way connected with Isis. Another is that the theory places the book in the 12th or 13th centuries, which is significantly older even than that of the Roger Bacon theory of authorship. Levitov did not provide evidence of the veracity of his reasoning beyond his translation.

Constructed language

The peculiar internal structure of the "words" of the Voynich manuscript led William Friedman and John Tiltman, independently of each other, to the conclusion that the unencrypted text could be written in an artificial language, in particular a special "philosophical language". In languages ​​of this type, the vocabulary is organized according to a system of categories so that the overall meaning of a word can be determined by analyzing the sequence of letters. For example, in the modern synthetic language Ro, the prefix "bofo-" is a color category, and every word starting with bofo- will be the name of a color, so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. Very roughly, this can be compared to the book classification system used by many libraries (at least in the West), for example, the letter "P" might represent the languages ​​and literature section, "RA" for the Greek and Latin subsection, "RS" for the Romanes languages, etc.

The concept is quite old, as evidenced by the 1668 book The Philosophical Language by the scholar John Wilkins. In most known examples of such languages, categories are also subdivided by adding suffixes, hence a particular subject may have many words associated with it with a repeating prefix. For example, all plant names begin with the same letters or syllables, as do all diseases, etc. This property could explain the monotony of the manuscript text. However, no one has been able to explain convincingly enough the meaning of this or that suffix or prefix in the text of the manuscript, and, moreover, all known examples of philosophical languages ​​belong to a much later period, the 17th century.

Hoax

Bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript's text (such as doubled and tripled words) and suspicious illustrations (fantastic plants, for example) have led many people to conclude that the manuscript may in fact be a hoax.

In 2003, Dr. Gordon Rugg, a professor at Keele University in England, showed that a text with characteristics identical to the Voynich manuscript could be created using a three-column table of dictionary suffixes, prefixes, and roots that were selected and combined by overlaying several cards with three cut-out windows for each component of the “word” on this table. To obtain short words and for variety of text, cards with fewer windows could be used. A similar device, called a Cardano lattice, was invented as a coding tool in 1550 by Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano, and was intended to hide secret messages within another text. However, the text created as a result of Rugg's experiments does not have the same words and frequency of their repetition as observed in the manuscript. The similarity between Rugg's text and the text in the manuscript is only visual, not quantitative. Likewise, one can “prove” that English (or any other) language does not exist by creating random nonsense that is as similar to English as Rugg’s text is to the Voynich manuscript. So this experiment is not conclusive.

Influence on popular culture

There are several examples of the Voynich manuscript influencing, at least indirectly, some examples of popular culture.

• In the works of Howard Lovecraft there is a certain ominous book “Necronomicon”. Despite the fact that Lovecraft most likely did not know about the existence of the Voynich manuscript, Colin Wilson (eng. Colin Wilson) published the story "The Return of Loigor" in 1969, in which a character discovers that the Voynich manuscript is an unfinished Necronomicon.
• Contemporary writer Harry Veda presented a literary and fantastic explanation of the origin of the Voynich manuscript in the story “The Corsair”.
• Codex Seraphinianus is a modern work of art created in the style of the Voynich manuscript.
• Modern composer Hanspeter Kyburz wrote a short piece of music based on the Voynich manuscript, reading part of it as a musical score.
• Drawings and typefaces reminiscent of the Voynich manuscript can be seen in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ).
• The plot of “Il Romanzo Di Nostradamus” by Valerio Evangelisti presents the Voynich manuscript as the work of adherents of black magic, which the famous French astrologer Nostradamus struggled with all his life.
• In the quest-style computer game “Broken Sword 3: Sleeping Dragon” (eng. Broken Sword III: The Sleeping Dragon ) from DreamCatcher, the text of the Voynich manuscript deciphers

There are mysteries in the world that have remained unsolved for centuries, despite the efforts of hundreds, or even thousands of specialists. One of these secrets is probably the most amazing treatise in the world - the Voynich manuscript. No matter who tried to decipher it, no matter what versions the researchers offered, it was all in vain: the text of the mysterious manuscript has stubbornly kept its secret for more than five hundred years.

However, a rather interesting version of the decoding of the manuscript was proposed by the famous writer, paleoethnographer Vladimir DEGTYAREV.

- Vladimir Nikolaevich, so what does the Voynich manuscript tell about? What opinions are there on this matter?

Some say that this is an encrypted alchemical text that figuratively describes ways to prolong life. Others call this document a medical book for a certain European ruler. Well, still others generally believe that this manuscript is just someone’s mockery, which contains a set of meaningless graphic characters. By the way, it is not difficult to see the text of the manuscript itself; it has long been placed on the World Wide Web - the Internet.

- And yet it has not yet been deciphered...

High-level specialists - CIA and NSA cryptographers - tried to read the manuscript. The world's most powerful computer was even connected for this purpose. But in vain. Let me remind you: the book has four illustrated sections. The color drawings depict plants, naked women, the insides of the human body, some diagrams and even a map of a section of the starry sky. In fact, half of the information is quite clear because it is illustrated.

- What do these drawings and diagrams mean? What is the book ultimately about?

REFERENCE: The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 600 years ago by an author whose name has not been preserved by history. The text of the book is either encrypted or written in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet. As a result of radiocarbon dating of the manuscript, it was precisely established that the book was written between 1404 and 1438. They have repeatedly tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but so far to no avail. The book got its name thanks to the bibliophile from Kaunas, Wilfried Voynich, who bought it in 1912. Today the manuscript is in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.

The illustrations tell about a person, or more precisely, about how a person can live no less than the 120 years measured out to him by God. Of course, you can’t claim more, but it’s possible to live 120 years in full health, in your mind and memory. This is what is written about in the ancient manuscript. More precisely, this is one of the “storylines” of this completely scientific work.

Moreover, the “plot” of the book suggests a possible extension of life to three hundred years... Why such a figure was chosen, I will not say, but the formula “Being the elder of a family in twenty generations” directly speaks of the number 300. The time when the manuscript was created was different from ours in that one generation was considered a period of 15 years. Today we think differently: one generation is 25 years.

Do you mean to say that you have read the manuscript? Or did they simply make such an approximate conclusion based on the universal desire of people for longevity?

I only read a few pages of the manuscript, chosen at random from the Internet, because I needed to get some information about the plants that interested me. More precisely, about the line of plants that is depicted at the beginning of the manuscript.

- What language was the Voynich manuscript written in, if you managed to read it?

It turns out that the manuscript was written not in any particular language, but in a common language. This is the proto-language of our civilization, and it is hundreds of thousands of years old. It is important to remember that the book was not born 600 years ago - it was copied onto paper from linen scrolls or from layers of tanned leather. And it was also copied onto those same skins or linen scrolls - probably from clay tables or from palm leaves, and this happened around the 1st century according to the current calendar.

I realized that the rhythm of the writing does not suit the 1/6 folio sheets of paper on which the current text of the manuscript is transferred. After all, the style of writing, even of a strictly documentary nature, always depends on the size of the writing material. And the Voynich manuscript is not a strict document. This is most likely a scientific essay, a kind of diary of the development of an action according to the scenario of a certain scientific search. It seems that much earlier the text of this manuscript was executed on sheets of material that were elongated in length, and not in height.

- So what is this text about?

Today there is a popular hypothesis that someone in the 15th century sat over three hundred blank sheets of expensive parchment and diligently wrote on them various meaningless curlicues with no less expensive ink. Then he painted almost a thousand pictures and decorations with different, also extremely expensive, paints. However, there were no futurists, imagists or abstractionists in that era - if they appeared, they were quickly sent to the fires of the Inquisition.

So it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to create such a high-class abstraction. From time immemorial people have written a lot. One should not think that after the Flood there was complete illiteracy and it continued until the 19th century. For example, in the 17th century, a simple mediocre Belarusian merchant wrote in Old Church Slavonic, but... in Arabic letters. And nothing. His cash receipt for one hundred and fifty thalers was considered fair and was accepted into action...

I will not describe exactly the process of decoding three pages of this manuscript because of the complexity of the explanations. I can only tell you about my general impression. The manuscript used three languages: Russian, Arabic and German. But they are written in a certain alphabet, unknown in the world of scientists. Although in fact this alphabet is found much more often than one might think.

Last year, I specifically communicated with people who spoke African dialects. In the conversation, I cited two words from the Voynich manuscript: “unkulun-kulu” and “gulu.” They translated to me that it is “the one who came first” and “the sky”. This is a modern interpretation of very ancient East African concepts, the original meaning of which is “one who stands above all (slaves)” and “blue doom”. In general - “God” and “Death”. The last concept “gulu” (Si Gulu) refers to uranium, the same one that is used to stuff nuclear charges.

- But the book depicts plants. What does uranium have to do with the exotic flower or mushroom ergot?

A solution or infusion of ergot in very small quantities apparently acted as an antidote. People in those days lived very far from London and Paris. And in the Sahara, the dust carried radioactive particles, a kind of “blue salt” that wiped off a person’s skin. So ergot could well be used as an ointment against ulcers that appear on the body... Do you know what at all times was the most precious knowledge in Egypt, China, and Europe? Not a Fibonacci number, not an electric battery, not a method of producing kerosene from oil. The secret of longevity is what cost a lot of money. People paid a lot of money even for the most fantastic recipe. Imagine what would happen if you gave this elixir of youth to the world. No, it would be better if it remains a secret.

This was the name of a manuscript in a previously unknown language with certain knowledge of a specialist in various fields of science. Today the Voynich manuscript has been completely deciphered, but there are still many mysteries associated with it. This is what is known today about this manuscript and what knowledge he revealed in his creation.

Who is Voynich

This was the name of the antiquarian Wilfried Voynich (1865 - 1930), a collector who came across a unique manuscript of the 15th century. The authorship of the manuscript is still disputed, but its contents are considered more strange.

The text of the manuscript itself was written in an unknown language, in which one word had many meanings. However, until today, no one could understand the content of the book and what exactly was encrypted in it, and most importantly, the meaning of what the author was trying to convey.

Today no one can give a concrete answer as to who the author of the manuscript is. Encyclopedias mention many names of the probable authors of the text, but nowhere is there clear evidence that the text of the manuscript was written by these very people. There is even a hypothesis that the text was written in a mental hospital, but when and by whom is also difficult to figure out. Therefore, researchers and specialists in the study and deciphering of cryptograms have been struggling for a long time over the content and authorship of the manuscript, but at the moment, exact information about who, in fact, is the author of the manuscript is still unknown. For now, the name “Voynich manuscript” bears the name of the antiquarian to whom this manuscript fell into the hands.

The book is dedicated to herbs and traditional medicine. It has several sections devoted to botany, astrology, biology, cosmology and pharmaceuticals. However, what is most confusing is the strange pictures in the book, which can raise a lot of questions. It is also interesting that most plants are difficult to identify with modern ones. Only a few resemble marigolds, pansies, thistles and others.

The book consists of 246 small pages, neatly filled with calligraphic handwriting with unknown text and equally strange pictures. The plants depicted on them are different from those that exist today. For example, the American sunflower was oval-shaped, and the red pepper was depicted as green. Today, researchers are inclined to believe that this was a description of some Mexican botanical garden, and the irregular shapes of the plants are associated with the style of the drawing.

Modern researchers believe that the mysterious text was written in a phonetic language, and the symbols were invented by the author himself.

The manuscript was written by the same hand, but at different times. It is also known for certain that the book has nothing to do with either Arabic or Hebrew.

There are many astrological symbols in the book, but it is impossible to correlate them with what is known in astrology today. Also, if you rotate pie charts, of which there are many in the text, a cartoon effect appears and the images begin to rotate.

The astrological section proved that medicine of that time was always connected with astrology. However, those who read the Voynich manuscript, which was deciphered, in the original and in a language understandable today, noted that the knowledge is in no way connected with what has to do with modern astrology. Astrology and medicine closely coexist in it.

The biology section is full of pictures in which women constantly bathe in either clean or dirty water. There are a lot of pipes and branches everywhere. Obviously, hydrotherapy was still one of the most common methods at that time. Water in the text symbolized health and illness.

The Voynich manuscript has been deciphered, but the most difficult section turned out to be the pharmaceutical section, in which it is difficult to identify the plants depicted in the pictures and their names. There is also a version that the versatility of the artificial language, which cannot be identified and compared even with ancient languages, suggests that the book has a double bottom. But which one exactly is still a mystery.