26: The Voynich Manuscript | Red Thread
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so

Otoravimo Caraleth Fowlend Disrache Tobinath Sethran Dilarop Amenthis Rule of Two Volokhin Ferothi Jeffrey Epstein and this is the red thread and that was 100% absolutely verbatim straight out of the Voynich manuscript. Yeah, it was straight out of there. Could you believe it? It's page 13, I believe. Start talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the Rule of Two, going deep into that stuff.

Yeah, I knew this day would come, to be honest. So that's probably, there probably needs to be a bit of explanation behind that. I think it was self-explanatory. Oh, okay, never mind. So in this episode of Red Thread, hello, by the way, this is the Red Thread. That part of the intro was not a lie. I'm Jackson, joined by Isaiah and Charlie. This week, we're talking about the Voynich

Voynich Voynich, one of those two, manuscript, which is a book

a book from the 1400s that is basically indecipherable like it's it's written in a strange foreign language that has not been deciphered by anyone since then it's one of the biggest mysteries in literature so uh wait wait so i knew nothing about this that sounds so underwhelming i could write something that no one could decipher but no one would want to just be gibberish

Well, you couldn't write something from the 1400s. Maybe it would be interesting in like 600 or 800 years to someone if you could do that. Yeah, they still had like plenty of insane people back then though that could just start like scribbling nonsense. Well, hold on, hold on. What if your insanity has like a rhythm to it, you know? There's like patterns and hints and stuff like that. Like it's not just scribbling, right? Yeah.

I think. From what? From my limited knowledge about the manuscript. I mean, no. Is it just nonsense? Because you could do that. Like a child could do that. Okay, well, first of all, we don't know because we can't... We don't know what the writing is. So it could be nonsense. We're not sure. Yeah.

So it is a book full of potential nonsense with nonsensical drawings. There are nonsensical drawings, absolutely. It's all of my drawings. I can do that. We are two and a half minutes in. Charlie is swinging. Yeah, wait a minute. I had no idea what this topic was. I thought this was going to be something crazy. This could be like the Necronomicon, a book of spells and evil. Hey, it could be. We can't look at it. It makes no sense.

Well, no, we don't know specifically what it's about. Do you know what the Necronomicon is, though? If you read that, if it was in some strange language, you wouldn't know that. I can probably tell by the pictures of demons and stuff. This has like five naked ladies. So there's plenty of pages in the Voynich manuscript. It's filled to the brim with these strange drawings. So I definitely think we can kind of come to conclusions based on the drawings alone about what the book is about.

or what it contains, what the point of the book was, given contextual things like the drawings, what time period it comes from. We know certain things like that to a certain degree of efficacy. We know. But it's the language itself, the writing in there, that is extremely... It's impossible to decipher because we've got no way of contextualizing the language itself. There are some... To me, it looks like a mix between Latin and...

kind of like middle eastern languages maybe but that doesn't make sense for the time period either so i i don't know what kind of language it is um so yeah we don't know the specifics of what was actually written in the book it could be a necronomicon but based on the pictures and stuff um i don't think that's likely but there is definitely a likely outcome that we can talk about you're really selling me on this jackson just you guys know nothing about it i

I have vaguely heard of it. When you said, I didn't know it by name, but when I looked, I'm like, oh yeah, I watched some YouTube videos about this. So mine's like a one out of 10, very surface level, like not that familiar. And Charlie has never heard of anything to do with this before. Never.

Okay. Well, it is actually one of the biggest mysteries and it has been recommended. He hates that. Charlie knows he hates it, but other than that, I really don't like it. Okay. So what is it, right? What is it? What is the Voynich manuscript? Charlie, you can take it since you have no clue what it is.

It's a mysterious, undecodable 240-page book by an unknown author filled with strange, bizarre, childlike drawings and illustration of plants, astrological symbols, naked women operating bizarre machinery. The meaning and intent behind the Voynich Manuscript has eluded many for over a hundred years. The script is neat, but cramped on the page.

No, but it's like... Oh, like cramped together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The script is neat, but cramped on the page, forming sentences that have never been able to... Forming sentences that have never been able to have been read due to them being written in a language unknown. Stranger still are the pictures littered throughout the book, some as normal as plants or herbs, then branching into unusual creatures and nude women seemingly posing in buckets or pipes. God, I love the way you say herbs, by the way. You say it like herbs. Yeah, it's herbs.

Why do you say it like that? Is that an American thing? It's an American thing. Yeah, but it's actually how it's pronounced, to be fair. What do you mean? No. It's herbs. It's herbs. It's fucking herbs.

You don't get to own pronunciation. I do when it's correctly pronounced. Okay, whatever. It's just fucking herbs. Jackson, what do you mean we don't get our own pronunciation? That's how pronunciations work. They're entirely area-based. No, that's my point. He's saying that the American pronunciation is the only pronunciation. That's what he's saying. I'm saying you don't get to own the pronunciation itself. I have my own pronunciation because I'm Australian.

I use the H. Okay. Anyway, regardless, continue. Well, then after that, the Voynich manuscript is a mystery within a book, which keeps researchers coming back time and time again to try and crack the hidden meaning once and for all. An impossible task is how do you decrypt a language with no clues? Yeah, Charlie, how do you do that, huh? You don't because there's probably no meaning behind it.

Well, no, there's meaning behind it. We already know. We see the naked women with the machines and stuff. There's got to be meaning behind it. So how do you decrypt it? You don't. Is it just one guy's fucking fever treatment that he had after a fucking night nurse or something? Who cares? Well, what you have to do is it could be code, right? So you look for patterns. You look for stuff like that.

Yeah, but I mean, that's how you would decrypt it if it wasn't some insane person rambling on about... Okay, Jackson, you gotta pick a lane. Is this decryptable or is this completely insane, not gonna do anything with it? Look, I'll play both sides, but we can't both play both sides, okay? Because then we just have Charlie being mad the whole time. You gotta pick a lane. Well, mad is not the right word. More so perturbed, perhaps. At best.

What is perturbing about it to you? That anyone gives a fuck. It's just a random book of gobbledygook. I hope we get to the end of this and it says it was written by the United States Customs Immigration.

I'd go the other way. I think it'd be cool if it was written by Da Vinci or something. That'd be kind of cool. I was just referring to the people who kept the esports team from coming into the US. Oh, yeah. To make you extra mad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do like the idea of it being someone like Da Vinci, though. And he just, for some reason, started writing in Gobbledygook. Now, that would be funny if...

If like you knew you were like a beloved author who people would look at and you're like, all right, now one for fun. Okay, Charlie, we're going to do a red thread on your mindset here. Do you really truly not understand why people would find this interesting though? The book itself? I mean, no, I do get it. Like people love things like this, but just, I don't know, from a basic standpoint, if I ever stumbled across this, I'd be like, well, this is stupid.

If you came across a parchment or a book manuscript from the 1400s. That's the same way you could describe furries, though, or anything. I wasn't expecting furries to make an entrance into this episode. Well, they just did. Congratulations. Well, yeah, you should have expected it. Yeah, you should have. But what makes this like the furries, Isaiah? No, I said it's the exact... The way he described it is like, well, I understand how some people could like it, but I think it's... No, no, I get why people would like it. It's not that I don't get it. It's just that I personally don't give a fuck.

It's just a book of mumbo-jumbo. I'm sure it had meaning to the author, but I don't think it has anything profound in its pages. Well, it could have had a profound meaning to the author's community at the time, so it is still of historical significance, probably. Yeah, that's certainly possible. If Charlie was wearing a fedora right now, he could be talking about the Bible. Oh. Imagine. Imagine.

The Bible doesn't matter to me. It's just a bunch of gobbledygooks. I understand why some could be interested, but nay nay. I love it.

Okay, so a basic understanding of how we decrypt language, though, is to kind of put it into perspective why this is indecipherable. It's virtually impossible to decrypt a language without any clues or references because understanding a language requires knowledge of the vocabulary, grammar, and importantly, context. For example, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was only achieved due to the Rosetta Stone, a block of...

granodiorite containing both ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek texts. So we were only able to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the ancient Egyptian language because they were forged, they were

kind enough to leave a block with like the two languages next to each other, like ancient Egyptian and then, you know, ancient Greek below it. And we had an understanding of ancient Greek, so then we could compare the two. It still took a lot of effort, obviously, but that's the only reason we were able to decipher that.

And we don't have that for the Voynich manuscript. They didn't leave behind a little cheat sheet showing us how to decipher the language or kind of contextual clues as to what the certain letters or the characters meant in the grand scheme of things. So that's why it's impossible. We just have no way of... There's no key, basically, to unlocking the language and the secrets within about the Voynich manuscript. Isaiah, would you like to take the next...

paragraph? Yes, absolutely. So, the Voynich manuscript is made out of a material called vellum, which is a form of parchment made out of calfskin. Radiocarbon analysis on the pages by the University of Arizona determined that the manuscript was dated around 1404 to 1438 to a 95% probability.

The type of ink used indicated that the manuscript likely originated from northern Italy. It always blows my mind that we can get that level of detail. Granularity? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, well, the ink obviously indicates this town in Italy around this year. Like, man. Yeah, Charlie's unimpressed. That doesn't impress him. I'm not impressed. Yeah, no. He could have done that just by looking at it. Yeah, I could do that. Yeah.

Oh, so just because some man from the sky told you to make a book. I can't imagine it without like an eye, a monocle and a fedora right now. Like snubbing his nose at the book. Yeah. All that Charlie cares about is that it's old. That's the amount of granularity he needs. That's the information that he needs. The only thing I think is cool here is the titties in it. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, brother. Let's go. Fourth of July. God bless America. I know who wrote this book.

It was my Uncle Todd, damn it. Oh, Todd, you old rapscallion. Always going to Northern Italy.

Not like, um, they do that all the time with like Jane does or John does that are found, you know, like, um, uh, bodies where they'll be able to be like, oh, well this person, uh, three weeks before death vacation to this region of Greece, but they still can't determine like whose name it is. It's, it's wild. Yeah. Just by like the pollen found on this, you know, some, some, yes, yes. Something absurd like that. But, uh,

Yeah, it always never ceases to amaze me. It is super impressive, yeah. And I mean, determining that this came from the specific years between 1404 and 1438, not just like a century or just by saying like it came from the Middle Ages or something like that. 24 years. Yeah. Like 800, no, 600 years in the future, being able to determine that. Like super impressive, yeah. Super cool.

The document is organized into folios, a term used in manuscript and book terminology referring to a single piece of paper or parchment. The sheet can be folded to create two pages, but each side of the sheet is still one page or one folio. The Voynich manuscript is organized into these numbered folios sequentially.

Each one typically has two sides labeled recto, the front side, or verso, the back side. See, I would have assumed recto was the back side, right? You would think, yeah. Yeah, what's up with that? Must be the Voynich language. I think that kind of recto is like the one connected to the term like erect, right? Okay, well... Like the same root word, which refers to like front or forward facing or something like that, because I know like...

Whatever. Yeah, sure. The manuscript has over 200 pages, 116 folded folios, but 14 are conspicuously missing, which we can tell based on the numbering. There you go. There's the intrigue, Charlie. 14 of them are missing. Now there's a mystery. Where'd they go? Where'd they go?

I'm going to become a Voynich believer just to counter whatever this energy that Charlie's bringing to the room is. He hates the Voynich. This non-believer tone. The secret to life may have been on those 14 pages or even bigger titties. Bigger titties, like really gratuitous. Yeah, have you considered that, Charlie? I can't say I have considered that.

That they could be even bigger? And what if you were reading the extra pages and it explains like the rule of two or something, huh? Well, I already know the rule of two. I wouldn't need a textbook to tell me how it works. Okay, well, what if that's where it came from, huh? At least you can appreciate that. We decipher it. It says it's been written by Darth Bane. Darth Insanius, Darth Tyrannus. One of them.

The Voynich manuscript itself has been commonly divided into six sections by researchers, each one identified by the different style of illustrations pictured. So the first section is the herbal section, or sorry, the herbal section. Oh.

I didn't even write that one. I want you to go back to herbal and not like the enunciation there. The herbal portion takes up about half of the manuscript, with one or sometimes two drawings of plants and paragraphs, most likely about the plant next to it on each page. Although some plant illustrations seemingly resemble plants we know, none of the drawings have been identified conclusively.

For example, people think folio 33V could be a sunflower, but it's just different enough as to where people are unable to confirm it. Many pictures also illustrate strange and intricate root systems on the plants, some forming little balls at the end of their roots and some sprawling wide across the pages.

The drawings are generally accompanied by a paragraph or two of text in an unknown language. Yeah, so, okay, let's have a look at the photo now, Charlie. What do you think of that, huh? That's not of this world. You're right. I ain't seen shit like that. Corn on the cob in the sky. That's nuts. Wait, which one are you looking at? He's looking at the 33. He's looking at 33V. I can see that as corn on the cob. Oh, I can see the corn on the cob now. Yeah, wow. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Interesting.

Yeah, so maybe aliens, huh? Maybe it's an alien angle. That's probably what it is. Drawing from an alien world. That's the Occam's razor of this question for sure. So I looked it up as well. Apparently it was super difficult to draw it all like this back in the 1400s, believe it or not. Like the process of creating ink.

I'm not going to go into the details, but creating ink was very difficult back then and painters were like very rare. So this would have taken a lot of time and effort to like draw this kind of stuff. And it still looks like a child drew it. So not a great use of time. You know, those old paintings where it's like someone who's never seen like a rhino tries to draw a rhino and it's like, like they're trying to draw something based on descriptions. So it looks really weird. This is kind of what that looks like to me.

Like, they haven't seen the actual thing they're talking about. They're just, like, working off of a description. I could believe that it's, like, a kind of anatomical drawing of, like, some plant that they've seen. I could just believe it. Like, I could just kind of see the sunflower. What is, like, the fucking... The COVID things down the bottom by its root system? Like, what did they draw? See, that's what I mean. Someone could be, like... Someone said, oh, well, it has... It's like...

The brown roots underground, and then they connect to these kind of ball things, but they have their own growths off of that. And that's how you would describe that outright, but that looks so weird. Yeah. Wait a second. You know what an interesting theory might be? This is jumping ahead a bit. We know these pages were from the 1400s, right? Right. Just before that, there was a little known thing floating around called the Black Plague or the Black Death. So what if this...

this folio right here is about like the black deaths uh impact on plants or something because look it's like corrupting the root system below maybe yeah but i mean they that's interesting they had they had no way of knowing what like microscopic organisms yeah true they wouldn't have known how to draw that that's probably not even yeah yeah true because the black plague would be like it was often depicted as like the grim reaper or like

Or like rot or something. What if the manuscript writer was a time traveler who went back in time, but through the process of going back through time... Okay, now I'm starting to understand. Now we're in. Now you're speaking right language. Let's go! Let's go! For some reason, the process of traveling back in time broke the brain center language barrier.

area of your brain and he couldn't understand languages anymore. No, no, no. You're going about the wrong direction. He's speaking in a future language that hasn't been invented yet. There you go. He goes all the way back to the Black Plague to research, can't get back to the future, so he starts to document things in a script that has not yet been invented.

So he comes from a future where Corn on the Cob has grown like that. Yes, he's trying to describe it. Or alternatively,

This was a kind of plant that existed back during the Black Death, but was never documented. Maybe he goes back then and starts to document flora and fauna that went extinct and we don't know about. Due to the Black Death, right? The Black Death ate the corn plants. Exactly. It killed the reproduction of it. So he begins to write about it in the language he knows, which is a future language. It makes perfect sense.

But now what he's done is he's created a cyclic event where we have the language in existence before it becomes invented because we have the Voynich manuscript. So either it's the sort of paradox where the language is created off of his writing of the language now taken to the past. Oh my God.

Or the language is created in independence of it, which would also, depending on which way it goes, explain paradoxes in time travel. If it was always inevitable to happen or it only happens because of these self-fulfilling prophecies. I agree. Yes. What if it's just a prop from Lord of the Rings? The language kind of looks like, it looks elvish, right? It does look kind of elvish. Yeah, I can see that.

Maybe it's just a really, really detailed prop. Okay. But yeah, the time traveler came back with the prop from the Lord of the Rings museum. Charlie, do you want to take the second section? Yep. This section of the manuscript depicts intricate illustrations of celestial objects, zodiac signs, and circular diagrams that often feature the sun, the moon, and our stars.

There are a lot of familiar symbols in this section, like the two fish for Pisces, a ram for Aries, a bull for Taurus, twins for Gemini, and more. Symbols are surrounded by concentric circles filled with star patterns, nude women in strange poses, and more unidentifiable text. So what's interesting, how long ago did we come up with these symbols denoting the astrological signs? Like Gemini being twins, Scorpio being twins.

So it is a time traveler, then. It has to be. It is. That dates all the way back to Greece and Rome. Yeah. So way, way older than this. That probably means that whoever wrote this had some understanding of other languages. See, that's what's interesting about the manuscript. It's not just someone who's illiterate. Like, they have an understanding of, like...

you know, astrology, they have some understanding of at least the way that a personal manuscript would be laid out and definitions next to things. Because sure, literacy was rare back then, but for someone to put something... Like, look at the Pisces depiction, how concentric that is and stuff. Someone who's able to do that

And then write what looks like legible text next to it implies some level of like learned intelligence. So maybe, maybe it's like a personal code.

maybe he wrote it in some kind of like uh something only he and like maybe secret societies were a big thing back then right maybe this was the language of him in a society and this is the only existing you know record of it uh which is interesting this the scientific nature of the of the document and like the kind of process he the person would have gone through to create it and like the

the concentric circles and stuff that probably would have been hard to pull off for an unlearned individual. The whole thing would have been difficult for someone without some level of knowledge and understanding. It would be hard for them to pull it off. Impossible for them to pull it off even. So yeah, I would assume that that person would have some level of understanding of the popular languages at the time to write in, which would have been Latin at the time. So it is,

Weird that there's this unknown language filtered in which does make me think like secret society or secret language or yeah some kind of made-up thing instead of just a lost language I'll go ahead and take the third section as well. This is the Balneological the section is made you know you take it I knew you take it when I saw the women

This section is mainly known to feature mini-illustrations of nude women, often referred to as nymph-like, with interconnecting tubes and capsules.

The term "balneological" refers to the science of the therapeutic use of baths. Many of the women are depicted with rosy cheeks, some with blonde hair, some with brunette together in some sort of water. Some of these illustrations are quite bizarre. Women standing up in baths from the ground with their hands in wavy pipes. Researchers have speculated that this section could represent anything from a guide to medicinal baths to ritualistic practices.

The repetitive depictions of water, bathing, and interconnected vessels also raise questions about medieval concepts of health, hygiene, and possibly even spiritual purification. What is that one right there? That's the one I want to know. The naked woman standing in like a small little basket of water, putting her hands into two giant Tetris tubes. What is that? You know what this kind of reminds me of?

This is almost like those kids textbooks that explain to you like how your body works where it's like, oh, you're the mitochondria moves over to the nucleus. You know, it depicts everything is like little people walking around. This almost looks like someone trying to explain how

body systems like what the heart does what digestion is stuff like that almost looks like like the fourth one in the bottom right almost looks like a GI tract or something it's like him trying to explain the body's processes to someone who doesn't understand it using people but he can't put little guys inside of the body because that's gay so he's

So he makes a bunch of naked women. This one's for my bros. I gotta find a way to get dudes interested in this. I'm gonna put naked chicks in it. Put naked women all over it, yep. I think it's just that the guy got bored writing half the book about plants and boring shit like that, astrological signs and stuff. So then he got horny, and then this is where it went.

There's like centerfolds as well, where they're enough like ones that you like an actual porno mag or yeah, a magazine where like you fold them out into like a giant picture. Not necessarily of like naked women for those, but there are centerfolds, which is cool. Yeah, I agree with you, though. I think it's some kind of like knowledge base for porn.

early stage understanding of human biology because there are like there are like um drawings of like fallopian tubes looking things as well and things like that so i i agree maybe that's what maybe that's what she is the girl with the tetris pipes maybe that's a uterus it's

God, I don't know. That one and the one above it are the most confusing things ever. The alligator pipe's pretty good. I like the alligator pipe. Okay, so for audio listeners, right? It's a woman standing in, like, a tube. The tube is connected to a set of pipes with outlets that are spraying water everywhere. The pipes themselves have, like...

What would you call that, like alligator scales on it, maybe? Yeah, alligator pipe. And then she's like naked. The woman is naked and pressing on the pipes. Like, covering... Wait, no, is she covering, like, the holes of the pipes to stop the water from coming out of it? Oh, you're right. That's what it is, yeah. But then there's a third one shooting it directly into her face. I don't know, I'm so confused.

This is him describing how pee is stored in the balls. That's what this is. I think we finally cracked it with that. We did, yep, yep. Does she look... This is impolite to assume, but does she look pregnant there? She does look... Well, I think, honestly, that might just be how he likes them, because most of the women... Mostly, yeah, they were quite peculiar looking. He's got a type, you know? Yeah, curvy.

Yeah. Very interesting. My body is full of curvy naked women and you can't tell me otherwise. Are we going to be able to put this on screen? It's academic. It's a drawing from the 1400s. I hope so. I got away with showing Gustav Dore

He did a bunch of like topless women in like the 1800s. And he was actually a good artist. And I didn't get demonetized. Oh, you're insulting this artist now. Yeah. I think I think you've got to play fair. If if you are a man, you have to have tiny little men inside of you. I don't care what the church says.

Like, I think this guy's playing the game, the field a bit too much. I am impressed by this man's artistic talent. I couldn't draw this good. He was doing it like 600 years ago with like sticks and stuff probably. Like it was that hard at the time. So I'm impressed. All things considered. Yeah. I do like the alligator too. I like the alligator too. It's pretty good.

Yeah, I wish the entire reason as to why I hope that this is eventually deciphered is so I can figure out what that alligator tube is. That's the most interesting thing. What's crazy about it is he would mix these drawings with like the next drawings we're going to look at. So it's like these insanely complex, weird details. And then like the woman's got her hands in the tubes. Yeah, it's strange. All right. You can take the next one.

uh so the fourth kind of uh section in there is the cosmological one uh this is unrelated but the the picture of all the women in the green pool reminded me are you all familiar with that story of like the leader i think it was a king of something who him and like eight other people died because the floor collapsed and they fell into the septic tank no when was this no

This was like old school. I know this is a tangent, but it's interesting. Is it common to live above a septic tank? Well, it was in like a castle or something, right? So the toilets would... I mean, septic tank's a strong word for a hole in the ground, right? Right. So it's just a shit room. They fell in the shit room. Yeah, pretty much. Um...

I googled it. It's called the Erfurt Latrine Disaster. Wow.

That's a super cool name. Henry VI, King of Germany, at the cathedral, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse. Most of the attendants fell through into the latrine cesspit below ground floor where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement. Oh my god. 60 people drowning. 60.

Yeah, well, I mean, imagine that, like, how, like, shoddy stuff was built back then. And it was all the nobles of the Holy Roman Empire gathered together and they drowned in poop. 60 people.

It's like the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones, but worse somehow. It says, of those who died, many drowned in human excrement or suffocated from the fumes emitted by the decomposing waste. They literally... Some of them didn't even drown. They just fucking... They got stunk to death. That's so fucking awful. I wonder... You know they didn't pull everyone out. They probably pulled out the king and stuff, but the rest, they probably just like, all right, well, build over it. Oh, man.

But anyway, yeah, the drawing that came to mind looking at the second drawing of all the women in the pit. I had to mention it. I don't understand why you would do that, though. Like, wouldn't it be common to like have latrines outside, not in the castle?

Well, at some of these places, they would put them interior for convenience, and they just assumed the craftsmanship was good enough. It's wild because the Romans had a lot of this stuff down pat, right? A thousand years prior, like bathhouses and stuff like that. And then a thousand years later, there's accidents like that happening left and right because people don't know what they're doing. It's weird how the knowledge of tech can be lost. Yeah.

The Dark Ages scare me. Anyway, the fourth kind, Cosmological. The Cosmological section is one of its most intriguing and visually captivating parts, but also one of the more confusing to actually look at.

They're also on fold-out pages. One particular six-page spread, often called Rosette's Folio, has nine circular forms all connected to one another. Many have theorized about what this could possibly mean. An astronomical or cosmological map? A secret code? Plant cells? Many think it may be a stylized map connecting cities, castles, or even baths, which would connect Bank to the balneological section of the book.

Yes, so there's a link here. This is going to be up on screen. It's impossible to describe what this looks like. It's really cool. It's kind of like the... I don't know. How would you describe this? Like...

a pattern of symbols, basically, forming a giant ring. It almost looks like fractals. Yeah. I was going to say, like, I think they're called mandalas, right? Or something like that. Maybe. But I don't know. It's really hard to describe. It's on screen if you want to go over to the video episode to look at it. I have no clue what it could possibly mean. Like, maybe a map, like, set in the document. There are, like, smaller little drawings of, like, the people in the baths still. So it could be, like,

it could be bathed or a city of like a drawing of a city i'm not sure it is wild though it's definitely very interesting to look at and i i think it goes back as evidence to that this was and maybe intelligence not the right word but an educated man for the time an educated person at the time it kind of reminds me of the divine comedy a little bit

The nine circles. The nine circles, yeah. So everyone knows the nine circles of hell, right? But there's also nine circles of heaven and Paradiso. And the way that Dante kind of described a lot of the shapes and imagery he saw in the nine circles, it kind of reminds me of that. It's like Dante's depiction of heaven, which would have come out about a hundred years before this book did. When you say it came out a hundred years before, was it

There were no, like, bookstores, right? It wasn't, like, on the bestseller list at the airport for this peasant, I doubt. No, but in Italy, it was circulated everywhere. Oh, yeah, we believe that this manuscript came from Italy as well. Northern Italy, yeah. And Dante was the most famous Italian poet, arguably of all time, but certainly of the era.

Yeah, so if it's an educated person then they would have definitely come across it. And there are nine circles in that, so it's definitely possible. But without the text, it's impossible to determine what it actually means.

Alright, so that's the cosmological one. I'll take the pharmaceutical. The fifth chapter, the pharmaceutical chapter, the section of the manuscript contains illustrations and texts that seem to relate to herbal medicine and remedies. It has detailed drawings of plants, roots, and other botanical elements accompanied by jars, vessels, and other containers that might be used in the preparation and storage of medicinal medicine. Isn't that the same word twice? Medicinal medicine. I love that. Medicinal medicine.

Jackson, you've done it again. Excellent choice of words. Adjective.

Yeah, I like the alliteration. Even though the text is unreadable, the layout appears to document specific processes and methods for combining and using botanical ingredients accompanied by drawings of unidentifiable herbs and plants. Yeah, so I think the idea, my idea of the book is that it was like a kind of like the modern day equivalent of like a, or sorry, an ancient equivalent of the modern day self-help book kind of like a

teaching people about like spirituality as well as like baths and stuff like that taking baths to reduce stickiness your reproductive organs and then like a cookbook at the end for like things to make to heal yourself basically

It does kind of look like organs, doesn't it? Some of it. What's that? It does kind of look like organs. Some of it. I was specifically, yeah, going back to the Balneological section. Yeah, a lot of the stuff in there looks like organs. Same with some other stuff in here. Yeah, so that leads on to the sixth chapter, Charlie.

Yeah, I'll go ahead and take it. This is recipes. So this is the recipe section. No drawings, just short paragraphs in a dot point format with stars running down the left side. And strangely, every second star has a red dot in the middle. Due to the formatting and structure of the paragraphs, it resembles recipe instructions and pages resemble medieval recipe collections or herbal remedy books. Yeah, so see, with the power of context, right, we can determine probably that this was some kind of, like I said...

uh book designed to help people at the time like maybe something that a herbalist would have i didn't like charlie's tone with that part i want you to do it again but happy and yeah i do not want to do a happy tone and trusting joyful even i will say one thing it's an aesthetically pleasing to look at language that doesn't exist you think so

Yeah, I actually think it looks really cool when it's formatted this way. Again, I think this is some secret society language or something. What would be the purpose of a secret society drawing this stuff?

Well, they do that a lot. They'll have their own languages and codes and stuff like that. Oh, no, I get having their own languages, but theoretically, hypothetically, why would a secret society be drawing pictures of plants and stuff and women in black? Well, it depends on what the subject matter is, but it could be sharing of knowledge or maybe it's some kind of manuscript they wrote out about...

Club members are required to take a bath each week because the convention hall was getting too stinky. Yeah, sure. Or just like general opinions of like health or the sciences at the time, something like that. That would explain a lot of the astrological stuff. What was the biggest secret society in Italy at the time? Do you know? I feel like you would know. I don't, Jackson. I'm sorry. Not you. I was referring to you.

The Illuminati didn't show up until the 1700s. What would the secret? It would be something through the church, of course, through Rome. The Catholic Church. The Holy Roman Empire, I think, exists. Yeah, it would have existed around then. Secret Society Italy. Were the Jesuits a thing by that point?

They were. They've been a thing for a while. The Jesuits have been a thing since pre-1000. The Jesuits actually designed most of our modern calendar. Hey, that's good. I like the calendar. Which is why it's all centered around Jesus and stuff like that. Counting back from it. Yeah, yeah. Making Jesus' birth the centerpiece of it. Yeah.

It would be something through like maybe a monastery or again the church. I can't think of any super big famous ones. The Carbonari showed up in like 1800. And then, like I said before that, you had like the Illuminati throughout Europe. Freemasonry, I don't think was a thing yet.

I don't think, I'm not sure honestly in that age which one would be the top dog. Some church related thing. Yeah, some church related thing or some kind of spiritual cult or something like that that has not, you know, lasted beyond that point in time would be my guess.

Okay, so today the Voynich manuscript is located in the Bainecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. But how did it get there? The timeline is filled with holes and unknowns, but let's try and backtrack to figure out what happened to the Voynich manuscript. Maybe then some light will be shed on it.

1409 to 1438, it was around this time that the Voynich Manuscript is created. Exact date unknown, we know this due to the radiocarbon dating conducted on the manuscript's vellum.

This time period covered the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance in Europe. When we think about it in that context, the contents of the book speaks to that of mankind post-Black Death and that of a shift of interest towards art, literature, and science. As such, it makes sense to believe that the manuscript came from somewhere in Europe during that time period.

Next, the early 1500s. The Voynich Manuscript was owned by Emperor Rudolf II of Germany. According to the Binnicki Library website, he purchased it for 600 gold ducats and thought to be the work of Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon was an English philosopher from the 13th century who was renowned for his work in science, math, and philosophy. The nature of the manuscript's mysteries and scholarly layout was likely the reason that Emperor Rudolf II believed that the book came from him.

It's thought that he acquired the book from English astrologer John Dee, who allegedly owned another of Roger Bacon's work. We can pretty much now rule out that Roger Bacon wrote the manuscript as he died in 1292, many years before the manuscript was written. What's up with these names? Like John Dee and Roger Bacon from like the 1200s? That's pretty cool. Super like generic names. I guess. Well, they were they were European. So, you know.

Yeah, I don't know. Roger Bacon just sounds like a really cool name, though. Everyone's name was like John, Roger, Peter, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, and I guess they're generic because they were so popular at that time. There's a character in the Bible named Jason.

It feels so out of place. Yeah, I know. It's funny because Paul's writing. He's like, bring with thee Timotheus, Bartholomew, and Jason. 1608 to 1662. The manuscript is then given to Jacobus Horky de Tepenex. That's better. Yeah. John Roger and Jacobus Horseski de Tepenex.

The greatest cruise note to mankind. The gang.

It's not known why, although there are stories that he, as an imperial chemist, healed the emperor of an unknown disease. Evidence of Jacobus' ownership can be found on the first folio, where his signature, though now faded and barely visible, can be seen. Jacobus Horkinky D. Tipinix was a pharmacist and doctor to Emperor Rudolf II, and therefore quite a proximate member of his court. Some think the manuscript was given as a gift for all of his services, others theorize that it may have been entrusted to him to study and decipher.

Okay, so all of this to me, like 100% proves someone who was educated and knew what they were doing wrote this. Because I know books were rare, so you would probably keep them for anything. But for some reason, the emperor has it in the early 1500s.

A book that only would have been written at most 80, 90 years ago. So remember, in the 1500s, Emperor Rudolf II of Germany bought it and purchased it for 600 gold ducats, I think they're called. I don't know. Because he thought it was Roger Bacon's. Yeah, he thought it was Roger Bacon who wrote it, who was a well-known

You know, smart man at the time. He bought it from an English astrologer named John Dee. So, yeah, it's likely that people at the time thought it was like something of intense. Yeah, it had to be from someone. It had the tellings of someone significant. And maybe like, even though to us, it seems jimberish. I mean, it could just be the drawings too. Sure. But maybe.

But maybe there was some knowledge, like I said, a society or a language that quit existing that kind of dropped off the map for a while. Although you wouldn't think we would completely lose track of a language that was so well-founded it had, like, written text. But I don't know. I don't think it's a lost language. I really don't think it's a lost language. There would have been other, like...

evidence of it that would have been the language across other sources. Yeah, because this has zero development or anything off of another pre-existing language. Yeah. Also, I mean, another hypothesis could just be that

Emperor Rudolf II of Germany was a bit of a horndog and liked naked pictures of women, maybe. I don't know how much 600 gold ducats is at the time, but maybe it's just he saw the naked women and he didn't understand the word. Oh, this book, Roger Bacon, the great... Yes, I'll take this one. Oh,

Oh, yes. Good source of knowledge. Smart in literature. Yes, very smart. Very literature. How common were naked women? I mean, drawings of naked women at the time. How common were naked women is a great question. Did they exist before the internet? Yeah. Before I could look at them on Cornhub? Yeah. Jackson walking into the club. How common are naked women around? Pardon me, patrons. Where are the naked women? I was told that was common.

I know there's a lot of people who would make money in ancient times by drawing naked women for porn and selling it to people. So it had some knowledge. People knew it was out there.

Yeah, so it wouldn't have been like a rarity maybe for him. So that probably rules out the idea that he just bought it from a naked woman. I mean, like that kind of culture has always existed. There's a reason they call like brothels or prostitution the oldest job in the world, right? Like, that's been around a long time. So there were people... Drawings of it and stuff like that were not uncommon. Yeah, no, I...

understand that sentimentality it's more so like i'm trying to just decide if he bought it for the naked women though and i guess that would be determinant on if maybe the emperor also has a thing for like the like those curvy women specific fetish to be met yeah he has he has a fetish for what them going through tubes i guess he loves the wacky rube goldberg machinery he's into uh he's into vore he

Yeah, this is the earliest example of Vore. True. Yeah. He commissioned it. He's like, I need you to draw women, get it digested, but put a bunch of text around it so it looks like a manuscript or something. Yeah, I need plausible deniability. I also need you to use ink from Northern Italy 100 years ago so no one can track it. This is the first porn commission. Yep, yep.

So now we move on to the late 1600s when the manuscript was in possession of Johannes Marcus Marcy, scientist and doctor in Prague. The link between Jacobus and Johannes is foggy and unknown. It was possibly held by George Baresch, a Prague alchemist. In between, there have been stories told about Gorg having the book in his library, calling it sphinx. He's on an argo. Argo.

You could just call him George. There's no E on it, so he's just Gorg. That's just how it was spelled. It's still George. Nah, it's Gorg. That's classic Gorg. From fucking Middle Earth. I don't know why that's so funny to me, just seeing someone named George and being like, Gorg, how are you doing today? Slay any villages recently? Alright, what did Gorg do with the book?

He called it a Sphinx because he was puzzled by its useless, unreadable book. Yeah, so he didn't like the book very much. The Sphinx obviously being a reference to the riddle of the Sphinx, which is an Egyptian thing. The phrase a Prague alchemist is so funny. Like, might as well be wizards at this point. The people we're talking about.

What do alchemists do again? They like turn stuff into other stuff? Yeah, they like... Yeah, more or less. I mean, now it's effectively chemistry, but at the time it was like the manipulation of matter, you know? Yeah, really cool stuff.

Because it's like the Philosopher's Stone or something, not the Harry Potter thing, right? That's what all the alchemists were searching for or something. Well, that's an anime plot. Yeah, they weren't all searching for it per se, but it was a thing within alchemy. Yeah. That there was a stone that I think was supposed to be held by...

Who was it that had it? Anyway, some, like the first alchemist had it. And then, yeah, Voldemort. And then it could turn any matter to something else. Yeah, it was like you could turn anything into gold, I think, right? That's the idea. Yeah. What was his name? Was it...

Charlemagne? Was Charlemagne the one that had it? Well, I've heard of that name, so that might be it. Charlemagne had significance to the Holy Roman Empire. I can't remember. It's either that or there was some film plot that said Charlemagne had it. I can't remember. We're getting all mixed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It probably doesn't matter too much. You threw me off with the Harry Potter thing.

I don't remember what the Harry Potter character's name was with the two faces. Remember? Flamel. Nicholas Flamel. That's where it comes from. Yeah, yeah. Was that also the one that you were thinking about, though? No, Charlemagne was older. Charlemagne was like... The original Flamel. Okay, sure. I'm done. Continue on.

Now we move on to the 1665 to 1666. Johannes Marcus Marcy sent the manuscript to Athanasius Kircher, German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published numerous works on geology, medicine, religion, and more. Johannes wrote Athanasius a letter which was found inside the manuscript saying that the book was left to him by a friend and believed that he was the only person who could decipher it.

At first, only a few parts of the manuscript were sent to him to try and decipher. He was unsuccessful, but incredibly curious. He pushed to buy the book, which was initially met with refusal, but he did eventually manage to get his hands on it, though we know not of how. Then we go to 1666 to 1870. The Voynich manuscript was kept at a Jesuit college in Rome called Calatio Romano, where it appears to have stayed for a long time undisturbed.

Although one or more of the obscure items in their collection, the manuscripts and books, it did not attract much attention. The name of the college in Rome was Collegio Romano. You'll never guess what it is.

I think I can read Italian now. It's no different to like University of Tampa or Florida, University of Florida. It's just funny to be like, he stayed at the college in Rome called Collegio Romo. All right. Yeah, let's continue.

You know what I'm surprised the most about, Charlie?

that anyone gave a fuck about it in the first place to keep track. Because me too. No, I'm surprised that you don't care enough to question why it's called the Voynich Manuscript. You haven't said that at all yet. I haven't given you any kind of context for it. Well, I figured it was named after someone and now we're getting to that person soon. Oh, yes. I don't like your attitude about this. I want you to be happy. He hates books. I think it actually comes down to him hating books. I don't like literature. Nerds.

19... Go ahead. No one was saying anything. Oh, I thought I heard... It was the spirit of Voynich getting mad at Charlie because he doesn't like books. That's what that noise was. Let him come. 1912, this is when we get to the reason behind the manuscript's name. Up until this point, it wasn't known as the Voynich Manuscript, rather referred to as simply whoever owned it at the time's manuscript. That concept didn't change in the 1900s either. Wilford... Wilfrid Voynich.

A Polish book dealer and antiquarian, as a young man he was involved in the Polish revolutionary activities against Russia. He was actually arrested in 1885 by a Russian police force for his political activities and was imprisoned and sent to Serbia. He failed twice to escape the prison but was successful on his third attempt.

Using a fake passport, it took him six months to make it out of Russian territory, reportedly going through Mongolia, Peking, now Beijing, and to Hamburg, where he was forced to sell his overcoat and glasses for money to get a ticket to London. I need to correct you. I know you hate being corrected, but I think you said Serbia. He was imprisoned in Siberia, which... Oh, Siberia, sorry. Yeah, is different. I know people...

Probably someone will care about that. So, corrections. It's Jackson. His name's Jackson. That's who cares about him? I'm seething over here. How dare he?

He barely had any food, almost got shipwrecked on the way, but finally made it to London. He had nothing except apparently an address, written in Russian, of a man called Sergius Stepniak, another revolutionary who he wanted to seek out for aid. There is a story that Wilfred was looking for someone who spoke his language to help him, and he saw a familiar face. The story is a bit unbelievable, but who knows? Apparently when he was arrested, he looked out of the prison window and saw the face of a woman completely dressed in black, and here she was again in London.

The woman, Ethel Lillian, Bool, was also a revolutionary and knew Sergius Stepniak, if you can believe it. Can you believe it? I can. What are the odds? I can. She was over in Serbia. I mean, Siberia. Fuck, you got me saying Serbia. She was over in Siberia outside his prison and then she was in London. So some people have taken this in like a more conspiratorial angle with the book, like a secret society guarding the book or something. I don't know about that. Or Voynich was insane.

Yeah, I think it's probably hallucinations. Wilfred and Ethel went on to get married and Wilfred established himself as a rare book dealer with a specialty in having rare manuscripts and early prints of books. In 1911 or 1912, Wilfred heard about a secret auction at the Vatican Secret Archive, now known as the Vatican Apostolistic Archive. Why would they call it the Secret Archive? Yeah, because it's public.

A secret because it was unbeknownst to the superiors at the time. He bought quite a few books here, including the now famous Voynich Manuscript. Wilfred began to sell the other books he obtained, but he held on to that manuscript. He came to believe that it was written by Roger Bacon. Jesus Christ. Everyone believes it was written by Roger Bacon. Even though he died a hundred years earlier. And with some sort of manual to medieval magic he wanted to decode before he showed the public. See? See? There is magic involved, Charlie. It's...

It's kind of like the Necronomicon. There's a fucking hallucinating prisoner who kept seeing a woman in black. I don't think there's magic. Charlie's so mad at the book.

That's a stupid book. Wilfred moved to New York in 1914 at the beginning of World War I where he set up another bookstore. It was here in 1915 where he began to show the public the Voynich manuscript which he originally called the Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript. He's so desperate. He's cursing on Roger Bacon's good name. I mean, it'd be more pretentious for him. That's like me finding a book and being like, ah yes, the secret Nichols Manuscript. Oh yeah.

So I get it, but it's funny how it keeps being like the definitely certainly Roger Bacon, no question about it book. Yeah, I don't know why he came to believe that Roger Bacon wrote it. I guess he... Well, that was the knowledge they had at the time, right? Because we know now it wasn't. It was passed on through the owners. Yeah, because the emperor had it. Yeah, that was the idea. Emperor Rudolph believed it. Yeah. So then it was just passed on.

When he began to show it around, he lied about how he originally found it, protecting the secret auction that had actually taken place. He claimed he discovered it in a chest in an ancient castle in southern Europe, or a castle in Austria, or a castle of an Austrian nobleman.

All slightly different versions of the same story. He said that the original owners of the chess had passed away and their collectibles forgotten about. The books he obtained had pages of identifiable text and names which Wilfred actually removed. One page in particular saying, from the private library of P. Beckix, this being Petrus Beckix, who was the head of the Jesuit order in the mid-1800s.

It's crazy how many hands this book has crossed. That's wild that he removed evidence of ownership so that his story made more sense. Yeah. Good guy. Where's the ethics in antique owning, huh? This secret lost book. Hold on. Let me tear out some of its history. And now it came from a secret chest in Southern Europe.

Which, why is that more attractive, by the way? Isn't it kind of more attractive to people to know the history? And it's still got a history behind it. Yeah, but if you say... Because this whole story about it was some family's heirloom doesn't make sense if 50 years ago it was owned by Jesuits. Yeah. I guess he needed to make the Roger Bacon story add up as well, probably.

Yeah. 1930-1960, Wilfred Voynich died in 1930 without getting close to deciphering the manuscript. After his death, the manuscript went into possession of his wife, Ethel, who kept it until her death in 1960. After her passing, the ownership of the manuscript went to Anne Nill, a friend and assistant to Ethel and Wilfred. She was in charge of managing their estate and the manuscript after their deaths.

Anne Nill went on to sell the manuscript in July of 1961 to Hans P. Klaus for $25,500. Apparently, Anne was unwell and felt pressure to sell the manuscript, which resulted in her selling it to Hans for way less than Wilford thought the manuscript was worth, $100,000. No!

Hans P. Klaus was also a rare book collector and seller, and like Wilfred, saw the Voynich manuscript as a high-value item. He attempted to sell it, immediately asking for $100,000, then later increasing the price to $160,000. The art of the deal, baby. He stole it from a dying woman, basically, and then immediately tried to sell it. Oh, you don't want it for $100,000? Well, maybe $160,000 will change your mind. Due to market demand, I am increasing the price from $100,000 to $160,000.

He was not able to sell it, and in 1969, he donated the book to the Benecke Library. He explained that owning the manuscript felt like a burden because he was getting so many requests from scholars and researchers to access and research the book, so he decided that the right thing to do was turn it over to an institution where it could freely be studied. That was a quote, by the way. That's a quote directly from him, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah. That last one. Though seemingly a selfless act in the name of research and education, there was actually a change in a particular tax law that year. Taxpayers were able to donate appreciated property to a charity organization and get the tax reduction for the full market price value. And on top of donating the manuscript, Haynes also gave his very collect... Why do you call him Haynes here? It's Hans. Whatever. Hans. Hans also gave his very valuable collection of Spanish manuscript Americana over to the Library of Congress.

Now, getting to the present. Wait, isn't that kind of how the art world operates as well? With donating art to get massive tax benefits? It's like a tax fraud. It's all money laundering, yeah. The Voynich Manuscript has sat in the Banecki Rare Book and Manuscript Library ever since, where it's kept in a controlled environment with restricted access to protect the fragile 600-year-old document.

Yeah, I feel like... Look at it in this little box there. It's so cute. One breeze would just disintegrate it. It must be so stressful keeping something like that. Although I'm not sure how much it's actually worth in... Zero dollars. Well, now because of the hype built around it, it probably is worth a ton of money. Yeah.

Okay, Isaiah, I'm asking you specifically because I think you'll actually engage with the question. What is the Voynich manuscript about? Do you want to take it? Exactly. So I'm going to take a tinkle real quick. Yeah, you're going to go take a shit or something. I don't care what it's about. You're going to do something more useful with your time.

Have we deciphered anything? Well, no. The true nature of the Voynich Manuscript remains a complete mystery. Despite extensive studies and analysis on the documents, there has not been a single explanation that has been universally accepted, but here are some theories.

For one, that it is a medieval herb or science health text. The Voynich manuscript is filled with pages of botanical illustrations, although unrecognizable, that dominate a very large portion of the document. Alongside the drawings of containers and jars, it suggested a knowledge on herbal remedies and the medicinal properties of plants and herbs.

There are sections that seem to depict anatomical diagrams, zodiac charts, and what appear to be pharmaceutical recipes, which supports the idea that the manuscript may be a health manual. Medieval herbal science often combined botany, medicine, and astrology, all featured heavily in the Voynich manuscript. I agree and think this is the most likely. The only question is, what is the language? Yeah, I mean, I think we can understand the context of like,

what the contents may have been due to the images, right? Like some kind of health manual. So some also believe that the manuscript may be a manual for women looking to treat gynecology, gynecology, Jesus Christ. Take your time. Reproductive issues in women. An article by the Daily Mail in 2017 reported that an expert in medieval manuscripts, Nicholas Gibbs, pointed out that the illustrations and contents were reminiscent of those used by women.

no shit right i mean it was mostly you've got naked women in there could be related to women what do you mean for example the nude women in the bus which were often used as a form of healing in the past and the plant illustrations may be referring to a remote

aromatherapy healing, both of which were popular with women at the time. This has been widely disputed as firstly, Gibbs claimed that the manuscript was written in shorthand Latin, but linguists and cryptographers have not found any clear parallels between the script's writing and the Latin language, which puts doubts on his ideas. Some think it's more like Hebrew. So there's been like a few people that have come out...

over time to say like we've cracked the Voynich manuscript it's actually like a language based off Hebrew and then they like there's one specific example of someone doing that and they use Google Translate to translate it from Hebrew to to like English and it just didn't make sense like the outcome didn't make sense so yeah some people see Hebrew while others see more aliveness with Mandarin Chinese pinyin so

There's nothing confirmed in terms of the language. So it's hard to take those claims seriously.

There is also doubt as the botanical illustrations in the manuscript are unidentifiable, posing questions on how these unknown plants would be able to assist in women's health. So yeah, because we can't tell what the fuck the drawings of the plants were meant to be, we don't know if they were good for women or not. So that could shed some doubt on it. Maybe it was like a book of poisonous plants for killing people, maybe. Like an assassination book. I don't know.

I will say now that Charlie's back, he can read the next section. I'm going to go pee because I don't want to hear him defame the good name of this book. We're just trading peas back and forth. It's so cute. The language in the Voynich manuscript, often referred to as Voynichese, has a strong consistency in its text. There's a unique set of 25 characters and consistent structure, which leads the general belief that it could be a coherent language rather than just nonsense.

There is, however, no punctuation, no errors crossed out, or words rewritten in an interesting distribution of characters, predominantly at the beginning of words, while others occur more frequently in the middle or end of words.

In the research document, The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript by Claire L. Bowern and Luke Lindemann, they conclude that the character level metrics show the manuscript as unusual. The word and line level metrics, however, show it to be like a normal regular language and within the range of a number of plausible languages, unlikely to be manufactured.

There have been studies that indicate that while completely unreadable, the manuscript does make some sort of sense and are 90% similar to other books known at the time, like the Bible. This is a quote.

That was from Dr. Diego Amancio at the University of Sao Paulo. So that's an expert weighing in on the matter, basically saying it could be a natural language. But then that raises the question of why do we not see evidence of this language anywhere else, right? Well, again, if it's a society thing. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Because that's where you would have languages develop without any...

pre-existing steps to get there. Just like, boom. Yeah, well, I mean, like, if right now, if me and you were to sit down and we were to be like, okay, we're going to make a secret code that only we can speak, like our own alphabet and stuff, and then we write it down and communicate in that, there's no pre-existing steps to get to that language. There's no, like,

archaeological trace of where the language came from, we just came up with it all at once. It's not like a naturally developing language where there's tribes and groups and you see it adapt over time. It just appears. So that's the difference between natural languages where it's something that's born in the community and kind of progresses over time. Yeah, there's no dialect, there's no history, it just happens. Usually with those ones, there's a base language that it is adapted from. Whereas this is

Like, with a secret society or whatever. It's just, like, entirely made up. I guess, yeah. That does make sense. And that goes in nicely with the next one. A cipher or code. So, ciphers were not uncommon around the time the Voynich Manuscript was written. Many scholars, alchemists, and political figures using codes to protect sensitive information. It's almost like...

I'm cool. The script in the main descriptor has entirely unique characters that are unknown to any other language existing at the time. But there are patterns and repetitions of certain words and letters that suggest there could be meaning in the text, hence it being a language of some kind. The characters in the text could be replacing certain letters and other cipher techniques may be layers to create a more unique, difficult to decode cipher.

Decoding it has been attempted by many cryptographers, linguists, computer scientists, and more, but no one has been able to crack it. It's not an unusual thought for advanced ciphers to be created around this time. Take steganographia. Steganographia? Steganographia, sure.

by Johannes Truthemius. That's a fake name. Truthmius. Truthmius. He makes riddles. Yes. Truthmius, which has been written, which was written around 1499 BC and combined elements of cryptography and steganography. Yeah, there you go. No, I do think the most likely answer is that it is a cipher or code, but if we were to decipher it, it's probably just like herb

herbal remedies at the time. Yeah. Why? Why would they go through that entire trouble, that trouble of making a secret society? If they wanted the information to be kept to them, especially in

in 1400s italy because italy was in the middle of like a lot of like city states were at war with the church and the church was at war with uh the holy roman empire and they were fighting the vatican and there's like all these different like battles and stuff going on so if you wanted your information to be kept to yourself you would basically develop your own code so that you know your enemies couldn't get it yeah especially if it's like the book is like a map to all the sauciest

bathhouses around the place you would want that to stay secret. Of course. You don't want to find your naked curvy woman. Alright Charlie take a big old hoax.

Well, this isn't what I believe. I don't think it's a hoax. I think it's just a fucking insane person, to be fair. Another theory that many believe is that the Voynich Manuscript is just a hoax. Even though there's strange signs in the text which show genuine, obscure, or coded language, it's argued that we probably would have made progress in deciphering it by now. There are certain aspects in the text, too, such as certain words repeating two or three times in a row. Researchers have also noted that, unlike many languages where the most common words are the shortest, like "a" and "the," the Voynich Manuscript doesn't have this structure.

There are theories that suggest that mostly everyone who has had possession of the manuscript could have written the manuscript as a hoax. Take Wilfred. As a rare book dealer, he was always on the hunt for valuable items to add to his collection and make a lot of money from. Could he have fabricated the manuscript as a unique and alluring text to gain the interest of scholars, researchers, and the public? He had access to vellum, ink, and other materials needed to create this document, although he would have needed quite a lot.

He had experience with historical manuscripts which may have enabled him to create a realistic, authentic book. He promoted it often as a valuable artifact, claiming it was from Roger Bacon, and hyped up its significance, which could have convinced many that it was a highly valuable and desirable item.

But there is no real evidence to support this, and the radiocarbon dating on the vellum shows it was most likely created a long time ago. And also, the pages had not been previously written on. They were new. So if it was a hoax, it was most likely before Wilfred's time. Okay, but wait, couldn't, could Wilfred have bought vellum from, like, 600 years ago and, like, preserved it and then written on it, maybe? Yeah, 100%. I don't see why he couldn't. Yeah. I could buy vellum right now, I bet. I'm gonna check. Hmm.

See, there's plenty of vellum here. Okay. My house is full of vellum at this moment. I've got a ton of vellum. How much is vellum? Well, depends on what kind of vellum we're looking for. It looks like they sell it by the bundle at like 20 bucks. Yeah, that's not bad. But it's probably not 600-year-old vellum. Yeah, it's probably like new vellum. I want the old stuff. I don't know about him, Wilfred, like lying about it because like...

The guy who's like, oh, I got it from an ancient trunk, doesn't seem the guy to be like, well, actually, this ruler, the emperor had it and then it passed off to a Jesuit and the Jesuit moved it here and stuff. It was in a college for a while before making its way to the Vatican. I don't know. Yeah, I feel like, sure, he would have lied about where he got it from maybe, but it seems like a whole bunch of different... He wouldn't put evidence in the book that contradicts his story. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think it was Wilfred. I think it's possible that it was a hoax, especially with something coming up. I definitely think it's possible that it was a hoax, but probably from closer to the time period where it was actually created. Yeah, that's more plausible. I also like the part about there's no us or does or stuff like that doesn't make sense to me because like, sure, in naturally occurring languages, that makes sense. We have a lot of...

like setups and qualifiers and stuff like that in sentence. There's a lot of ofs and thus, but if you take a code, you normally cut all that out. Like for example, sign language, right? Sign language doesn't have of these, by the way, stuff like that. It's just like the points you need to get across. It's me go here. Now you do this, right?

it's very to the point. And if you were going to create your own code or language, you wouldn't include all the qualifiers in with that. It'd just be the data. So that's why there's no small words basically is what you're saying. In my opinion. Yeah.

So one of the biggest pitfalls of this theory, not what Isaiah was just saying, but the theory of it being a hoax, is that it's actually quite hard to create a cohesive constructed language without referring to or referencing one or several natural languages. One of the best examples of this is Tolkien's Quenya language, which was influenced by Finnish. And there's a bunch of other examples as well. I mean, it's not impossible, as Isaiah has said, like me and him could probably create. Do you think we could actually create an entirely...

you know, original language, like a constructed language easily. I'm not smart enough to, but I think a group of people in theory could.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know enough about it. But yeah, if the theory is correct that someone created Voyniches as a constructive language, it's expected that they likely used a natural language as a base. And it's bizarre that it didn't use Latin, which was the industry standard for scientific books during the Middle Ages. This whole idea appears to be unlikely because then we'd likely have made predictions

headway into deciphering it, as some have said to have done by comparing it to Hebrew in the past. Okay, Charlie, you take the next section. This is actually probably the theory that I believe the most in. Alright, that it was created either by a man named Edward Kelly and or previously referenced John Dee. The two shared an interest in alchemy, spiritualism, and occult in the 16th century. Edward claimed he could see angels or spirits that communicated to him in a special language called

An Achaean, which he would often then relay to John. John was actually an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, and it is unknown if he was a believer in Edward's mystical claims or an accomplice to a facade. They would travel across Europe together, attempting to communicate with angels and seeking esoteric knowledge.

The theory goes that they created the manuscripts as proof of Edward Kelly's angels and spirits, and perhaps the language in the manuscript is actually the Enochian language they described. In which case, the book is literally the ramblings of an insane man and his friend designed to scam the eventual buyer of the book, Emperor Rudolf II of Germany.

Maybe that's why it wasn't based on any natural language. See, that's the theory I believe in. Because it did touch... Okay, well, I didn't know that going in. That's probably... I didn't know that was even a scenario. He thought he was talking to angels. Yeah, I said it from the very beginning. So John Dee was the person that sold it to Emperor Rudolph II. And one of his closest friends was a man named Edward Kelly who believed in talking to angels with the Enochian language. Okay.

So Enoch is a character in the Bible who a lot of like esoteric beliefs and stuff like that is based around. Because he was one of the few people in the Bible who never died. He went directly to heaven. He was pre-flood. It says he communed with the angels and with God directly that when it came time for him to die, God simply carried him to heaven. Like a piggyback ride?

The way Hebrews phrases it is that Enoch was translated so that he did not see death. So Enoch has a bunch of lore and beliefs built around him. So it makes sense that this guy obsessed with like Christian spiritualism would say the language was Enochian in nature, like it's based off Enoch. Also, that gives further validity to my theory that the depictions of the nine circles are based on Dante's Paradiso. Oh, yeah.

Because for one, Dante's Paradiso was the most famous extra biblical work at the time around the Bible and heaven and whatnot. And also all those depictions of the weird shapes and fractals are all very popular in like...

extra biblical teachings of like what angels look like what shapes look like wheels within wheels stuff like that divine things yeah i have seen yeah like of the impossible shape so what's the word of it divine architecture stuff like that um yes so that makes a lot of sense wow yeah i could see that yeah but then what about the bath women maybe they're angels

They could be angels. Angels are known to be taking baths all the time. Yeah, true. I mean, you see naked angels in paintings and stuff. Well, that's the thing, too. Like, most...

angelic depictions were either... Or at least, there were two different kinds of angelic depictions. There was the warrior angel, and then there was the caring administrator-to-man type angel. Those were almost always depicted as androgynous or explicitly feminine. So depicting angels as naked women in groups... Actually, that makes a lot of sense because a lot of the things they're doing...

Could be described as like trumpets or could be described as like is in tangling with the affairs of man of making things happen. Could just be depictions of angels going about their activities on earth, going up and down from heaven, so to speak. Hmm.

It could also be about spiritual cleansing as well, maybe. Something along those lines. A lot of different interpretations, possibly. But yeah, regardless, that's the theory that I believe the most in. But now we're going to get into the theory that Charlie believes the most in. So, Charlie?

Yeah, the aliens. So there are thousands of articles and websites dedicated to the idea that the Voynich Manuscript comes from some kind of extraterrestrial who found its home on our little rock. Most common belief is that the aliens crash-landed on Earth during the Middle Ages and documented life on the planet until it was either picked up or died.

That's so true, King.

That's so true. There are thousands of articles about it though and people talking about this theory as if it's the actual likely outcome of this which to be fair could be could be could be not ruling anything out. I like the idea of that just means they suck at drawing like if they're drawing like plants that way and stuff that's not what they look like. It also meant that the

the alien was a little voyeur who was watching naked women bath and shit like that. And also like what, what the heck? Like aliens can fly around and they have like interdimensional travel, but yet they get to earth and they draw sunflowers really stupid and don't know how things work. Like why? Oh, maybe that's why he drew it different though. Cause his eyes are alien. And they, his perception's different. Now we're talking. Yeah. Maybe it's why it's a different colors. But then why does he know about like out?

astrological signs and stuff like that, like Pisces and stuff.

big big fan of tiktok astrology maybe he had like a coordinate on earth that was helping him with this information and then we have the rule of two so true there's always a second alien there's always a second alien all right boys that's gonna do it for this one uh i think i think i'm personally of the opinion that it's the edward kelly slash john d scam the old classic john d scam uh

Yeah, that's where I'm at. I don't think we'll ever decipher it, though. Yeah, my backup theory would be that's a cipher of some kind, like I said, like a language that was just basically created all at once. But I didn't know the guys who sold it to the thing were, like, speaking to angels about forbidden prophecies and stuff. With that information, I would have to agree with you. Yeah, scam. Okay.

But it's such an elaborate scam. Well, one scammer and one insane person. Yeah. One person who almost certainly had some form of schizophrenia, but at the time was just called in touch with the spirit. Holy heaven. Charlie, you agree with that? Yeah, I agree with that. All right.

That's going to do it for this Red Thread. Let us know your thoughts below. Let us know where you lean on the Voynich manuscript. Did you like it? Did you hate it as much as Charlie did? Or were you somewhere in the middle? Let us know. Other than that, that's going to do it for this episode. Thank you very much for all of your support. Really does mean a lot. Yeah.

audio itunes uh spotify we're all over there uh isaiah wait i oh man i forgot to do it at the start can you shout out your own stuff live on the show right now oh that's so sweet of you i actually have no idea what ticket sales are at right now i know it's over half but yeah so um

It's a stalker film I worked on with Stephen Royalty and Evan Hancock, creators of the SEP films. We're doing a short tour for it in August and the first week of September. So if you want to come see that, meet me, meet the cast and crew, ask us questions, stuff like that about the movie. We are touring to Brooklyn, Tampa, LA, and Dallas through August. So tickets are on sale at

stalkerentertainment.com wait no sorry x1entertainment.com slash stalker tour so get in while you can and thank you all for the support and thank you to you two for allowing me to shill on the podcast I appreciate it of course no no no no no link will be in the description so go get your tickets now to that thank you very much for joining us for another episode of Red Thread we hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next time there's a manuscript to decode bye

Bye. Thank you all for watching. Thank you. Bye-bye.