The Voynich Manuscript: The World's Most Mysterious Book, Explained

Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat

Dr. Harini Bhat explores the enduring mystery of the 600-year-old Voynich Manuscript, a medieval codex written in an undecipherable script.

Key takeaways

• Carbon dating confirms the parchment was created between 1404 and 1438.
• Linguistic analysis shows the text follows Zipf's Law but possesses unusually low entropy, making it too predictable for natural language.

Main topics

• Voynich Manuscript history
• Cryptanalysis and codebreaking

Notable quotes

An unreadable page is harder to live with than a blank one.

Conclusion

While no definitive translation exists, the manuscript remains a profo

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:02) Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linklater. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's a feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. Speaker 3 (0:37) This is Rewind. Speaker 4 (0:43) There's a book sitting in a library at Yale University, about 240 pages of calfskin, hand-painted in the early 1400s with drawings of plants, charts of stars and moons, its pages so wide they fold out over the edge of the table. And every word is written in an alphabet that appears nowhere else on Earth. Not before it, not after it, roughly 38,000 words in a script. No known relatives, no key, and no translation. An emperor bought it. A Jesuit genius failed to crack it. The codebreaker who broke Japan's diplomatic cipher in World War II gave up on it. So have supercomputers and AI. 600 years and nobody has read one verified sentence. So is this a code protecting something worth hiding? A con sold to a rich collector. a language that died with whoever invented it, or something even stranger. I'm Dr. Harini Ba, and this is Hidden History, a Rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural and everything in between. From vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review, and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. We're also on YouTube with full video that brings each episode to life. Just search at Hidden History Pod and subscribe. Today's episode is all about the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval book cataloged at Yale as Beinecke Manuscript 408. It's covered front to back in writing that no linguist, cryptographer, or computer has ever been able to read. So what's in there? Is it encrypted? And if so, what was worth this much effort to hide? Is it a hoax built to separate a wealthy collector from his money? A language that only ever had a handful of speakers? or something even stranger. Speaker 4 (3:05) Before we get into who made this thing, picture it properly. The Voynich Manuscript is a codex, the technical word for a book with pages bound along one edge. It's written on a type of parchment called vellum. Animal skin scraped, stretched, and treated until you could write on it. This one's made from calfskin, confirmed by protein analysis in 2014. Vellum was the paper of the medieval world and expensive because every few pages cost you an animal. Nobody wasted it. So whatever is written in here, someone thought it was worth it. The book is roughly 9 by 6.5 inches, 2 inches thick, and around 240 pages. Several are oversized and fold out into diagrams larger than the book itself. And something that surprised me, this is no luxury object. There is no gold leaf, and the parchment is average quality with the ordinary holes and tears of any working medieval manuscript. Whoever made this was careful, but they weren't showing off. It doesn't seem like it was built to dazzle anybody, which we'll get into soon. Now, the writing. Roughly 20 to 30 characters recur often enough to look like an alphabet, most drawn in one or two strokes of a pen. The lines run left to right, the words are cleanly separated, and some paragraphs start with a decorated letter the way a scribe would begin a chapter. And the handwriting is fluent. That is the detail that gets me. No corrections, no crossings out, no place where the writer stopped to think about which symbol came next. Whoever wrote this wasn't inventing it as they went. So what's it about? The book has no title page and no table contents, so scholars divided it into sections based on what the pictures look like. The biggest chunk is the herbal section, close to half the book. with about 113 plant drawings. Each gets its own page with its own paragraph of text, its own painted roots and leaves. And almost none match a real species. A few are close enough to argue about, but most aren't. Then the astronomical section. Suns, moons, stars, circular charts with rays coming off them. None of the constellations are recognizable. There's a zodiac section. And this one's interesting. Because those symbols do resemble the zodiac imagery in other 15th century European books, sometimes reordered. And in an interesting detail, small nude figures stand in rings around each sign. There's a cosmological section built around nine big circular diagrams called rosettes, which spread across the widest of the fold-out pages. Then we get to the strangest part of the book, which is called the balnological section. Balneology is the study of therapeutic bathing, so basically the medicine of soaking in water. And these pages show dozens of nude women standing in pools of green and blue liquid connected by what looks unmistakably like plumbing. And the book closes with a pharmaceutical section of roots, bulbs, and labeled apothecary jars, then a final stretch of dense text broken into short entries. each marked with a little star like a bulleted list. Now look at that inventory again. Herbs, then the stars, then bathing, then prepared compounds and jars, then short recipes. Strip out the fact that you can't read it, and you have a health and natural world reference book. Hundreds of European physicians and households own something like this, which makes the unreadable part maddening rather than mystical. Somebody seemingly made a practical, useful book and then locked it. So how does a working reference book from the early 1400s end up in a Yale library with a Polish book dealer's name on it? We can only follow this book back so far. The trail starts about 150 years after the parchment was made and everything before that is a hole in the record. So let's start where the documents do. Prague, the 1580s. The court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled from 1576 to 1612. Rudolf was a collector on an imperial scale, filling his castle with clocks, animals, art, fossils, and instruments, and chasing the strange and unexplained with the budget of an empire. According to the story that comes down to us, he paid 600 gold ducats for our manuscript. on a rumor that it had been written by Roger Bacon, a 13th century English friar with a reputation for alchemy. That was a fortune. You could have bought a house with it. So clearly, Rudolf thought this book was something worth having. And his court was one of the strangest rooms in European history. Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe did foundational astronomy under Rudolf's patronage. In the next wing, he sponsored alchemists and men who claimed to speak with angels, including two Englishmen named John Dee and Edward Kelly. Some believe they were the ones who actually wrote the book. After Rudolph, the book turns up with a man named Jacobus Sinopius, who signed his name on the first page. You can still see it, mainly. And his day job matters. Sinopius was a trained pharmacist who ran the Imperial Botanical Gardens. grew herbs, and distilled his own medicines, and he was good enough at it to become Rudolf's personal physician. But the story really starts around 1639 when the book belongs to an alchemist in Prague named Georg Barash. He was obsessed with learning how to read it, so he wrote to the smartest man he could think of. That was Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar in Rome, and the closest thing the 17th century had to universal genius. He wrote about magnetism, music, geology, and languages, and he'd announced that he had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was completely wrong, although nobody knew that yet. But with that kind of reputation, he seemed like the perfect person to crack the book's code, so Barge copied out some pages and sent them to Rome. Kirker didn't crack it. When Barge died, his library went to his friend, Johannes Marcus Martzi. He was the rector of Charles University in Prague and a serious scientist who studied the diffraction of light before Newton did. In 1665 or 1666, Martzi decided to give Kircher another crack at deciphering the book, sending him the whole manuscript with a cover letter tucked inside. That letter stayed inside the book for the next 250 years. is the document that gives us the Rudolph story, the 600 ducats, and the Roger Bacon attribution. Marcy described the book as a sphinx that would obey no master but Kierkegaard. Turns out, he was wrong. After that, the manuscript effectively vanishes. It goes into Jesuit collections in Rome and sits there unread and unremarked until the 20th century. Which brings us to 1912 and a man named Wilfred Voynich. Voynich had lived a life. A Polish revolutionary arrested by the Russian authorities and exiled to Siberia, he escaped, made his way to London, and reinvented himself as one of Europe's most successful antiquarian book dealers. In 1912, he was going through a Jesuit collection at the Villa Mondragone in Italy when he bought a crate of manuscripts. One of them was our book. He gave it the name we now know it by and then something even more valuable. He gave it a story. Voynich decided he really was holding the lost scientific masterwork of Roger Bacon, proof that a medieval friar had been centuries ahead of his time. He toured the United States with pages from it in the early 1920s, telling audiences it would