The Voynich Manuscript

 

The Voynich Manuscript is one of the stranger items held by the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts library of Yale University. Physically, it is a tiny notebook comprising pages of text and illustrations, mainly of plants, but also including astronomical and astrological charts, recipes, and pictures of naked women. However, the text is in a language that nobody has ever been able to translate or decipher, which means that the origin and purpose of the manuscript are still shrouded in mystery ever since it first came to public attention before World War I.

 

Wilfred Voynich

Wilfred Voynich (1865-1930) was a dealer in books and manuscripts who operated firstly in London and then in New York. While working in London, having opened his business there in 1895, he undertook regular trips to continental Europe seeking items that he could purchase for sale in his shop. It was on such a trip in 1912 that he acquired the manuscript that has ever since borne his name.

One mystery, apart from the nature of the manuscript, is precisely how Voynich came to own it. He claimed that he had bought it in a castle in southern Europe. However, it emerged in the 1960s, more than 30 years after his death, that he had acquired it from a Jesuit college in Italy, along with some other documents. It also appears that Voynich might have stolen it from the college’s library as opposed to acquiring it legally.

Voynich claimed that there had been a letter accompanying the manuscript and that this was by a 17th-century scientist from Prague who in turn claimed that it had been written by Roger Bacon, the 13th century English philosopher who was known to have been interested in the subjects covered by the manuscript. Voynich, as a dealer, would have had every reason for wanting to believe such a story, to which he added the idea that the manuscript could have been taken to Prague by the Elizabethan alchemist John Dee, who was known to have visited Prague and to have met the Emperor who, according to the supposed letter, had owned the manuscript.

 

Real or Fake? 

This is the question that has been at the heart of the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript ever since its appearance. The suspicion that Voynich had acquired a clever forgery, or perhaps created it himself, was always going to be present in the mind of anyone tempted to part with the large sum of money for which Voynich sought to sell it. However, the best way by which Voynich might possibly have been able to prove its provenance, without the equally mysterious letter that he no longer possessed, would have been to offer a translation of the text, which could then have been compared with other known works by Roger Bacon. It would be remarkable for a forger or dubious dealer to be unable to offer this definitive proof, so the fact that Voynich could never do so does seem to count in his favour as a dealer offering a genuine item for sale.

Carbon dating of the vellum on which the text was written – a technique that was not available during Voynich’s lifetime – has shown that it dates from the early 15^th century, and the style of the handwriting matches that time period, thus proving that it could not have been the work of Roger Bacon. However, the fact remains that it could have been forged at an even later date – there is no reason why a modern forger could not have used 15^th century vellum and copied the appropriate handwriting style.

 

But what is it?

That is the other major mystery surrounding the manuscript. The text is written in a language that has resisted all efforts at translation, as it resembles no known language and the characters are not recognizable as letters in any known alphabet. No codebreaker has been able to suggest a possible cipher that might be of use.

At first sight, the notebook appears to be a herbal, by which is meant a guide to herbs and other plants that could be used in medicinal preparations, together with notes on how to make them. However, very few of the illustrations can be identified as being those of actual plants, so how could the document have had any practical use even if the text made sense to someone?

One suggestion that has been offered is that it is an example of “outsider art”. This is work produced by somebody undergoing some kind of mental breakdown, and there have certainly been cases of people suffering hallucinations or severe psychosis who have devoted many hours to creating extraordinary artworks and documents that made no sense to anyone apart from, possibly but by no means certainly, themselves.

As it is, the Voynich Manuscript remains a mystery. Unsellable, it ended up being presented to the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts library of Yale University, where it remains to this day.

© John Welford

 

The Devil's Footprints

 

Did the Devil visit East Devon in February 1855? There are still some people today who think that this is the only possible explanation.

On the morning of 9th February, after a two-inch fall of snow and a severe frost, people came out of their houses to find strange footmarks leading across the frozen countryside in single file. The marks, resembling those of a donkey’s hooves, were in a single line with each print 8 inches apart, one in front of the other. They certainly looked as though they have been made by a two-legged as opposed to a four-legged animal.

The trail was on both sides of the estuary of the River Exe, for a distance of as much as 100 miles. It zigzagged about, leading through gardens, over gates, haystacks, walls and roofs. Local people reported seeing the prints in some very strange places, such as under a gooseberry bush and through a 6-inch pipe. When dogs were brought in to investigate a thicket through which the trail passed, they retreated, howling in terror.

As might be expected, the event was widely reported and several newspapers made careful investigations. Attempts to reach a logical conclusion as to the cause were not helped by the differing descriptions and drawings supplied by witnesses.

It was soon revealed that the trail was not made in a single night but over several. It also became clear that the footmarks were not consistent along the whole length of the trail. In places it looked as though they might have been made by large birds, particularly those prints seen on rooftops.

Many suggestions were made to explain how the footmarks on the ground could have been made. Although most people thought that they looked as though they had been made by a donkey, others said that badgers, otters, cranes and even mountain wildcats were responsible. One amateur naturalist even thought that the prints most closely resembled those of a kangaroo!

It was the fact that the prints were clearly those of a cloven hoof that gave rise to the notion that the Devil himself had visited East Devon. At Woodbury they led up to the church door and looked as though they had been made by a hot iron. The work of a practical joker could not therefore be discounted, at least at this location.

Whatever the cause of this strange phenomenon, many local people refused to leave home after sunset for a long time afterwards. They, at least, were convinced that the Devil had singled out Devon for his special attention.

© John Welford

The mystery of "The Man in the Iron Mask"

The title “The Man in the Iron Mask” belongs to a novel by Alexandre Dumas (1802-70). He based his story on a real event, namely the incarceration for almost 34 years of a prisoner whose face was always concealed. Who could the mysterious prisoner have been?

The bare facts

The story begins on 24^th August 1669, with the arrival of a prisoner at Pignerol prison (in what is now northern Italy but under French control at the time). He was delivered in person by a minister of King Louis XIV, but the document that was handed to the prison governor contained some very unusual stipulations, namely:

“The prisoner must be closely guarded and be unable to communicate by letter or any other means. He must be kept in complete isolation so that his guards cannot hear him, and you will never listen to anything he might wish to tell you, threatening to put him to death if he ever opens his mouth to speak to you of anything other than his needs”.

There were occasions when the prisoner was transferred to other prisons, including a move in 1687 to the Ile de Sainte-Marguerite (off the south coast of France near Cannes), when he was transferred in a sealed sedan chair with his face covered by a mask of black velvet.

In 1698 he was transferred to the Bastille in Paris, with instructions that every precaution be taken to ensure that he was not seen by anyone. The officer who was second-in-command at the Bastille later made it known that he was not told who the prisoner was, it was not written down anywhere, and his face was always masked.

The prison log recorded the man’s death in 1703, and that he had always worn a black velvet mask which he was never allowed to remove, even for eating or sleeping.

The mention that the mask was of iron, not velvet, came courtesy of the writer Voltaire, who was a prisoner in the Bastille in 1717 and heard stories from the jailers about their earlier mysterious prisoner.

Speculation about a royal twin

Alexander Dumas only wrote his novel in 1850, and clearly he based it on what he had read. He used speculation, rumour and imagination to concoct his tale, in which the mask followed the “iron” tradition begun by Voltaire and the prisoner had become a twin brother of King Louis XIV.

The idea was that Louis had had an identical twin brother, but his father (King Louis XIII) was concerned that the younger twin might come to challenge his brother for the right to be the heir to the throne. He was therefore removed from the royal household when very young and brought up as the son of a French nobleman.

However, at some point after Louis had become king (which he did in 1643 when still not five years old) the younger twin had seen a picture of Louis and realised who he was. When this was reported to the king he took the extraordinary step of having his brother incarcerated for the rest of his life in the manner that has been described. At least, that is how Dumas imagined things to have been.

Could this have happened?

If Louis had had a twin brother, is it at all likely that he would have taken such action? Even if King Louis XIII had been afraid of sibling rivalry to the extent that the younger twin would have challenged the older for the throne, why must one assume that Louis XIV thought the same way? Did he see his brother as a potential threat, even when he was established as the most powerful ruler in Europe – which he was in 1669 after 26 years on the throne?

Another question is whether Louis knew that he had a twin and, if so, when did he know this? Was it only in 1669 when he was told that his brother had recognised him from a portrait?

If the facts are as Dumas surmised, then Louis’s action does make some sort of sense. Rivals to the throne would normally be dealt with more severely and be done away with, either publicly or secretly, but when that rival is one’s own twin brother, one can imagine that this would have gone against the grain.

Under such circumstances, one can also see why it would be important for the brother not to be recognised by anyone else, and for him not to be allowed to communicate with anyone that he was indeed the king’s twin.

However, there are also huge problems with this scenario. For one thing, there is absolutely no evidence that Louis ever had a twin brother.  Royal births were hardly secret affairs (it was typical for the room in which a birth took place to be crowded not only with doctors and midwives but also with high ranking people who would witness the birth and thus confirm that the child was definitely the son or daughter of the queen and not a smuggled-in substitute), and it is hard to imagine that a second baby would have been overlooked or that everyone present would have been sworn to secrecy and kept that secret for decades afterwards.

Then there is the question of why concealing the identity of the prisoner was so important after 1669 but apparently less so before then. If the twin brother had suddenly realised who he was when aged around 30, why had nobody else noticed the similarity at some point before then? If, as Dumas suggests, the twin had been brought up in a noble household, there must have been plenty of people around who regularly saw the king and who would surely have spotted the likeness. It also seems unlikely that anyone brought up in such an environment (the supposed twin brother, for example) would not have seen the king on many occasions, especially as Louis XIV was renowned for maintaining a large court of aristocratic hangers-on and engaging in many lavish ceremonies and functions in which all the nobility of France would have played a part at one time or another.

For all these reasons, the notion that Louis had locked up his twin brother and insisted that he always be masked does sound to be highly unlikely.

In that case, who was the masked man?

More than sixty suggestions have been made as to who the man in the mask (whether iron or velvet) might have been. These have included some very well-known names such as the Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of King Charles II of Great Britain) and the French playwright Moliere. However, all these candidates pose a particular problem, namely that it is known when they died and it wasn’t in 1703.

Many of the suggestions have related to less well-known people, such as French army officers and obscure aristocrats who fell from favour. However, if the person was not of any great importance, why bother with the charade of keeping them alive in such circumstances for such a long time?

My own theory

This may not be an original idea – highly unlikely! – but it strikes me that there could be another reason why a prisoner was kept masked for 34 years. This was not so that they could not be identified but because their face had become so disfigured that its sight would be too great a shock for any observer, including the person himself should he happen to see himself in a mirror.

A disease such as leprosy or necrotizing fasciitis (the “flesh-eating bug”) might have had this effect. With little understanding of the cause of the ailment it might have been assumed that the condition was infectious and that the victim had to be kept as far away from human contact as possible, such as in a secure prison.

If the person was of high birth – such as a member of the royal family – they would have been allowed to live out their natural term of life, however long that might have been. This might have applied, for example, to an illegitimate son of the king. According to Voltaire’s account, passed to him by prison officers, the man was finely dressed and an accomplished musician who was clearly not treated in the manner that a dangerous criminal might have been, so imprisonment for protection as opposed to punishment does sound at least possible.

However, this is mere speculation, as is virtually every other account of the case. Stories tend to grow in the telling, and Alexandre Dumas wrote his novel some 150 years after the events in question, so there had been plenty of time for growth! Nobody knows the answer to the conundrum, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will.

© John Welford

The mystery of the Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines are probably the world’s best-known example of “geoglyphs”, which can be defined as large-scale man-made markings on the ground that are made for artistic, religious or social reasons. But why are they there?

The Nazca Lines are in southern Peru, on barren land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. They comprise a huge collection of designs that cover many square miles. They take the form of straight lines, spirals, geometric shapes and depictions of animals and birds including monkeys, condors and hummingbirds.

The Lines are best seen from the air, which is what gave the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken the extraordinary idea that they were created by extra-terrestrials who used them as landing strips for their flying saucers in prehistoric times.

However, there is no need to go to these lengths to explain how the Lines came into being, although their precise purpose has yet to be established with certainty.

The Nazca were a tribe of people who lived in the area from around 400 BC to 600 AD. They were farmers who cultivated lands that were watered by rivers that ran off the Andes and flowed to the west. Their civilization was reasonably advanced and they produced distinctive pottery and textiles that bear patterns similar to those seen in the Lines.

This is a naturally arid region, not helped by the fact that the weather pattern known as El Niño can lead to seasons in which little rain falls and the rivers dry up. There is evidence that the people were highly religious and developed elaborate rituals to appease their gods in the hope of ensuring that the rivers would flow and their crops flourish. The Nazca Lines may well have played an important part in these rituals.

The Lines are narrow pathways that have been trodden flat and marked by stones along their edges. The stones are darker than the underlying dusty soil, being rich in iron ore, and are to be seen everywhere in the area as a result of natural geological processes. The paths were clearly intended to be walked along, although they do not lead to anywhere in particular. It may well be that one way of appeasing the gods was to walk a path from beginning to end, and it is noticeable that the paths form continuous lines with few if any crossings – a Nazca could take a ritual walk, chanting a prayer as he or she did so, and not run the risk of bumping into anyone else.

Shards of pottery have been found at intervals along the Lines, so it is possible that walkers may have smashed pots containing oil or some other precious liquid as they walked, as a means of reinforcing their prayers.

The Nazca civilization disappeared about 1,400 years ago, so it is not possible to be certain about the purpose of the Lines. That said, any explanation involving Earth-bound people is surely more likely than that they were navigational aids for little green men from outer space!

© John Welford

The mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976) provided a mystery of her own in 1926. On the evening of 3^rd December she disappeared from her home in Berkshire and the next morning her car was found abandoned a few miles away.

The event became big news as 15,000 people volunteered to search the surrounding countryside and a lake was dragged by the police, the fear being that Mrs Christie had met her death by accident or design.

However, the search was called off eleven days later when Agatha Christie was found, perfectly safe, staying at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Despite this outcome, the mystery of what had happened during the interim between disappearance and discovery continued, because Agatha Christie had no memory of how she had got from Berkshire to Yorkshire and could offer no explanation for her behaviour.

The mystery has never been solved, although various theories have been put forward.

One thought was that the whole thing was a publicity stunt designed to boost sales of Agatha Christie’s latest novel, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”. However, this is unlikely because the book was doing very well anyway and there was no need for any such promotion.

Another suggestion made at the time was that she had suffered an attack of amnesia after the recent death of her mother.

A more likely explanation is that it had something to do with Agatha Christie’s private life, particularly her state of mind over the crumbling of her marriage to Archibald Christie. A clue to this possibility is that she checked into the Harrogate hotel using the name of Archibald’s mistress, which must mean that the affair was uppermost in her mind.

The marriage stumbled on for another two years before the Christies divorced. Agatha would later find happiness with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. She used to joke that an archaeologist was the perfect husband because he got more interested in his spouse the older she got!

The story of Agatha Christie’s disappearance was featured in the Hollywood film “Agatha” in 1979. This frankly disappointing production starred Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, the latter playing a completely fictional American investigating journalist. The attempt to make an exciting story out of something that was basically a non-event led, somewhat predictably, to a result that left much to be desired.

© John Welford