In Germany, they were able to decipher the contents of the 18th century manuscript, which served as a guide for sorcerers. The librarians at the University of Kassel managed to learn the secrets of gaining wealth and love with the help of evil spirits, which contains more than 10 thousand manuscripts of international importance.
At first it seemed to them that the text was written in Arabic - signs and symbols on the pages were executed in an oriental manner. The manuscript was later shown to an expert, and he rejected any suggestion of the author's oriental origin.
“I assumed it was written in German,” said Sabine Ludemann, head of the Hessian book collection. The encryption scheme turned out to be quite simple - each letter of the alphabet had its own symbol. It took a week to translate the 90-page work.
The book describes spells and spirits, summoning which you can find wealth, love and heal from ailments. It also says exactly how the ritual needs to be performed in order to achieve the desired effect. So, for example, one spell will only work if it is cast three hours after midnight. And for the correct effect from the other, it is necessary to summon a spirit and put stones in a circle.
In addition, there is a lot of Christian symbolism in the text: in addition to references to angels, the name of Christ is often found there, and it is written in several languages - in Latin, German and Greek. The library staff did not explain this, noting that historians of religion should be engaged in this.
There is no author's name in the book. Most likely, this is due to the fact that he was a member of one of the secret societies. Most of the other interest in magic, alchemy and treasures at the end of the XVIII century. exhibited by the Freemasons and Rosicrucians, the researchers noted. But it is still impossible to determine exactly who the author belonged to.
Perhaps the most famous text that cryptologists from all over the world are decrypting is the so-called Voynich manuscript. It got its name in honor of the antique dealer who acquired it in 1912.
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It is an illustrated codex written in an unknown language. Based on the results of radiocarbon analysis of fragments of the manuscript, it was possible to find out that it was written between 1404 and 1438, in the era of the early Renaissance.
In 2003, a system was developed with which you can create texts similar to the Voynich manuscript. The researchers then concluded that the book was just a bunch of random characters, initially meaningless. However, ten years later, physicist Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester and Damian Zanette from the Bariloche Atomic Center published their work with the conclusions that there was a semantic model in the text and that the manuscript was an encrypted message. At present, the Voynich manuscript is kept in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University (USA).
