These were some thoughts on the frustrating nature of 'Voynich Studies' I made some time ago after my initial excursions into the manuscript. I still largely stand by these impressions.
The Voynich manuscript is an annoying mystery. It is also a cultural phenomenon that receives more than its share of sensationalized headlines. The Voynich code is “cracked”, according to brainless journalists, every two or three years. But in fact the contents of the manuscript evades our understanding and very little progress has been made on it in the last century. It has been subject to intense study, to no avail.
There are several reasons for this, beyond the opaque nature of the work itself.
The most entrenched of these, and by far the biggest obstacle to understanding the work, is SCIENTISM. By this I mean the ideology and assumptions of science, as opposed to its methods. Scientism is the narcissistic progress narrative that supposes that modern science (properly called Enlightenment empiricism) is the what the whole of human history has been struggling towards, and so the study of the past becomes the study of all the steps that led us to our current sciences.
The Voynich manuscript is placed in this narrative where it is seen as a work of pre-science or protoscience. Moreover, since we cannot understand it, it must be a work of advanced protoscience. There is a sort of breathless awe that announces the fact that even supercomputers and – yes, great scientists – have been unable to decipher it. Gee!
Therefore, according to many, it must be a work by some genius, someone far ahead of their times, someone like us. (The narcissism of this worldview is entirely undisguised.)
This nonsense began right from the beginning. We are told that Rudolf II paid a huge sum for the work believing it to be by that saint of modern science, Roger Bacon. Voynich himself clung to and promoted this idea, primarily for financial reasons. A genuine lost work by Bacon would be worth a fortune.
But in neither Rudolf II’s time, nor since, has there been any evidence whatsoever linking Roger Bacon to the work. It is pure surmise. It is based entirely in the idea that since the work defies our best efforts to understand it, it must be the work of a scientific supermind from the past.
Modern science has a long list of saints of scientism - the Big Book of Famous Scientists - and the work has been attributed to nearly all of them over the centuries. Roger Bacon is one.
The next candidate was John Dee, not exactly a saint of science, but one of the fathers of modern pseudo-occultism. Dee was an Elizabethan charlatan, and again there is not the slightest evidence linking him with the work.
Then, of course, there is Leonardo da Vinci. He certainly is a saint of modern science. We celebrate him because we think he was just like us. There are dozens of theories trying to link Da Vinci with the Voynch. A typical theory proposes that Da Vinci – a boy genius, with extraordinarily advanced scientific knowledge at an early age – wrote the book when he was ten years old. This is why the pictures are crude but the coded language and content is advanced beyond our current state of knowledge. If only we could decipher it it would reveal great scientific secrets that young Da Vinci prepared for us back in the Renaissance.
Frankly, this is really extraordinary rubbish. There is not the slightest clue – nothing, zip, zero – linking Da Vinci with the manuscript. The reasoning is simply that since we cannot understand the book it must therefore have been written by someone in history who was smarter than us. That could only be Leonardo da Vinci.
When people look at the strange diagrams and pictures in the Voynch they see, not an eccentric and crude assembling of medieval cosmology, but pictures of microbes or galaxies. Therefore it must be a work by an early scientist who had an early microscope or telescope. It must be the work of one of the great pioneers of modern science.
In great measure, this is the assumption behind most 20th C. studies of the work. Nearly all of them. This is why the book is now in the hands of scientists who drag it into the laboratory and submit it to every known possible test and feed its text into computers in a quest to quantify it.
That is the first obstacle: to suppose that it is a work of protoscience by one of the great figures of the scientific progress narrative.
Closely related to this is the failure to understand it in the context of alchemy. In the scientific narrative, alchemy is merely proto-chemistry and there is still an academic establishment that cannot shake off such a limiting view. It is fair to say that throughout scientific literature there is no proper understanding of alchemy except as proto-chemistry, which then opens the way for psychologized treatments by people such as Jung. The fact remains that modern educated people are profoundly ignorant of alchemy, broadly considered. They think in an entirely different paradigm, and are not even aware of it.
(There's a substantial and often profound literature about alchemy outside of the scientific parody. You could start with Mircea Eliade's book The Forge & the Crucible.)
So called experts on alchemy cannot even place it within alchemical ideas. But for the record: the Voynich manuscript is clearly, obviously, is an alchemical herbal. It may be a strange one, but that’s what it is. The Voynich ms, odd though it is, its clearly somewhere in that genre. One of the primary reasons we don’t understand it is because we don’t understand the by-ways and complexities of the alchemical dimension of herbalism in that period. For a start, there are numerous schools and streams of alchemy and it doesn't help to place the Voynich in the wrong one.
The relevant understandings have been marginalized in the modern world. The streams of thought behind the Voynich have gone into alternative medicine, Paracelsian medicine, Anthroposophical medicine. That is, what Wikipedia demeans as "fringe medicine" – things that scientism is intent on marginalizing rather than understanding. So the world-view, the mentality, able to get within such a work is exiled to the fringes of science in our time. Every scientist, every educated person, is trained in a hostile paradigm.
Scientism has its own fringes though – points at which it becomes pseudo-religion. There are thus those who – not content with Leonardo da Vinci – propose that the work has extraterrestrial origins. This of course is nonsense with bells and whistles, but it arises out of the same mentality, the same worldview. The logic of it is: we are the smartest people in history. We can’t understand this work. Therefore it must be a work by an advanced intelligence. Aliens in flying saucers is only slightly more ridiculous than a ten year old Da Vinci but comes out of the same set of assumptions.
So too, in the main, do proposals that dismiss it as a hoax. Mr Voynich was not entirely straight up and down – he had his fingers in the black market -, but the chances that he or anyone else acquired 200+ pages of medieval Italian vellum and a quantity of medieval ink in order to perpetruate a fraud is going a bit far. Hoax theories are rooted in the same idea as the genius theories. We modern people are exceedingly smart and if we cannot understand this book, and it's not by a scientific genius, then it must be a fraud. There is no other explanation, least of all that it is our own conceptual inadequacies that is the problem.
The manuscript is authentic. But was it perhaps a hoax in its own time? Only a bloated fool with too much money, like Rudolf II, would pay large sums for it. But he would have paid just as much for a single-paged letter by Roger Bacon. The manuscript’s abundant peculiarities seem sincere and uncalculated. The only thing in favor of it being a hoax is that we don’t understand it.
Worse than this – but not unrelated to scientism – the Voynich has also been entangled in the politics of our era. It has suffered a terrible fate. It has become involved in post-colonial studies.
Here we find a whole swathe of bizarre and anachronistic theories that place the work in the New World. Some people think it is a work by the Mayans. Or the Aztecs. Or some other Central American civilization. That would put the work in a later period and an entirely different context.
Such theories are given more credence than they deserve because they carry with them a certain political legitimacy. People in our time are very willing to think the work is a product of European colonialism, either a lost treasure of the indigenous Americans or else stolen goods by the dastardly colonialists - either way an outcome from the Spanish oppression of the people of the Americas.
These studies are almost entirely based on some misidentifications of a few of the herbs and almost nothing else, beyond an indulgence in intellectual fashions.
A part of this are the vast array of proposals by ethnic advocates for the language in the work being their language. This reflects the post-World War 2 global order, where the world splintered into 150 petty nation states, each trying to cobble together a coherent national and/or ethnic identity. The work has been a victim of language and ethnic chauvinism. The Slavs say it is slavic. The Mexicans say it is Mexican. The Balts say its baltic. The French say its french. Good heavens, the Hawians say its Hawian. Almost every ethnic language in Europe and many beyond have laid claim to it – again because they think it is some lost work of scientific genius, and they want it to be theirs, to prop up their national and ethnic narrative. This has certainly been an obstacle. The post-colonial age is not about objectivity.
Against all this – namely the intellectual shortcomings of our own time – the Voynich ms. is exactly what it seems to be. An alchemical herbal. From Europe. From northern Italy. Written in a humanist hand. 1400s.
This has been the concensus of sober opinion. Erwin Panovsky came to this view, as did Charles Singer, the great historian of medicine. The evidence – scientific and otherwise – all points to this setting, overwhelmingly. More specifically, in fact, the word best attached to it is ALPINE. It comes from the Alpine, German speaking regions of northern Italy. No matter what anomilies and pecularities it contains, that is its historical context.
It is not a work of genius. Nor is it pretty. Among alchemical herbals from that period it is a dog. Voynich himself described it as an ugly duckling. But it is certainly mysterious. Amateruish. Crude. Sloppy. Syncretic. But also unique. It is a work of traditional cosmology, but an outlandish and highly idiosyncretic one. The author is very unlikely to have been a major historical figure, and certainly not one of the saints of science. Theories that suppose otherwise, and try to place it in some remote or exotic context, are not only mistaken but tell us more about our own intellectual prejudices than they do anything meaningful about the manuscript. It is not a lost masterpiece of Mayan medicine suppressed for centuries by the big bad colonialists and the Catholic Church.
Other than some useful technical studies, the secondary literature on this manuscript – nearly everything written in the 20th C – has been unitelligent, or embarassing. Newbold’s theory was just embarrassing, for instance. It set a very low standard. The Voynich is a fascinating thing, but the history of the modern failure to understand it on even basic terms, the failure to see it through an appropriate lens, is a phenomenon in itself. It tells us much about ourselves and our own blindspots. The work has become a minor cultural obsession. There is a so-called ‘community’ devoted to it. This is very tiresome. No one could be blamed for avoiding it altogether. There are many fine researchers amongst it, but their contributions are lost amongst the noise.
Aside from that, though, it is a worthy study. It is an unusual work of alchemical herbalism that, as Singer noted, is proto-Paracelsean. It won’t reveal much about the history of science, and even less about the bathing practices of the Aztec women, but it does cast a new light on alchemical thinking in the relevant period. By alchemical, we mean cosmological. It is a work of premodern cosmology, or traditional cosmology which is the same thing. In fact, in this respect it is a very valuable work, but only to those of us who want to understand such things for their own sake and on their own terms. The quest is not to crack the code but rather to engage in substantive ways with premodern modes of thought. The Voynich – even if or especially if we can’t read it’s text - is a good study for that.
R. B.
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