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[verbminx]

OK, tonight I am interested in The Voynich Manuscript. It's a one-of-a-kind book worth over $100K and located in a rare books library at Yale University. Nobody knows how old it is, and nobody knows what it says. The manuscript is written in a cipher script (or two) that occurs nowhere else. It's been attributed to Roger Bacon, a thirteenth century astronomer and mystic, but that origin is suspect.

Here's another suspect origin, with an attempt at deciphering the manuscript.

Here is a gallery of pages from the manuscript.

When I was younger I loved mysteries; I read everything I could. Encyclopedia Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew (but not Hardy Boys), Kay Tracey, Happy Hollisters, Dana Girls, Trixie Belden - you name it, I probably liked and read it. I read every volume of most series... every Holmes story, every Trixie Belden novel, all 56 original Nancy Drew hardcovers plus a decent number of the earlier versions (many of the stories were completely rewritten several times, under the same title, so a version from the early 1930s will be an entirely different story when compared to a version from the 1960s - there were several Trixie novels which had also been entirely rewritten). I was also a little fiend for "learn to be a detective!" books and kits, and books on ciphers and codes.

When I got a little older, I read most of Anne Perry's books up through around the time she started her William Monk series. I occasionally read books by Barbara Michaels / Elizabeth Peters, and by Mary Stewart, but I think by that time I preferred historical fiction (not romance) and some fantasy. I retained my interest in codes and ciphers, but since I've never felt much pull towards math, they quickly became too closely aligned.

So things like the Voynich MS, while seeming a bit spooky to me, also really draw me in and turn my brain up a few notches, insinuating possibilities and connections and intricacies and arcana. I'm not impressed by or interested in new-age esoterica, but alchemy, ciphers, strangeness, unknowability... that's my bag.

Comments

Re: rosetta stone

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

I think the cipher page... which I read in its entirety tonight... is not well-written enough to support its theories, and contains much historical vagueness. I suppose I'd like to see the whole book, but since it was written twenty years ago, I'm pretty sure it's been discredited. (Also, I believe a lot of the "Bible Code" stuff was also based on the idea of vowelless consonants - certainly biblical hebrew was written that way - & that attempt at decoding has been pretty much discredited by the cryptography community.) It's really more interesting as a mystery, I think... though from the other things I've read of it in the past day or so & what I know of alchemy, I also think the chances are good that it's some sort of alchemical text.

I should look at the Nancy Drew books. My stepmother worked at a huge used-book store when I was young, and also, she had a tendency to go to a lot of yard sales and junk shops. As a result I had the chance to read a lot of the older Nancys (where ND is so, so retro-glam!) and Dana Girls and so on. She collected them.