The Synopsis
This paper will prove (hopefully, beyond the reasonable doubt) that the famous Voynich Manuscript was a clever hoax (although ‘fraud’ or even ‘scam’ would be a more accurate term).
The objective of the ‘Voynich manuscript project’ was to create a unique “collector’s item” that was subsequently sold to a wealthy collector for a huge sum of money which made the author of this manuscript financially independent for life (or at least solved his financial problems). Which was his financial goal all along.
The author of this manuscript was an Italian merchant (and an exceptional con artist to boot) who did extensive business with Chinese traders (most likely, in silk); traveled to China along the Silk Road and even lived there long enough (most likely, in temporary captivity) to learn to speak, read and write fluent Chinese. He was also an excellent artist.
The manuscript itself was created in five steps: (1) taking a certain book in Latin, (2) translating it into Chinese; (3) ‘Romanizing’ Chinese translation with letters of Latin alphabet; (4) replacing Latin letters with symbols of the artificial (‘proprietary’) alphabet developed by the author of this manuscript; and (5) adding illustrations (that had absolutely nothing to do with the text of the manuscript) created by the author.
This sequence of steps pretty much guaranteed that the text of the Voynich manuscript will never be known as there is no way in the world to (a) figure out which symbol of the proprietary alphabet corresponds to which Latin letter (frequency analysis simply won’t work); and (b) to perform a ‘reversed Romanization’ back to Chinese.
The Manuscript
The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system (‘VM language’). The vellum in the book pages has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (approximately 1404–1440), which was later confirmed by tests of the paints used to produce drawings, and have been most likely composed in Northern Italy. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish antique book dealer who purchased it in 1912.
The manuscript is 240 pages long (some pages seem to be missing) and was written left to right (which makes the unknown ‘VM language’ similar to European languages and not to either Arabic or Hebrew).
Likewise, symbols of this language represent letters rather than syllables or words. Most of its pages contain not only text, but also illustrations or diagrams. The binding and covers are not original to the book, but date to during its possession by the Collegio Romano.
While there is some dispute as to whether certain characters are distinct or not, a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. In this respect, the ‘VM Language’ is similar to Latin that has 23 distinct characters. There are no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document.
Because the text cannot be read, the general categories of illustrations are conventionally used to divide most of the manuscript into six different sections:
1. Herbal (however, all attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed)
2. Astronomical
3. Biological
4. Cosmological
5. Pharmaceutical
6. ‘Recipes’ (full pages of text broken into many short paragraphs each marked with a star in the left margin)
Concise History of the Manuscript
The first 200 years or so of the manuscript’s history are shrouded in total mystery. The historians know about its whereabouts during this time precisely nothing. The earliest historical information about the manuscript comes from a letter found inside its cover. This letter was written in 1666 (about 250 years after the writing of the manuscript) to accompany the manuscript when it was sent by Johannes Marcus to Athanasius Kircher.
The letter claims that this document once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) and was subsequently given or lent to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (died in 1622), the head of Rudolf's botanical gardens in Prague.
The next confirmed owner is Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist also in Prague. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (1595–1667), then rector of Charles University in Prague, who a few years later sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent.
There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome).
Around 1912, the Collegio Romano was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly. Wilfrid Voynich acquired about 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name.
In 1930, after Wilfrid's death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich. She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to an antique book dealer, Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969, where it was (and still is) catalogued as "MS 408".
Language or Cipher?
Statistical analysis of the manuscript reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages rather than random text produced by applying ciphers. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts.
The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written in the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the words have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns.
This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors. This difficulty motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters (‘Romanization’) but sometimes with invented alphabets.
Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo's thirteenth century journey, let alone at the beginning of the 15th century.
The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript).
Also, the ductus (number of strokes that make up a written letter, and the direction, sequence and speed in which they are written) flows smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered, as there is no delay between characters as would normally be expected in written encoded text.
All this evidence clearly points to some form of a language, rather than a cipher. An artificial language with an artificial alphabet.
The Purpose of the Manuscript
The first attempts to decipher or translate the manuscript were made by Wilfred Voynich himself – right after he acquired the document in 1912. Having failed at that endeavor, he spent the next several years (to his very death in 1930) attempting to interest scholars in deciphering the script while he worked to determine the origins of the manuscript. Without much success.
Therefore, the systematic attempts to decipher/translate the manuscript, identify its author, etc. began only in 1969; after it was acquired by Yale University (the university is a research establishment, after all).
All these attempts (and there were dozens, if not hundreds of these) suffered from the same problem: they started from anywhere except from where they should have started. And they should have started with identifying the purpose of this manuscript. In other words, why the hell did the mysterious author write (create) this mysterious document? And what for?
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, actually) once said: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.
This is exactly what I am going to do in this section of the document, I will build a comprehensive lists of all plausible theories about the Voynich manuscript and then eliminate those that are impossible (in other words, those that squarely contradict the evidence in this ‘case’). The one theory that remains, must be the right one. Usually what remains is the simplest one.
Theoretically, there are only five possibilities: (1) research diary; (2) scientific or philosophical treatise; (3) theological/religious discourse; (4) ‘scripture’ – a ‘sacred’ religious text; and (5) hoax or outright fraud (obviously, for a financial gain).
Theory I. Research diary. Not possible, because (a) the structure of the diary is completely different from the structure of the manuscript; (b) pictures are way too elaborate for a research diary which is, essentially, an interim document and (c) the confidential diary would have been much more likely be encrypted rather than written in an artificial language (the latter would have been an overkill in terms of time and effort, no matter how important and valuable the research).
Theory II. Scientific or philosophical treatise (in the Renaissance-era Italy it was often one and the same thing). Also not possible, because such treatises are written to publish and disseminate discoveries, inventions, thoughts, conclusions, breakthroughs, etc. to the largest possible audience, rather than to conceal it with a cipher or an artificial language.
Theory III. Religious discourse. More precisely, heretical religious discourse (there is no need to conceal the text of an orthodox discourse). The discourse that could have landed its author at the stake. Burnt alive by the Holy Inquisition. Theoretically possible, of course, but very highly unlikely (for all practical purposes, impossible).
Such a sophisticated document, written in a highly intricate artificial language indicated the existence of a highly evolved heretical religious sect that would have definitely left at least some other traces. Of which are precisely none whatsoever.
Theory IV. Sacred religious text. For the same reasons as given in the analysis of Theory III, it could have been only heretical religious ‘scripture’. And also not possible for the same reasons as above.
Theory V. Sophisticated fraud. Now, this is a good one. A real good one. It was reported that Emperor Rudolph II paid 600 gold ducats for the Voynich Manuscript sometime in late-16th century. Which was about six times the annual wage for a skillful worker (in present-day USA it would be equal to about $300,000).
And it was about 150 years after the Gutenberg invention that made books radically less expensive than at the beginning of the 15th century (and thus made all “collector’s items” – including the Voynich manuscript substantially less valuable). Which means that the author of this document had a very powerful incentive (the proverbial motive) for this scam. A financial motive. A good old-fashioned greed.
Now how on earth did he manage to pull it off?
The Genius and the Fraud
The most likely scenario for this fraud looks something like the following. A certain merchant from Northern Italy traveled to China (sometime in 1400s) along the Silk Road – the path pioneered by the Venetian merchant traveler Marco Polo almost 150 years before.
He stayed there (voluntarily or, more likely, involuntarily) long enough to learn to fluently read, speak and write Chinese (specific dialect really did not matter). Most likely, his experiences had been painful enough for him to not want to make them public. So nothing is known about him.
When he finally came back home, he found himself in deep financial trouble and had to do something to fix these problems reasonably fast (in a matter of a few months). Merchant activities were out of the question, so he had to figure out something totally different. And quite profitable.
He knew that collecting rare (and especially mysterious) books was a popular hobby among wealthy citizens of his city who were willing and able to pay ‘top florin’ for exceptional items. So he came up with a brilliant idea – to create an absolutely unique and mysterious book and then sell it to the highest bidder.
He took one of the books that he owned (maybe, the only book that he owned) and translated it into Chinese. Then he ‘Romanized’ the translation (using a ‘phonetic script’) and re-wrote the book using the alphabet that he had invented (every character corresponded to a letter in a Latin alphabet). He added a few meaningless characters, some Latin comments; sophisticated pictures – and voila, he was in a possession of an instant “collector’s item”.
He very carefully handled the informal auction, received even more money than he hoped for, took care of his financial problems and went back to his merchant ways. In which he was highly successful.
Leaving the world with one more mystery – the Voynich manuscript. The mystery that has not been solved for six centuries. Until now.