This week a small Spanish publishing house secured the right to clone the Voynich manuscript. The original is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University - although a hi-res version of the whole thing has been available online for years - and it is one of the oddest things I have ever seen. The 246 quarto pages contain words written in an unknown language, and pictures of things that look familiar, but do not actually exist. It would resemble a medieval herbal catalogue if any of the plants in it were real. There are astrological-style charts, authentically hairy tubers, a baby dragon eating a sort of alien chard, and naked women immersed in vats of green liquid in what could be an early modern version of The Matrix.
“Discovered” by Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in a monastery in 1912, and apparently once owned by Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, the manuscript’s mythic history reads like a Who’s Who of esoteric celebrities. Did John Dee create it to impress his European patrons? Did Roger Bacon write it? More plausibly, was it created by Voynich himself, a trained chemist with access to old vellum? In 2009 the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have come from the early 15th century. Or at least the parchment did.
Forgery or no, it is one of the oldest unsolved riddles in the world. Cryptologists have spent decades trying to work out what it means. Why would it resist decryption? Every other time a strange document has been discovered, it has been deciphered somehow. Languages have been rebuilt from tiny fragments; complex enemy messages decrypted with relative ease. It is (currently) mathematically impossible to create an unbreakable code. The encryption we use for online banking works not because it is unbreakable, but because of the time it would take to perform the necessary calculations to break it.
But the Voynich manuscript is not made out of numbers. It has words, pictures and diagrams. It seems to want to tell us something – about organisms, reproduction, disease. In my novel PopCo I describe it as “like a book you’d find in a dream; almost real but not quite”. Like fiction, perhaps. Which made me wonder. I’m a novelist who is fond of weird plants and dragons. I have a drawing app. Indeed, just the other day I was creating what we’ll call a ‘fictional document’ (not a novel – don’t ask). With a few weeks and some old vellum, who knows what one could produce? Forging something like this would certainly be possible. But why isn’t there a clue, a joke, a key of some sort? Great hoaxers usually claim authorship of their creations. Dee was not without ego; neither, apparently, was Voynich. So where are their hidden signatures? Whatever the manuscript turns out to be, the Spanish publisher, Siloe, is now to reproduce 898 exact replicas, each one costing around €8,000. Forgery isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it is.
