Voynich, Hill, Crumb: A Hitherto Vexing Codex | datagubbe.se

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2021-07-11 09:30:06

The Voynich Manuscript, for those not in the know, is a mysterious codex likely written and illustrated some time between the years 1400 and 1600. It's a riddle in many ways: its origins are unknown, the author is unknown and, more importantly, the meaning of its contents is also unkown. The name Voynich comes from a Polish book dealer who bought the manuscript in 1912.

The text is written using an indecipherable alphabet and although statistical analysis reveals similarity to natural language, cryptanalysis of it has thus far been unsuccessful. The illustrations are similarly confounding, consisting mostly of unidentifiable plants and women emerging from baths, barrels or canisters.

Various theories have been put forth about the meaning and/or purpose of the manuscript, but none of them have managed to satisfactorily explain all aspects of the codex or even produce a single meaningful decoding of the text. Whenever a new theory emerges - which still happens from time to time - it is swiftly debunked.

One of the theories that's hard to both debunk and prove is that of glossolalia - meaning the text is supposedly the ramblings of someone generally not considered to be performing at peak mental capacity. This has some appeal to me, though not to various pundits in the know, mostly because it's based around the assumption that the glossolalia was induced by migraine attacks and even, by comparing it to the works of Hildegard von Bingen, that it can still be meaningfully deciphered.

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