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Thank you for providing more information about this topic. However, I have heard NOTHING about the 2 guys who said the language was a very old version of the Turkish language. What happened to their work? Do you know?
I love how his cadence has changed from purely lecture-like education to a dry-humored, goofy professor. He's so good at humanizing everything he teaches in a professional yet entertaining way. One of my favorite TH-camrs!
I remember a Tool concert joke that Dr. Justin made a long while back in one of his videos a little over a year ago. I wouldn't say so much goofy, but just... High brow, super dry humor. I feel like we all know and understand this niche, haha
As disappointing as it would be it it were proven to be a hoax, it would still be one of the most fascinating, ridiculously-elaborate and convincing hoaxes in all of history, which would be at least a quarter as cool as if it actually meant something.
How would it be disappointing then if it's meaningless or if you found no meaning in it other than it's purporting to be something it's likely not. It doesn't even have the slightest reference to anything in any milieu to latch onto and make one go, mmm that might mean something...nothing. Even psychedelics weirdness has something to offer in its strangeness. I think VM's one accomplishment is getting folks to try and decipher it at all to no avail.
@@babylonisfallen4411 I think it's an elaborate medieval distraction hoax made by a drunken monk apprentice. It defies decryption and language logic and its images aren't even fantastically resonant. Monks would not know what an animal from another continent looked like so why would they suddenly know about animals or plants from another dimension whatever. There's no internal logic to it and I think the point of it as a hoax is to get SOME people's wheels turning trying to decode it, when it's not even imaginative nor sparks the imagination. Not even a hint or clue. Better off reading a slew of actually meaningful fantasy or more of esoterica lectures and thoughts by Terence Mckenna as well.
its pretty impressive. a bunch of medieval scammers managed to fool the worlds greatest linguists and cryptographers for over a century and perhaps more.
@@Blox117 It depends how you look at it. Maybe the supposed conmen managed to "fool" the linguists and cryptographers, but if there's no hidden meaning to begin with, have the experts really been "fooled" or defeated? It would be like me handing you a box full of jigsaw puzzle pieces and challenging you to complete the jigsaw when in fact I threw together a bunch of random pieces from many different jigsaws. Have you been "fooled" if you can't complete the puzzle? Looks like I would be the fool in that story!
I always figured this was like a scribe training thing. Like a group of scribes practicing making a manuscript. At the end probably put it all together as like a class project kind of thing to remember
I have a complete colour reproduction of the Voynich Manuscript, it's called "The Voynich Manuscript" published by Beinecke Book & Manuscript Library, and is edited by Raymond Clemens. It cost about 100 GBP, and is wonderful. Its a complete, 1:1 size colour reproduction with many fold outs for the more complex diagrams. I've spent many hours engrossed in it, and would most highly recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest.
Great video! My hunch has always been that the author(s) of the Voynich was similar to Tolkien - building their own fictional world and language, and that the text was an encyclopaedia for that fictional world.
on occasion i’ve wondered if it’s some board rich kid’s art project that unintentionally ended up out in the world without context and then people do what people do and got fixated on the mystery, but a person throwing it out as a money making hoax does seem pretty likely
If I recall correctly, the script itself was found in a chest that was used for children's books. I believe I read this a long time ago when I was roughly around 9-10 years old (90's era).
One of the missing sections starts: "To my darling Sandy, for all her patience and support. All persons mentioned in this book are fictional; any resemblance to any persons, living or dead..."
This is the kind of channel where you can safely assume everyone has heard of the Voynich Manuscript and most of us probably tinkered with trying to figure it out at some point in our youth.
I think the theory you expressed at 10:20 is quite intriguing. I imagine someone who can speak and understand a certain language, but had no schooling in reading or writing that language. It's possible the author constructed his own homebrew method for writing the language.
I never considered the idea of the text in the Voynich Manuscript to be entirely originated by an algorithm, but now that I see its properties (repetitions, and especially the gradual "evolution" from repating some clusters to others) it really looks very likely. As a musician myself, it reminds me some not uncommon compositive tools used in contemporary Music in the last century, aimed to create a complex, sometimes apparent random/chaotic outcome, but starting from very elementary material (this is findable from serialism to minimalism, through a vast range of styles and languages). [Not implying that VM is actually music score, of course - that's probably the case of Edward Elgar's Dorabella Code, but this is another story.] Since I've been following you from some months, but this is almost surely my first comment, I'd also add a thank you for your videos! :)
When I was younger I wrote fake texts in fake scripts and left them around campus to drive linguists crazy. And this was before I had even heard of the Voynich manuscript.
Same! I had this lazy fascination with making a fractal written language that radiated outward from a central node, instead of written lines or columns.
Excellent choice of theme, this manuscript has always intrigued me. I’m so glad you decided to do this , your channel has filled a void in this algorithm that to ppl like me interested in everything and anything occult, hidden, or not known would otherwise not be found , thanks!👍🔥
@@TheEsotericaChannel your work is absolutely unique in its content and delivery , well researched is not enough to convey the easily seen natural interest you have in the world of the unknown, research can be done but the approach is the difference here. Keep up the good work, it has been more than noticed by the esoteric community, may your light keep shining bright! Blessed be👍
I've worked in clinical settings with certain people who obsessively create elaborate private languages and symbols that in fact have no meaning at all that anyone else could ever share. I wonder if this is in that class?
I was thinking exactly this throughout the video. Perhaps the writer believed he was transcribing a message given to him in the language of angels, describing another reality that he could see in visions/hallucinations. Or maybe the language is a sort of intellectual glossolalia.
Here's a blog post about the same idea (not mine, but I find the idea worth considering): worldwithwords.blogspot.com/2008/10/hypergraphia-graphomania-and-voynich.html
Yeah, the flow and repetition seems like someone experiencing graphorrhea from schizophrenia might write. It also explains how it keeps a zipfian and binomial distribution despite being hindreds of years before either distribution was discovered. Especially in the hastily-written style and unrealistic plants and astrological imagery. I wonder if an AI could identify this as potentially indicative of disordered thinking using either textual or image thematic cues.
I’ve always believed the Voynich was the work of a “crazy”creative type. Touched by fire. Probably someone of some social and economic stature too. It was their personal diary and sketch book. Kept them occupied. And it’s beaten all the computational analysis because it was the writing of someone mentally ill, yet had some semblance of lucidity at times. It reminds me too much of graphomania.
Your personal history with the VMS is so heartwarming and nostalgic to me. I never did any serious work on it, but I also got that scratchy Yale copyflo as a gift when I was 17! Interesting discussion about the hoax possibilities as well, of course. I agree it seems unlikely to be a medieval cipher or any exotic language. But if, as you say, the "cryptological horizon" at the time was low, the cryptanalytic horizon was the same. I have to wonder why even a dedicated hoaxer would go to the trouble of devising a system clever enough to show language-like features to even present-day tests, when no prospective buyer would have the tools to distinguish the results from something purely arbitrary. And how likely would someone with such a different mindset from that of our own era be to come up with such an "algorithm?" Still, it's possible, which is more than can be said for many Voynich theories! I do also hope it's not a hoax, though. (Especially if it turns out to be something nobody's even thought of yet!)
There have been some experiments with young people to create non-sense texts with loose patterns that have yielded interesting results. Especially is a person has some Latin, it's not hard to take a couple of 'root' words and mutate them according to loose rules.
The fact that the Voynicheese respect the Zipf law may simply be a consequence (by design) of the "algorithm" used to create the content (text). Why do you jump automatically to an extraordinary anachronic conclusion where there is only a "quasi-mechanical" method involved?
Whenever I see all the illustrations of women in tubs connected by pipes, it looks to me like some sort of symbolic representation of a process. But then, I've been a computer programmer for years and have looked at lots of flow charts, process charts, state machines, and data flow diagrams, so that is definitely influencing how I process images like these.
It is how the ancient aliens people seebthe world it seems - thing look like thing, thing must be thing! But for the rest of us this is pretty usual too, we just don't run with it - I often look at way people in the past named things, and wonder why did you name this natural thing that was there forever, with comparison to a much newer thing? I can't t think of many examples in English, but one example being s monkey in the South America called 'the Englishman' for it's red face. Excuse me, sir, what was it called before anyone had seen English people? Ok now I thought of one -; foxglove, again, gloves are not that old an invention, the plant came before, yet people looked at it and went, it looks like a glove, for a fox. Let's name it that. Before it what did they say - the flower that resembles nothing? (in Finland btw it is known as 'thimble flower' so again, naming after a familiar newer thing).
all bathtubs are indirectly connected to each other if they are connected to the water main in the city. the water is the shared commodity, thusly the bath tubs are interconnected (but in reality not quite like in the drawing.) It is like a shared subconscious that connects minds, but again not directly, but all minds have access to the same pool of information which is older than the mind.
Insightful. Read up a little on the Kabbala, the Tree of Life and the Sephirophs. Arcane processes were big deals at this stage of history, and almost everything was used to represent them.
I'm almost 100% sure that you are right. The thing is: If this is a hoax, and it is a hoax, it's still conducted in an utterly brilliant way and has no equal. It's impossible to improvise such a nonsense text with multiple persons involved without first very thoroughly reflecting on what is needed to make the non-text appear textlike.
It seems like if it was a successful hoax, there would be more examples. Of course there are other fake books, but in terms of texts using a similar hypothetical method of generation, why is there only just one? Maybe it was actually unsuccessful at the time--the hoaxers couldn't sell it, and it wasn't until many years later that it started being passed around as something authentic. But still seems weird that other fake books wouldn't try to use similar methods
Awesome episode Dr Sledge. I applied a Sephardic key by changing the letters that are not Solitreo ie, Greek and the weird ones. And this is what I got for the first line, Front page First Paragraph First line Word My person who represents my ancestors begins this which I’m able to understand in my mind that it changes in its cosmic cycle of life and death. as we traveled he directed our attention to everything that moved in the cosmos. Everything that is has their place and state He said that everything changes and it's impregnated with the primal force of its source. Its physical existence and response is impregnated in this world with the achievement of its vital impregnation. It contains the seed or its place and state. He said that life and death is the precursor of the life and death of the universe and this is the state and place of the life and death of the universe. He said change is the origin of the state and being of the universe. The response of life in the universe originates from what is made in what it holds and how it changes.
@@TheEsotericaChannel i can email you they first page translation. It took me about 6 months. If I had that alphabetic transliteration I could program an ai to kind of make sense of it. The translation is weird because there’s no exact translation. A letter has a definition but to make sense of the context some accommodations need to be made. It’s not exact. This is why I gave up. No one will accept it.
Wow, I was remembering how the last update I ever heard on this manuscript was in fact that it was related to some obscure or older form of Hebrew. Great work! Can't wait to see an actual translation! Keep up the good work!
At this point it seems like the most valuable information we can mine from the Manuscript is less about direct content and more about structure. Cryptographic analysis and statistical linguistics seem like fascinating fields.
Great introduction, as coming across the Voynich rabbit-hole years back grabbed me by the shirt collar and dragged me into the world of anything and everything occult and/or esoteric. Following the updates over the years, I seen the Turkish hypothesis but the most recent one was with some algorithm finding it to be Hebrew in some way, or if I remember correctly, at least pulling from it some old proto-Hebrew/Phoenician words from the "text". Bravo on another great episode and I send love and light up to the highest and mightiest of YT algorithm gods for delivering me to your great channel.
Thank you so much for going into the linguistic details of the manuscript and situating it in the known context of other manuscripts of the time. This is material you never hear from traditional videos or documentaries about the Voynich Manuscript, and I feel like they’re really important to settling on a theory of its production. Thank you!
I've shared your decades-long fascination with the VM, and I've reached a very similar tentative conclusion. As Oscar Wilde almost said, 'There are two tragedies in life - not understanding the Voynich Manuscript, and understanding it.'
as a matematician i am delighted by this manuscript and your eloquent video and explanation of it!!! will definitely check out your rec list!! thank you infinitely!!
I do have an alternative explanation - not a better one, maybe even a worse one, just an alternative - that it is a product of 'automatic writing'. Glossolalia usually produces fairly repetitive, language like sounds, and automatic writing could be expected to do the same. It would explain the low quality as well, a hoax does also, but a hoaxer might have been more careful in making the lines straight and the pictures perhaps a little neater. Automatic writing would be sort of self- hoax , so the text could share similar features of repetition, and random change. Both would go on producing text that looks like text, which would have satisfied a hoaxer, but also motivated a religious mystic or possibly s manic person to continue. If it can be proven several writers worked with the manuscript, this would make an automatic writing text less likely. As for why make the hoax? Besides money, some rich and idle people have spent inordinate amounts of time and money on practical jokes, or elaborate art containing jokes, so it could well just be someone getting one over on someone else. Perhaps some very rich eccentric had a grudge on some scholar, or a group of, and dropped this amount to have this book made, just to laugh in his sleeve as people seriously studied his fake book, and it was just luck his prank never came to light.
I had the same idea, having grown up in "speaking in tongues" churches where that sort of glossolalia is common. However, it doesn't really resemble automatic writing to my eyes. The hand is too neat and even, and the word patterns don't fit well. Automatic writing is typically done blinded, often under the influence of some psychoactive substance induced trance-state, and tends to be either more repetitive or more random. This falls somewhere in the middle. The fact that it's organized around the illustrations also argues against I'd say it's more characteristic of some type of obsessional writing, ie. graphomania/graphorrhea/hypergraphia; which tends to have these kinds of word/phrase repetitions, and very often goes along with the same sort of crude drawings. If it is, as research indicates, the work of more than one author, that wouldn't necessarily rule out obsessional writing by at least one of the authors, possibly imitated by other authors (hence the shift in word pattern from the A text to the B text, and the quasi-stochastic presentation of the text). It also wouldn't necessarily rule out a multi-phase work by the same author over a much longer period of time; again with potential modification/addition by later authors attempting to produce something likely to sell for a substantial amount of money to a wealthy and credulous collector. I know I'm far from the only person to make that association as well; obsessional writing has long been a popular hypothesis for the manuscript's origin.
Hands down thee most interesting and knowledgeable video of the vms and def a breathe of fresh air finally a real researcher with actual level headed conclusions that are worth listening to - love this channel
I've been watching your channel for quite some time, but I honestly usually watch/listen to your videos as something to relax before bed, or to fall asleep to... hopefully you understand I don't mean that in any negative way at all; your voice is very calming, and the topics you cover are inherently fascinating, but as someone who was raised outside of any faith tradition, and finds themselves without any natural inclination whatsoever toward religious faith, in fact quite the opposite, that fascination is also at arm's length and without any emotional or 'serious' engagement, hence the 'good for falling asleep' category. But right off the bat, in this video, the fact that you are presenting a view I haven't seen commonly talked about... heck, just the fact that you are presenting a clear opinion or your own personal perspective, or expert conclusion or assessment, on a topic like this is way more immediately interesting to me.... I would probably watch your content in a much more engaged way if you were putting more of your own opinion and perspective into these... although, I super understand that for a lot of the topics you cover, that wouldn't be reasonable or appropriate, and that for many topics, your goal is simply to educate, which you are doing an excellent job of. I certainly have no criticism of your content, lol. But if there are other opportunities where you have a strong opinion on a contested matter, I would love to know what you think
Are there any similar hoax documents that you're aware of? Like, Voynich tends to be treated as a singular object, but if it's a relatively uncomplicated process for the creation of the text, then I would have expected other people to come up with the same idea.
The Vinland Map comes to mind. No language involved and no where near as elaborate but it's story is interesting. Someone bound it into because of the controversy. It was another Yale acquisition.
While it definitely isn't a hoax, Tianshu, "A Book from the Sky" might be in similar vein. Tianshu is most definitely a work of art, a singular object. It does share with VM the fact that "it looks like meaningful text". One Chinese critic wrote of Tianshu that it's "ghosts building walls" --- once could just about tease this sentiment out of this video.
I always thought the illustrations look quite shoddy, but everybody was oohing and ahhing over them. You're the first one I've heard say it out loud, so thank you for that! Great video all the way. Looks like the thesis is unfortunately correct.
I've read that words on the same line are often repetitive or similar in the manuscript, but what strikes me is that there seems to be similar repetition and mutation vertically, i.e. a word often resembles one above it. So, you could make a calculation about how much spatial proximity correlates to similarity in the words. You could also predict which other page(s) the scribe has used as inspiration for any given page.
I love this manuscript and have been invested in this mystery for many years now but this is by far my favorite theory. I would love for its creator/s to know that people are still poring over it in our time. They got us!!
That was great!! 😊I too hope it’s not a hoax but with modern technology and modern scientific minds going through it over & over, it’s making me believe it just might be 😕
The early 1500s would have been a prime time to produce a phony book of "esoteric lore" purporting to be from the recently discovered new continent to the west. Most Europeans would have known diddly-squat about America, so an enterprising scribe (or small team of scribes) could pretty much make up anything and sell it as "the notebook of a learned Aztec doctor of Natural Philosophy." The apparent subject matter of the Voynich matches with other "books of knowledge" being produced in Europe at the time. The format, in terms of cheapness of materials, sloppiness of illustrations, and casualness of penmanship, matches well with the idea of a student's notebook (still a very common item in an era when printing was in its infancy). The hoax theory also perfectly explains why none of the plants in the herbal section can be identified. They're all fake. They come from an imaginary world which the author may have claimed was the New World. It's possible this book was not produced merely to sell, but could have been a prop used as part of a more elaborate con in which someone traveled around pretending to be a Learned Aztec Doctor of Natural Philosophy. Keep in mind this was a time when bogus alchemists were successfully swindling the wealthy nobility out of large quantities of gold. There was definitely profit to be gained from something like this. The more I think about it, the more the hoax theory makes sense ... but how could it ever be proven?
I’m always reminded, when it comes to hoax occult texts, of the Black Pullet. A work of someone who, while directly aping the style of an occult text, was specifically intended to contain no true magical information. When I look at the Voynich Manuscript, my thought is that it is either a parody of or love letter to encrypted occult manuscripts. Someone reproducing not the information within these texts, but capturing the experience and emotion of encountering an “indecipherable” grimoire for a layman, almost in the style of the modern Dragonology children’s book series. Not only that, but the author did such a damn good job that it still tickles the imagination of laymen, occult enthusiasts, expert occultists and academics even to this day.
To me, the most mysterious part of the book isn't the pictures or the writing, it's that there aren't more books like it around. I've long suspected it was a forgery myself, and knowing how relatively easily one can make it, I'm surprised that no one else, not even the original author, did the scam a second time.
I really enjoy the linguistics and cryptography here! You mentioned Hildegard of Bingen, do you ever intend to cover Julian of Norwich? I'd love to see your coverage of her and the anchoress/anchorite movement more broadly.
I agree with you that the manuscript itself is far from being a finely crafted book. It looks like it was made by amateur scribes/illuminators and I just do not see the beauty some people have argued about it compared to other books from that period and earlier. I find the manuscript fascinating and while it could be some "obscure made up language" that only a handful of people would have understood, your analysis lends more credence to it possibly being a hoax created using a strange method. I have always been on the fence about it and I feel even if it is a language, it would hold no secrets that we do not already know.
The unique thing about the Voynich Manuscript is that even if it IS a hoax, it's value doesn't _really_ change all that much. If it is, it would almost definitely be the most elaborate hoax of all time, and that's notable in itself!
just a suggestion: it would be cool to see what you think of joseph smith's "reformed egyptian" language, there are published samples of the characters that smith wrote. also the meroitic language, which is poorly understood. pretty random, I know.
Imagine coming up with a funny prank with some of your mates and you end up creating a centuries-long mystery that drives scholars in the distant future crazy
This is another amazing video. Since you last uploaded, I've been binging your content while I slave away at my boring desk job. Thank you for such amazing content! On an unrelated note, have you (or anyone else here) seen the recent coverage of the French footballer Paul Pogba? He's allegedly the victim of extortion, and extortionate materials are apparently evidence that he consulted with a marabout to curse a perceived rival, Kylian Mbappe. Normally, my love of football and penchant for the esoteric don't overlap, but I really shouldn't be surprised. Athletes are stereotypically superstitious, I suppose.
The letters in the Voynich remind me of the current state of the Cherokee syllabary or Thai letters or even some elements of the modern Korean syllabary. So interesting!
Im new to this channel but iv binged a few videos so far and i just want to say each and every one has been brilliant. Im not exactly an intellectual but i am deeply fascinated by subject matter like this. And i would like to compliment this channels creator for making these videos understandable for the layman while not downgrading the quality of the information delivered. You have my sub sir
What a treat! Although you're right that it should come as no surprise that you, and I, are interested in this fun little manuscript. Sounds like we share an idea of a good time. Just give me a quiet corner of a pub and leave me alone with a mysterious cipher. What you've laid out here is compelling but I never feel entirely satisfied by statistical analyses of VMS transcriptions that use natural languages as a point of comparison. J. K. Petersen has drawn attention to some of the glyphs in the VMS that appear similar to Latin scribal abbreviations. Doesn't seem like a stretch to me that whoever wrote the VMS would be familiar with scribal abbreviations. This is not to say that the underlying language, if there is one, is Latin or that the things in the VMS that look like Latin scribal abbreviations are functioning as Latin scribal abbreviations would. What sticks in my craw is that, as J. K. Petersen has pointed out on their blog (see e.g. the posts 'The Chameleon Quality of Scribal Conventions' or 'Voynich Script - The Leaning Letter and Why I Never Use the Eva Font') and as I'm sure you would have come across many times, scribal abbreviations did not have a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship with what they represented. The same glyph could represent a variety of different sounds/syllables/words etc depending on context. I don't have any sort of theory of what any of the VMS symbols stand for or that any of them are abbreviations or shorthand. These observations don't make it any more or less likely, in my opinion, that the VMS was somehow generated without an underlying meaningful language (whether as a hoax or for any other reason) no more or less likely. They are just a reason I don't find comparisons of the VMS transcriptions with natural languages satisfying. What I desperately dream of is a comparison of the VMS text with transcriptions of manuscripts written in the Latin alphabet from the late 14th and early 15th centuries. As far as I can tell there are not many "raw data" transcriptions like that available, since anyone who was both willing and able to read the original, abbreviated text for whatever reason would be likely to just read it in the original hand/original manuscript. I do wonder what a statistical analysis of texts like that would look like though. It would certainly differ from natural languages. The question would then be whether it differed from the natural languages that it was representing in similar ways to the ways the VMS text differs from natural languages. Like, if I wrote "M8, I h8 K8 & I'm l8 4 a d8 & don't want 2 w8 2 mins 4 a mid w8 gold pl8" that is not enciphered but neither would a statistical analysis show that it behaved like the natural language (although admittedly gibberish-esque) sentence it is meant to represent, "Mate, I hate Kate and I'm late for a date and don't want to wait two minutes for a mid weight gold plate. So I just hope one day there'll be a large enough database of raw transcriptions of mediaeval manuscripts for such an analysis to be possible.
Just for my understanding: weren't there words, that seem to be linked to the different chapters of the manuscript? So, words that appear only in the herbal section, words that appear only in the astrological section, etc. - Wouldn't that be a hint that the text is linked to the pictures and might contain information after all? And a question: I guess somebody has already tried Bacon-code on the manuscript (Quasi-binary encryption)? What supports this is a vast amount of words containing five letters. And aside from that, the letters are very distinctivly seperated in two forms: with and without a circle. In codes that I have seen, the letters itself were quite unimportant, important was if they had a circle (which stood for "0") or not (which stood for "1"), sometimes even combined (a "d" would be 01, a "p" would be 10, a "B" would be 100 for example). This could even explain the regular character of the words as the letters itself have no meaning and their usage and distribution may vary over time. You also can't easily check if what you wrote is correct, which easily explains the absence of corrections. The Bacon-code was invented by Roger Bacon in the 13th century, so could be very possible. But I guess somebody has already fed this to some computer...?
Love it. I think I came to the same conclusion, without your amazing research. Just knowing that modern cryptography and the speed of computers can break almost anything given time, kind of killed the idea there is anything to decrypt. Though it is still strange that someone went through the effort to have any kind of algorithm past random letters. It seems like the first person you sell it to isn't going to do entropy analysis and statistical letter distributions.
I should send Susan a nicely worded message to thank for putting your videos in my recommendations. I'm finding your videos endlessly entertaining and insightful.
Best Voynich analysis I've ever seen. As a programmer who has done a good amount of work in conlangs and language generation, it seems to me like if this is the product of an algorithm, then it can be reverse engineered computationally, or at least, one could show proofs that certain specific candidate algorithms could produce voynichese.
@@TheEsotericaChannel you could allow for some degree of error tolerance, or even just outright rejection of blocks that dont fit the pattern (mark those as possibly stochastic), and then look at things like the amount of these uninterpretable blocks vs pattern-fitting blocks (noise vs signal ratio). This could translate into a confidence score for each candidate algorithm. All this notwithstanding, it is still very strange that it exists at all. Obviously, the theory that it was made as a fake to sell to a collector makes pretty good sense, and is probably the answer, but there could be stranger reasons... something that comes to mind is almost a John Dee-Enochian tables type situation, where it is some type of "trance transcription", perhaps aided by ceremonial intoxicants. I think a useful data point would be to know how long it actually took the scribe(s) to compose the entire thing.
@@TheEsotericaChannel I'm also wondering what kinds of statistical analyses have been done on the corpus... like, are we just looking at it from a lexical level? Or are we looking at second-order structural patterns, i.e. parsing a theoretical grammar out of it? This kind of analysis can be done totally agnostically to any lexical content... you'd just find every unique lemma , and record a series of data points for each one, basically the position in the "sentence" every time the string is encountered, and then a kind of graph showing the "adjacency weight" of every lemma to every other one. From here you would probably use a neural network trained on real world language data, and you'd be able to work out candidate part-of-speech markups for the whole document. THEN from there , you'd be able to get a general idea of how well those actual candidate grammars correspond in their properties to real grammars, i.e. how "realistic" or likely to be the grammar of a real language it is.
As you were talking through this and the motivation one might have for producing such a work with apparently no meaning or utility, a thing called Temple OS came to my mind. It's a computer operating system written by a wildly gifted but mentally ill person. It's amazing that one person could write this thing and it functions as designed but it's of essentially no use to anyone. It occurs to me that perhaps this is also the work of a disturbed mind that became obsessed with the production of something that perhaps was being dictated by the voices in his head. Some religious christians do "speaking in tongues" where they are "convinced" that the noises they are making have some grand and lofty meaning. Perhaps the writer had something similar going on in their head and sought a means to write it down because they were convinced that it had a great value.
This was so fascinating, and I completely agree. I had seen a statistical breakdown of the Voynich “vocabulary” on a YT video a couple of months ago, and was instantly convinced it was a hoax. I’m really surprised this is not the overwhelming opinion. I learned a lot from this video, even though I already knew quite a bit, and I’m so glad you made it. Even though I subscribe to the medieval hoax theory, I’m definitely with you on hoping I’m proven wrong some day.
Typically erudite and charming, thanks. It's always seemed pretty obvious to me that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax. But it's an extremely well done, and even humorous hoax. Bravo to its creators, who continue to find true believers after more than five hundred years. Glad I'm subscribed, keep up the good work. Cheers from overcast Vienna, Scott
This sounds like something I would do as a kid. I would love to headcanon that this is some medieval kid who got his hands on his parents expensive work materials. It’s the access to the material, but apparent lack of skill or knowledge of the craft. It’s so goofy and mediocre, but the material so pricey, it is exactly the kind of expensive mess a kid would make make
I used to hate this idea because it felt underwhelming to me, like there's all this mystery and hidden meaning surrounding it and it all just amounts to nothing? But now that you've given me a decent explanation for why someone in the middle ages would create such an elaborate hoax, I think I kinda love the idea. Some writer scamming the holy roman emperor into getting a year and a half's salary and then completely baffling future historians entirely through trickery and manipulation of symbols feels magical in its own way even if it's not ritual magic or "real" occultism
OK I've been watching for a long time now and this is easily one of the best ones yet (in a already crowded field of great videos you've done) brilliant professor, I loved this, thank you 🙏👍👌🖤
(I am no scholar and English is not my first language) I don't think it matters if it is a hoax or not. It is as important as any other mystical text or book, as it shows humanity's obsession with the unknown. And much of the manuscripts appeal might be that it seems so bizarre, so we want it to mean something more, even when a part of us thinks it doesn't. All this time has only made it more "mysterious" as we have a belief there is, or want to believe there is some old sacred lost knowledge. For example: An old religious sect is much more interesting to us than a new one. As the passing of time "validates" a belief system and/or it's "importance". I also think there is a prestige aspect to it, as the person(s) eventually solving it will be remembered. And that keeps people going after all these years. As you said, and I am paraphrasing; "We never read a text, but we read ourselves". I think the people who try to solve it often use their own background, education, religion, and that "colours" their perception too much. If it is eventually solved, it will most likely be disappointing. Because it will not live up to all the mystery that has been built around it. And it will certainly never be about what people want it to be. It might just have been made because someone wanted to own or make a mysterious book. Given it's crude nature I think that might be what it is. The great amount of money used, was used so it didn't get dismissed right away. Anyway it is a "600 year old mystery story", and the collective consciousness has added so many theories through the years. So the mystery acts as a "gateway-drug" to get people into all the different subjects that have been tied to the manuscript. So it's value is as a catalyst for further studies
@@TheEsotericaChannel Yes! Your fluency in cryptographic vocabulary makes it really clear how much you have researched this. I liked how I had to look up definitions of several words you said, lol. I think the manuscript is likely a hoax, but that doesn't make its story less interesting at all. Not regretting my patreon membership! -V from the North Shore
Listening to this something came to mind. A sample or prop book. In movies and plays you often need prop books. And many publishers have sample books. What if this was a business's production sample and they made it cheaply but had smaller examples in higher quality materials. This would even explain missing pages as they may have given out sample pages.
The VM looks readable to a lot of people. I can read Cyrillic, so it looked extra readable to me. I too have spent thousands of hours over a number of years, using my crude methods to read the manuscript. One of my ancient in-laws may have been involved with obtaining the manuscript back in the 1400's, so I also feel a connection. I am glad you mention that multiple scribes wrote it. To me, this argues a bit against an elaborate hoax. I believe the underlying language is a Serbo-Croatian dialect with Turkic language and influence. I believe the writing is based upon Croatian Glagolitic Cursive which is vastly different from regular glagolitic. It appears to me the cursive system was partly constructed from Turkic scripts. In March 2018, the Ardic family in Calgary, Canada, were in the news presenting a Turkic solution for part of the VM text. Their system worked on certain parts which they presented. (I am not yet able to fully understand their system.) While there are few mistakes in the VM, there are examples where the scribes seemed to say, 'To hell with this garbage', and they inserted some very old Cyrillic letters. One example is almost an add on, like the scribe knew the word and sound he had to make but could not remember the VM character. To me, this indicates someone was trying to actually say something. Perhaps it indicates there were actual sounds, phonemes, involved in the text. In 1400's Eastern Europe there were many dialects, and alphabets varied from district to district and duchy to duchy. Our modern alphabet is a luxury! I believe there is actual information present. The big letters, the 'gallows letters', I believe are combined letters or sounds. Likewise what looks like two C's with a bar atop c__c (bar on top), also can represent multiple letters or sounds. This particular character makes a lot of changes throughout the text. This character figured heavily in the work of the Ardic family. It has a lot of different uses. Again, I think the complexity of the use of this character argues against a hoax. Some of the claimed absolute solutions to the VM had common weaknesses in the system. I have heard the VM is in Hebrew. A problem with Hebrew is that vowels are fairly optional. Lots of things can be made from Hebrew. (Remember the 'Bible Code' from a number of decades ago?) The Ardic's Turkic system allows portions of the words for numbers to be inserted with certain marks over the c__c character. (They have stated their system might be able to translate about 30% of the manuscript.) The word you call "daiin", I translate as "samo" meaning only or alone in Serbo-Croatian. I believe my system has yielded some fantastic results which I have shared in various places. Some are captions with the crazy pictures. While my work yields descriptions of some pictures, the results are something I would never guess. I believe if the big letters and the c__c thing was fully understood, full translation could proceed. I have researched enough ancient esoterica to know by now that there is unlikely to be found spectacular knowledge unknown to us today. I am extremely curious about the people who wrote and devised the VM, and it's area of origin. I want to know if it is written in a lost dialect, using a lost writing system. Even if it is some kind of hoax, the hoaxers were likely familiar with the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Turkic writing systems. So, who were they? (I had a lot of fun with the VM and believe I have discovered some things. Late in 2019 my household of eight people, and I, had COVID. [None of us were horribly ill. We had all previously had severe "unknown" viruses which were prevalent in our area and which did far more damage than we experienced from COVID.] New Year's Eve, 2020, I had found some interesting things in the VM and I very much looked forward to the next day. I awoke feeling like an axe went through my skull. For decades I have had chronic, severe, genetic migraine. That is part of the reason I had a lot of time to work with the VM. After COVID I had daily migraine and a feeling of severe depression for months. I got rid of the depression but the migraines now come every week and last several days. In many ways I have accepted disability. My husband always said I had a lot of ambition but not the health to back it up. Maybe he was right. I do not know if I will ever again be able to work on the VM.)
The text very much reminds me of placeholder text for books, offered by any layout programm, filling in any given space with thousands of words of a nonsensical - yet latin-sounding - text, starting with "lorem ipsum"… The manuscript may just as well be a book showing interested customers the abilities of the staff of writers, inluding interesting-looking imagery and placeholder text :)
Never know it could have been part of an elaborate “scam” of the times, as it seems too “costly” both for time & money to be just purely for nonsensical “jokes” or pranking ppl at the time. However thank you ESOTERICA for talking about this as a topic X 👏🏻🙌🏻🥰😁☺️👌🏻👍🏻
Question/s: The image from the manuscript at around 16:45 in the video shows a relatively perfect circle of text, and the internal circle with much more imagery and detail, that also has text, and not nearly as circular, so I am asking if anyone thinks that was a lapse in the design, or intentional? I'm also wondering if in some way this may be a depiction of a spherical object, or a solar system, since there seems to be a star in the middle?
Regarding the cost of two large folio volumes, 62 livres 11 sous equals 1251 sous. Since 480 sous was 1 ounce of gold, 1251 sous is about 2.6 ounces of gold.
I thought, for a long time, that this was probably the work of a single monk who suffered with extreme anxiety, maybe on the Autism spectrum. I've seen people build their own worlds, complete with plants, rituals, recipes, and languages, because it makes them feel calmer. To be clear, you've seen that too, I'm pretty sure that's what Lord of the Rings is. I thought, okay, this person liked writing and wasn't a great drawer, that's okay, not everyone is great at drawing. I'm not ruling it out, but it being a Medieval hoax makes a lot of sense. I can't really shake the idea that the words mean nothing, it's basically just a pattern that they followed, and that's why there are no mistakes in the writing. That's just a little bit too plausible. Something else that I've thought about a lot since I first watched this video is that the world was expanding rapidly at that point, from a European perspective. A century or two before, you might see people from Africa or Arabia, some limited goods would be flowing in from the Silk Road, but your world was pretty small and almost exclusively European. By the time this book was created, ships were becoming stronger, and they could preserve food for longer, and suddenly, you have a flood of goods and people from Asia, goods and people from parts of Africa you didn't even know about, and goods and people from an entire continent no one in Europe knew was there. In the middle of all of that, in the middle of the introduction of chocolate and corn and tomatoes and coffee and tea and textiles comes this book. Where is this thing from? All of these plants are new to you, what are they, where are they from? What language is this? This would be the perfect time to hastily turn out a codex full of nothing in an attempt to sell it to the highest bidder. I'd like to believe it was a personal passion project, but the hoax idea fits a little bit too well, especially with the social climate at that time.
Thank you for this Dr Sledge. 👍 Like many, I have been fascinated by the Voynich MS for decades (yes, I’m old 😆). I rarely comment but watch and enjoy your discussions regularly. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Excellent and thorough contribution - a trademark of your channel - to the ongoing discussion and lingering mystery of the manuscript. What strikes me, after listening to your very plausible albeit tentative conclusion of this being an elaborate hoax that fetched a good penny on the market, is its conspicuous singularity. The art market is full of hoaxes, some of them surviving and fetching good pennies for centuries, yet in this genre? maybe you have a broader birds eye vision of the landscape of textual hoaxes over the centuries. I very much enjoyed the philosophical /psychological introductory notes about the dichotomy of us looking into a text vs the message staring at us without a condensate of information forming on the screen that separates the two! thanks so much 🙏
What I find the most fascinating about this story is that the creators of the manuscript clearly anticipated that their work would be examined by experts who might be able to tell the difference between an unknown language and random strings of characters.
I like to imagine the scribes joking over some beer after a copying shift imagining all the people they'd fool - I wonder if they got close to guessing the scale of the success of their hoax
I did some work on this about 15 years ago, and found one of the translated lines of text was "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
I think for me it's the mystery of it I love. Real or not, I don't think I ever want it solved. Keep it a puzzle to ponder over. That said, the repeated words and variations stood out to me from your lecture. Makes me wonder if we need to remove all that repetition and then focus on deciphering what is left as the "real" message.
I think that even as a hoax, it's very interesting. If it is true, I'd like to know why they went through so much trouble to do the language in this way, especially when the rest of the book seems to have been done relatively poorly. I'm sure forgeries didn't need to be this complex to work back then, so what would be the point? And, what was the process? Where did it originate? Why wasn't it used again? I think questions like this would still have plenty interesting answers.
Excellent video. The hoax hypothesis makes me think of false diaries of oriental travels like the Travels of Sir John Mandeville and some versions of Marco Polo. I could imagine this manuscript being presented as coming from the Indies -- people would assume it was written in an unknown writing system and language.
I just briefly looked at the script and what you say makes a lot of sense. I also strongly suspect that the scribes weren’t really literate, they knew only some words, and that ignorance actually helped them create a far more interesting and mysterious looking language. I think they were mostly drawing letters rather than writing them and that’s why there’s so much repetition and also how and why it changes the way it does. I kinda love the idea of very clever but poorly educated peasants pulling this off.
To hold such a document so dearly for years, as you have, and to conclude that it was a hoax all along... That takes a real level of maturity that surpasses some academics that I know
It occurs to me that a book of prayers or mantras or songs could be highly repetitive. I don’t know if it fits or not, but repetition can easily be part of a real text, particularly if the text includes prayers, mantras, or spells, and does not contain your usual structured sentences or phrases.
Maybe this manuscript is like a late medieval version of the Piltdown Man hoax. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this, he figured it was done as a joke that got out of hand, and could no longer be retracted once it was out in the open.
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It's a book with a latinised version of alpine water nymphs "myth". They manage the mountain water.
Thank you for providing more information about this topic. However, I have heard NOTHING about the 2 guys who said the language was a very old version of the Turkish language. What happened to their work? Do you know?
I love how his cadence has changed from purely lecture-like education to a dry-humored, goofy professor. He's so good at humanizing everything he teaches in a professional yet entertaining way. One of my favorite TH-camrs!
Goofy.... goofy?
Goofy seems off
More like relatable
The way a funny friend would explain a serious topic
I remember a Tool concert joke that Dr. Justin made a long while back in one of his videos a little over a year ago. I wouldn't say so much goofy, but just... High brow, super dry humor. I feel like we all know and understand this niche, haha
The correct adjective is down to earth, but yes, he is one of my favorite Tubers too
Garsh
This brilliant blend of academia and entertainment proves that it’s totally possible to deliver the latter without sacrificing the former. 🔥
That's the hope!
@TheEsotericaChannel "Education should delight as well as instruct " You certainly do! Thank you! ❤
As disappointing as it would be it it were proven to be a hoax, it would still be one of the most fascinating, ridiculously-elaborate and convincing hoaxes in all of history, which would be at least a quarter as cool as if it actually meant something.
How would it be disappointing then if it's meaningless or if you found no meaning in it other than it's purporting to be something it's likely not. It doesn't even have the slightest reference to anything in any milieu to latch onto and make one go, mmm that might mean something...nothing. Even psychedelics weirdness has something to offer in its strangeness. I think VM's one accomplishment is getting folks to try and decipher it at all to no avail.
I think it would be hilarious if it were a hoax even though I would love for it's meaning to be discovered
@@babylonisfallen4411 I think it's an elaborate medieval distraction hoax made by a drunken monk apprentice. It defies decryption and language logic and its images aren't even fantastically resonant. Monks would not know what an animal from another continent looked like so why would they suddenly know about animals or plants from another dimension whatever. There's no internal logic to it and I think the point of it as a hoax is to get SOME people's wheels turning trying to decode it, when it's not even imaginative nor sparks the imagination. Not even a hint or clue. Better off reading a slew of actually meaningful fantasy or more of esoterica lectures and thoughts by Terence Mckenna as well.
its pretty impressive. a bunch of medieval scammers managed to fool the worlds greatest linguists and cryptographers for over a century and perhaps more.
@@Blox117 It depends how you look at it. Maybe the supposed conmen managed to "fool" the linguists and cryptographers, but if there's no hidden meaning to begin with, have the experts really been "fooled" or defeated?
It would be like me handing you a box full of jigsaw puzzle pieces and challenging you to complete the jigsaw when in fact I threw together a bunch of random pieces from many different jigsaws. Have you been "fooled" if you can't complete the puzzle? Looks like I would be the fool in that story!
I always figured this was like a scribe training thing. Like a group of scribes practicing making a manuscript. At the end probably put it all together as like a class project kind of thing to remember
I have a complete colour reproduction of the Voynich Manuscript, it's called "The Voynich Manuscript" published by Beinecke Book & Manuscript Library, and is edited by Raymond Clemens. It cost about 100 GBP, and is wonderful. Its a complete, 1:1 size colour reproduction with many fold outs for the more complex diagrams.
I've spent many hours engrossed in it, and would most highly recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest.
I have the same one!
@@TheEsotericaChannel book buddies!
I wonder what the editor edited lol
I have the complete pdf version of the manuscript. Hoping to get a physical print someday!
@@diverguy3556 I also recommend the Codex Seraphinianus, a book inspired by the Voynich Manuscript. I have a physical copy, just incredible
Great video! My hunch has always been that the author(s) of the Voynich was similar to Tolkien - building their own fictional world and language, and that the text was an encyclopaedia for that fictional world.
I always loved the xkcd strip that depicted it as a DM’s journal
on occasion i’ve wondered if it’s some board rich kid’s art project that unintentionally ended up out in the world without context and then people do what people do and got fixated on the mystery, but a person throwing it out as a money making hoax does seem pretty likely
Could be!
It's a reasonable possibility.
If I recall correctly, the script itself was found in a chest that was used for children's books. I believe I read this a long time ago when I was roughly around 9-10 years old (90's era).
@@badtaste311 1490's era
One of the missing sections starts: "To my darling Sandy, for all her patience and support. All persons mentioned in this book are fictional; any resemblance to any persons, living or dead..."
Nice to see the Red Dwarf quote here!
I didn’t get the reference and still thought it was funny, time to finally watch Red Dwarf I guess.
@@kylenewberry9792 only series 1-6 are worth watching, and the first episode of series 7
This is the kind of channel where you can safely assume everyone has heard of the Voynich Manuscript and most of us probably tinkered with trying to figure it out at some point in our youth.
i didnt know about it and im a level 10 blue mage
I've got better things to do with my time lol
new subscriber I'm assuming 😂
This just popped up on my feed. Not familiar with it whatsoever. 😅
Where can you find the scans of the entire thing? I have only been able to find singular pages and not in the best quality.
I think the theory you expressed at 10:20 is quite intriguing. I imagine someone who can speak and understand a certain language, but had no schooling in reading or writing that language. It's possible the author constructed his own homebrew method for writing the language.
that means that someone would be the only one in all of humanity whod understand it.
I never considered the idea of the text in the Voynich Manuscript to be entirely originated by an algorithm, but now that I see its properties (repetitions, and especially the gradual "evolution" from repating some clusters to others) it really looks very likely.
As a musician myself, it reminds me some not uncommon compositive tools used in contemporary Music in the last century, aimed to create a complex, sometimes apparent random/chaotic outcome, but starting from very elementary material (this is findable from serialism to minimalism, through a vast range of styles and languages).
[Not implying that VM is actually music score, of course - that's probably the case of Edward Elgar's Dorabella Code, but this is another story.]
Since I've been following you from some months, but this is almost surely my first comment, I'd also add a thank you for your videos! :)
When I was younger
I wrote fake texts in fake scripts and left them around campus to drive linguists crazy. And this was before I had even heard of the Voynich manuscript.
Lol I used to make a secret script to write in English so my brothers couldn't get my journal and black mail me or anything
@@YaakovEzraAmiChi
I still do that.
Same! I had this lazy fascination with making a fractal written language that radiated outward from a central node, instead of written lines or columns.
most likely it just got thrown away
@@pkre707 Gallifreyan?
Thanks, Dr. S! A great end to the work week. Put this towards your next boilermaker. Cheers!
Excellent choice of theme, this manuscript has always intrigued me. I’m so glad you decided to do this , your channel has filled a void in this algorithm that to ppl like me interested in everything and anything occult, hidden, or not known would otherwise not be found , thanks!👍🔥
Thank you so much!
@@TheEsotericaChannel your work is absolutely unique in its content and delivery , well researched is not enough to convey the easily seen natural interest you have in the world of the unknown, research can be done but the approach is the difference here. Keep up the good work, it has been more than noticed by the esoteric community, may your light keep shining bright! Blessed be👍
I have that same book, bought it as a birthday present to myself. Haven't unwrapped it from the cling wrap....lol
I've worked in clinical settings with certain people who obsessively create elaborate private languages and symbols that in fact have no meaning at all that anyone else could ever share. I wonder if this is in that class?
I was thinking exactly this throughout the video. Perhaps the writer believed he was transcribing a message given to him in the language of angels, describing another reality that he could see in visions/hallucinations. Or maybe the language is a sort of intellectual glossolalia.
Here's a blog post about the same idea (not mine, but I find the idea worth considering):
worldwithwords.blogspot.com/2008/10/hypergraphia-graphomania-and-voynich.html
@@TrudeHell Thanks for another rabbit hole for me to go down. Very interesting post.
Yeah, the flow and repetition seems like someone experiencing graphorrhea from schizophrenia might write. It also explains how it keeps a zipfian and binomial distribution despite being hindreds of years before either distribution was discovered. Especially in the hastily-written style and unrealistic plants and astrological imagery. I wonder if an AI could identify this as potentially indicative of disordered thinking using either textual or image thematic cues.
@@lilamjazeefa9466 I wonder if/how we could get this to people who are researching this for a possible lead?
I’ve always believed the Voynich was the work of a “crazy”creative type. Touched by fire. Probably someone of some social and economic stature too. It was their personal diary and sketch book. Kept them occupied. And it’s beaten all the computational analysis because it was the writing of someone mentally ill, yet had some semblance of lucidity at times. It reminds me too much of graphomania.
Your personal history with the VMS is so heartwarming and nostalgic to me. I never did any serious work on it, but I also got that scratchy Yale copyflo as a gift when I was 17! Interesting discussion about the hoax possibilities as well, of course. I agree it seems unlikely to be a medieval cipher or any exotic language. But if, as you say, the "cryptological horizon" at the time was low, the cryptanalytic horizon was the same. I have to wonder why even a dedicated hoaxer would go to the trouble of devising a system clever enough to show language-like features to even present-day tests, when no prospective buyer would have the tools to distinguish the results from something purely arbitrary. And how likely would someone with such a different mindset from that of our own era be to come up with such an "algorithm?" Still, it's possible, which is more than can be said for many Voynich theories! I do also hope it's not a hoax, though. (Especially if it turns out to be something nobody's even thought of yet!)
There have been some experiments with young people to create non-sense texts with loose patterns that have yielded interesting results. Especially is a person has some Latin, it's not hard to take a couple of 'root' words and mutate them according to loose rules.
The fact that the Voynicheese respect the Zipf law may simply be a consequence (by design) of the "algorithm" used to create the content (text). Why do you jump automatically to an extraordinary anachronic conclusion where there is only a "quasi-mechanical" method involved?
We love your tidbits of wild humor, like dnd references, music references, etc.
Keep rocking!
Whenever I see all the illustrations of women in tubs connected by pipes, it looks to me like some sort of symbolic representation of a process. But then, I've been a computer programmer for years and have looked at lots of flow charts, process charts, state machines, and data flow diagrams, so that is definitely influencing how I process images like these.
I think the Talmud says something like "We never read a text, we only ever read ourselves."
It is how the ancient aliens people seebthe world it seems - thing look like thing, thing must be thing! But for the rest of us this is pretty usual too, we just don't run with it - I often look at way people in the past named things, and wonder why did you name this natural thing that was there forever, with comparison to a much newer thing? I can't t think of many examples in English, but one example being s monkey in the South America called 'the Englishman' for it's red face. Excuse me, sir, what was it called before anyone had seen English people? Ok now I thought of one -; foxglove, again, gloves are not that old an invention, the plant came before, yet people looked at it and went, it looks like a glove, for a fox. Let's name it that. Before it what did they say - the flower that resembles nothing? (in Finland btw it is known as 'thimble flower' so again, naming after a familiar newer thing).
all bathtubs are indirectly connected to each other if they are connected to the water main in the city. the water is the shared commodity, thusly the bath tubs are interconnected (but in reality not quite like in the drawing.) It is like a shared subconscious that connects minds, but again not directly, but all minds have access to the same pool of information which is older than the mind.
Insightful. Read up a little on the Kabbala, the Tree of Life and the Sephirophs. Arcane processes were big deals at this stage of history, and almost everything was used to represent them.
plot twist: it's part of the Missionaria Protectiva spread by the Bene Gesserit
Wouldn't that be a gas?
Love it!
I'm almost 100% sure that you are right. The thing is: If this is a hoax, and it is a hoax, it's still conducted in an utterly brilliant way and has no equal. It's impossible to improvise such a nonsense text with multiple persons involved without first very thoroughly reflecting on what is needed to make the non-text appear textlike.
No.
@capnmnemo Yes
@@alfredbackhus6110 define hoax, and how do you know it is one?
It seems like if it was a successful hoax, there would be more examples. Of course there are other fake books, but in terms of texts using a similar hypothetical method of generation, why is there only just one?
Maybe it was actually unsuccessful at the time--the hoaxers couldn't sell it, and it wasn't until many years later that it started being passed around as something authentic. But still seems weird that other fake books wouldn't try to use similar methods
Awesome episode Dr Sledge. I applied a Sephardic key by changing the letters that are not Solitreo ie, Greek and the weird ones. And this is what I got for the first line, Front page
First Paragraph
First line
Word
My person who represents my ancestors begins this which I’m able to understand in my mind that it changes in its cosmic cycle of life and death.
as we traveled he directed our attention to everything that moved in the cosmos.
Everything that is has their place and state
He said that everything changes and it's impregnated with the primal force of its source.
Its physical existence and response is impregnated in this world with the achievement of its vital impregnation.
It contains the seed or its place and state.
He said that life and death is the precursor of the life and death of the universe and this is the state and place of the life and death of the universe.
He said change is the origin of the state and being of the universe.
The response of life in the universe originates from what is made in what it holds and how it changes.
Write up a methodology and publish a few folios in Cryptologia and you'll be famous! You mind posting your pre-translation?
@@TheEsotericaChannel i can email you they first page translation. It took me about 6 months. If I had that alphabetic transliteration I could program an ai to kind of make sense of it. The translation is weird because there’s no exact translation. A letter has a definition but to make sense of the context some accommodations need to be made. It’s not exact. This is why I gave up. No one will accept it.
It’s Jewish, for example aleph means life and death but the context needs to fit within the context of the following and previous letters.
No one will accept it because it's obviously none-sense.
Wow, I was remembering how the last update I ever heard on this manuscript was in fact that it was related to some obscure or older form of Hebrew. Great work! Can't wait to see an actual translation! Keep up the good work!
"We have been trying to reach you regarding your cart's extended service warranty..."
At this point it seems like the most valuable information we can mine from the Manuscript is less about direct content and more about structure.
Cryptographic analysis and statistical linguistics seem like fascinating fields.
Great introduction, as coming across the Voynich rabbit-hole years back grabbed me by the shirt collar and dragged me into the world of anything and everything occult and/or esoteric. Following the updates over the years, I seen the Turkish hypothesis but the most recent one was with some algorithm finding it to be Hebrew in some way, or if I remember correctly, at least pulling from it some old proto-Hebrew/Phoenician words from the "text". Bravo on another great episode and I send love and light up to the highest and mightiest of YT algorithm gods for delivering me to your great channel.
Thank you so much for going into the linguistic details of the manuscript and situating it in the known context of other manuscripts of the time. This is material you never hear from traditional videos or documentaries about the Voynich Manuscript, and I feel like they’re really important to settling on a theory of its production. Thank you!
I've shared your decades-long fascination with the VM, and I've reached a very similar tentative conclusion. As Oscar Wilde almost said, 'There are two tragedies in life - not understanding the Voynich Manuscript, and understanding it.'
Jack Payne, Perfect!
as a matematician i am delighted by this manuscript and your eloquent video and explanation of it!!! will definitely check out your rec list!! thank you infinitely!!
I do have an alternative explanation - not a better one, maybe even a worse one, just an alternative - that it is a product of 'automatic writing'. Glossolalia usually produces fairly repetitive, language like sounds, and automatic writing could be expected to do the same. It would explain the low quality as well, a hoax does also, but a hoaxer might have been more careful in making the lines straight and the pictures perhaps a little neater.
Automatic writing would be sort of self- hoax , so the text could share similar features of repetition, and random change. Both would go on producing text that looks like text, which would have satisfied a hoaxer, but also motivated a religious mystic or possibly s manic person to continue.
If it can be proven several writers worked with the manuscript, this would make an automatic writing text less likely.
As for why make the hoax? Besides money, some rich and idle people have spent inordinate amounts of time and money on practical jokes, or elaborate art containing jokes, so it could well just be someone getting one over on someone else. Perhaps some very rich eccentric had a grudge on some scholar, or a group of, and dropped this amount to have this book made, just to laugh in his sleeve as people seriously studied his fake book, and it was just luck his prank never came to light.
Hey... good thought... I had to study that at University.... much more than I wanted .lol
I had the same idea, having grown up in "speaking in tongues" churches where that sort of glossolalia is common. However, it doesn't really resemble automatic writing to my eyes. The hand is too neat and even, and the word patterns don't fit well. Automatic writing is typically done blinded, often under the influence of some psychoactive substance induced trance-state, and tends to be either more repetitive or more random. This falls somewhere in the middle. The fact that it's organized around the illustrations also argues against
I'd say it's more characteristic of some type of obsessional writing, ie. graphomania/graphorrhea/hypergraphia; which tends to have these kinds of word/phrase repetitions, and very often goes along with the same sort of crude drawings. If it is, as research indicates, the work of more than one author, that wouldn't necessarily rule out obsessional writing by at least one of the authors, possibly imitated by other authors (hence the shift in word pattern from the A text to the B text, and the quasi-stochastic presentation of the text). It also wouldn't necessarily rule out a multi-phase work by the same author over a much longer period of time; again with potential modification/addition by later authors attempting to produce something likely to sell for a substantial amount of money to a wealthy and credulous collector.
I know I'm far from the only person to make that association as well; obsessional writing has long been a popular hypothesis for the manuscript's origin.
Hands down thee most interesting and knowledgeable video of the vms and def a breathe of fresh air finally a real researcher with actual level headed conclusions that are worth listening to - love this channel
I've been watching your channel for quite some time, but I honestly usually watch/listen to your videos as something to relax before bed, or to fall asleep to... hopefully you understand I don't mean that in any negative way at all; your voice is very calming, and the topics you cover are inherently fascinating, but as someone who was raised outside of any faith tradition, and finds themselves without any natural inclination whatsoever toward religious faith, in fact quite the opposite, that fascination is also at arm's length and without any emotional or 'serious' engagement, hence the 'good for falling asleep' category.
But right off the bat, in this video, the fact that you are presenting a view I haven't seen commonly talked about... heck, just the fact that you are presenting a clear opinion or your own personal perspective, or expert conclusion or assessment, on a topic like this is way more immediately interesting to me.... I would probably watch your content in a much more engaged way if you were putting more of your own opinion and perspective into these... although, I super understand that for a lot of the topics you cover, that wouldn't be reasonable or appropriate, and that for many topics, your goal is simply to educate, which you are doing an excellent job of. I certainly have no criticism of your content, lol. But if there are other opportunities where you have a strong opinion on a contested matter, I would love to know what you think
Incredibly interesting perspective, nice to hear from someone who has worked for years trying to decode the thing
I already listened to a lot of things about the manuscript, but I just never tire of it honestly :) thank you for a cool video
Are there any similar hoax documents that you're aware of? Like, Voynich tends to be treated as a singular object, but if it's a relatively uncomplicated process for the creation of the text, then I would have expected other people to come up with the same idea.
Lots of forged deeds and bureaucratic documents but nothing on this scale that I know of.
@@TheEsotericaChannel Thanks. To me that makes it more interesting as a hoax, than simply an untranslated technical manual.
The Codex Seriphinianus is a fascinating book - it’s an art project by an Italian Architect, but it quite beautiful and fascinating
The Vinland Map comes to mind. No language involved and no where near as elaborate but it's story is interesting. Someone bound it into because of the controversy. It was another Yale acquisition.
While it definitely isn't a hoax, Tianshu, "A Book from the Sky" might be in similar vein. Tianshu is most definitely a work of art, a singular object. It does share with VM the fact that "it looks like meaningful text". One Chinese critic wrote of Tianshu that it's "ghosts building walls" --- once could just about tease this sentiment out of this video.
Pictures of creatures that don't exist combined with incomprehensible words? Obviously a tabletop roleplaying game.
I always thought the illustrations look quite shoddy, but everybody was oohing and ahhing over them. You're the first one I've heard say it out loud, so thank you for that! Great video all the way. Looks like the thesis is unfortunately correct.
I've read that words on the same line are often repetitive or similar in the manuscript, but what strikes me is that there seems to be similar repetition and mutation vertically, i.e. a word often resembles one above it. So, you could make a calculation about how much spatial proximity correlates to similarity in the words. You could also predict which other page(s) the scribe has used as inspiration for any given page.
I love this manuscript and have been invested in this mystery for many years now but this is by far my favorite theory. I would love for its creator/s to know that people are still poring over it in our time. They got us!!
That was great!! 😊I too hope it’s not a hoax but with modern technology and modern scientific minds going through it over & over, it’s making me believe it just might be 😕
The early 1500s would have been a prime time to produce a phony book of "esoteric lore" purporting to be from the recently discovered new continent to the west. Most Europeans would have known diddly-squat about America, so an enterprising scribe (or small team of scribes) could pretty much make up anything and sell it as "the notebook of a learned Aztec doctor of Natural Philosophy." The apparent subject matter of the Voynich matches with other "books of knowledge" being produced in Europe at the time. The format, in terms of cheapness of materials, sloppiness of illustrations, and casualness of penmanship, matches well with the idea of a student's notebook (still a very common item in an era when printing was in its infancy). The hoax theory also perfectly explains why none of the plants in the herbal section can be identified. They're all fake. They come from an imaginary world which the author may have claimed was the New World.
It's possible this book was not produced merely to sell, but could have been a prop used as part of a more elaborate con in which someone traveled around pretending to be a Learned Aztec Doctor of Natural Philosophy. Keep in mind this was a time when bogus alchemists were successfully swindling the wealthy nobility out of large quantities of gold. There was definitely profit to be gained from something like this. The more I think about it, the more the hoax theory makes sense ... but how could it ever be proven?
I’m always reminded, when it comes to hoax occult texts, of the Black Pullet. A work of someone who, while directly aping the style of an occult text, was specifically intended to contain no true magical information. When I look at the Voynich Manuscript, my thought is that it is either a parody of or love letter to encrypted occult manuscripts. Someone reproducing not the information within these texts, but capturing the experience and emotion of encountering an “indecipherable” grimoire for a layman, almost in the style of the modern Dragonology children’s book series. Not only that, but the author did such a damn good job that it still tickles the imagination of laymen, occult enthusiasts, expert occultists and academics even to this day.
To me, the most mysterious part of the book isn't the pictures or the writing, it's that there aren't more books like it around. I've long suspected it was a forgery myself, and knowing how relatively easily one can make it, I'm surprised that no one else, not even the original author, did the scam a second time.
Wow wow wow, the introduction about cyphers is so well written, we don't deserve such luxury haha.
I really enjoy the linguistics and cryptography here! You mentioned Hildegard of Bingen, do you ever intend to cover Julian of Norwich? I'd love to see your coverage of her and the anchoress/anchorite movement more broadly.
Yep, I'll get around to her at some point.
This is by far the best analysis of the Voynich I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it took this long to pop up in my feed. Thank you for this!
I agree with you that the manuscript itself is far from being a finely crafted book. It looks like it was made by amateur scribes/illuminators and I just do not see the beauty some people have argued about it compared to other books from that period and earlier. I find the manuscript fascinating and while it could be some "obscure made up language" that only a handful of people would have understood, your analysis lends more credence to it possibly being a hoax created using a strange method. I have always been on the fence about it and I feel even if it is a language, it would hold no secrets that we do not already know.
The topics this channel handles and the way it does it ,cannot be found on my native tongue , so thank you!
The unique thing about the Voynich Manuscript is that even if it IS a hoax, it's value doesn't _really_ change all that much. If it is, it would almost definitely be the most elaborate hoax of all time, and that's notable in itself!
most elaborate? i think the 2020 virus takes the crown
just a suggestion: it would be cool to see what you think of joseph smith's "reformed egyptian" language, there are published samples of the characters that smith wrote. also the meroitic language, which is poorly understood. pretty random, I know.
Imagine coming up with a funny prank with some of your mates and you end up creating a centuries-long mystery that drives scholars in the distant future crazy
THAT INTRO IS IMPRESSIVE. i'd be very proud of this episode, brother.
Great video. Have you ever looked into the Codex Seraphinianus? Wonder if it's similar to the Voynich manuscript
It's a self-conscious riff on it!
@@TheEsotericaChannel We definitely need a video on this someday... I keep wanting to buy a copy, but the price-tag is forbidding
The one that has a couple of pages of legs?
This is another amazing video. Since you last uploaded, I've been binging your content while I slave away at my boring desk job. Thank you for such amazing content! On an unrelated note, have you (or anyone else here) seen the recent coverage of the French footballer Paul Pogba? He's allegedly the victim of extortion, and extortionate materials are apparently evidence that he consulted with a marabout to curse a perceived rival, Kylian Mbappe. Normally, my love of football and penchant for the esoteric don't overlap, but I really shouldn't be surprised. Athletes are stereotypically superstitious, I suppose.
The letters in the Voynich remind me of the current state of the Cherokee syllabary or Thai letters or even some elements of the modern Korean syllabary. So interesting!
Im new to this channel but iv binged a few videos so far and i just want to say each and every one has been brilliant. Im not exactly an intellectual but i am deeply fascinated by subject matter like this. And i would like to compliment this channels creator for making these videos understandable for the layman while not downgrading the quality of the information delivered. You have my sub sir
What a treat! Although you're right that it should come as no surprise that you, and I, are interested in this fun little manuscript.
Sounds like we share an idea of a good time. Just give me a quiet corner of a pub and leave me alone with a mysterious cipher.
What you've laid out here is compelling but I never feel entirely satisfied by statistical analyses of VMS transcriptions that use natural languages as a point of comparison. J. K. Petersen has drawn attention to some of the glyphs in the VMS that appear similar to Latin scribal abbreviations. Doesn't seem like a stretch to me that whoever wrote the VMS would be familiar with scribal abbreviations. This is not to say that the underlying language, if there is one, is Latin or that the things in the VMS that look like Latin scribal abbreviations are functioning as Latin scribal abbreviations would.
What sticks in my craw is that, as J. K. Petersen has pointed out on their blog (see e.g. the posts 'The Chameleon Quality of Scribal Conventions' or 'Voynich Script - The Leaning Letter and Why I Never Use the Eva Font') and as I'm sure you would have come across many times, scribal abbreviations did not have a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship with what they represented. The same glyph could represent a variety of different sounds/syllables/words etc depending on context.
I don't have any sort of theory of what any of the VMS symbols stand for or that any of them are abbreviations or shorthand. These observations don't make it any more or less likely, in my opinion, that the VMS was somehow generated without an underlying meaningful language (whether as a hoax or for any other reason) no more or less likely. They are just a reason I don't find comparisons of the VMS transcriptions with natural languages satisfying.
What I desperately dream of is a comparison of the VMS text with transcriptions of manuscripts written in the Latin alphabet from the late 14th and early 15th centuries. As far as I can tell there are not many "raw data" transcriptions like that available, since anyone who was both willing and able to read the original, abbreviated text for whatever reason would be likely to just read it in the original hand/original manuscript. I do wonder what a statistical analysis of texts like that would look like though. It would certainly differ from natural languages. The question would then be whether it differed from the natural languages that it was representing in similar ways to the ways the VMS text differs from natural languages.
Like, if I wrote "M8, I h8 K8 & I'm l8 4 a d8 & don't want 2 w8 2 mins 4 a mid w8 gold pl8" that is not enciphered but neither would a statistical analysis show that it behaved like the natural language (although admittedly gibberish-esque) sentence it is meant to represent, "Mate, I hate Kate and I'm late for a date and don't want to wait two minutes for a mid weight gold plate.
So I just hope one day there'll be a large enough database of raw transcriptions of mediaeval manuscripts for such an analysis to be possible.
Just for my understanding: weren't there words, that seem to be linked to the different chapters of the manuscript? So, words that appear only in the herbal section, words that appear only in the astrological section, etc. - Wouldn't that be a hint that the text is linked to the pictures and might contain information after all?
And a question: I guess somebody has already tried Bacon-code on the manuscript (Quasi-binary encryption)? What supports this is a vast amount of words containing five letters. And aside from that, the letters are very distinctivly seperated in two forms: with and without a circle. In codes that I have seen, the letters itself were quite unimportant, important was if they had a circle (which stood for "0") or not (which stood for "1"), sometimes even combined (a "d" would be 01, a "p" would be 10, a "B" would be 100 for example). This could even explain the regular character of the words as the letters itself have no meaning and their usage and distribution may vary over time. You also can't easily check if what you wrote is correct, which easily explains the absence of corrections. The Bacon-code was invented by Roger Bacon in the 13th century, so could be very possible.
But I guess somebody has already fed this to some computer...?
Love it. I think I came to the same conclusion, without your amazing research. Just knowing that modern cryptography and the speed of computers can break almost anything given time, kind of killed the idea there is anything to decrypt. Though it is still strange that someone went through the effort to have any kind of algorithm past random letters. It seems like the first person you sell it to isn't going to do entropy analysis and statistical letter distributions.
I too hold out hope this manuscript is more than just a hoax. Thanks for all you do! Esoterica is an amazing channel💛
As a Beinecke staffer, this was a very enjoyable watch.
Such a neat job! Feel free to share the episode. I've only had the chance to visit once and I'd love to come back!
I should send Susan a nicely worded message to thank for putting your videos in my recommendations.
I'm finding your videos endlessly entertaining and insightful.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - The Shining. Maybe the reason is Wine and Boredom.
The Voynich manuscript wormhole is probably the best one I’ve fallen into in all my years on YT.
Best Voynich analysis I've ever seen. As a programmer who has done a good amount of work in conlangs and language generation, it seems to me like if this is the product of an algorithm, then it can be reverse engineered computationally, or at least, one could show proofs that certain specific candidate algorithms could produce voynichese.
Yep, it if were only an algorithm. I'm confident that there is also stochastic induction into the text as well.
@@TheEsotericaChannel you could allow for some degree of error tolerance, or even just outright rejection of blocks that dont fit the pattern (mark those as possibly stochastic), and then look at things like the amount of these uninterpretable blocks vs pattern-fitting blocks (noise vs signal ratio).
This could translate into a confidence score for each candidate algorithm.
All this notwithstanding, it is still very strange that it exists at all. Obviously, the theory that it was made as a fake to sell to a collector makes pretty good sense, and is probably the answer, but there could be stranger reasons... something that comes to mind is almost a John Dee-Enochian tables type situation, where it is some type of "trance transcription", perhaps aided by ceremonial intoxicants. I think a useful data point would be to know how long it actually took the scribe(s) to compose the entire thing.
@@TheEsotericaChannel I'm also wondering what kinds of statistical analyses have been done on the corpus... like, are we just looking at it from a lexical level? Or are we looking at second-order structural patterns, i.e. parsing a theoretical grammar out of it?
This kind of analysis can be done totally agnostically to any lexical content... you'd just find every unique lemma , and record a series of data points for each one, basically the position in the "sentence" every time the string is encountered, and then a kind of graph showing the "adjacency weight" of every lemma to every other one. From here you would probably use a neural network trained on real world language data, and you'd be able to work out candidate part-of-speech markups for the whole document.
THEN from there , you'd be able to get a general idea of how well those actual candidate grammars correspond in their properties to real grammars, i.e. how "realistic" or likely to be the grammar of a real language it is.
As you were talking through this and the motivation one might have for producing such a work with apparently no meaning or utility, a thing called Temple OS came to my mind. It's a computer operating system written by a wildly gifted but mentally ill person. It's amazing that one person could write this thing and it functions as designed but it's of essentially no use to anyone. It occurs to me that perhaps this is also the work of a disturbed mind that became obsessed with the production of something that perhaps was being dictated by the voices in his head. Some religious christians do "speaking in tongues" where they are "convinced" that the noises they are making have some grand and lofty meaning. Perhaps the writer had something similar going on in their head and sought a means to write it down because they were convinced that it had a great value.
This was so fascinating, and I completely agree. I had seen a statistical breakdown of the Voynich “vocabulary” on a YT video a couple of months ago, and was instantly convinced it was a hoax. I’m really surprised this is not the overwhelming opinion. I learned a lot from this video, even though I already knew quite a bit, and I’m so glad you made it. Even though I subscribe to the medieval hoax theory, I’m definitely with you on hoping I’m proven wrong some day.
Sledge mate your depth of knowledge and erudition is an absolute delight. Blessings from UK 🇬🇧
Typically erudite and charming, thanks. It's always seemed pretty obvious to me that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax. But it's an extremely well done, and even humorous hoax. Bravo to its creators, who continue to find true believers after more than five hundred years.
Glad I'm subscribed, keep up the good work. Cheers from overcast Vienna, Scott
This sounds like something I would do as a kid. I would love to headcanon that this is some medieval kid who got his hands on his parents expensive work materials. It’s the access to the material, but apparent lack of skill or knowledge of the craft. It’s so goofy and mediocre, but the material so pricey, it is exactly the kind of expensive mess a kid would make make
To quote from one of my favorite ST: TNG episodes, "It might just be a recipie for biscuits."
I used to hate this idea because it felt underwhelming to me, like there's all this mystery and hidden meaning surrounding it and it all just amounts to nothing? But now that you've given me a decent explanation for why someone in the middle ages would create such an elaborate hoax, I think I kinda love the idea. Some writer scamming the holy roman emperor into getting a year and a half's salary and then completely baffling future historians entirely through trickery and manipulation of symbols feels magical in its own way even if it's not ritual magic or "real" occultism
OK I've been watching for a long time now and this is easily one of the best ones yet (in a already crowded field of great videos you've done) brilliant professor, I loved this, thank you 🙏👍👌🖤
(I am no scholar and English is not my first language)
I don't think it matters if it is a hoax or not. It is as important as any other mystical text or book, as it shows humanity's obsession with the unknown. And much of the manuscripts appeal might be that it seems so bizarre, so we want it to mean something more, even when a part of us thinks it doesn't.
All this time has only made it more "mysterious" as we have a belief there is, or want to believe there is some old sacred lost knowledge. For example: An old religious sect is much more interesting to us than a new one. As the passing of time "validates" a belief system and/or it's "importance".
I also think there is a prestige aspect to it, as the person(s) eventually solving it will be remembered. And that keeps people going after all these years.
As you said, and I am paraphrasing; "We never read a text, but we read ourselves". I think the people who try to solve it often use their own background, education, religion, and that "colours" their perception too much.
If it is eventually solved, it will most likely be disappointing. Because it will not live up to all the mystery that has been built around it. And it will certainly never be about what people want it to be.
It might just have been made because someone wanted to own or make a mysterious book. Given it's crude nature I think that might be what it is. The great amount of money used, was used so it didn't get dismissed right away.
Anyway it is a "600 year old mystery story", and the collective consciousness has added so many theories through the years. So the mystery acts as a "gateway-drug" to get people into all the different subjects that have been tied to the manuscript. So it's value is as a catalyst for further studies
This episode is particularly well written, and your vocabulary is exciting and thrills the poet in me.
Well written you say?
@@TheEsotericaChannel brother your word smithing has me looking forward to a book from you!
@@TheEsotericaChannel Yes! Your fluency in cryptographic vocabulary makes it really clear how much you have researched this. I liked how I had to look up definitions of several words you said, lol.
I think the manuscript is likely a hoax, but that doesn't make its story less interesting at all.
Not regretting my patreon membership!
-V from the North Shore
Thanks for the kind words and the support via Patreon - I'm glad I have support to make content like this!
Thanks kindly!
Listening to this something came to mind. A sample or prop book. In movies and plays you often need prop books. And many publishers have sample books. What if this was a business's production sample and they made it cheaply but had smaller examples in higher quality materials. This would even explain missing pages as they may have given out sample pages.
I never got this into it. But I definitely spent time just starting at each page. What a fascinating item, however it came about.
The VM looks readable to a lot of people. I can read Cyrillic, so it looked extra readable to me. I too have spent thousands of hours over a number of years, using my crude methods to read the manuscript. One of my ancient in-laws may have been involved with obtaining the manuscript back in the 1400's, so I also feel a connection.
I am glad you mention that multiple scribes wrote it. To me, this argues a bit against an elaborate hoax.
I believe the underlying language is a Serbo-Croatian dialect with Turkic language and influence. I believe the writing is based upon Croatian Glagolitic Cursive which is vastly different from regular glagolitic. It appears to me the cursive system was partly constructed from Turkic scripts.
In March 2018, the Ardic family in Calgary, Canada, were in the news presenting a Turkic solution for part of the VM text. Their system worked on certain parts which they presented. (I am not yet able to fully understand their system.)
While there are few mistakes in the VM, there are examples where the scribes seemed to say, 'To hell with this garbage', and they inserted some very old Cyrillic letters. One example is almost an add on, like the scribe knew the word and sound he had to make but could not remember the VM character. To me, this indicates someone was trying to actually say something. Perhaps it indicates there were actual sounds, phonemes, involved in the text.
In 1400's Eastern Europe there were many dialects, and alphabets varied from district to district and duchy to duchy. Our modern alphabet is a luxury!
I believe there is actual information present. The big letters, the 'gallows letters', I believe are combined letters or sounds. Likewise what looks like two C's with a bar atop c__c (bar on top), also can represent multiple letters or sounds. This particular character makes a lot of changes throughout the text. This character figured heavily in the work of the Ardic family. It has a lot of different uses. Again, I think the complexity of the use of this character argues against a hoax.
Some of the claimed absolute solutions to the VM had common weaknesses in the system. I have heard the VM is in Hebrew. A problem with Hebrew is that vowels are fairly optional. Lots of things can be made from Hebrew. (Remember the 'Bible Code' from a number of decades ago?) The Ardic's Turkic system allows portions of the words for numbers to be inserted with certain marks over the c__c character. (They have stated their system might be able to translate about 30% of the manuscript.)
The word you call "daiin", I translate as "samo" meaning only or alone in Serbo-Croatian. I believe my system has yielded some fantastic results which I have shared in various places. Some are captions with the crazy pictures. While my work yields descriptions of some pictures, the results are something I would never guess.
I believe if the big letters and the c__c thing was fully understood, full translation could proceed.
I have researched enough ancient esoterica to know by now that there is unlikely to be found spectacular knowledge unknown to us today. I am extremely curious about the people who wrote and devised the VM, and it's area of origin. I want to know if it is written in a lost dialect, using a lost writing system. Even if it is some kind of hoax, the hoaxers were likely familiar with the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Turkic writing systems. So, who were they?
(I had a lot of fun with the VM and believe I have discovered some things. Late in 2019 my household of eight people, and I, had COVID. [None of us were horribly ill. We had all previously had severe "unknown" viruses which were prevalent in our area and which did far more damage than we experienced from COVID.] New Year's Eve, 2020, I had found some interesting things in the VM and I very much looked forward to the next day. I awoke feeling like an axe went through my skull. For decades I have had chronic, severe, genetic migraine. That is part of the reason I had a lot of time to work with the VM. After COVID I had daily migraine and a feeling of severe depression for months. I got rid of the depression but the migraines now come every week and last several days. In many ways I have accepted disability. My husband always said I had a lot of ambition but not the health to back it up. Maybe he was right. I do not know if I will ever again be able to work on the VM.)
The text very much reminds me of placeholder text for books, offered by any layout programm, filling in any given space with thousands of words of a nonsensical - yet latin-sounding - text, starting with "lorem ipsum"… The manuscript may just as well be a book showing interested customers the abilities of the staff of writers, inluding interesting-looking imagery and placeholder text :)
Never know it could have been part of an elaborate “scam” of the times, as it seems too “costly” both for time & money to be just purely for nonsensical “jokes” or pranking ppl at the time. However thank you ESOTERICA for talking about this as a topic X 👏🏻🙌🏻🥰😁☺️👌🏻👍🏻
Question/s: The image from the manuscript at around 16:45 in the video shows a relatively perfect circle of text, and the internal circle with much more imagery and detail, that also has text, and not nearly as circular, so I am asking if anyone thinks that was a lapse in the design, or intentional? I'm also wondering if in some way this may be a depiction of a spherical object, or a solar system, since there seems to be a star in the middle?
Regarding the cost of two large folio volumes, 62 livres 11 sous equals 1251 sous. Since 480 sous was 1 ounce of gold, 1251 sous is about 2.6 ounces of gold.
I thought, for a long time, that this was probably the work of a single monk who suffered with extreme anxiety, maybe on the Autism spectrum. I've seen people build their own worlds, complete with plants, rituals, recipes, and languages, because it makes them feel calmer. To be clear, you've seen that too, I'm pretty sure that's what Lord of the Rings is. I thought, okay, this person liked writing and wasn't a great drawer, that's okay, not everyone is great at drawing. I'm not ruling it out, but it being a Medieval hoax makes a lot of sense. I can't really shake the idea that the words mean nothing, it's basically just a pattern that they followed, and that's why there are no mistakes in the writing. That's just a little bit too plausible. Something else that I've thought about a lot since I first watched this video is that the world was expanding rapidly at that point, from a European perspective. A century or two before, you might see people from Africa or Arabia, some limited goods would be flowing in from the Silk Road, but your world was pretty small and almost exclusively European. By the time this book was created, ships were becoming stronger, and they could preserve food for longer, and suddenly, you have a flood of goods and people from Asia, goods and people from parts of Africa you didn't even know about, and goods and people from an entire continent no one in Europe knew was there. In the middle of all of that, in the middle of the introduction of chocolate and corn and tomatoes and coffee and tea and textiles comes this book. Where is this thing from? All of these plants are new to you, what are they, where are they from? What language is this? This would be the perfect time to hastily turn out a codex full of nothing in an attempt to sell it to the highest bidder.
I'd like to believe it was a personal passion project, but the hoax idea fits a little bit too well, especially with the social climate at that time.
Thank you for this Dr Sledge. 👍 Like many, I have been fascinated by the Voynich MS for decades (yes, I’m old 😆). I rarely comment but watch and enjoy your discussions regularly. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Excellent and thorough contribution - a trademark of your channel - to the ongoing discussion and lingering mystery of the manuscript. What strikes me, after listening to your very plausible albeit tentative conclusion of this being an elaborate hoax that fetched a good penny on the market, is its conspicuous singularity. The art market is full of hoaxes, some of them surviving and fetching good pennies for centuries, yet in this genre? maybe you have a broader birds eye vision of the landscape of textual hoaxes over the centuries. I very much enjoyed the philosophical /psychological introductory notes about the dichotomy of us looking into a text vs the message staring at us without a condensate of information forming on the screen that separates the two! thanks so much 🙏
It is unique as a book but lots of text forgeries existed back then. I'm honestly surprised more don't survive
There was practically an industry for creating hoax holy items
What I find the most fascinating about this story is that the creators of the manuscript clearly anticipated that their work would be examined by experts who might be able to tell the difference between an unknown language and random strings of characters.
Why do you think that?
I'll amend this later, after the video. It's just a plant book.
Excited to explore this channel, your content is really cool.
34:25 ... "What does it mean?" In the words of that sagely sage, Mr. Natural, "It don't mean shit!"
And that's all I need to know!! 🤣
Dammit! I now need a t-shirt that says, "Purely Stochastic". Thank you so much!!!
I like to imagine the scribes joking over some beer after a copying shift imagining all the people they'd fool - I wonder if they got close to guessing the scale of the success of their hoax
I did some work on this about 15 years ago, and found one of the translated lines of text was "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
I think for me it's the mystery of it I love. Real or not, I don't think I ever want it solved. Keep it a puzzle to ponder over. That said, the repeated words and variations stood out to me from your lecture. Makes me wonder if we need to remove all that repetition and then focus on deciphering what is left as the "real" message.
Would you consider doing an episode on the Hobby Lobby Dead Sea Scroll Hoax?
Probably not. But it was written on Roman show leather, love it.
An amazing theory and a well laid out argument to support it. Kudos!
I think that even as a hoax, it's very interesting. If it is true, I'd like to know why they went through so much trouble to do the language in this way, especially when the rest of the book seems to have been done relatively poorly. I'm sure forgeries didn't need to be this complex to work back then, so what would be the point? And, what was the process? Where did it originate? Why wasn't it used again? I think questions like this would still have plenty interesting answers.
Money, they wanted to make 💰
Excellent video. The hoax hypothesis makes me think of false diaries of oriental travels like the Travels of Sir John Mandeville and some versions of Marco Polo. I could imagine this manuscript being presented as coming from the Indies -- people would assume it was written in an unknown writing system and language.
I just briefly looked at the script and what you say makes a lot of sense. I also strongly suspect that the scribes weren’t really literate, they knew only some words, and that ignorance actually helped them create a far more interesting and mysterious looking language. I think they were mostly drawing letters rather than writing them and that’s why there’s so much repetition and also how and why it changes the way it does. I kinda love the idea of very clever but poorly educated peasants pulling this off.
To hold such a document so dearly for years, as you have, and to conclude that it was a hoax all along... That takes a real level of maturity that surpasses some academics that I know
It occurs to me that a book of prayers or mantras or songs could be highly repetitive. I don’t know if it fits or not, but repetition can easily be part of a real text, particularly if the text includes prayers, mantras, or spells, and does not contain your usual structured sentences or phrases.
Maybe this manuscript is like a late medieval version of the Piltdown Man hoax. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this, he figured it was done as a joke that got out of hand, and could no longer be retracted once it was out in the open.