For several hundred years this encrypted book has been one of the unsolved mysteries of the past, over which the greatest minds of mankind fought …
Fighter from Russia
In 1912, the Jesuit Order decided to open a seminary in the old Villa Mondragon, located in the Italian town of Frascati. The restoration required a lot of money, and the representatives of the order secretly put up for sale some of the ancient books that were carefully preserved in Jesuit vaults, including the Villa Mondragon itself. Potential buyers were selected carefully and for a long time, and, in addition, the books were sold on the condition that no one would know exactly where they were acquired.
One of the chosen ones was the famous American antique dealer Wilfried Voynich, the husband of the famous Ethel Lilian Voynich, the author of the novel The Gadfly. The Italian Jesuits would be surprised if they recognized that part of Wilfried Voynich's biography, which he carefully concealed. In fact, his name was Mikhail Voynich, and he was born in 1865 in the Russian Empire. After grammar school, he studied at the Moscow University at the Faculty of Chemistry, and then became an underground terrorist, joining the "Narodnaya Volya" movement. He was involved in many unpleasant and bloody operations, for which he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, but managed to escape and in 1890 ended up in London. Here Ethel Lillian Boole, daughter of the famous mathematician George Boole, was waiting for him. Young people met in Russia, where Ethel worked as a governess and had close ties with Russian revolutionaries.
Ethel and Mikhail, who changed their name to Wilfried, got married and later emigrated to the United States, where the former militant turned into a respectable antiques dealer and second-hand bookseller, and where no one knew about his bloody past …
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Mysterious letter
And so fate brought him to Italy, to the Jesuit depositories, where he acquired 30 old books, each of which was a rarity. Among other things, Voynich bought a very strange manuscript, which interested him very much. It was a manuscript of 246 pages, 17 by 24 cm, decorated with unusual drawings. But the most amazing thing was that the book was written in an unknown language! And so far nobody has been able to read it …
Voynich's experienced eye dated the book to the supposedly 13th century. But there was no direct evidence of this. The manuscript contained a cover letter addressed to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. The letter was written by Jan Markus Marci, rector of the University of Prague in the middle of the 17th century. In the letter, he talked about the history of the manuscript. It was once bought in Prague by the emperor Rudolph II from an unknown merchant for 600 ducats - a huge amount at that time. Rudolph believed that it belongs to the pen of the famous scientist Roger Bacon.
Then the emperor presented the manuscript to his pharmacist and confidant, Jacobus de Tepenets, about which he left a dedication on the book. Voynich later found out that it happened in 1608.
After the death of de Tepenetz, the manuscript came to Marzi, and he sent it to Kircher in 1666, noting that he was the only person who could read it.
It is not known whether the Jesuit scholar read this manuscript, but it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence at the Villa Mondragon in Frascati, which the Jesuits acquired in 1866.
Nudes in the water
When the manuscript was in the hands of Voynich, he immediately tried to decipher it. But nothing worked. The text of the book is written in Latin, but does not belong to any of the known languages. There are more than 170,000 characters in the Voynich manuscript, and there are no words longer than 10 letters in the book. Some letters are found only at the beginning of a word, others only at the end, and some always in the middle - as in the Arabic script.
Almost all pages have pictures. Judging by them, the book has several sections - botanical, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical and prescription.
Wilfried (Mikhail) Leonardovich Voynich (1865-1930)
In the botanical are images of plants, in the astronomical - diagrams with the moon, sun and stars. In the biological section, the text wraps around drawings of naked bathing women.
The cosmological section contains drawings that supposedly explain the picture of the world order - a kind of map with islands and volcanoes.
The pharmaceutical section depicts plant parts and pharmaceutical vessels. The recipe section consists of short paragraphs, separated by notes.
Columbus pepper
Voynich was never able to decipher the manuscript and turned to the most prominent scientists of that time for help, however, according to an agreement with the Jesuits, hiding the true history of the book and how it came into his hands. But no one was able to read the mysterious book, although several times it seemed that the secret of the manuscript had been solved.
In 1919, Professor William Newbold, a leading cryptographer from the United States, took on the decryption of the manuscript. Two years later, he published his version of the transcript. He assumed that the line on the last page is the key to the text. Based on this line, he came up with a code and wrote a "translation" of the book. According to Newbold, the manuscript was written by Roger Bacon in the 13th century and tells about the structure of human internal organs, cells, spermatozoa, as well as the eclipse of the Sun and the Andromeda nebula - knowledge unknown in the 13th century.
However, Newbold admitted that each time he deciphered, he obtained new results. After the death of the professor, British cryptographer John Manley published an article in which he proved that Newbold took for signs the strokes that appeared on the manuscript from old age.
Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864-1960)
The decryption was invalidated, but nevertheless it is still the only thoroughly worked out version. All other scientists could not put forward anything similar, although they used a variety of methods.
In 1930, Voynich died, and his wife inherited the manuscript. She made a number of more attempts to decipher the manuscript, especially since cryptography had gone far ahead by that time, but they all ended in vain, however, nevertheless expanding the knowledge about the manuscript.
So, in 1944, botanist Hugh O'Neill saw an American sunflower and red pepper on the pages of a manuscript, which proved that the manuscript could not have been written before Columbus's travels. True, in the Voynich manuscript, the red pepper is depicted as green, and the sunflower has a strange shape.
Shortly before her death, the writer bequeathed the manuscript to her friend, leaving her a letter, which was opened only after Voynich's death. In it, she told the detailed history of the manuscript.
In 1961, the manuscript was purchased for 25 thousand dollars by an antiquary from New York, Hans Kraus. A few years later, he donated it to Yale University, where it is now kept in the rare book library under number MS 408.
Many modern researchers are trying to decipher the mysterious Voynich manuscript, but there are no results, despite the presence of super-powerful computers and complex cryptographic programs.
The only thing that has been proved with the help of modern technology is that the manuscript is definitely not a fake and a set of meaningless signs, as many researchers have argued …
Natalia Trubinovskaya. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 7 2010
PS You can see the original Voynich manuscript here.