The Voynich Manuscript Pt. 1
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Fall was giving way to winter. A harsh chill nipped at Hans Peter Kraus as he and his bag man made their way across the campus at Yale University. He was deeply chagrined. What he was planning to do had filled him with a shame so dense that he honestly wondered if he'd ever feel like himself again.

Kraus glanced at the bagman for the hundredth time, making sure he was still there, the precious box still in his hands. He couldn't bear to think of the possibility of losing the artifact in transit. And then when Kraus exited Yale Library later that day, he was no longer the owner of the legendary, confounding Voynich manuscript.

Years of trying to fetch a worthy price for the ancient tome had produced no results. Finally, to save himself further embarrassment, he'd agreed to just donate the damn thing. Over half a century since its unveiling, the Voynich Manuscript was still a historical and literary puzzle. Historians, scholars, linguists, and codebreakers still didn't know who'd written it, where it had come from,

or what the Byzantine text on its stained yellow pages even said. And Krauss had learned the hard way that no one was particularly interested in shelling out six figures for a mystery that might never be solved.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.

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Secret codes have been a vital part of espionage for centuries. From the time of the earliest recorded writings, there have always been those who manipulate language to craft secret messages that can only be understood with the correct cipher. But consider this: it's estimated that every 14 days, a language dies.

Over half of the 6,000 languages spoken today will likely be extinct by the year 2100. What if someone found an old code, one written in a language that had long since died out? No one would be able to read it. This is one possible explanation for the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. The Voynich Manuscript is written in a language that no one has ever been able to identify.

Initially discovered by book dealer Wilfred Voynich in 1912, the tome is considered incomplete. Some pages are missing, and without a cipher to decode its mysterious language, there's no way to determine how much is gone. What remains are around 240 pages of vellum, animal skin used for centuries as writing paper and painting canvas.

Each page is covered in handwritten text, the words composed of unfamiliar letters. Many of these letters are simple characters comprised of a single pencil stroke, while others are more complex. These more intricate characters look like they could be related to Arabic or perhaps Turkish script.

For reference, if you're a fan of The Lord of the Rings, as much as I am, much of the writing in the Voynich Manuscript looks similar to J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish. To this day, no one has been able to determine what any of these letters mean or how they function in relation to one another. If this weren't enough, many pages of the Voynich Manuscript feature hand-drawn illustrations

These include trees, plants, astrological arrangements, star charts, animals, mythological creatures, and crudely drawn humans, among many other symbols. Just as the bizarre writing doesn't seem to match any known modern languages, many of the plants depicted in the Voynich manuscript don't match any known flora on Earth.

Complicating matters even further, we still don't know if the Voynich manuscript is written in code or in some kind of dead forgotten language or some combination of the two. An encrypted text written in a dead tongue would make for the ultimate code-cracking challenge. As such, it's not a good idea to write a book that's written in a dead tongue.

The manuscript has drawn the attention of both linguists and codebreakers alike in the hundred plus years since its discovery in 1912, and it has defied every attempt to decipher it. To explain why, we'll have to look at the tools codebreakers use and how the mysterious book resists their application. Codebreaking largely relies on ciphers.

That is, the key to the encryption is usually vital to cracking the code. For example, let's say you create a code by assigning each letter in the English alphabet a number between 1 and 26. A cipher might be the piece of paper that tells you which number corresponds to which letter. With this paper, you would know that the word "car" in this code would read out as 3-1-18. You would then be able to unscramble the entire code.

But without knowing the key, codebreakers instead have to look for clues in the pattern to reverse engineer the cipher. Or sometimes codebreakers can compare a text to other writings that use the same cipher. But the Voynich manuscript appears to be entirely unique. Without another example of the language, reverse engineering isn't an option.

The words in the Voynich Manuscript are aligned on the left margin. The text is likely intended to be read from left to right. This would imply that its language has roots in a Western or European language, as opposed to something like Arabic or Hebrew, which reads right to left. However, this small clue has done little to help codebreakers make progress in deciphering the Voynich Manuscript.

While the left alignment suggests the text is European,

It's incompatible with the specific processes codebreakers use to decipher encrypted European texts. One such method is called matching characters. The most commonly used letter in English writing is the letter E. So if you are trying to decipher a code to English, it's a good bet that whichever character appears the most corresponds to E. With that foundation, codebreakers can begin to translate a text.

This method can also be used to identify small common words: to, at, be, and so on. By looking at the smaller repeated words in a text, you can start to deduce which ones are functioning as common articles. But the Voynich manuscript lacks any punctuation, so it's impossible to know where sentences begin or end. And without that, there's no way to determine sentence structure.

It's essentially impossible to figure out how letters or words function in relation to one another. As we mentioned, in addition to the strange writing, nearly every page of the manuscript has an illustration. Most of them are labeled, providing another potential matching opportunity. Presumably, you could compare the labels of two different drawings to try and find a link.

For example, if you compare two drawings of flowers, you might look for similar labeling words to define common aspects like leaf or stem or petal. But in all of the labels, across hundreds of pages, almost none of the words repeat. It's confounding. The Voynich Manuscript offers over 200 pages of writing and illustration for codebreakers to contend with,

But nothing in those pages seems to offer much help in terms of revealing how anything in the manuscript is meant to be read. The Voynich manuscript also lacks many of the usual elements of a regular language or code. There are no words in the text that are, for instance, a single character, nor longer than ten characters. The layout of letters doesn't match up with that of normal writing either.

Scholars have noted that some characters seem to appear only at the start of words, others only in the middle, and others only at the end. These could indicate any number of things: tense changes, pluralizations, possessives. But without an entry point, it's impossible to tell. Most of the characters are relatively simple in that they can be written out in a single uninterrupted pencil stroke.

But others consist of more than one line. In Japanese or Chinese writing, multiple strokes combine to create a single word contained within one character, while a single character in English is a letter that has to combine with others to form words. Japanese or Chinese characters function as words by themselves.

In the case of the manuscript, we don't know whether some multi-line characters are single letters or if they're functioning as complete words. It was initially assumed that the Voynich manuscript is rooted in European languages because of the left-hand alignment, but when a statistician ran the text through an algorithm, he came to a new conclusion. The test compared the spread of letters to known languages

and determined that the organization of letters and characters was actually closest to Chinese. But even that isn't much of a jumping off point. With the evidence available, we can't even assume that the writing functions like a known language. For over a hundred years now, scientists, linguists, and historians have tried to find out what the Voynich Manuscript actually says.

But its content is only part of the mystery. What about the source of the text? We still don't know who wrote it or why. Where did the manuscript come from? Who filled its pages with drawings? And why isn't there any apparent historical evidence of the source of this mysterious language? Was the Voynich Manuscript intended to hide some ancient secret?

So long as the book continues to defy the most dedicated codebreakers, we won't have any answers. The modern history of the Voynich manuscript is one of heartbreaking failures, endless frustration, false leads, and more than one hoax put forth by those who wrongfully claimed they'd cracked the code.

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The Voynich Manuscript is a 200-plus page tome filled with writing that no one has been able to decipher. In addition, there are hundreds of hand-drawn pictures of plants, animals, and astrological symbols. The manuscript appears to be centuries old, but its modern history begins around 1912 when it was first discovered by Wilfred Michael Voynich.

Wilfrid was born Mika Habdank Voinich in what is now Lithuania in 1865. Though he attended school in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow with the intention of becoming a pharmacist, Wilfrid soon discovered a passion for politics and organized dissent.

In 1885, when he was 20, Wilfrid joined the First Proletariat, a revolutionary organization run by Ludwik Wierinski, a Ukrainian philosopher and activist. The following year, Wilfrid took part in a failed attempt to break into the Warsaw Citadel, a fortress prison in Poland that housed some fellow revolutionaries.

He was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, where he suffered for three years. Wilfred escaped in 1890 and relocated to London under a false identity. He was briefly involved in revolutionary activities with another anti-Tsarist organization, but soon abandoned such pursuits after the death of a friend.

Instead, Wilfred embraced London as his new home and worked to establish himself as an antiquarian bookseller. He became a legal British citizen in 1904 at the age of 39 and anglicized his name to Wilfred Michael Voynich. For the rest of his life, Wilfred operated a rare bookstore out of Soho Square, and by all accounts, he was quite successful.

The nature of the rare book business lies in one's ability not just to procure valuable items, but also to maintain an active list of wealthy patrons willing to pay for such artifacts. Wilfred was adept at both. It was his rare knack for hunting down lost, forgotten, or previously undiscovered books that perhaps led Wilfred to the Villa Mondragogne, a 350-year-old estate in Italy—

Or perhaps he'd got a hint of potential from one of his other old manuscripts. Whatever the reason, Wilford traveled to Italy in 1912, and it was there that he discovered the book that would become his ultimate legacy. Located 13 miles west of Rome, the Villa Mondragone has been owned by the Vatican since 1620, when it was relinquished by the original owners.

The villa operated as a college beginning in 1865, run by the Jesuits in order of Catholic priests. However, by the first decade of the 20th century, the villa was experiencing funding issues, which led the Jesuits to consider the loathsome prospect of selling off some of their historical artifacts. Enter Wilfrid Voynich, who struck a deal to acquire some of their rare books.

The exact details of how Wilfred came to possess the Voynich manuscript aren't known. Wilfred later offered only vague details about how and where he found the manuscript. In some of these statements, he even claimed that he found it somewhere other than Villa Mondragone. But this was likely a ploy to stop rival book dealers from scooping up any rare books he might have missed.

In 1921, in one of his few writings about his momentous discovery, Wilfred merely claimed to find the manuscript in a castle in southern Europe. He explained, While examining the manuscripts with a view to the acquisition of at least a part of the collection, my attention was especially drawn by one volume. It was such an ugly duckling compared with the other manuscripts,

It's unclear if he tried to privately sell it immediately after acquiring it, or if he even showed it to anyone at all. But in 1914, Wilfred opened a second shop in New York.

And in October of 1915, he oversaw an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in which he displayed a number of his rare books. It's estimated that Wilfred's collection had cost him over $8 million, over $200 million today. Of all the near priceless pieces that Wilfred showcased in Chicago, the one item that garnered the most press coverage was the curious manuscript.

A bulletin from the Art Institute read, "Among the most important items is an unsolved cipher manuscript by Roger Bacon, 13th century. The profuse illustrations give sufficient clues to establish the importance of the cipher content." Now, there are two things of note here. This press release from Wilfred's exhibit at the Art Institute seems to be the first ever public reference to the Voynich manuscript.

And second, this release directly ascribes the authorship of the manuscript to Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon was a 13th century friar and philosopher. He was well known, among other things, for his writing on universal grammar. He is also one of the main historical figures suspected of being the real author of the Voynich Manuscript.

We'll dive into the theory about Roger Bacon's potential connection to the Voynich Manuscript in our next episode, but for now, we can't overstate the significance of this unveiling at the Art Institute of Chicago. We don't know what research Wilfred conducted in private in the three years between finding the manuscript and revealing it to the public, but it was likely Voynich himself who originated the connection between Bacon and the Manuscript.

revealing his findings to the press at the 1915 Chicago presentation. Once his claim was published, it became generally accepted that Roger Bacon was the key suspect in the mystery of the manuscript's authorship. After the exhibition was publicized, Roger Bacon became a permanent part of the Voynich manuscript lore, and he likely will stay that way until the manuscript is finally deciphered.

We'll explore the truth of that connection next week. After the Chicago show, Wilfred Voynich spent 18 years trying to crack the mystery writing. He enlisted a number of fellow book dealers, linguists, and historians. In 1919, William Romaine Newbold, a philosophy teacher, examined the Voynich manuscript at Wilfred's invitation.

Newbold concluded that the text had been written by Roger Bacon, though as we've shown, that connection was previously established before Newbold began his work. Newbold died in 1926 before he could complete his full research. However, his notes were compiled and published posthumously in 1928 under the somewhat dramatic title, The Cipher of Roger Bacon.

In the publication, Newbold proposed a dense and very complex methodology for cracking the cipher. A place of beginning must be found and then the minute shorthand characters must be identified and transcribed in order and transliterated into ordinary letters.

It is of prime importance to get them in their proper order, for the second step is to double every one but the first and the last, and then to divide them into pairs. The next stage is to commute or change every letter which in its pair stands next to any one of the letters in the Latin word commuta or to queue. Then each pair has to be translated into its alphabetic value, which is next translated into its phonetic value.

By this decipherment, we now have a meaningless string of Latin letters belonging to the 11-letter alphabet. These letters must be rearranged to form a Latin text. Okay. Naturally, most people couldn't follow Newbold's logic or how he came to this method of deciphering the text. Nearly as confusing as the manuscript itself.

However, Newbold had been a renowned teacher and philosopher, and his late-in-life passion for codes and ciphers was known throughout the academic community. And so, when his thesis on the Voynich Manuscript was first published, most people assumed he knew exactly what he was talking about, even if they didn't understand what he was talking about.

The essence of Newbold's theory was that the writing in the Voynich manuscript was more akin to shorthand than to an actual language, and that the letters in the manuscript were actually words themselves, making a series of smaller characters that could only be seen with a magnifying glass.

This theory that each letter contains a word is similar to later speculations that the manuscript may be based on Chinese or a language comparable to it. Newbold also claimed to have decoded large swaths of the text. These translations revealed a number of scientific writings that would have made Roger Bacon the most advanced mind of his generation.

Newbold's key takeaway was that Bacon had somehow managed to craft astrological charts centuries before the existence of any telescopes powerful enough to confirm his findings. Newbold's take made a splash, for a time. Given that his was the first major analysis to be published, a number of people accepted his conclusions.

Wilfred Voynich did not live long enough to see the first major pushback against Newbold's theories. He died in 1930 at the age of 64. The following year, Newbold's theory came under suspicion when some skeptical linguists looked closer at his claims. John Matthews Manley, an English and philology professor, published Roger Bacon and the Voynich Manuscript in an issue of Speculum,

a historical and scientific journal devoted to the study of the Middle Ages. In short, Manley stated that "The Newbold claims are entirely baseless and should be definitely and absolutely rejected." Manley proceeded to pick apart Newbold's theories piece by piece and emphasized that his cipher is wholly unreliable, unverifiable, and impractical.

Newbold's obsession with cracking the manuscript likely caused him to make jumps in logic to support his own conclusions. Again, it's worth noting that Newbold is likely not the first person to suggest the Voynich manuscript's connection to Roger Bacon. However, Newbold is credited with publicizing and popularizing that link in his initial book.

It seems very likely that Wilfred Voynich himself suggested the theory of Roger Bacon's authorship to Newbold. And Newbold, in turn, took that as fact. Manley's publication had the desired effect. The scientific community found Newbold's hypothesis unreliable. Linguists went back to the drawing board and none would be successful in their renewed efforts to crack the code.

Even today, all we have are hypotheses as to the Voynich Manuscript's real purpose. It could be a medical document, or a star chart, or a log of some unknown group's scientific endeavors. Some even think it could be a prophecy to a future cataclysm. But without any consensus on how to translate the volume, the Voynich Manuscript's secrets remain a mystery. And perhaps that is by design.

Recent theories have speculated that the Voynich manuscript may be intentionally indecipherable. Because it's a hoax.

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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. It's possible that when Wilford Voynich died in 1930, he passed with the knowledge that his eponymous manuscript had been cracked and that the mystery had been solved. But just a year later, William Newbold's cipher for the Voynich manuscript was heavily critiqued by philologist John Matthews Manley.

The academic community came to accept that they were no closer to translating the manuscript than they'd been in 1915, when the document was first unveiled to the public. After Wilfred's death, the manuscript changed hands a number of times over the course of several decades. Many of these owners would employ experts or try themselves to break the code. All would fail.

First, the manuscript went to Wilfred's wife, Ethel Lillian Voynich. In 1931, after Manly refuted Newbold's thesis, Ethel took up her husband's mantle. She enlisted prominent linguists and codecrackers to examine the manuscript. Among these notable figures were Professor Henri Heiernot and his assistant, Friar Theodore Peterson.

They were responsible for creating the first complete copies of the manuscript, which allowed multiple people to study the manuscript at once. But they didn't make much headway. At some point in 1944, cryptographer William Friedman also became publicly involved.

Friedman was a U.S. government intelligence worker and codebreaker. He'd previously made a name for himself by cracking Japanese code machines prior to America's entrance into World War II. Friedman is also credited with helping John Matthews Manley write his critique of Newbold's work. Then, in 1944, Friedman led his own team, known today as the First Study Group.

The first study group's key contribution to Voynich research was making the manuscript machine-readable. Specifically, they transcribed every line onto an IBM punch card so that it could be fed to a machine. As an aside, consider that in the 1940s, a computer could work out math problems or decode encrypted messages. But that was about it.

It's through the efforts of the first study group that we have the statistical data about the number of characters in the Voynich manuscript, how often they repeat, and how they are structured. And yet their efforts didn't reveal much else. Although surviving records of their meeting minutes confirm that they met throughout the summer of 1945, there's very little evidence of what the group actually determined.

it's likely that they didn't discover anything significant enough to publish. And we do know that a second study group was assembled nearly 20 years later in 1962 and met regularly for about a year. Again, beyond the knowledge that this group existed, there's very little data on their findings.

Friedman witnessed firsthand how Newbold's book had cemented Roger Bacon's connection to the Voynich manuscript, even after his work was disproven. Friedman likely knew that if he published a piece on the manuscript that didn't offer precise, logical, grounded data, he would be no different from Newbold. He'd possibly propagate theories that would take hold in the public consciousness and dilute the real truth.

Ethel Voynich had hoped to carry on her husband's mission to decipher the manuscript, but she too died with it still untranslated in 1960. Ownership passed to Anne Nill. She worked in Wilfred's bookshop for years and was a close friend and companion to Ethel after Wilfred's death. It's likely, though not confirmed, that Nill also took over whatever remained of the Voynich's rare bookstores and collections.

In the interest of keeping the businesses afloat and herself out of poverty, she began working for Hans Peter Kraus. He was a successful Austrian-born book dealer. Kraus bought most of the Voynich's stock of rare books. This included the Voynich manuscript for around $24,000, a little over $250,000 today.

According to one source, once Krauss secured a wealthy buyer for the manuscript, he intended to split the profits with Nill. Unfortunately, she died in 1961, shortly after she sold the manuscript to Krauss. Krauss continued to try and sell the manuscript for a princely sum of $160,000. That's the equivalent of over $1.3 million today.

Unfortunately, there's not much data available on how Krauss tried to sell the manuscript or whom he tried to sell it to. The antique book world of that time was very much built on personal relationships and in-person conversations. We can assume that Krauss spoke to many buyers about selling the manuscript, but we can't know more than that. No records of any such dealings exist.

The mystery of the Voynich manuscript had been a case of public interest for over 50 years, but every widely publicized attempt at deciphering the code had been either fully disproven or met with enough skepticism to render the mystery still unsolved. Any prospective buyer likely knew that owning the manuscript came with significant responsibility and scrutiny. They were obliged to continue the efforts to translate it.

Through most of the 1960s, Krauss peddled to his network of fellow antiquarians while also taking it upon himself to become better versed in the manuscript's history. He traveled to the Vatican and explored their library for clues, just confirming the authorship would prove invaluable to Krauss, both for finally pinning down some of its provenance, but also allowing him to increase the asking price. But nothing turned up.

And in 1969, after nearly eight years of unsuccessfully trying to make a sale, Kraus donated it to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It's still there today. Interest in the manuscript has waned in the decades since it came to Yale, though there are still those who carry on the efforts to decode it.

In 1972, Prescott Currier, a Navy captain who'd previously worked with Friedman during the days of the First and Second Study Group, published a paper claiming that the reason no one had been able to decode the Voynich Manuscript was because it wasn't written in code. It was in a language that had not previously been discovered.

Then, four years later in 1976, National Security Agent James R. Child argued that the manuscript had been written by two different people working in a hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect.

And a couple years after that, in 1978, writer and cryptographer Mary D'Imperio compiled a comprehensive history of everything that had been learned about the Voynich Manuscript since its discovery in 1912. There are dozens more examples of the ongoing efforts to decode and expand knowledge of the Voynich Manuscript. And yet, nothing provided a definitive answer. And this raises the question...

What if the reason this mystery seems unsolvable is because there really is nothing to solve? Could the manuscript just be a hoax? An intentionally unreadable text made for some unknown reason hundreds of years ago? Have all of these efforts to decode the manuscript been for nothing? And what if the hoax was perpetrated centuries ago, just waiting for Voynich to cause confusion on a mass scale?

Or perhaps Wilfred Voynich himself had the last laugh. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com.

Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Colin McLaughlin, fact-checked by Anya Barely, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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