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 Roger Bacon, a medieval philosopher regarded by many as a wizard, which was then purchased by John Dee and his scrier (spirit medium) John Kelley.
- Most notably (and related to the previous), it was created by John Dee and John Kelley as part of their work documenting Enochian Magick and the Enochian language- perhaps even representing its written form.
- ↑ 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 Gnostic view, a channeling of "direct language" aka the "language of angels" and represented a return to non-conceptual/representational linguistics.