How The Voynich Manuscript Works

Since its re-discovery in the early 20th century, the Medieval codex the Voynich Manuscript has thoroughly puzzled anyone who has tried to unlock its secret language and bizarre drawings. Will it ever give up its secrets?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, friend House Stuff Works
dot Com, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and uh Noel's over there,
and this is Stuff you should know. Which episode I'm
not a percent sure yet. Let's do this one. Okay,

(00:28):
how's it going. It's going pretty well, man? Yeah, yeah,
how over with you? I'm pretty excited about both the shows. Yeah,
these are gonna be blockbusters if we can get them right.
Let's right, they're gonna break the box office. Yeah. Uh so, Chuck,
where you ever? Um? Have have you ever heard of
the Voytage Manuscript before? Prior to this? It's it's fairly famous. Yeah,

(00:53):
but just a few years ago, like through working here. Yeah,
thanks to the stuff they don't want you to know
boys today. I'm sure they covered this already. Certainly, there's
just no way. It may have been their first episode.
You know. You just say the words ancient codex and
guys come flying. Yeah, they're like, what do you want?
When they open their trench coats and they got ancient
codices aligning it. Um. Well, for those of you who

(01:16):
don't know what the Voyage Manuscript is It is a
what appears to be a legitimate medieval codex, which is
stuff that was formerly a loose leaf manuscript that's been
bound later on. That's what a codex is. Um. That
is written in a language that no one has any

(01:37):
idea how to read. It's never read it, it's never
been seen before. Um. It doesn't appear in any other
type of writing that's known to survive. And it's also
illustrated with some really bizarre pictures, like otherworldly plants, women
doing things that you are aren't readily identifiable. They're hears

(02:00):
to be a recipe section, yes, pharmac pharmacological section. Yeah.
It's almost like a a farmer's almanac of sorts from
medieval times, written in language and depicting plants and things
that have never existed. And the reason why it's it

(02:21):
seems legitimate is that it bears a striking resemblance two
similar books at the time. But those books are written
in things like Old English or Italian or things that
people can read, and they have pictures of plants in
them that you point to and say, oh, well, that's
a holly bush or something. This is not the case.
The thing is a mysterious otherworldly tome that clearly made

(02:45):
an appearance. Somehow it crossed over from a parallel multiverse
into this one accidentally. Yeah, I've got my theory, which
I'll just go ahead and tease the listener with it.
I'll throw out later. Okay, that's it. That's your teeth.
I'll throw out my you've got the theory, but I
just laid mine on the table. Which is what that
it's it's a book from a parallel multiverse to ours. Dude,

(03:07):
it's slipped into this. It's like that. Have you heard
that barren Stain bears theory? Yeah? Sure, I don't remember
it is barren Stein. I always remember, is Barren Stain.
Oh really, huh you're the only one. No, that's not true.
You're one of the few. I was really surprised to
hear people thought it was barren Stein. But apparently as
far as that theory goes, and if you don't know

(03:28):
what I'm talking about, just like a barren Stain Bears theory,
I guess. Yeah. I mean I was convinced that barren
Stein Berenstein, Yeah, but not a e instead Berenstein Bears
always always Barren Stain. For me, it's so weird, and
I'm one of those that was so convinced. I was like, no,
this is clearly some weird hoax because it's the Berenstein Bears.

(03:49):
Everybody knows that that's so funny. And I'm not alone,
like it seems like the majority of people are definitely,
they're very You're one of the few barren Stainers. Well,
its supposedly, according to this this hypothesis, I actually managed
to slip over from a multiverse into this one without
realizing it from the baron staying in the universe. So um, anyway,

(04:11):
Let's get back to the Voyage Manuscript, shall we, because
it is a real deal thing, um, and it apparently
it has a certain amount of providence to it. We
know about when it first popped up thanks to a
seventeenth century letter that identifies it as having been purchased
by one Rudolph the Second, who was the Holy Roman

(04:34):
Emperor for a while. Um. And Rudolph loved curious things, right,
he collected um little people apparently. Uh, he had a
cabinet of curiosities of sorts, and he was very interested
in this Voyage manuscript, so much so that he paid
six hundred gold dukits for it, which is apparently about

(04:56):
the same as ninety thou dollars today for this book
because he a lot and he supposedly was the first
owner of the Voyage manuscript. That's right. It has been
dated um with carbon dating to the early fourteen hundreds. Uh,
And it has a very strange it's not written on
parchment or any kind of regular paper. It's written on

(05:18):
calf skin, which is not a it's sort of is
a somewhat of a giveaway or at least a big
clue what that it dates it. Yeah, well, we'll talk
about whether or not it's a hoax if someone found
this this vellum, and that'd be very strange to create

(05:38):
a hoax and dig up hundreds of year old calf skin.
So it's not likely that's a hoax. No, there's all
sorts of reasons it's it's not a hoax, but that
that rumor still persists. So in six nine, this antique
collector and progue named George Bresch he uh sent a
letter to this dude uh a fantasist I think so,

(06:01):
a fantasyist cuature. He was a scholar in Rome. And
he basically said, and this is so weird to me.
He's he teases this guy, It's like, I've got this thing.
It's really weird. It's got all these crazy symbols and
images and this alphabet that is uh, unknown to anyone.
But I'm just not gonna send it t Im, just
gonna tell you about it. Well, he loved it himself.

(06:23):
He tried to crack the code himself, the guy who
was the owner of it at the time. But I
send that letter, just teasing the guy and be like,
have a nice day, because he wanted him. He he
wanted him to crack it for him, but he didn't
want to give up the book. Well how can you
crack it if you don't send it. Well, you can
send like, um, facsimiles of it that kind of stuff.
So he did that, I believe. So I know he

(06:44):
was cracking it himself. But this guy UM an atheist
Kirk creature. He uh. He was supposedly very well known
at the time for having cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, even though
it later turned out he had gotten it wrong. But
that's why I wonder why I didn't send it to
the guy. Well, the lesson has learned because um what
was the dude's named barsh the original guy who wrote

(07:07):
the letter. Yeah, George boresh So, um, he dies and
he's he dedicated his life to cracking the Voynage Manuscript,
which wasn't called the Voyage Manuscript by that point. No,
I should point out I don't think I had a
name at the time. I actually called this something. Um, well,
they definitely didn't call it the Voyage Manuscript. We'll see
in a minute. But um, George boresh Uh, he died

(07:30):
and he gave it to a friend of his, Jan
Mark Marcy. And Marcy is pretty good reason or supports
the idea that Borresh didn't want to give up the
book for good reason, because he actually did contact um
the Jesuit living living in Rome Kircher and said, hey,
here's the book, figure it out, and the guy never

(07:53):
got it back. So if Borsch wanted to keep his book,
he was very smart to not send it to Kircher. Well,
and when he sent it, when Marcy sent it to Kircher,
he said, by the way, um, I know a little
bit about the background. It looks like it was of
the work of Roger Bacon. Yeah, even though there was
no nothing to back that up. Well there there isn't

(08:13):
anything to back it up. And that's actually it turns
out Rudolph the Second believed that it was a work
of Roger Bacon when he bought it. That's right. Roger
Bacon was this. Um, he was basically a proto scientist
from the thirteenth century in England. And we've talked about
him before, I think in the Scientific Method episode, like
he really helped lay the groundwork for science in the

(08:34):
Western world. Yeah, he's credited with a lot of things
he didn't do too. Oh is that right? Yeah? Um, well, anyway,
this is possibly one of them. They there's still a
persistent legend that it was Roger Bacon's work, that it
did come from England. But um, the prevailing ideas about
the voyage manuscripts providence, um kind of drifted a little

(08:55):
further east, as we'll see. But um, when Rudolph the
Second bought the thing, uh, he thought it was Francis
Bacon and all this were we know, second hand, Chuck, like,
we don't. Like, there's no documents showing that Rudolph the
Second purchased this book. There's not a sales receipt, no
but there's something close that does kind of back it up.
Rudolph the Second had a dude um named Jacobus the

(09:19):
temper Nets I believe it's how you pronounced that, And
this was his um court pharmacists, basically his court botanist um.
And he was actually a really rich man. And Rudolf
the Second, out of an appreciation to this guy for
saving his life, gave him the Voyage Manuscript as a gift.

(09:39):
And this dude's watermark or seal or signature appears very
faintly in the Voyage Manuscript. So it definitely backs up
the idea that Rudolf the Second own this book at
one point in time, and it's entirely possible that he
did think Roger Bacon created it, but that doesn't mean
that Roger Bacon did create it. Uh So, for a

(09:59):
couple hundred years, it kind of, you know, wasn't on
the forefront of anyone's mind, basically disappeared until when here
we go, Wilfrid Voynage bought it in Italy, uh and
get said, I guess let's name it after me. Yeah,
Well they he in the manuscript became like very uh

(10:21):
pretty famous because he was tireless in trying to get
this thing cracked. This book has this really neat um
trait of like bringing people under its sway. You know,
it's well, it's a mystery, it is, and everybody loves
a mystery. It seems like it's possibly an impenetrable mystery,
which I think makes people want to crack it even

(10:43):
more sure because you get to be the one, you know, Yeah,
and you could change the name to the Josh Clark
Manuscript and say Voynage. Get bit, who's that? Do you
remember some company like bought the Sears Tower and tried
to change the name to their company's name for the tower,
and she, howgo do you learn that a few years ago?
Is it not the serious tower anymore? They tried to

(11:04):
change Everybody's like, no, we're still calling it the Sears Tower.
Oh Like even if they did change it, people are
still going to call it that. Yeah, gotcha. So I
think the same thing would happen with the Voyage Manuscript
even if I cracked it, right. That's like with a
lot of professional sports stadiums, I'll still refer to it
as the original cool name and not you know, right,
the r c A Dome or whatever. Although the new

(11:26):
stadiums are are they just don't even bother naming them.
They just go ahead and say who's got the most money? Right? Uh?
So voyage Uh, this manuscript he worked tirelessly. Uh and
it eventually ended up in modern times at Yale University
in nine where it still resides today. Right. So that's
just the story of it. And there's a lot more

(11:47):
detail to who have had their hands on this thing
over the years. Yeah, we'll talk about that, um right
after this break. Big announcement, folks. It's called a podcast

(12:07):
event called The Message, that's all right. Thanks to ge
Podcast Theater and Panoply, there is an eight part series
out right now called The Message, and you can get
it wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and you know what,
it's gonna blow your collective scientific minds because it's currently
rocking our worlds. So The Message follows the story of
Nicki Tomlin, who's a PhD in linguistics, right, that's right

(12:30):
at the University of Chicago, if I'm not mistaken, that's right.
And she's following a team of cryptologists, which really, if
you say cryptology, you've really got me hooked already. Their
research thank tank called Cipher and they're trying to dacode
a message received from outer space from seventy years ago. Yeah,
it's from outer space, we think. And if you're not
familiar with the story, well then I guess you'd better
go listen to the message. You can get it on iTunes,

(12:53):
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Just go search for the message and subscribe today. So
thanks to g E Podcast Theater and panopally for pushing
the boundaries of the medium. You guys are doing a
great job. Go subscribe to the message and listen today.

(13:15):
So Chucky, you're saying that um Voyage, it went from
Voyage ultimately to Yale, but in between that, like, Voytage
really kind of brought this manuscript into the four. Like
he he identified people who were professionals at cracking codes
and said, can you can you do this? The first

(13:35):
guy he went to was a University of Pennsylvania philosopher
UM and he had a really weird idea of what
the Voyage manuscript is really all about. Yeah, so if you, um,
if you look at the Voyage manuscript, the script is
like this weird really ornate lettering, right and it's actually

(13:58):
called gallows because a lot of it were like looks
a bit like a hangman's gallop, and um this uh.
University of Pennsylvania professor philosophy professor decided that it wasn't
the text itself that mattered. It was the little tiny
microscopic figures that the ink made inside each letter that

(14:21):
was the actual code. And I think Voytage like just
took his manuscript back and slowly backed out of the
room when the guys told him, man, yeah, he said,
they corresponded to Greek letters. Uh. And he actually said,
there's a message in here that confirms that it's Roger
Bacon inside the inc with these Greek letters. Uh. And
not only that, but Bacon well just some other theories

(14:46):
that's not even worth getting into, other theories that Bacon
hid in this inc. It was all untrue though, right.
Other people went back and said, oh, let us look
at these little weird um letters, microscopic letters that you're
seeing in the ink. Oh, well, that's just the ink
cracking as it dries, So you're nuts. Yeah, he I mean,

(15:08):
he tried to decrypt some of it, and it held
water for a little while, but it was only like
a very small part that was that even matched what
his decryption uh theory. So yeah, it didn't hold any water.
So that was the first guy who took a real
crack at it UM. The second people who did were
actually world War two codebreakers UM and the guy who

(15:29):
founded the n S a William Friedman who gets a
lot of the credit, but his wife is actually at
least as equal, if not as better, in in cryptography,
his wife Elizabeth, and they actually UM as World War
Two was waning, These people like broke the Japanese code right,
the Purple Code, I think is what it was called.
So they weren't like slouches as far as cryptography went. UM,

(15:52):
but they got together as the war was waning and
winding down and they weren't as needed any longer. They
got a bunch of their fellow cryptographers together and said,
let's work on the Voyage manuscript. And I guess they
probably figured that they would have it handled in short order.
That's not at all how it worked out. No, he
did not figure anything out. He gave up I think

(16:13):
he spent like thirty years working on it and then
finally declared that the thing was impossibly couldn't do it
and surrendered. I think it's how it was put. And
so after that this thing, once this guy and his
group said we can't do this, it kind of got
relegated to Yale for a while, and then the internet came.

(16:33):
That's right, So you want to talk about the book
itself a little bit, man, I would love to. The
book itself is two hundred and forty six pages, although
they think it is missing up to uh, you know,
fifty fifty five pages. Uh. I mean they don't know,
but they're guessing right, it could have been up to

(16:54):
two hundred and seventy three pages long. It's about nine
inches uh tall by six inches wide, and um, like
we said, it's on calf skin, which lends credence to
the fact that it's from the fourteen hundreds. It it
matches up with the carbon dating, so that makes some sense,
it does. They think that up to eight people worked

(17:17):
on the righting itself, and it is written from left
to right, which also lends credence to the fact that
could be European in nature. Makes sense, of course, uh,
although there are other theories that it is from the
eastern side of the world. But I don't know what
evidence they have on that. There's also the theories that

(17:38):
it's from the far west as well, if like Mexico
or Central Americas. Some people say that's right. Um. And
then so with the actual words themselves, the letters, there's
I think forty to forty characters in this weird alphabet
and understand, and that depends on who you ask. I've
seen as low as fifteen. Yeah, the highest I saw

(17:59):
is forty, but average I saw was thirty. Is what
people typically cite. Um, and these things, these letters are
put together to form what we would think of his words,
and then the words are put together without any punctuation,
and then occasionally are put into paragraphs. But for the
most part, it's just like world World World word, World

(18:20):
World Word. And then on almost every single page of
the codex itself, Um, there's an illustration of some sort
or another. Yeah, about two and twenty illustrations. Um. The
fact that it didn't have punctuation isn't a big deal.
Apparently that was pretty normal for the time, so that
doesn't really give anything away. Um. And it's also not

(18:42):
divided into chapters via text, but via illustrations. They believe
it might be divided into six different chapters, which are
a botanical this is where you're gonna find your weird
unknown plants, um astronomical which uh zos, adiacal signs, and
celestial bodies stuff like that, which are and we should

(19:04):
say the zodiac symbols and um drawings of the zodiac
are the only things that are unquestionably recognizable in the
whole book, which makes it even stranger that it's not
just completely fantastic. There's also some stuff that's recognizable. There's
a biological chapter with naked ladies doing weird things and

(19:25):
bathtubs um or possibly water slides. It kind of looks
like in at least one a water slide. Yeah, I
don't know what you would call it a water slide.
Maybe it would be uh No, there's one there's a
Roman aqueduct or something. There's another one though that's like
it's a vertical drawing straight up and down. Uh And
there's like three women that are clearly like together in

(19:49):
the way that that three people would go down a
water slide at once. There's one a little further down
and she's like on her back going downward, and then
there's another woman at the bottom who's like basically splashed
down the almost spitting image of a water slide, a
green water slide. Uh. There's cosmological um with just these
weird circular patterns. It almost looks like um, like crop circles,

(20:15):
just weird designs that make no sense. Uh. And then
pharmaceutical this is where they have like different parts of
plants broken down and these like jars and things that
doctors you know, may have put things in right, which
they did at the time in the medieval era. This
is what it like a pharmacist, a doctor would have

(20:35):
stored their pharmacological herb zoom, which is why they're like,
this is the pharmacological section. And then finally, um, no
illustrations in the recipe section. Uh, it's just nothing but deliciousness.
I don't know how they know it was a recipe section.
Even so, they divided the book up into these six
chapters and they actually think that, um, remember the book

(20:57):
was loose pages at one point, what was it, I
think a hundred and twenty folded pages, um. And they
think that when the whoever bounded because it was bounding
goat skin of a younger age than the actual manuscript,
that whoever bounded, got the pages out of order here
or there, so that there's some pages that are in

(21:19):
the wrong chapter, but that roughly it's in the right order. Yeah, uh,
they have. Um. Another reason it might be Europeans because
the average length of the word is four or five letters,
although there are no two letter words and nothing with
more than ten characters, which is just more confounding. It

(21:41):
is because none of it is there's no consistency that
points exactly in one direction basically. Well, even more confounding
is there are examples of the same word used in
succession two or three times. Here there up to five times,
so that's very odd. You don't see that very often,
and say English. Maybe they were just trying to make

(22:01):
a point. Times they're like I like this recipe very
very very very very much. You never know. Yeah, it
was written by Chainsaw and Dave from Summer School, who
remember that movie Summer School. They had to write like
a five word essay, so they used like the last
forty words where they like texas Chainsaw mask are very

(22:24):
very very battle trick. Yeah. So check. We've laid out
a lot of details here and we're not the first
person in the first people who notice these details, right,
Other people have and they really like studied them, especially
as the use of computing and linguistics has come together
in the twenty first century. And we will talk about

(22:46):
all that jazz right after this. So chuck, there's weird

(23:15):
things like the same word being used up to five
times in a row. There's no punctuation, which apparently is
fairly normal, no word over ten letters. All this stuff
like it seems weird. But if you put that into
a computer with what we know about language these days,
you can spit out some pretty interesting conclusions about the

(23:35):
Voyage Manuscript. One of the things that people have long said,
especially after William Friedman and his wife Elizabeth threw up
their hands and said we're done after thirty years of
studying this thing, a lot of people said, it's just
a hoax. It doesn't mean anything. It's gibberish. The reason
that no one will ever be able to crack it
is because it doesn't mean anything. And um, that's still

(23:59):
a longstanding theory. Like you can find plenty of journal
articles in um, you know, respectable pure of your journals
about how this thing is hoaxed. And in fact, there
was one a few years back that said, we found
a Renaissance cipher key, which is used for encoding anything,
but it was Renaissance era, and that if you took
gibberish and put it into it, you could conceivably come

(24:23):
up with what's in the Voyage manuscript. And everybody said,
that's great, you proved that it's possible, but you didn't
actually show how they did that to produce the Voyage manuscript.
So the thing is still a mystery. It doesn't really
prove anything, but it does support this idea that is,
it's possible, and no one involved in looking at the
Voyage Manuscript will disagree. It is possible that it is

(24:45):
just a hoax and that it is just gibberish. So
the hoax, there's a hoax theory, right, But there are
plenty of other theories as to this thing, and a
lot of them say, no, this thing is real. Uh yeah, Well.
One theory is that it's just a language that we
don't know and haven't seen. I don't buy that, no,
I mean, how could this possibly be the only surviving

(25:07):
evidence of that language you know exactly? Another theories that
it's just it's so well coded that it's impenetrable. But
that raises a good question too. So if you wanted
to code something, especially if it were safe for art
or a hoax or to show what an incredible mind

(25:29):
you had, why would you make it so impenetrable that
no one can ever possibly crack it. Yeah, it seems
like you would eventually be doing that for some sort
of recognition. Sure, so that kind of kicks a little bit,
kicks the legs out of that theory to me, or
that it's so important and secretive, like the meaning of

(25:51):
life is contained here in and it doesn't look like
it from looks like the illustrations. It doesn't because I
mean you say you're correct, the illustrations are kind of
hockey a little. Um, it's not the most Uh, it's
not the most gorgeous book you've ever seen. If it's
the Secrets in the Universe, then I'm pretty disappointed. Yeah. Yeah,
what's the third theory? Uh, there's another one that, um, well,

(26:17):
now that basically that it's gobbledygook, that that's sort of
the hoax thing. There's two different parts. One that it's
just gobbledygook and it was someone having fun, and another
one is that it was a hoax trying to fool
people into thinking something right, So that's sort of split
into two parts. Uh, mental illness is another theory. Yeah,
like um, Franciscan monk locked away in a room with

(26:41):
autism who like just really went to town. Yeah, that's
a that's actually a theory as well, or that it
might be religious like speaking in tongues transcribed. Yeah, you
want to hear my theory. Yeah, you think it's drugs. Yeah, man,
so kind of like where you'll find like the doodles

(27:03):
in a college textbook margin. I think someone uh got
ahold of a lot of really good hallucinogenics and over
the course of a few months did them and did this. Yeah,
so went on like a three month bender and ended
up spitting out the voyage spanning script or a lifelong bender.
And this was just one of the things they produced.
I mean, that's pretty interesting, to tell you the truth.

(27:24):
I don't think it's pretty druggy to me. It does
also again, the quality of the um the illustrations themselves
kind of suggest like this is really awesome, but I
don't have full control over my my motor cortex right now. Yeah.
Plus it it would solve the problem of like it
has meeting, or it can be transcribed, or this person
was trying to get famous. Yeah, they're just making it. Yeah,

(27:48):
so that's a pretty good theory. Um, let's go back
to the hoax theory, right, Yeah, there's a lot of
people who shout down the hoax theory because they say,
do you know how much time this thing took? Sure, like, yeah,
that's a that's one. So the hoax people would say back, well,
people still made hoaxes in the Renaissance, which is the
time this book first popped up. They made fraudulent medieval

(28:12):
documents because that's when antiquarian book collecting really started and
you could make some money from some suckers like Rudolph
the Second. Right, So I mean there's like a there's
definitely teeth in both arguments as to whether it's a
hoax or whether it's not. But as we've gotten a
lot better with um using computers to figure out things
like statistical distribution and stuff like that, and have applied

(28:34):
it to things like language. When looking at the Voyage manuscript,
it actually follows a lot of the patterns that a
natural language does, which leads a lot of people to
believe that no, there's actually real meaning in the Voyage
Manuscript that we just haven't unlocked. Yeah. So for example,
like um, the different sections have their own vocabulary. There's

(28:57):
words that show up and say like the pharmacological sect
and do not appear anywhere in the cosmological section, which
again is something that you would find in natural language.
If you're reading a chapter of a textbook on cosmology,
and you pick up a book on far pharmacology, like,
there's gonna be words in each one that would not

(29:17):
appear in the other one, right, And that's how the
Voyage Manuscript is. That's a big one. There's this thing
called Zip's law, which is probably a podcast episode in
and of itself. But Zip's laws this weird statistical law
that says that, um, say, the second most common word,

(29:37):
the second most frequently used word, will be used twice
as much as the third most frequently used word, The
third most frequently used word will be used three times
as much as the fourth most frequently used word. It's
a really weird thing, and it appears to be a
natural law, and apparently natural languages follow this kind of distribution,

(29:58):
so does the Voyage Manuscript. So to come up with
Zip's Law, which wasn't discovered until the nineteen thirties. I think,
so to create this text understanding that Zip's Law was
eventually going to be discovered, and then going to the
trouble of predicting the frequency of these words that you're
going to use and then spreading them out accordingly. Again,

(30:20):
it's not impossible, but it's mind boggling the amount of
work that would have been put into this being a hoax. Yeah,
here's my deal too. Let's say it is a cipher um.
From from looking at the thing, it would just end
up being you know, this is this plant, this is
this recipe. It just seems kind of boring to begin with.

(30:44):
And for that reason, a lot of people hope that
the Voyage Manuscript has never cracked that one was. Yeah,
they don't want to discover that they Yeah, I mean
like because ultimately it is there's pictures of plants there
and they look weird and everything. But if we cracked
this code, it would as as this one. I, um,
what is his name? He a dude named Read Johnson
wrote a New Yorker article on it. I don't think

(31:06):
there's been a podcast this year where we didn't mention
a New Yorker article that that magazine is banging read
read Johnson said he'd put it that right now, the
Voyage manuscript is in this quantum state where it's in
all positions at once. But once we crack it, they'll
be forced to take this collapse into this one single

(31:26):
position and it'll lose all of its mystery or aura.
It'll just be the farmer's almanact. Yeah, and that it's
as it is right now. It's in basically it's perfect
form to stop working people. Right. But that's not the
case at all, because, as I said before, the Internet
is on this and there are a lot of people
who think that they have cracked it, but I haven't. Necessarily. Yeah,

(31:48):
there's this one guy, Um Stephen Backs. He's a professor
of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England,
and he said he claims he's deciphered fourteen characters. The
reason that this is somewhat believable because he's not saying, hey,
I know what the whole thing means. He's he's being
very modest and saying, of cipher deciphered only fourteen characters

(32:12):
based on what he thinks are matching plants Juniper coriander
and Hella bore uh specifically and Taurus an illustration um,
basically the constellation Taurus. So he thinks, I would if
you can identify those pictures, then you should be able

(32:32):
to correspond the letters saying those names next to them. Right.
He went on a hunt for like proper nouns in
the text, Yeah, which is pretty good approaches. Yeah. Yeah,
I think he said he identified fourteen right, fourteen characters
only Oh I thought it was fourteen words, no ten words. Um,
And he's the first to say, like, I might be right,

(32:52):
it might be wrong. This is certainly not a closed case.
But here's my best crack at it. Well, there's a
live science article on our podcast page for this episod
so that has um kind of a rundown of his discovery.
And I think embedded in it is a YouTube video
that he made demonstrating how he found this. Yeah, and
he's not a crackpot. He seems like a good guy.
He's at Bedfordshire. There's another dude, is that the latest

(33:16):
theory is from guy named Nick pelling um Britain. Nick Pelling,
I guess that's his name. I thought two thousand six. Uh,
he came up with this theory. That was an Italian
architect name Antonio Abolino um as the author and he says,
you know what, I think this guy tried to escape

(33:36):
a Tanbul around five and before he left recorded his
knowledge of said place. UM. But basically that's been shot
down for various reasons. So there are a lot of
people believe that northern Italy is where it was made
where it's from um. So that part's not entirely like

(33:57):
out of the realm of possibility, but um. And the
reason why they think it was actually in the Tyrolean
Alps is the predominant view of where the Codex was made. UM.
But if you look at some of the pictures just
drawing on the margins of castles, the architecture depicted is
peculiar to the Northern Alps from that time, in northern

(34:19):
Italian Alps from that time, and usually write about in
pain about what you know? Yes plus around uh trent
to I believe, um, there there are some healing waters
and I think possibly that's what's depicted with the women
bathing and water sliding and water sliding. Uh. So I
think I do agree that let's well, I mean, keep

(34:41):
on trying, but I don't think anyone's gonna correct this thing.
So I think the mystery will remain, which is kind
of neat. But you do think that there's actual language
encoded in it? No, I think it's drugs, Okay, So
you think it's just total gibberish. Yeah, or or you know,
this dude and his drug friends made up a language
that exists that within their turret. But again it's following

(35:04):
almost unpredictable, just so unbelievably complex statistical distribution of of
words and letters that it's like that the genius it
would take to fake that or even accidentally make it up,
as I'm saying, maybe they did have have their own
little language, Well they were, there were some smart burnouts. Yeah,

(35:28):
there were a lot of smart burnouts back then. I
wonder if they would be blown away to know that
people were still trying to crack that code that they
made in high school listening to Van Halen. Or maybe
there's some other discovery yet to be made of another text,
a legend, perhaps you know, a Rosetta stone as it were. Yeah,
maybe they just haven't found it yet, and there maybe

(35:50):
there's a whole series of things. Um, you would think
it would have popped up by now, but you never know,
or maybe that has lost the time forever. I'm sticking
with the multiverse idea. Yeah, it's fun to theorize if
you want to fall down a rabbit hole. I also
want to say, before we sign off, go to Voynage
dot nu. There is a dude named Renee zanderberg In

(36:11):
who is a pre eminent voyage scholar. Uh, and he
actually discovered a letter. It was like the the only
the second letter associated with the Voyage manuscript ever discovered.
The first one was discovered with the voyage manuscript. Um.
So he's like hardcore knows what he's doing when it
comes to the Voyage manuscript. And he's compiled this really
amazing website where it's like, here's all the information we have,

(36:33):
here's what we know. Not slanted, not like I'm right
or anything. That's just a really interesting website to go
check out. Does he have did you have everything pasted
on his wall with like yarn at the scratched out
on all the pictures. I think it's pretty neat. I
mean I just like things that are unknown and you

(36:55):
can speculate all day, and it's not one of these
unknowns where, uh, you know, where skeptics can come in
and say, you know, this doesn't even exist, like it's
a real thing. Yeah, they're like it's a hoax. They
just got their hands on some velum. But really, and
they predicted that we would be carbon dating fifty years later.

(37:15):
I don't think so, Buddy goes down. It's nice like
it's a genuine bona fide mystery residing in the Yale Library.
If you want to know more about the Voyage Manuscript,
like I said, go to voytage dot and you. You
can also visit our website at um how stuff works
dot com by typing voyage in the search bar. And
since I said dot and you, it's time for listener

(37:39):
mail or the Yale Library is it on display or
is it chucked away? They actually, I'm glad you brought
that up. There's another um uh, the Yale Collection. They
did high resolution scans of every single page. You can
go on to the Yale Library site and basically browse
the Voyage Manuscript. You have to have a an appointment

(37:59):
and get permission first, which I imagine would be the
result of like an extensive letter writing campaign. You have
to make an appointment to go see the actual thing, yes,
but I mean not just like. I'll be there at
five Tuesday. How's our for your Like you have to
get permission and submit your credentials and all that stuff.
But you could conceivably see it. You have to be
a friend of John Hondgman he holds the keys um

(38:23):
all right, Uh okay, So the answer is they don't
have it on display prominently. That's another way of saying
what I said. All right, I'm gonna call this. Uh,
my baby won't sleep. Hey, guys, I'm sure you get
a handful of thanks every day, Actually not as many
as you'd think, But I just want to offer up

(38:43):
my thanks for my wife, my daughter, and I. My
wife and I recently had a baby, Madeline. At times
we find ourselves up all hours of the night attending
to a sleepless baby. I think she was born on
a twelve hour jet lag, and for that we take
the Red Eye every night until she ad just. Uh.
When we have tried every method in the book to
try and get her to sleep, it just seems like
nothing will do. However, we've come to find that she

(39:06):
loves car rides. So whether it's one am, two am,
or four in the morning, there's a good chance we
are in the car driving around the neighborhood, listening to
stuff you should know that sounds really creepy, hearing our
voices echoed down empty streets. Yeah, while we're trying to
get our daughter to fall asleep. And now it's cute
again when I can assure you that I don't fall

(39:26):
asleep in the cars, being the one driving, I can say.
I can't say the same for my daughter. It's not
to say that you guys put her to sleep, but
I think it's the combination of a car seat or
running engine and the background background noise of two podcasters.
So thank you for keep us, keeping us up listening
to your show at the same time putting my daughter
to sleep. You may have the youngest stuff you should

(39:46):
know fan at only a month old, and that is
sleepless and hat Field p a wow. So we've been
told by plenty of adults that we put them to sleep,
so it's nice that there's just a little cute to
be now. So our one month old Fan is not
our youngest. We have one that's even younger one born

(40:07):
on October. We want to wish a huge, huge hearty
congratulations to our buddy Adam and serena huge congrats the
utes couple. Cute baby yes uh right out of the
womb cute, which is yes, not often the case, he
really is. His name is Henry Hollis, so do you guys.

(40:29):
Congratulations Henry, Welcome to the Stuff you Should Know family,
and UM. Way to go, dude, agreed. Um. If you
want to get in touch with us, you can tweet
to us at s y s K podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us uh an email to Stuff Podcast
at house stuff works dot com and has always join

(40:50):
us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. For more on this in thousands of
other tappics, isn't Hasta works dot com