The view you take of the Voynich Manuscript’s text inevitably affects the view you take of its drawings: though you could construct scenarios where (for example) someone sane did all the writing and someone mad added all the pictures, they really wouldn’t be very likely. And so there are actually only three broad classes of Voynich theory that have attracted attention over the years:-
- It’s written in an unknown / synthetic language –> the pictures are representational
- It’s written in cipher or private shorthand –> the pictures are obscured / encrypted
- It’s meaningless / hoaxed nonsense –> the pictures are meaningless / nonsensical
In “The Source”, bestselling novelist Michael Cordy takes option 1 as his starting point, and weaves a pacy yarn around the amazing South American secrets hidden in the text by a Jesuit missionary / priest called “Father Orlando Falcon”, holding a bizarre redemptive power which the Vatican itself feels threatened by, yet which might be able to save the lives of the atheist geologist hero’s decipherer wife and their unborn child, yada yada yada. But enough of the PR-speak.
By all rights, I should hate this book: right from the start, it pits the Superior General of the Society of Jesus (basically the uber-Jesuit) and his homicidal killer half-brother against a rationalist oil scientist and a not-very-convincing linguistics student, in a kind of 1940s cartoon propaganda take on Religion vs Science. And as regular blog readers will know, my heart normally sinks a mile whenever evil Jesuits’ crooked noses and gaunt faces pop up in a novel (it was a cliche 350 years ago, and even Dan Brown was smart enough to try to reinvent it as Opus Dei). And here we also have an added Big Oil vs Gaia wrestling bout awkwardly threaded through the narrative.
You can doubtless see where this is going: even though Michael Cordy’s craft has improved dramatically since his 1997 debut novel “The Messiah Code” (which I reviewed here), his Big Themes construction and Top Trumps who-will-win-as-if-you-don’t-already-know characterization really don’t work for me. And yet “The Source” still manages to comprise, despite its superabundance of traditionalist book-for-the-beach tropes, as good an introduction to the mystery of the VMs as anything out there. (The only bit of wishful thinking is the “Voynich Week” mini-conference at the Beinecke – as if!)
And finally: I think there is a lesson in there for Voynich theorists, too: if you take an Option 1 approach and try to read the drawings in the balneological (‘water’) section too literally, the nymphs will tie you in knots.