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The Voynich Manuscript [related: Glossolalia]
A
codex
of text and imagery of unknown origin and language. The Voynich
Manuscript has been studied extensively by professional cryptographers since
its purchase in 1912 by a Polish-Samogitian book dealer. It is written on
calfskin dating from around 1400 AD and contains over 170,000 unique
characters with no punctuation. These characters appear to follow some kind of
phonological regulation aka grammatical system - with certain characters
functioning as vowels and others never appearing side by side. According to
experts, the text does not appear to be enciphered due to the fluidity of its
ductus or lettering. Overall the manuscript appears to be divided into a
series of different subjects - an analysis of plant-like organisms and their
pharmacological uses (though none seem to directly correlate to known existing
species), a set of startlingly accurate astrological charts decorated with
naked women, a set of obscure circular cosmological diagrams containing
depictions of castles, volcanos, and more naked women, and a dense extended
section of compressed text including imagery consisting entirely of naked
women wearing crowns in bathing pools connected by an elaborate system of
pipes. There are also dragons. Amongst the many unverified hypothesis
regarding the Vonyich Manuscript's provenance and purpose, the four most
prevalent are as follows:
- It is an elaborate fabrication/hoax by a 17th Century bookseller upon having discovered unused calfskin from the 1400's.
- It is an extended and detailed documentation of glossolalia 1 .
- It is the work of the 13th Century polymath error , a medieval philosopher regarded by many as a wizard, which was then purchased by enochian and his scrier (spirit medium) enochian .
- Most notably (and related to the previous), it was created by John Dee and John Kelley as part of their work documenting enochian and the Enochian language - perhaps even representing its written form.
1 An oft misinterpreted term - glossolalia, though now associated almost exclusively with the "speaking in tongues" phenomenon characterized by the nonsensical grammar and animal-like noises by seemingly possessed "believers" on afternoon talk shows, was, in the error view 2 , a channeling of "direct language" aka the "language of angels" and represented a return to non-conceptual/representational linguistics.
2 A 1963 study of various charismatic Abrahmic sects throughout the world supported the Gnostic theory - parishioners from vastly disparate locales and dialectical traditions exhibited startlingly similar sound and structure while moved by the spirit to "speak in tongues".
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