The Voynich Manuscript
Sometimes it seems as though the Internet’s servers are filled to the brim with me-too web-pages, whose repetitive vacuosity faisl to add one jot of insight to the human condition. And this parlous state of affairs is especially true when it comes to webpages on the Voynich Manuscript (the “VMs” for short).
In itself, the VMs is a truly amazing historical cipher mystery, far better (and deeper, and cleverer) than any novelist could construct - but perhaps the biggest mystery about it nowadays is why hardly anybody seems able to string together a non-lame sentence about it, let alone a whole paragraph. You shouldn’t have to surf very far to see examples of the basic Wikipediaesque template people tend to slavishly follow, based around fugue-like variants on the following set of true (but unhelpful) factettes:-
- The VMs is more than 200 pages long, and nobody can read a word of its neat cipher-like writing
- It was uncovered (and bought for a song) in 1912 by dodgy antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid Voynich
- It is full of odd plant drawings that nobody can satisfactorily identify, often with bizarre roots
- Many of its margins hold small sketches of naked women (whom researchers call “nymphs”)
- Nobody can usefully date it, or place it, or attribute it to anybody without just plain guessing
Once they’ve covered this basic ground, the better breed of blogger’s “value-add” tends to be to append a nicely-turned phrase along the lines of “Well, I can’t see why there’s any debate - it’s plainly an <insert ironic reference to a current headline here>”. Well, whoop-de-doo: as if the world really needs any more heavy-handed irony to help it spin on its axis.
Why is it that nobody thinks to mention the sheer intellectual romance, the tragi-comedy of all the dumb-ass solutions that have been proposed, and the blood-spattered trail of ruined reputations and wasted lives this inscrutable “Sphinx” has left scattered behind it? It is a cruel siren, luring would-be code-breakers into whirlpools of their own making, giving them raw material to fashion their own vortices of self-deception that suck them ever further towards nowhere, as well as a blank screen to project their own code-breaking fantasies onto. For a book full of carefully posed nymphs, the phrase “cherchez-la-femme” can rarely have been more apposite to the (largely male) group of would-be code crackers.
Ultimately, what is the VMs all about - is it mischief, misdirection, or madness? Really, was the author closer to David Copperfield or to David Icke?
All that is really certain is that, beneath its veneer of apparent simplicity and naivety, the VMs is anything but simple and naive - it is a complex, multi-layered beast of a puzzle, that will require a really concerted and special kind of collaborative historical problem-solving effort to crack. But will you be a part of that whole effort - or just a casual passer-by, idly dipping your toes in the shimmering cryptographic waters?
