The Voynich Manuscript is more than a regular codex; it’s a medieval mind-bender filled with bizarre drawings and an alphabet nobody can crack. But is there actually anything to crack?
The Manuscript
1912 is when antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich got his hands on the manuscript in Rome. Now sitting in Yale University’s library, it continues to make even the smartest folks scratch their heads.
Open its pages, and you’re greeted by a wonderland of the weird: plants that, to our knowledge, don’t grow on Earth; trippy cosmic charts, and tiny, naked people…? I’m taking an educated guess here. The book implies they often bathe in interconnected green goo. The text itself flows neatly, left to right, with no messy punctuation, looking every bit like a real language. Yet, every single attempt to translate or decrypt it has hit a brick wall.
Naturally, this stubborn mystery has sparked countless theories. Is it a lost language? A secret code of medicines? There are communities who think it’s extraterrestrial in origin, and some convinced it was made up by someone who was bored. Fair enough, I can’t imagine there was much to do back then except wait for execution for stealing a spoonful of buckwheat or something.
Maybe it’s an ancient medical text, an alchemist’s handbook, or perhaps just a very elaborate joke played on posterity. The wild drawings combined with the unyielding script make it a really big playground for speculation.
The Cryptologist’s Take
I spoke to Klaus Schmeh, who’s basically a rockstar in the world of cryptology. Not only is he a computer scientist, he’s also written 15 books, hundreds of articles, and 25 scientific papers on the subject, and is the most published cryptologist in the world. So when he talks about codes, people listen. And the Voynich Manuscript? It’s definitely caught his eye.
“There is so much encrypted text, and we have so much modern material for analysis, but still, it’s never been cracked. Nobody has ever been successful in breaking this encryption. It’s unusual and interesting,” Schmeh said.
But despite its allure, Schmeh hasn’t actually tried to decode it himself. Why? “In my view, it’s not even solvable. I don’t think it’s really encrypted text — it’s probably nonsense,” he stated.
His reasoning makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the history of codes. “The encryption systems created in the 1500s were not really good. They were still very basic, and just about all of them can be solved today.
“We have so much text for analysis; it should be possible to break this encryption if it really is an encryption from the 15th century. An encryption created then that still can’t be broken today…It’s simply extremely unlikely. This is pretty clear evidence for the hoax hypothesis.”
He doesn’t mean a hoax as in someone pretended it was from the 1500s. It is from the 1500s, as it’s been carbon dated. Schmeh means it might be more like a bit of trickery.
For a long time, Schmeh leaned into the idea of a clever deception. “My favorite theory was that it was a forgery created to sell to book collectors. Maybe from the beginning it was meant as something that looks expensive; valuable, special.”
The Inconsistency Issue
So, what makes decoding the Voynich such a nightmare? Schmeh points to its instability as an encoded book.
“It’s inconsistent. Usually the first thing you do when you examine an encrypted text is you create text statistics — you count the letters, you look at the length of the words. Usually you’d get some impression of what kind of encryption it is.
“This is exactly what doesn’t work in the Voynich Manuscript. There have been plenty of statistical examinations but there seems to be no direction at all. I think it will probably never be solved.”
He even brought up another historical example: Steganographia, a book from around the same time as the Voynich. “He created the book just to impress others,” Schmeh said, referring to the author Johannes Trithemius. For centuries, Steganographia looked like a dark magic grimoire, full of strange numbers and mystical ramblings. But in the 1990s, after it was finally decrypted, it turned out to be… well, pretty trivial stuff. It was covertext for material on cryptography.
Could the Voynich Manuscript be a medieval predecessor to a very elaborate pot stirrer, designed simply to awe and mystify without ever revealing a deeper truth? It’s a compelling thought, especially coming from someone who lives and breathes codes.
Dr Volkhard Huth, a historian and the director of The Institute of Personal History (Institut für Personengeschichte) in Bensheim, Germany, agrees with our cryptologist. He said: “I am now of the opinion that the so-called Voynich cipher is not a cipher in the strict sense, i.e. that it is not based on any cryptographic system. In other words, the supposedly encrypted text should have no hidden significance. Otherwise it would have been decrypted long ago using the computer methods available today.”
Maybe we’ll never know – maybe we will. Mr Schmeh did say he once thought the Zodiac Cypher would never be decoded, but he was proved wrong. What do you think? Is it a profound mystery still waiting to be solved, or just one of history’s most magnificent hoaxes?
