Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways. I don't know. I'm not you never know
Speaker 1: what stories of things we simply don't know the answer to. Hi, everybody,
Speaker 1: welcome to Thinking Sideways. I'm Steve as always, I'm joined
Speaker 1: by my co host Devon and Joe, and once again
Speaker 1: we're gonna look into a kind of a big mystery
Speaker 1: and we're going to solve it. Yeah. I don't know
Speaker 1: about that, but we've gotten a lot of listener requests
Speaker 1: for this particular story and we finally gave in, we're
Speaker 1: gonna do it. We've also gotten a lot of listener
Speaker 1: requests for longer shows, so just keep in mind, this
Speaker 1: is what you asked for. It is going to be
Speaker 1: a long one because ladies and gentlemen, what we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about today is we're gonna talk about the Voyage Manuscript.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people have probably heard of the manuscript,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna we're gonna go through all of the
Speaker 1: details and you're gonna be really surprised at how much
Speaker 1: there is. Uh To give it a basic overviews, the
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript is a book which is written in an
Speaker 1: unknown language and it's full of illustrations or maybe a
Speaker 1: known language, but we don't know what it is, but
Speaker 1: an unknown alphabet, that's possible. That's possible. Sorry, that's okay,
Speaker 1: let's strange code. Let's start with the history and talk
Speaker 1: about the book first. Probably the simplest place is probably
Speaker 1: the beginning, the best place, Okay, the book itself. It's
Speaker 1: called the Voytage Manuscript because it was purchased by a
Speaker 1: man named Wilfred Voynage in nineve But it's been around
Speaker 1: for several hundred years, and we know some of the history,
Speaker 1: or people guests at some of the history, and well,
Speaker 1: I'll just dive right into the history. Somewhere between sixteen
Speaker 1: hundred to sixteen ten, it's believed that the book was
Speaker 1: owned by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second. And
Speaker 1: this this would by the way, be well over a
Speaker 1: hundred years after it was created. Well, according to the
Speaker 1: theories that of the age of creation. Yes, so this
Speaker 1: is this is a partial history passed through a lot
Speaker 1: of famous hands. It has. From there it left the
Speaker 1: Emperor Rudolph the Second's hand and was owned but theoretically
Speaker 1: by his imperial distiller Um banned by the name of
Speaker 1: Jacobus two Pensk's, which is an easy namesake. It ends
Speaker 1: in a seas, so I think I I nailed that
Speaker 1: between sixteen thirty to sixteen forty five. They think that
Speaker 1: a German Bohemian alchemist named Joey George Barresh owned it.
Speaker 1: Sixteen sixty five, it's believed that it was owned by
Speaker 1: Johannus Marcus Marci of kron Land. Yeah, wherever that is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I tried to that that might actually be a store
Speaker 1: or not a country. Yeah, I went to the local
Speaker 1: chron Land. Yeah, yeah, he actually it was I read
Speaker 1: about this. He was friends with George Barresh, and when
Speaker 1: Bresh died he willed the book to Marcy of kron Land. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and apparently he was friends with with Mr Kirscher, and
Speaker 1: Borresch had actually been in correspondence with Kersher because he thought,
Speaker 1: you felt that Kersher had had he had the smarts
Speaker 1: to actually decipher break this code. You're right, I remember
Speaker 1: reading that Kersher he was a very bright guy anyway.
Speaker 1: But but so he actually he actually hand copied sections
Speaker 1: of the books of the book and wrote to alan
Speaker 1: As Kersher twice with these and asking him for his input.
Speaker 1: And Kersher wanted the book itself so you can look
Speaker 1: at it and and but Rash was never willing to
Speaker 1: do that. But then when he died, he willed it
Speaker 1: to his friend Johanness marci And of kron Land the store,
Speaker 1: and he willed to him, who almost immediately gave it
Speaker 1: to Kirsher because he felt like Kirscher was the only
Speaker 1: guy who would be able to make hatcher tails out
Speaker 1: of it. That's okay. That that explains the gaps that
Speaker 1: I couldn't couldn't quite pin down Kirsher, Yeah, and wound
Speaker 1: up and wind with it. I guess it was destiny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: destiny For the next couple of centuries. We're talking two
Speaker 1: d fifty plus years. We don't know where it was.
Speaker 1: It's believed that the Jesuits had it and that they
Speaker 1: moved it around Europe from place to place. Why or
Speaker 1: how is unknown. Well, they're pretty good at keeping records
Speaker 1: at saying we don't know if this is important or not,
Speaker 1: but it looks like might be, so we're going to
Speaker 1: just hang on to it. I just put in the
Speaker 1: back corner. Yeah, that's one of those thing. I can
Speaker 1: imagine myself just rooting around my basement two boxes and like, oh,
Speaker 1: there is it. Wouldn't believe I was. I was down
Speaker 1: in my basement the other day this last weekend doing
Speaker 1: a little house cleaning and getting and going to stuff,
Speaker 1: and I found stuff I'd totally forgotten I ever owned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh wow, that's the joy of having a basement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's see from there. As we said, nineteen twelve, Wilfred
Speaker 1: Voyage purchases the book. We don't know where he gets
Speaker 1: it from, or I don't know. I know he purchased it,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember exactly where. I believe he bought
Speaker 1: it in Italy, did he? Yeah, I'll run with that
Speaker 1: because I can't remember exactly where. When he died he
Speaker 1: gave it to He I believe, willed it to his
Speaker 1: wife Ethel, who then gave it to a woman named
Speaker 1: an Nil, who then sold it in nineteen sixty one
Speaker 1: to a man by the name of HP Krause. In
Speaker 1: nineteen s the Nine Crowds donated to Yale University's Binicky
Speaker 1: Rare Book and Manuscript Library. So Yale has it. So
Speaker 1: Yale has it today. They still have it today for now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's and that's where it is. That's where they're
Speaker 1: they've done a great job of getting good photos of
Speaker 1: it and making it available to everybody. But it's a
Speaker 1: several year old, hundred year old text, so we don't
Speaker 1: want everybody leafing through it kind of but it is.
Speaker 1: But I think it is available if you go in
Speaker 1: and your researcher of any kind. I know they've made
Speaker 1: it available to certain forensic scientists. They have you've got
Speaker 1: to have the credentials to prove that you can get
Speaker 1: to it. You and I couldn't just walk in there
Speaker 1: and we have the credentials. The thing about it, I've
Speaker 1: looked at their photographs of the book online and it's
Speaker 1: very clear and you know, you can really great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've done a really good job, high detail and everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good. Yeah. All right. So we've talked about the
Speaker 1: history that we think we know that we're fairly that
Speaker 1: we yeah, we're fairly sure. People believe they figured it out.
Speaker 1: Folks have tried to pinpoint where it might have and
Speaker 1: when it might have been made, and some of that
Speaker 1: they've done based on characteristics that are in the text itself.
Speaker 1: Let me just run through some of that. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: it has what they referred to as a upright handwriting
Speaker 1: style that's reminiscent of Carolinian minuscule, which evidently was in
Speaker 1: use from eight hundred to twel hundred. Or it's uh, there,
Speaker 1: there's another it's it's Italian. How do you say that? Show? Okay,
Speaker 1: which I guess is called the Humanist hand, which was
Speaker 1: from fourteen to fifteen hundred, and the radio the carbon
Speaker 1: dating kind of puts it in that range as well.
Speaker 1: People have also said that the drawings have parallel hatching,
Speaker 1: and hatching is when you you draw a series of
Speaker 1: lines to infer shading, which is similar to you know,
Speaker 1: one of the first guys that really did a lot
Speaker 1: of that is Da Vinci. If you look at a
Speaker 1: lot of old drawings, that's how he gave depth and shadows.
Speaker 1: You cross hatch in there. So people think that it
Speaker 1: could have been from his arrow, which would have been
Speaker 1: if it was made in Germany or that style came out,
Speaker 1: it would have been in Germany and around fourteen ten.
Speaker 1: If it was made in Florence it would have been
Speaker 1: fourteen forty, or if it was after fourteen fifty, then
Speaker 1: it could have been anywhere, because that style had gone
Speaker 1: across Europe. It had gone viral. Yes, but so that's
Speaker 1: a pretty good solid like you know, sixty year seven
Speaker 1: year old window, right. Yeah. For for the cross hatching, yes,
Speaker 1: and for that that uh kind of matches with the
Speaker 1: hands for the Italian Yeah, for the Italian hands handwriting style, yes,
Speaker 1: it does. But we've also got some things some people
Speaker 1: who have owned the book have made notes on it
Speaker 1: and in the margin, and that handwriting seems to be
Speaker 1: done in the style of the fifteenth century. So we're
Speaker 1: looking at the four hundreds and there's some of the
Speaker 1: other notes that are written on it, and this is
Speaker 1: primarily notes that are in the zodiac section. That style
Speaker 1: of handwriting. People have pointed to say is from the
Speaker 1: southwest of France, so there's a lot of different places
Speaker 1: that it could have been just based on basic facts.
Speaker 1: So it's it's kind of hard to figure out. So
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's a manuscript, and so it's
Speaker 1: like a book, yes, right, And it's um nine point
Speaker 1: three inches by six point four inches by two inches, right,
Speaker 1: so it's two inches thick thick, so not a big
Speaker 1: book though that's like a huge but it's not like
Speaker 1: one of those massive things you think about from life,
Speaker 1: which is because you look at the pictures and they
Speaker 1: look really big. They do, Yeah, exactly, it's kind of
Speaker 1: blown up, but it's a little book, but it's it's
Speaker 1: hundreds of vellum pages, and vellum's pretty thin paper material.
Speaker 1: It's kind of see through almost a little bit too.
Speaker 1: So it's possible for there to be a lot of
Speaker 1: pages in a small amount of space, i e. Like
Speaker 1: old books, old bibles, things like that. You see it
Speaker 1: on a paper like that. Paper is valuable, so you
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta use as much of it as possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, make it as condensed as possible. So
Speaker 1: they're collected into eighteen what are called choirs, which are
Speaker 1: those little like fold like folded areas. Right. You know,
Speaker 1: when you look at a traditionally bound book, you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at it from the top, you notice
Speaker 1: that you have sections. Yeah, and those are folded over
Speaker 1: and stitched together and stitched together in one big book. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Those are the choirs, right, each one of them, each
Speaker 1: one of those sections. Yeah. So depending on how some
Speaker 1: of the pages are folded or things like that, or
Speaker 1: how you count them, I guess it's about two and
Speaker 1: forty pages in total. Um. There's some numbering in the
Speaker 1: right hand corners of the right hand pages is which
Speaker 1: pretty much everybody agrees was done by somebody who owned it.
Speaker 1: So this is one of those people who after the
Speaker 1: fact owned Yeah, it wasn't done by the person who
Speaker 1: did it, but who was kind of maybe archiving it.
Speaker 1: You know, they owned it. They were like, hey, we
Speaker 1: should probably number these pages. It might be they kept
Speaker 1: dropping the book and all the choirs would fall a
Speaker 1: party didn't. Yeah, he started. Yeah, so they are numbered
Speaker 1: one through a hundred and sixteen, but there's some number gaps,
Speaker 1: so people think that it's it's probably more like two
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy two pages originally altogether. Yeah, because there
Speaker 1: are there are missing pages and we don't know what's
Speaker 1: supposed to be on them, right. And then Wilford Vointage,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned before, acquired the manuscript in nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of strong evidence that all
Speaker 1: all the different choirs have been kind of reordered, rearranging
Speaker 1: it the way they thought it should go. Understanding how
Speaker 1: that that's correct? Yeah, yeah, I mean you know that
Speaker 1: or that again. You know, you drop a book and
Speaker 1: you're like, I don't remember where everything goes I'm just
Speaker 1: going to shove it back in. You know, it's been
Speaker 1: around for so long, it's it's quite possible it's been
Speaker 1: rebound several times since kind of fall apart. So interestingly,
Speaker 1: know if there's missing stuff, you know, and since it
Speaker 1: used to be in the hands of the Pope, it
Speaker 1: would be kind of cool to go through the Vaticans
Speaker 1: all their archives and see if the missing pages are
Speaker 1: there of similarities the Vatican. Dear Vatican, this is you've
Speaker 1: heard of us? Surely Pope frances his favorite podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um So, anyways, back to the the story, um So, based
Speaker 1: on modern analysis, we pretty much know that it was
Speaker 1: written by a quill pen with iron gall ink for
Speaker 1: the text and the figure outlines, and then colored paint
Speaker 1: kind of like watercolor color paint. It's color was applied
Speaker 1: to the figures. Um And the book has been carbon
Speaker 1: dated to the early fifteenth century, so the early four hundreds.
Speaker 1: So that kind of corresponds with what we were talking
Speaker 1: about with the history I bit as well. Okay, so
Speaker 1: I'm sure you guys want to know about the text itself.
Speaker 1: So it's it's clearly written from left to right. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so it's got a pretty pretty straight left margin
Speaker 1: and kind of a ragged right margin, which is what
Speaker 1: is to be expected, So that gives it's just probably
Speaker 1: more likely European than Semitic and origin. Some of the
Speaker 1: longer sections are broken into paragraphs, and some of them
Speaker 1: actually have bullet points that they're shaped like stars or flowers,
Speaker 1: and there's no punctuation. And I've noticed as myself going
Speaker 1: through the text, it's like there's no obvious punctuation in
Speaker 1: there unless certain characters represent a period, but then we'd
Speaker 1: be seeing them consistently, and I'm not seeing that pattern.
Speaker 1: There's no indications of errors or corrections, so there's no
Speaker 1: no words that have been crossed out, there's no you
Speaker 1: know how you you do that little thing where you
Speaker 1: write the word above and there's a little va pointing
Speaker 1: up to go. None of that going on. And and
Speaker 1: for as long as this text is, that's amazing. But
Speaker 1: I feel like that a lot. It happened a lot
Speaker 1: in those days, but you just like wrote it, and
Speaker 1: rewrote it, used the papers like write. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know how quickly Vellum absorbs in either, but
Speaker 1: from modern Vellum sucks inc in pretty quickly. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't know about you know, four years ago, how it was.
Speaker 1: I know that it pulls it in pretty quick. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the old timing stuff. I was just wondering if the
Speaker 1: ink takes a while to soak in, and if you
Speaker 1: have to have a moment to wipe it off, if
Speaker 1: you make a mistake and then rewrite it, you might
Speaker 1: be able to blot it up. But I think you
Speaker 1: see that you'd see the Yeah, books back then were
Speaker 1: all handwritten. They didn't have the printing press writing. And
Speaker 1: I think often you see books that didn't have I mean,
Speaker 1: some of them did have mistakes in them, but some
Speaker 1: of them didn't. And I think that's one of the
Speaker 1: intriguing things about this manuscript is that, you know, assuming
Speaker 1: that it is a real text, it may be suggests
Speaker 1: that there are other versions of it, or there were
Speaker 1: other versions. Yeah. I was gonna say, to have written
Speaker 1: it enough time just that you didn't make any errors anymore.
Speaker 1: Back in the day when monks would write the Bibles
Speaker 1: and they would eat, just sit down and make the
Speaker 1: same page over and over and over, you had to
Speaker 1: write that thing a lot of times. But here's what
Speaker 1: I'll tell you is that having a job in which
Speaker 1: I often write the same thing over and over and
Speaker 1: over again. It's always like the fiftieth time that you
Speaker 1: make a mistake, right, It's never like the first time,
Speaker 1: because you're like on it, you're like the right way,
Speaker 1: you're really paying attention. And then it's like after you
Speaker 1: feel like you've written enough times that you like you
Speaker 1: have it is when you make the mistakes you get comfortable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can do the cut and paste. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I did in my job, a lot of boiler plate
Speaker 1: in my reports. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, okay, back to
Speaker 1: the text I do to you all the time, so
Speaker 1: no worries. So anyway, no indications of errors or corrections,
Speaker 1: and that might be significant. I'll talk about that later,
Speaker 1: but I'll hold you all a suspense for now. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about that after the commercial. Uh So, they're
Speaker 1: over a hundred and seventy thousand letters in this text.
Speaker 1: They call them lifts that and there are thirty five
Speaker 1: thousand words of varying length in there, from a couple
Speaker 1: of letters to about ten. They're very simple pen strokes
Speaker 1: for the most part, so the words seem to follow
Speaker 1: like a phonological or orthographic law. This is linguistic stuff
Speaker 1: that I have a hazy understanding of it, meaning that
Speaker 1: certain characters appear in each word, like vowels. For example.
Speaker 1: You can't write an English letter without a word without
Speaker 1: a vowel, so so some vowels are going to just
Speaker 1: have to be there. Uh. Some characters never follow others,
Speaker 1: Some always follow others. There's been a couple of in
Speaker 1: that I've noticed just from perusing the text, and always
Speaker 1: seem to go together. There's like Q in a year.
Speaker 1: There's yeah, exactly in this text there there are two letters.
Speaker 1: Then they might just be a single character too, but
Speaker 1: it looks like an L and an F, and they
Speaker 1: always follow each other, and so probably as it could
Speaker 1: just be a single character. I don't know. But so
Speaker 1: the characters seem fairly simple, though I think you know
Speaker 1: right there they they are in one way, but in
Speaker 1: not another way. Yes, yeah, so anyway characters. Some characters
Speaker 1: always follow some characters and never follow other characters. Some
Speaker 1: can be doubled or tripled even, but others not. Some
Speaker 1: words only occur in certain sections, and some occur throughout
Speaker 1: the manuscript. And I've noticed as too, even though I
Speaker 1: haven't read the whole thing. I spotted. I've sort of
Speaker 1: hopped around a little bit and looked at various pages,
Speaker 1: and I've noticed some words that appear a lot in
Speaker 1: some sections and not in others. So and it maybe
Speaker 1: possibly has something to do with the subject matter of
Speaker 1: the section. I'm not really sure. There aren't a lot
Speaker 1: of repetitions among the labels that are attached to the illustrations.
Speaker 1: The illustrations themselves, even though there's much repetition in the
Speaker 1: text itself, there's not in the labels, which suggests that
Speaker 1: they're actually labels. Probably. Yeah, so, and and as Joe
Speaker 1: was kind of saying, there are different sections, they're actually
Speaker 1: six to print sections, and this is what we we've
Speaker 1: defined it as six sections. Yeah, they're fair I think,
Speaker 1: you know, as Joe is saying, there, they are fairly distinct,
Speaker 1: at least with the illustrations. Um. And I think that's
Speaker 1: you know, the one thing that we can kind of
Speaker 1: know about this manuscript is we don't know what the
Speaker 1: words say anything like that, but we can look and say, oh,
Speaker 1: the drawings in this kind of group are all the same.
Speaker 1: So we're going to say this is a section. So
Speaker 1: the six sections, there's an herbal section that has drawings
Speaker 1: of plants, uh, most of which are like really unidentifiable
Speaker 1: or kind of almost like impressionistic paint drawings of that
Speaker 1: because of the coloring, the way that it's coloring, but
Speaker 1: that they're also kind of straft yeah, stylized. I think
Speaker 1: it's probably the best. Okay, it could be that it
Speaker 1: was they were drawn by somebody who couldn't draw, which
Speaker 1: would be interesting because it would mean there are multiple
Speaker 1: artists because some of the other drawings are like really good,
Speaker 1: really great. Then there's the astronomical section, which has illustrations
Speaker 1: of the sun, moon, stars, and zodiac symbols. The so
Speaker 1: called biological section, which is kind of the most interesting
Speaker 1: and fascinating one because it's um got some weird kind
Speaker 1: of anatomical drawings with small female human figures populating systems
Speaker 1: of tubes and transporting green liquid from place to place.
Speaker 1: They also have a lot of Christian symbology mixed in
Speaker 1: with them, and they look really European. And then we
Speaker 1: have the cosmological section, with mostly circular drawings that are
Speaker 1: kind of they've they're they're so far they're unexplained to me.
Speaker 1: It looks a lot like video game maps, right, like
Speaker 1: different worlds in a video game map, and they're like
Speaker 1: there's bridges in between some of them but not others,
Speaker 1: and they're all kind of circular and weird. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's just what it looks like to me. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's the pharmaceutical section, which is it's called that because
Speaker 1: it has drawings of containers which often have small plant
Speaker 1: parts like leaves or roots next to the containers. And
Speaker 1: recipe section, which consists mostly of like lots of short
Speaker 1: paragraphs um that have like weird star drawings in the margin.
Speaker 1: So it's definitely worth the time to go out and
Speaker 1: take a look at the pictures, indeed, and and they're
Speaker 1: they're they're fascinating. I think we might have mentioned this already.
Speaker 1: But they believe that the color was added to the
Speaker 1: illustrations later on, and the research points out that they
Speaker 1: believe that they only had four I think it's four
Speaker 1: colors available, So every time there's a blue, it's the
Speaker 1: same blue, whether it's it's thinner or stronger, make it
Speaker 1: lighter or darker, but it's always the same blue or
Speaker 1: the same green. So they didn't have a whole lot
Speaker 1: of colors available, which makes sense because you have to mix.
Speaker 1: You had to mix color by hand at that point,
Speaker 1: the same berries exactly, and it's not easy to make,
Speaker 1: so you use all of it and you just make
Speaker 1: as much as you need. You know. One of the
Speaker 1: things about the drawings and everything, it kind of makes
Speaker 1: me wonder is that, as you know, paper was probably
Speaker 1: pretty scarce back in those days. I sort of wonder
Speaker 1: if somebody somebody was like making these sketches, somebody else
Speaker 1: came along and needed some paper to write on and
Speaker 1: just and just basically rode around these around these drawings.
Speaker 1: It was completely unrelated. And and then you know, somebody
Speaker 1: else came along later and did a little color and
Speaker 1: treated them like coloring books. I mean, it's always possible.
Speaker 1: Anything is possible when it comes to the voltage manuscribed,
Speaker 1: it really is. And that's one of that, just as
Speaker 1: in the side. You know, we talked about the history before,
Speaker 1: but it's amazing how long people have been puzzling over
Speaker 1: this thing. Some of the people that like like Mr
Speaker 1: Marcy that we talked about earlier, that wouldn't turn it
Speaker 1: over to what's his name, Mr Kirch, Mr Kirshner or
Speaker 1: Mr Kerscher Uh, he spent twenty years trying to figure
Speaker 1: this thing out. People currently have spent longer. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it is perplexing. And the illustrations are interesting because typically
Speaker 1: there's one illustration per page, and as Joe was alluding to,
Speaker 1: it takes up the majority of the page. And if
Speaker 1: if we look at the plant one specifically, it's typically
Speaker 1: the entire plant from route to tips. So it's maybe
Speaker 1: they have a flower drawn here there that's kind of
Speaker 1: a highlight section, but most of it is just that
Speaker 1: one plant and then and that's why people believe that
Speaker 1: they're the text is about those plants. Some of the
Speaker 1: other the other illustrations of the women that you were
Speaker 1: talking about before, a little more perplexing. I think the
Speaker 1: worse the really good explanation for that. I know we're
Speaker 1: going to get to Yes, we got to get to
Speaker 1: the series later. Let's let's let's talk really fast going
Speaker 1: through this description period. Yeah, because I know what people
Speaker 1: want to hear is all these jazzy, cool theories and
Speaker 1: then they want us to solve this mystery. Well, that,
Speaker 1: my friends, is kind of the basic description of the
Speaker 1: Voytage manuscript. Again, I strongly encourage you to go look
Speaker 1: at pictures if you haven't already or look at more pictures.
Speaker 1: Sure they're doing it right now because it's it's you
Speaker 1: can't describe it, and it's it is worth it to
Speaker 1: find the sites that have a lots of the images
Speaker 1: and be high quality versions, because if you look at
Speaker 1: them in say a news article, because there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of news articles about it lately, it doesn't do
Speaker 1: a justice. It's when you get one of those ones
Speaker 1: that you can zoom in multiple times and really see
Speaker 1: the detail. But that's why it really kind of gets in.
Speaker 1: It's really intriguing at that point. Wait, this isn't just
Speaker 1: some crudely drawn thing. There's actually some decent detail in.
Speaker 1: There's really interesting stuff that obviously we all puzzled over it.
Speaker 1: But it's really interesting nonetheless. But it is that time,
Speaker 1: as always, where were going to everybody's favorite part, which theories,
Speaker 1: And I've got the first theory, let's hear it. So
Speaker 1: our very first theory is that the Voytage Manuscript was
Speaker 1: written by Leonardo da Vinci in a private language, none
Speaker 1: other than Leonardo da Vinci as well, start off with
Speaker 1: the top work our way down from there, I gotta
Speaker 1: say from the start, though, that Leo was a better artist. Yes, okay.
Speaker 1: So here's here's the thing. People think, the folks that
Speaker 1: subscribe to this theory, they believe that da Vinci wrote
Speaker 1: this when he was a very young man, maybe a
Speaker 1: teenager or just starting his career. But he hadn't really
Speaker 1: developed his system of of drawing. So this is very
Speaker 1: early on. So it's it's kind of it would be
Speaker 1: like looking somebody who was in a cubist movement, but
Speaker 1: looking at their early works when they were trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to draw in a Cubist way. It's
Speaker 1: not as developed as the rest of his work. You
Speaker 1: just arend it out. I did. I totally aren't heerd
Speaker 1: it out. I can't help it. Da Vinci was known
Speaker 1: for writing in semi coded ways. He made what is
Speaker 1: you may have heard of mirror script, and what it
Speaker 1: is is that if you took a piece of writing
Speaker 1: and you held it into against the mirror right now,
Speaker 1: you can't read it, But if you wrote it as
Speaker 1: if it was that mirror image, it looks like utter gibberish.
Speaker 1: Think about it. You write most people right, and they're
Speaker 1: writing tips to one side. The letters flow to the right.
Speaker 1: In English, typically so if you were to start writing
Speaker 1: it from right to left and everything go to the
Speaker 1: other direction, we should qualify. It's not just English, it's
Speaker 1: anything that uses the European. Yes, European uses the Orian alphabet. Yes,
Speaker 1: I believe that's the proper phrase. But but at speaking
Speaker 1: of his mirror script, so did da Vinci use a
Speaker 1: mirror or did he simply learn how to write backwards?
Speaker 1: He learned how to write backwards, so he perfected it
Speaker 1: so that he was writing it the wrong way. He
Speaker 1: was also known for writing with his right hand, but
Speaker 1: he was initially a Southpa. He was a lefty, and
Speaker 1: in that time if you wrote with your left hand,
Speaker 1: you were it was a sign of the devil, and
Speaker 1: anybody who wanted to write left handed learned to write
Speaker 1: with their right hand. He rebelled against that later in
Speaker 1: his life and started and went back to using his
Speaker 1: left This theory which is primarily advocated by Edith Sherwood,
Speaker 1: she believes that this was something that he did when
Speaker 1: he was first learning to use to write with his
Speaker 1: right hand. How young is she saying that he would
Speaker 1: have been, I mean late teens, early twenties. The impression
Speaker 1: I got the thing that I The problem I have
Speaker 1: with this theory is that, first of all, the drawings
Speaker 1: don't look like Leonardo Divinsion, you know. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can say, well, it was an early version of him,
Speaker 1: but they The thing about artists is it always kind
Speaker 1: of looks like that person. You tend to have a style.
Speaker 1: There's inherent things. Particularly in that time in his life,
Speaker 1: he would have been much more advanced than this. It's
Speaker 1: also been pointed out that because of the cross hatching
Speaker 1: that is used, some of the hatching believe that it
Speaker 1: was he wrote it with his right hand, and he
Speaker 1: drew it with his left, and the hatching flows in
Speaker 1: the direction that he would have done it with his
Speaker 1: left hand, which is from right to left. He would
Speaker 1: have gone up or down, but it would have been done.
Speaker 1: It's done at that angle, whereas if I if I
Speaker 1: sit down and do hatching with mine, it's gonna float
Speaker 1: towards the upper right hand corner. And this seems to
Speaker 1: flow towards the upper left hand corner, which so she says,
Speaker 1: he wrote it with his right hand, So that's why
Speaker 1: the script doesn't match most of his notes. It also
Speaker 1: doesn't have as many It does have similar flourishes that
Speaker 1: he wrote, which a flourish is you can cross your
Speaker 1: tea or twelve year old girls love crossing their teeth
Speaker 1: and drawing a line up and putting a little heart
Speaker 1: at the end. That would be a flourish. Yes, those
Speaker 1: those kind of things are anything that is beyond what
Speaker 1: is needed to make it a little prettier. Is an
Speaker 1: easy way to think of what a flourishes for. Uh,
Speaker 1: this whole theory, I agree, there are holes in the theory. Um.
Speaker 1: Here's here's what I really really found to be. The
Speaker 1: issue is, Okay, I could see that maybe he invented
Speaker 1: a language. The drawings don't match. But let's just say
Speaker 1: he was goofing around. Okay, so he was just doing
Speaker 1: it a different style. He was with the pen in
Speaker 1: his mouth. Maybe. But the problem is DaVinci was known
Speaker 1: for drawing little things into his drawings, and there was
Speaker 1: little codes, evidently that he would put in. And once
Speaker 1: people start grabbing this, they start seeing what they want
Speaker 1: in the images in the illustrations, and suddenly it's there's
Speaker 1: little spikes off the edge of a leaf and suddenly people, oh,
Speaker 1: you see that that spells LEO if you connect the edges,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's seeing what you want to say.
Speaker 1: And that's that's where at first I thought this was like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this is really cool, this kind of makes sense, and
Speaker 1: then it just all and when he shambles off and
Speaker 1: you know it, it makes sense for me. When we
Speaker 1: look at the like the Maidens in the Bath, for instance,
Speaker 1: I can see how somebody could say this artist evolved
Speaker 1: into Leonardo da Vinci. The plant stuff, though, is really
Speaker 1: what trips me up, because it's really awful. I mean,
Speaker 1: just to put it bluntly, it's it's very crude, right,
Speaker 1: there's no perspective or anything like that. So unless we're saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: da Vinci did this when he was like seven years
Speaker 1: old and then came back and wrote it when he
Speaker 1: was twenty, I'm not buying it. I'm just not. There's
Speaker 1: so many plant drawings in here that it's about that, right,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, here's here's the other thing is
Speaker 1: that da Vinci left behind a lot of paperwork, lots
Speaker 1: of drawings, lots of writings. Yeah, he's prolific, not one,
Speaker 1: you know. So if he had invented a private language,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have let it go to waste. A lot
Speaker 1: of his papers, would there would be stuff around there?
Speaker 1: So yeah, well that's why there's examples of his mirror script,
Speaker 1: because he did a bunch of his notes and he
Speaker 1: had if he had mirror a script, why would he,
Speaker 1: I mean, if he had this, why would he do
Speaker 1: mirror scripts? Exactly? Your script might have been easier. And
Speaker 1: let me also, I'll defend it for a second. Let's
Speaker 1: say that he made this up. He made this this
Speaker 1: secret language of his own, this written language, and then
Speaker 1: he realized, I want to send a letter to Antonio,
Speaker 1: but Antonio doesn't know this language, so he can't read it.
Speaker 1: Whereas if he sends it to Antonio and it's written
Speaker 1: a mirror script, Antonio knows to just hold it against
Speaker 1: a mirror and read what's in the mirror. And that's
Speaker 1: much simpler for other people that you're corresponding to people
Speaker 1: to that. But you know, if you really want to
Speaker 1: encrypt something, and Leonardo was not that dumb, he knew that.
Speaker 1: He knew that, you know, he, I mean, he knew
Speaker 1: that that's the most easily crackable cipher and you know,
Speaker 1: of all time. So if he was truly interested in
Speaker 1: keeping secrets from people other than just maybe he just
Speaker 1: learned how to write backwards just for a novelty kind
Speaker 1: of thing. I kind of think it might have been.
Speaker 1: It's something to it. He probably did it on a
Speaker 1: whim to entertain himself and then just kept running with
Speaker 1: it because he was a bit obsessive. He really would.
Speaker 1: It seems like basically things he came up with in
Speaker 1: some of his writings, he would just keep working at it,
Speaker 1: which is why he came up with some very phenomenal things.
Speaker 1: But I think a lot of geniuses had that obsessive
Speaker 1: part of their personality. Yeah, and so, yeah, but he
Speaker 1: did some good stuff. Well anyway, let me let me
Speaker 1: talk about another theory, which is that it's a cipher. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ciphers are fun. Yeah yeah, But I'm not the one
Speaker 1: that came up with this theory. This guy came up
Speaker 1: with what I think is probably one of the most
Speaker 1: bizarre encryption algorithms of all times. So this guy, his
Speaker 1: name was William Newbold. He's a professor of philosophy at
Speaker 1: the University of Pennsylvania. He cracked this code uh, which
Speaker 1: involves anagrams of characters uh, and he found the character
Speaker 1: is not actually not actually in the words of the
Speaker 1: letters themselves, but in fluctuations or variations in the in
Speaker 1: the edges of the ink and the letters. So by
Speaker 1: finding a little so byre finding little wavy, little wavy
Speaker 1: things in the letters, by looking at them through magnifying glasses. Wait,
Speaker 1: so let me let me make sure I I because
Speaker 1: this one was weird. I read it and I thought
Speaker 1: I got it. But you have a better handle on
Speaker 1: it than I do. So if I were to take
Speaker 1: a felt tip pen and just draw a line on
Speaker 1: a sheet of paper, and the ink is gonna bleed out,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna go gonna do it irregularly, right, And
Speaker 1: so you're saying, he then looked at that irregular edge,
Speaker 1: and that's how he deciphered it. Apparently, that's my understanding
Speaker 1: of how it works. And uh, and then and then
Speaker 1: so there's information contained, apparently in those little irregularities. And
Speaker 1: then he converted that information into into letters, which were
Speaker 1: themselves anagrams, which had to be rearranged at the form
Speaker 1: coherent message for for what two and seventy two pages. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it wasn't that. It wasn't a hundred seventy thousand
Speaker 1: characters anagram now, but there was an anagrams between ten letters,
Speaker 1: and so it's like as an encryption uh techniques, I
Speaker 1: can't think of anything more unreliable, yeah, or difficult. So
Speaker 1: it's bizarre. But there are other people who have thought
Speaker 1: about I mean, there are people all over the web
Speaker 1: who believe that this is actually a cipher um. There
Speaker 1: was a guy named John Manley wrote a critical paper
Speaker 1: about new Bold's theory, and he did go he did
Speaker 1: point out, as I just did, at the unreliability of
Speaker 1: anagramming for cryptography is just you know, it just totally
Speaker 1: shoots a hole in the whole thing. Nobody, nobody does
Speaker 1: ciphers with anagrams, right, I mean, like that's not that's
Speaker 1: not a real thing. That's the thing you do when
Speaker 1: you're like in second grade anything. You're cool. If you're
Speaker 1: actually trying to communicate information to somebody, you don't just
Speaker 1: rely on Oh you're gonna be able to totally rearrange
Speaker 1: these words into the al right word, particularly in a
Speaker 1: language like English, but in other languages too. If you
Speaker 1: have I think, if you have like a friend who's like,
Speaker 1: you know, and you're both totally really genius is at anagrams,
Speaker 1: and some people are not me, but some people are
Speaker 1: then I suppose you could actually communicate doing that, but
Speaker 1: you know, for most of us, it's not gonna work. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that's enough. So as far as it being a cipher,
Speaker 1: if it is a cipher, it can only be one
Speaker 1: kind of cipher, and that is a substitution cipher. Because
Speaker 1: if you look at this page, this is from page
Speaker 1: seventy five of the manuscript, if you look at the
Speaker 1: two words that I've underlined, they're identical. Correct, there's three
Speaker 1: of them on this one page. Yeah, alright, So if
Speaker 1: it's anything other than a substitution cipher, then it's say,
Speaker 1: if it's some really sophisticated kind of cipher, then the
Speaker 1: odds are that, say an eight letter word are going
Speaker 1: to be translated by the sophisticated. Say it's say it's
Speaker 1: a one time pad, that the encoded tex is going
Speaker 1: to be the exact same word, especially three times on
Speaker 1: a page. Uh, Statistically, that's just not possible. Or it's possible,
Speaker 1: but it's like infinitesimally small odds of that happening. Unless
Speaker 1: it's a name. Unless it's a name, like it's the
Speaker 1: name of a city or something like that. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I don't think in this particular case it is on
Speaker 1: that particular But so anyway, Uh, the as you guys know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if we've mentioned it before or not.
Speaker 1: The n s A actually had their hands on this
Speaker 1: think for a while, and they were they were they
Speaker 1: actually noodle it around, tried to make some sense of this,
Speaker 1: and they were not able to. But if you look
Speaker 1: at this, that word has to be since the word
Speaker 1: appears more than once, this can only be a simple
Speaker 1: substitution cipher. And so for our listeners who don't know,
Speaker 1: and you should know if you've been listening to us,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you whatever, it's a word where a
Speaker 1: letter or a symbol represented is represented by another letter
Speaker 1: or symbol. So so in other words, A would be D,
Speaker 1: B would be F, C would be x, D would
Speaker 1: be M like that. So it's not not in any
Speaker 1: sort of pattern. And then you substitute those letters whenever
Speaker 1: you substitute one for the other. Uh. And so if
Speaker 1: the s A add their hands on this, and it
Speaker 1: quite obviously as a substitution cipher, if it is a
Speaker 1: cipher at all, then they would have cracked it in
Speaker 1: about three minutes. Not no, not three minutes thirty seconds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so did you have some big brains are really into
Speaker 1: that stuff. Yeah, so it cannot be a cipher as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell. Okay, well, we'll move on
Speaker 1: to our next theory. Yeah, this is pretty exciting. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: well what would you what would you title this theory?
Speaker 1: I would title this theory Stephen Backs has solved the mystery. Okay,
Speaker 1: well we we were lucky enough to do an interview
Speaker 1: about this with a gentleman who has been in the
Speaker 1: news lately by the name of Stephen Backs. But let's
Speaker 1: let's dr Backs introduce himself. Yeah, okay, my names Stephen Backs,
Speaker 1: and I'm a professor of applied linguistics in the University
Speaker 1: of Bedfordshire in England, and my particular interest in the
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript is to try and decode it from a
Speaker 1: linguistic point of view. And others have looked at it
Speaker 1: from a historical point of view or looking at the
Speaker 1: pictures and so on, but I'm particularly interested in looking
Speaker 1: at the language and the script and trying as best
Speaker 1: as I can to make a start on decoding it
Speaker 1: because the problem with the manuscript so far has been
Speaker 1: that since it was written around about perhaps fourteen thirty.
Speaker 1: No one's been able to decode anything of the script
Speaker 1: or understand anything of the language. So that's the angle
Speaker 1: that I'm taking. Really, So doctor Backs has obviously done
Speaker 1: a lot of research on the manuscript. Highly qualified guys,
Speaker 1: very qualified, I would say, almost as qualified as us,
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit more. We can be gracious on
Speaker 1: this one, very very gracious, but I did. It was
Speaker 1: really interesting to find out what got doctor Backs to
Speaker 1: first start looking at the manuscript. It was kind of
Speaker 1: like a random happens. Yeah. Well, well, Leah, Well, I
Speaker 1: was listening to the radio about two years ago, almost
Speaker 1: exactly two years ago, and there was a really interesting
Speaker 1: program about John d and they think he might have
Speaker 1: been the model for the character Prospero in Shakespeare's Played
Speaker 1: the ten fest a kind of mystical, strange wizard like figure,
Speaker 1: and he was really interesting. He tried hard to speak
Speaker 1: with angels and communicate with angels, had a large library
Speaker 1: of different books, and it was thought at one time
Speaker 1: that he might have owned this manuscript and then sold
Speaker 1: it on to the Emperor Rudolph the Second, who was
Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Emperor. Because we know pretty sure it
Speaker 1: did belong to the Emperor at one time, but it's
Speaker 1: now thought that actually John D didn't have much to
Speaker 1: do with it. But I got into it by looking
Speaker 1: at John D, listening to program on the radio, looking
Speaker 1: at Wikipedia, as of course we all do, and then
Speaker 1: finding the voyage the Voyage manuscript from that and thought, wow,
Speaker 1: this has got some really interesting signs and symbols, some
Speaker 1: of them looking a little bit like Arabic at us
Speaker 1: because I studied Arabic for so many years, that really
Speaker 1: intrigued me, and that kind of got me going on it. Really.
Speaker 1: As we were talking to Dr Backs, what I really
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of key in on was what exactly
Speaker 1: was it in the text that jumped out at him
Speaker 1: that he first started looking at working one kind of
Speaker 1: his aha moment, Right, Yeah, it's exactly right, his aha moment.
Speaker 1: That's that's the important piece. That's the first piece of
Speaker 1: the puzzle. Yeah, I mean, the very first one was
Speaker 1: I found a pattern which seems to be the repetition
Speaker 1: of of what looked like a R a R. And
Speaker 1: that kind of pattern in the manuscript is quite race.
Speaker 1: I thought, well, that might be a borrowing and it
Speaker 1: seemed to me to be alongside the plant, which I
Speaker 1: knew to be was called the our plant in Arabic,
Speaker 1: which is the junifer plant. So it struck me that
Speaker 1: it might actually be the name of that plant. Now
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure that that's that's correct anymore, but
Speaker 1: that kind of got me started on looking for the plant,
Speaker 1: and particularly the first word on each plant page, because
Speaker 1: in many evil manuscripts that's usually where the name of
Speaker 1: the plant was. The first word was the name of it.
Speaker 1: So then I started to look at other ones. And
Speaker 1: besides that, there's a really interesting picture on page sixty
Speaker 1: eight of the manuscript which has a big circle in
Speaker 1: the middle, and it has a face of the moon,
Speaker 1: but the rather sad, gloomy face actually drawn on a
Speaker 1: beautiful little picture. The top left hand corner there are
Speaker 1: seven stars which people reckon are probably the plier. These
Speaker 1: the seven sisters in the constellation of Taurus. So I
Speaker 1: took somebody else's idea which said that the word alongside
Speaker 1: these seven stars might be the word taurus, and basically
Speaker 1: I split it up into the letters, like thinking, the
Speaker 1: first one is probably a tough, the second one probably
Speaker 1: an add the third one could be a work sound
Speaker 1: because of the old form of Taurus's tower, would the
Speaker 1: third the fourth phone will be a ruh and that
Speaker 1: kind of way. Then comparing that with other words and
Speaker 1: other names of the plants, it seems to me that
Speaker 1: there were some patterns going on which would help to
Speaker 1: lead us to a fuller decoding later. But I should
Speaker 1: just empathize that at the moment, it's still provisional and
Speaker 1: it's still very very small. Me when I tell people
Speaker 1: I've deciphered ten words of a thirty five thousand word
Speaker 1: manuscripts all off their chair. But the point is, nobody's
Speaker 1: ever done any before at all. So both even one word,
Speaker 1: if you can say with confidence, and that's kind of something.
Speaker 1: The key thing from from my point of view is
Speaker 1: to look for proper names, and that's partly because previous
Speaker 1: analyzes of language, for example, the discipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was the way
Speaker 1: that they did it. They looked for proper names, like
Speaker 1: the pharaohs Rameses or Cleopatra, and once I thought they'd
Speaker 1: found them, they worked out each letter for example, Kirk
Speaker 1: Clay or partly they worked out each letter and the
Speaker 1: sound related to it, and so they built up a
Speaker 1: system of sounds and signs, and then from that they
Speaker 1: went on to find out that in fact that particular
Speaker 1: language was related to Coptic, so that they started with
Speaker 1: proper names. And I thought it would be useful to
Speaker 1: try the same approach with the Voyage manuscript, and people
Speaker 1: have tried similar things before. But I think partly my
Speaker 1: background in other Oriental languages such as Arabic and other
Speaker 1: languages with different scripts gave me a kind of handle
Speaker 1: on which I think helped me to get make some
Speaker 1: progress on it. No, you don't have a Roserto stone here? Well, no,
Speaker 1: I mean that would be the beauty of it. But
Speaker 1: unfortunately we don't have any other manuscript or any other
Speaker 1: text of any sort with the same letters and symbols
Speaker 1: as the Voyage Manuscript, which is one reason why it's
Speaker 1: so fascinating. It's the only texts in the world which
Speaker 1: has these letters and symbols. But it has a lot
Speaker 1: of them. I mean, there are thirty or five thousand
Speaker 1: words in the text, but we can't read any of them,
Speaker 1: so it's very frustrating as well. And so we asked
Speaker 1: dr Backs about some theories that perhaps the language that
Speaker 1: is in the document, in the manuscript is the written
Speaker 1: alphabet of the written language of a in extinct language.
Speaker 1: And here's what you have to say, Well, the extinct thing.
Speaker 1: I didn't actually say that. I mean, what I suggest
Speaker 1: is that the script might has definitely become extinct because
Speaker 1: no one else has used the script, but that the
Speaker 1: language underneath, the language underneath could well be a language
Speaker 1: that has has modern descendants, or could be a fully
Speaker 1: fully existent modern language. Um. I mean, if you take,
Speaker 1: let's take an example of Armenian, let's imagine that it
Speaker 1: might be Armenian. Well, you then say to yourself, why
Speaker 1: if it was the language was Armenian, why would they
Speaker 1: write it in a different script when they're a fully
Speaker 1: formed Armenian script they could have used. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: it must be some group of people who had to
Speaker 1: divide the script for themselves because there wasn't a script
Speaker 1: already there for them. And some people have suggested interestingly
Speaker 1: that it might be a Romani, the kind of gypsy
Speaker 1: language which also has interesting Indian roots, because obviously the
Speaker 1: Romany tribes are supposed to have come from Indian migrated
Speaker 1: across Asia into Europe. And that's quite an intriguing idea.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I believe that either, but it's intriguing
Speaker 1: because of course they are a group who didn't have
Speaker 1: their own script, who would have had to develop their
Speaker 1: own script if they wanted to encode all of this
Speaker 1: knowledge that they had. And then arguably you could argue
Speaker 1: they might have been that group might have been suppressed
Speaker 1: or died out, and their knowledge and their script died
Speaker 1: out with them. But yet still we have the Romani
Speaker 1: language around which which we could use to interpret it,
Speaker 1: and that does actually have a bearing with the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Egyptian hieroglyphs were shown to encode the Coptic language, which
Speaker 1: existed but had been suppressed for many decades and didn't
Speaker 1: have its own writing system. So there are kind of
Speaker 1: parallels which make you think it could be something like that.
Speaker 1: So one of the places that we ran across Dr Backs,
Speaker 1: he's kind of all over the internet right now, was
Speaker 1: his Reddit am a that he did ask me anything.
Speaker 1: And one of the theories that was floated in this
Speaker 1: was that it may have been written by this Italian
Speaker 1: explorer Nickelodeon Conti and his Indian wife and children. He
Speaker 1: was Italian, his wife was Indian, and the flourishes look
Speaker 1: a little Hindy to me. You know, I really liked
Speaker 1: this theory, so I asked Dr Backs about it, and
Speaker 1: he had something kind of interesting to say. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: like that theory too. I mean, I like the idea
Speaker 1: that it's kind of made by like a family or
Speaker 1: I really like that idea. But the problem is that
Speaker 1: if we jumped too quickly to identify an author, we
Speaker 1: tend to block out other possibilities. And I think, you know,
Speaker 1: the the idea of your your your kind of podcast
Speaker 1: being thinking sideways, you know, I think we've got to
Speaker 1: kind of keep our minds open and be aware of
Speaker 1: all kinds of possible things. But I do like that
Speaker 1: ticular idea about the county idea. I mean, a lot
Speaker 1: of people assume it was written in Italy because it
Speaker 1: was found in Italy and because some of the script
Speaker 1: looked a little bit kind of Latin. But my personal
Speaker 1: idea that it was probably a little bit further east
Speaker 1: than that, and I would, you know, be looking in
Speaker 1: the area of kind of Turkey, the Caucussus, Western Asia,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, but it does have. The thing
Speaker 1: is if you look at the pictures that are a
Speaker 1: lot of the pictures very European in their style. There
Speaker 1: lots of European female figures, there's some European clothing in there,
Speaker 1: there's some interesting European looking buildings and stuff. But when
Speaker 1: we say European, it could equally be kind of Near
Speaker 1: Eastern Turkish, Armenian, George and that kind of area. So
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of more likely than a purely
Speaker 1: European origin, mainly because the words that I've brought I've
Speaker 1: managed to identify seem to have more of a kind
Speaker 1: of Near Eastern, as you said, Arabic Persian basis, rather than,
Speaker 1: for example, a Latin basis, So that's kind of where
Speaker 1: I would kind of go for it at the moment. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Daubeck has invested two years of research into this. He's
Speaker 1: not just going to let it drop. So he is
Speaker 1: going to continue to look into the manuscript. But he's
Speaker 1: got some really creative ideas and how to keep doing
Speaker 1: that research, and how to get some help with that research.
Speaker 1: As I said, I've got my my website with Stephen
Speaker 1: backs dot net, which is I'm making it more into
Speaker 1: a forum for people to come and give their ideas
Speaker 1: of and so we've got the kind of areas for
Speaker 1: people to look at the plants and give their ideas,
Speaker 1: areas to look at the stars, and some really interesting
Speaker 1: contributions now about the star names in the manuscript, and
Speaker 1: I think that's a good next source for information where
Speaker 1: we could actually go and try and I mean again,
Speaker 1: typically in those days and also now a huge number
Speaker 1: of the star names that we we have come from
Speaker 1: Arabic originally, and that I think could be a good source.
Speaker 1: I don't think that the names and the one Witch
Speaker 1: manuscript are directly from Arabic, but I think many of
Speaker 1: them may well be derived from Arabic. So again that
Speaker 1: could be another source of helping to identify maybe some
Speaker 1: new letters and new sounds and so on. So that's
Speaker 1: I think it's a really exciting area to But my
Speaker 1: problem is I'm very ignorant about plants. I'm very ignorant.
Speaker 1: I need I need a lot more people to kind
Speaker 1: of chip in and help with their knowledge and say no,
Speaker 1: that's that's a good idea, that's rubbish, and so on.
Speaker 1: It's crowdsourcing is a great way to go about solving
Speaker 1: problems like I mean, you know, you get a lot
Speaker 1: of people who basically so you know, maybe this is crazy,
Speaker 1: but maybe x Y and said, he said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: all ideas are on the table, we might as well
Speaker 1: look at them, and even if you know you think
Speaker 1: it's crazy, let's put it in the pot and see
Speaker 1: where we can go from there. Okay, at this point,
Speaker 1: we've gone on quite a bit, quite a bit of time,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure most of you, if not all of you,
Speaker 1: have too peace, and we're only halfway done exactly, and
Speaker 1: so we're going to have a short intermission for your convenience,
Speaker 1: and we're back. So this next theory, Doctor Backs actually
Speaker 1: directed us towards. Thanks Dr Backs. Thanks Dr Back, very
Speaker 1: nice of him. He directed us to a article in
Speaker 1: a magazine now periodical. I think it is called the
Speaker 1: Chronica Horticulture. It's Latin, and the article is called Biological
Speaker 1: Section of the Voyage Manuscript, a textbook of medieval plant physiology.
Speaker 1: Question marks, question mark physiology. So this theory goes well, Okay,
Speaker 1: this theory is put forth by two doctors, doctor Tias
Speaker 1: and Tias. I think they're married, but they might be siblings.
Speaker 1: I gotta be honest, I don't know. I couldn't tell
Speaker 1: there they have the same last name. It may actually
Speaker 1: just be a coincidence. They just might have the last
Speaker 1: name last name doctor's tias. Can I say that doctor's tias.
Speaker 1: The doctor's tias have doctor and his companion. It's a theory.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the nerd reference. It's a theory based
Speaker 1: on the plants too, just like doctor Backs's theory. But
Speaker 1: they their goal is not to decipher the words, but
Speaker 1: to tell us what the manuscript, or at least the
Speaker 1: section of manuscript is about a textbook of medieval plant physiology.
Speaker 1: They claim that you can't actually identify any of the
Speaker 1: images by the plants, which, sorry, doctor Backs, is kind
Speaker 1: of true. They are hard to identify it. Again, this
Speaker 1: is something we talked about, is the illustrative quality or accuracy.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, they're they're very it's simplistic and it's hard.
Speaker 1: You know, the fifteenth century plants were a little different
Speaker 1: back then. We don't really they were kind of misshapen
Speaker 1: and had no perspective. No, but we don't know where
Speaker 1: they're from, right, so we can't even say, like, well,
Speaker 1: plants in this area at this time were these were
Speaker 1: kind of like, well, in Europe in the maybe fifteen century,
Speaker 1: the plants were kind end of maybe this and these
Speaker 1: are the ones that we know we're in vaguely kind
Speaker 1: of looks like this one. So it might be that one. Right,
Speaker 1: So they say that's that's what's not important. They want
Speaker 1: to talk about the theory to explain the nude women
Speaker 1: in the green tubs um and the tia theory is
Speaker 1: totally radically different. It claims that this explains how plants
Speaker 1: get their nutrition. So this is this is truly and
Speaker 1: I know the name said this, but this is truly
Speaker 1: a biological plant physiology brook So this is saying how
Speaker 1: nutrients go from the roots to the tips. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: so bear with me, right as as I'm sure most
Speaker 1: of you know, right because you passed second grade. Plants.
Speaker 1: Plants get their nutrition from the sun and the ground,
Speaker 1: right from the air, and from the air, most of
Speaker 1: it is through water, nutrient rich water that they suck
Speaker 1: up through their roots and then kind of digest using
Speaker 1: the song. That's like the most simplistic way that I
Speaker 1: can describe what happens the whole thing. Yeah, he hasn't
Speaker 1: he has suggests that since this idea would have been
Speaker 1: really new in the fifteenth century, this manuscript was developed
Speaker 1: to kind of explain it to people. That makes sense, Yeah,
Speaker 1: except they sort of slipped and wrote in the language
Speaker 1: nobody just so that maybe the manuscript was meant to
Speaker 1: and I'm quoting here delight entertained and instruct the reader,
Speaker 1: and the women would have represented the souls of the plant.
Speaker 1: Now you might be wondering why so many souls per plant,
Speaker 1: because it would ostensibly be one plant per page. Right,
Speaker 1: So Aristotle actually has a really good answer for this.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, way before this manuscript was ever made,
Speaker 1: plants or chicks, that plants have a lot of different souls.
Speaker 1: What he said was that when you cut a human
Speaker 1: or animal in half, they die because they only have
Speaker 1: one soul. So you cut their soul in half. Their
Speaker 1: souled eyes. But wait a second, has anybody ever tried
Speaker 1: rooting a human being to see if you can actually?
Speaker 1: You know, good question. We should probably try that next week. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anybody want a volunteer, No, I think we'll get to
Speaker 1: find an outside volunteer for this one. Okay, So we'll
Speaker 1: just go with the theory that when you cut a
Speaker 1: human in half, they probably die right normally, But when
Speaker 1: you cut a plant into half or many different segments,
Speaker 1: it'll live for a while or forever, sometimes forever. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they can kind of regenerate, you know, your replant it
Speaker 1: cutting cutting and replant it and it becomes a new thing.
Speaker 1: So it follows by ancient kind of theory that that
Speaker 1: plant must have many souls. You look super angry and confused.
Speaker 1: I'm confused. I'm I'm following this. This is not in
Speaker 1: my wheelhouse follow kind of think ancient times. And that's
Speaker 1: that's where I'm having the difficulty. Ha. Yes, I'm following
Speaker 1: the logic you're such a higher being's it's it's such
Speaker 1: a different mode of thinking. As an allegorical depiction of
Speaker 1: how the plant works. The problem I would have with
Speaker 1: this is like, for example, the one one that I
Speaker 1: can think of, where there's this plant like structure and
Speaker 1: his green and there's all these naked women. But if
Speaker 1: you you know, going and they're not, it appears from
Speaker 1: the picture that they're not going up the plant from
Speaker 1: the soil to the top of the plant. It appears
Speaker 1: that they're sliding down a water slide into a pool.
Speaker 1: At the bottom. They're going in the wrong direction. The
Speaker 1: souls might be going a wrong direction, but the water
Speaker 1: might not be. But but again I think, Joe, I
Speaker 1: think you're having a bit the same issue I am
Speaker 1: is that we understand that and a plant and a
Speaker 1: biological perspective that everything rises from the roots up, whereas
Speaker 1: they may not have had that perspective, and so they
Speaker 1: viewed it as going down or circulations. Yeah, it could
Speaker 1: have been a circulatory system. So the other thing about
Speaker 1: this t S series, they talk a lot about the
Speaker 1: large amount of Christian religious imagery through the manuscript Um.
Speaker 1: They point specifically to again the biological section with these women.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are holding what can kind of
Speaker 1: be identified as rosaries. There's one woman holding what is
Speaker 1: clearly across um and they've looked at illuminations, are really
Speaker 1: closely at. One of the sources they cite is if
Speaker 1: you look really closely at the head of us of
Speaker 1: one of the sunflowers, there's a cross in it. You know, Okay,
Speaker 1: I gotta I I need to stop you there, because
Speaker 1: this is the same thing that I had an issue
Speaker 1: with with this being something by da Vinci. And remember
Speaker 1: I said, people thought they saw his name written in
Speaker 1: things in kind of a hidden way. I looked at
Speaker 1: that image and it's happenstance to me that it looks
Speaker 1: like a cross. You have to infer the cross into
Speaker 1: that plan. Whereas if I was drawing that and I
Speaker 1: knew how the seeds were going to radiate out, to me,
Speaker 1: the easiest ways to draw the X and the y
Speaker 1: axis of circles to make the seed pattern and then
Speaker 1: just fill in the holes as you go around working
Speaker 1: your way out, So that I have an issue with that. Also,
Speaker 1: you know, it also could have been a plus sign
Speaker 1: the plant map. Yeah, I mean, so it is fairly indisputable, however,
Speaker 1: that these the women often are have these kind of
Speaker 1: religious symbols, and I think their theory is is that
Speaker 1: this is the time in history where Christianity is kind
Speaker 1: of on the rise, and it's kind of a turbulent
Speaker 1: time for Christianity. True, and that this could really easily
Speaker 1: be interpreted as like a pagan something. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of where they end their theory is that
Speaker 1: so these people put these Christian religious things in there
Speaker 1: so that people wouldn't it wasn't yeah, so people would
Speaker 1: know it wasn't pagan, but well no, it was just
Speaker 1: it was just educational manual. So so, but but you
Speaker 1: said that they said that it may have been a
Speaker 1: pagan manual or were they saying that it might have
Speaker 1: been a mistaken for a pagan manual that the author
Speaker 1: and illustrator wanted to ensure that nobody would ever look
Speaker 1: at this and be like, this is obviously pagan witchcraft,
Speaker 1: so that they were not pagan, that they were a
Speaker 1: Christian and they were like, hey, don't worry, guys, this
Speaker 1: is totally Christians. Is totally legit, totally legit, above board. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: if you're putting naked women and then you probably want to,
Speaker 1: I can have some crosses and rosaries to yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: just to just to cover yourself. Yeah, well there was,
Speaker 1: but there was that nudity in in art and illustration
Speaker 1: was not a frowned upon thing at that time. The
Speaker 1: human form and that that you know, females were always
Speaker 1: represented in that man There were there were no naked
Speaker 1: bike rides. That was kind of like beyond the pale
Speaker 1: yes that was that was pushing on the paintings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of the TS theory. It's interesting it
Speaker 1: only addresses that one little section. That's the problem is
Speaker 1: it only addresses one section of the whole thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean as opposed to course they don't they're not
Speaker 1: required to you by law. The astrological section, you know,
Speaker 1: the astrological sections are I guess at that point the
Speaker 1: only sections that they don't really address, right, because it
Speaker 1: does address the biologic illuminations, right, pharmaceutical and the pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: stuff as well, so it just doesn't address the star
Speaker 1: stuff and and and that gives it some credence. I
Speaker 1: I can understand the theory. I understand it better now
Speaker 1: that you've explained it to me, because when I read it,
Speaker 1: I didn't get it. You're welcome, but thank you, But
Speaker 1: I still I have qualms with it. And it's the
Speaker 1: same thing Joe said, because it's really focused in one
Speaker 1: and I again, as I said before, I think that
Speaker 1: people see what they want to say. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: can tell you that one of the doctor's tias is
Speaker 1: apparently an accomplished watercolorist in plant life. And they are
Speaker 1: both plant professors basically the people. Neither of them is,
Speaker 1: but they're both. They're both biologic doctors. Biologic doctors yep, biologists.
Speaker 1: Biologists the word I was looking for, thank you. So there.
Speaker 1: Neither of them are linguistic professors, which is why they
Speaker 1: avoid Well it makes sense. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know this, but have they basically focused on the drawings
Speaker 1: and not really paid a lot of attention to the
Speaker 1: text itself. Yeah, they focused entirely on the drawings, and
Speaker 1: I as far as I can tell, they are no
Speaker 1: longer researching and are no longer interested in researching. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of, it's kind of it's kind of a
Speaker 1: hair puller. You know, a lot of you know, this
Speaker 1: paper that I read was published in I think two
Speaker 1: thousand two or something like that, and it's, as I
Speaker 1: can tell, the last time, that's the only thing they
Speaker 1: ever published about it. So interesting theory. Our next theory
Speaker 1: is the Nueva Spana theory or New Spain theory, and
Speaker 1: New Spain New Spain is when the Spanish came to
Speaker 1: the New World and they started taking over and conquering.
Speaker 1: They took over Mexico a little bit after that. A
Speaker 1: little bit after that, Yeah, and then they also started
Speaker 1: taking over parts of the continental US. Well to them,
Speaker 1: that was they named it all New Spain, New York basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: or New Amsterdam is it's it's called but yes, So
Speaker 1: that is what Nueva Espania means is New Spain, and
Speaker 1: that's the area that references in and New Spain really
Speaker 1: took up a lot of the center of the current
Speaker 1: United States, so it's a very huge area. So this
Speaker 1: the Nueva Spania theory is put out by two gentlemen.
Speaker 1: We've got Dr Arthur Tucker and Mr Rexford Talbert, and
Speaker 1: I had some brief email correspondence with Dr Tucker and
Speaker 1: he was kind enough to send me their their research
Speaker 1: and their writing. You get a condensed format, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot to it, but let me kind of kind
Speaker 1: of boiled down what their theory is. What these two
Speaker 1: gentlemen decided to do was, rather than try to decipher
Speaker 1: the next right off, they did something similar to what
Speaker 1: the doctor's tias did, which is they focused on the illustrations.
Speaker 1: They wanted to try and figure out if they could
Speaker 1: pinpoint those illustrations to specific plants, and they didn't just
Speaker 1: focus on Europe. They went they looked at plants that
Speaker 1: were known and had been discovered across all of the
Speaker 1: known world at that time, and we're talking the mid
Speaker 1: fifteen hundreds what they found and and and they when
Speaker 1: they when I say the mid hundreds, that's when they
Speaker 1: think the manuscript was first quote unquote discovered. It happened
Speaker 1: in the well. They're they're basing it off of plants
Speaker 1: that they knew were in the fifteen mid hundred range.
Speaker 1: And that's and that's based on some other writings, which
Speaker 1: I'll get to in just a second. But what they
Speaker 1: did is they looked at the plans and one of
Speaker 1: the ones that they found was called the Soap Plant.
Speaker 1: They matched up the illustration in the description the illustration
Speaker 1: to other books that were put out in this time range.
Speaker 1: The soap Plant is depicted in the fIF fifty two
Speaker 1: Codex Cruise batter Nous of Mexico. And I might have
Speaker 1: mangled that pronunciation, but it's a book that came out
Speaker 1: of Mexico at that time, and it evidently is considered
Speaker 1: the first medical text that was ever written in the
Speaker 1: New World, and that was written by Spanish in the Spanish. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: And they took that and they said, wait, we've got
Speaker 1: these illustrations from that region of the world. Seemed to
Speaker 1: match this one plant let's try and match it to others,
Speaker 1: which is not a bad way to do it, you know.
Speaker 1: Let's not look like I can't understand what the writing is.
Speaker 1: So let me see if I know what the pictures are.
Speaker 1: That's how kids learn how to read, right. It really
Speaker 1: is still working on that. According to their research, they
Speaker 1: have identified thirty seven plants, six animals, and one mineral
Speaker 1: in the manuscript to the America's How did they identify
Speaker 1: the mineral, That's what I'm curious about. I'm not exactly
Speaker 1: positive how they came to that conclusion. To be honest,
Speaker 1: I read their research, but it's a little above my
Speaker 1: pay grade, and so I didn't quite understand everything. This
Speaker 1: whole thing is above but don't worry. But anyway, these
Speaker 1: plants were depicted in other writings from post conquest Mexico
Speaker 1: and North America. So they're saying, well, we see these
Speaker 1: and we see those, so we kind of draw the
Speaker 1: two together and say that it must have come out
Speaker 1: of that region of the world. Are they saying then
Speaker 1: that plants in the New World are blobbier and lack perspective? No,
Speaker 1: But I guess my question would be that the female
Speaker 1: figures right, not to like drive too hard on this,
Speaker 1: but they're very clearly very European, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: Western European. It's not what you see. The illustration style
Speaker 1: of Mexico and North America at that time when the
Speaker 1: Spanish had come was very different, different, and that even
Speaker 1: just the illustration style of that time in Spain was
Speaker 1: totally You don't see naked women from Spain in this period.
Speaker 1: In fact, you see like really covered in black clothing,
Speaker 1: very like morose women from Spain in this period. So
Speaker 1: I wonder if they have a theory to kind of
Speaker 1: reconciles not forget it well, in that exactly it, because
Speaker 1: you've got to remember that there's multiple cultures that have
Speaker 1: been conquered, and they have different beliefs, and they have
Speaker 1: a different way of doing things, and it may have
Speaker 1: been this weird melting pot and and here's here's something
Speaker 1: that they write because they do try to address the text.
Speaker 1: They don't try and crack it, but they do try
Speaker 1: and address it. And I'm gonna, yeah, let me read
Speaker 1: this directly. Here. A search of the surviving coduses and
Speaker 1: manuscripts from Nueva Espana in the sixteenth century reveals the
Speaker 1: calligraphy of the Voytage manuscript to be similar to the
Speaker 1: Codex Assuna, which is fifteen sixty three to fifteen sixty
Speaker 1: six evidently was written in Mexico City. Loanwords for the
Speaker 1: plant and animal names have been identified from the classical
Speaker 1: And again I'm gonna apologize on the pronouncea. How is
Speaker 1: that again? Nah? Yes, that the Spanish, the Tino and
Speaker 1: mixed texts, which are all different cultures in that area.
Speaker 1: So they they're kind of to me, it sounds like
Speaker 1: it's we're melting them all together. Everybody's together in the
Speaker 1: styles are all kind of shifting together similarly. I've gotta
Speaker 1: I gotta say that I took a look at the
Speaker 1: Codex Alsuna and I didn't think the calligraphy was all
Speaker 1: that similar. It's not. And this is the issue. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing again. I don't mean to beat a
Speaker 1: dead horse here, but we go back to Da Vinci. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the style is the same, but everybody kind of used
Speaker 1: the same kind of writing implement which forces you to
Speaker 1: write in a similar manner, but they're not the same.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I kind of like the theory that
Speaker 1: like it's another relic of the Aztecs. And that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of where this point they I never saw them
Speaker 1: come out directly and say this is an Aztec language derivative,
Speaker 1: but you really kind of get that sense the way
Speaker 1: they write about that. Again, the Codex a Sooner was
Speaker 1: written by Spanish and by my Spaniards, correct by Aztecs, right,
Speaker 1: And so you know these guys actually took the trouble
Speaker 1: to to learn this, this ancient written language of the
Speaker 1: Aztecs before they murdered him. Well, but if you think
Speaker 1: about not not every Aztec would have been killed, some
Speaker 1: of them would have escaped, either as slaves or free people.
Speaker 1: You've then got a job, and they pass this on
Speaker 1: to their children. You've got to hang onto your cultures,
Speaker 1: as every every culture does, teach it to your children,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't go away. And some of that might
Speaker 1: have bled true. I gotta tell you. I looked at
Speaker 1: some of the some of the alphabets and of the
Speaker 1: additionous people's like the Maya, the Mayan's, the all Man
Speaker 1: and the Aztecs, and they were basically they didn't seem
Speaker 1: to have a written alphabet so much as hieroglyphics. And
Speaker 1: so I mean I don't know that there's any evidence
Speaker 1: that's that any of the indigenous cultures here had any
Speaker 1: kind of writing system like this, But I got to
Speaker 1: be honest, I think one of the most compelling theories
Speaker 1: in terms of who might have written this is that
Speaker 1: it was, you know, like a slave language or like
Speaker 1: a gypsy roving caravan language, because it's it just kind
Speaker 1: of fits the parameters right with the language that's trying
Speaker 1: to be actively trying to be not what a lot
Speaker 1: of people are writing. Then it's meant to be a
Speaker 1: private language, but that it's written for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: but that it was a group of people that could
Speaker 1: have very easily been integrated into a different culture or
Speaker 1: died out. I think that's a very interesting idea. It
Speaker 1: is that you know, you know what with that theory,
Speaker 1: the problem I have with it is that there would
Speaker 1: be other remnants of this language around and instead of
Speaker 1: just this one thing. And so that's why I find
Speaker 1: out a little hard to believe. But that's also the
Speaker 1: hard part about history, and especially areas that are a
Speaker 1: lot of turmoil during history. Think about all the relics
Speaker 1: from the past that had been burned and destroyed, have
Speaker 1: been burned. Yeah, I mean these things, you know, we
Speaker 1: people gather, Oh my gosh, these are all the same.
Speaker 1: We've got a house and we've got to protect them.
Speaker 1: And then somebody drops a lamp and the whole thing
Speaker 1: goes up and smoke. So it could be that they
Speaker 1: had collected all this stuff and somebody was writing it
Speaker 1: and they it was the Inner Library Loan of the
Speaker 1: Aztec World, and they sent it to somebody else, and
Speaker 1: then the entire library goes up in flames, and here's
Speaker 1: the one surviving copy of it. But you know, actually,
Speaker 1: you know, one thing I could conceive of is that
Speaker 1: imagine an ancient surviving text from somewhere, something, something that's
Speaker 1: really really old, and somebody like a monk along about
Speaker 1: the fourteen fifteenth century, finds it and it's kind of
Speaker 1: crumbling and he thanks. You know, I've got nothing else
Speaker 1: going on in I lift in my life. So you know,
Speaker 1: maybe what I'll do is I'm going to copy this
Speaker 1: whole thing over, even though I don't even quite understand it,
Speaker 1: copy the whole thing over, and just so it's preserved
Speaker 1: for posterity, you know, And so maybe that maybe if
Speaker 1: this thing is actually real, which again I'm not buying
Speaker 1: into that entirely, but maybe if it is, maybe it
Speaker 1: actually dates back a lot further and somebody basically made
Speaker 1: hand copy of it, and that's the one we have.
Speaker 1: So we're looking at a flawed copy, is what you're saying. No,
Speaker 1: it might, it might. It might be a meticulous copy.
Speaker 1: But it's a copy. So that means that number one
Speaker 1: and it's not going to be precise. It's not that
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be a xerox. Yeah, and it could
Speaker 1: be potentially thousands, that's what I'm saying. It's it's something
Speaker 1: that could be much much older than the fourteenth or
Speaker 1: fifteenth centuries. Interesting, And that's that's a good theory. I
Speaker 1: hadn't even thought about that before. I only thought about
Speaker 1: just now. Well, while while we're on crazy theories, I
Speaker 1: have one because I feel like a little bit of
Speaker 1: a looney theory. It's a good one. Yeah, I like.
Speaker 1: I like the loony lunacy of it. This one, however,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't. I shouldn't be cruel, right, I should be,
Speaker 1: but a little bit. Yeah, let's have it. There's a guy,
Speaker 1: what's the guy's name, vicolat Vola. That's a crazy name,
Speaker 1: it's pretty crazy. Yeah, So he thinks that the Voytage
Speaker 1: manuscript details the spontaneous creation of d n A through
Speaker 1: the use of sound or a direct line from God.
Speaker 1: Not making fun of keep going because this is where
Speaker 1: he gets well. So basically he thinks that this manuscript
Speaker 1: is not something to be deciphered. It is something to
Speaker 1: read and pray on and channel prophecy directly from God.
Speaker 1: So he says it's religious text basically, Yeah, so more
Speaker 1: than a religious text. It sounds like it's kind of
Speaker 1: like the ark of the cabinet. It's actually channel's enormous energies. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess how I would how I describe
Speaker 1: it as like when people speak in tongues, that it's
Speaker 1: like written in tongues almost, and that like you could
Speaker 1: read it and pray on it and meditate on it,
Speaker 1: and if you were the special kind of chosen person
Speaker 1: by God, he would come down to you and say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what it means. He's actually using this method,
Speaker 1: has deciphered someone was for some of it for us,
Speaker 1: and I will read to you what he says it is.
Speaker 1: This is verbatim, and again he deciphered this. How just
Speaker 1: to praying on it and go okay, because he's one
Speaker 1: of the worthy people. You know. I gotta say that's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool and sacrament system. It's like unbreakable. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the name of a flower its heart of fire.
Speaker 1: It makes the skin beautiful when made an ointment, the
Speaker 1: oil is pressed from the buds. The ointment is used
Speaker 1: for the wrinkles. It is suitable for the kidneys and
Speaker 1: the head, as the flower prevents inflammations. It is antibiotic.
Speaker 1: Plant is ten centimeters in its height. It grows hot
Speaker 1: and dry slants. The plant is bright green by its color.
Speaker 1: And it's in Ethiopia. In somewhere in Ethiopia. You're welcome everyone. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, actually I've got some wrinkles. I'm going to Ethiopia.
Speaker 1: I guess. You know. The thing is is like believe
Speaker 1: what you want. But it's like, how hard is it
Speaker 1: to believe somebody who says, well, I am the only
Speaker 1: person who can decide. Through through the years, there's been
Speaker 1: a lot of Charlatans that have come forward and said
Speaker 1: they had the translation. And I'm not going to pitch
Speaker 1: a stone at this guy, but he seems to be
Speaker 1: part of that camp. To me, that's that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of mostly it just seems too convenient, Yeah, especially for
Speaker 1: something that's so popular. The thing that I know about
Speaker 1: people who act really receive prophecies is that they don't
Speaker 1: go around screaming about it, and they don't speak in
Speaker 1: the way that this guy is speaking, which is like,
Speaker 1: I'm so much better than you, I know everything, and
Speaker 1: this is so there's a little arrogance in there that
Speaker 1: you don't appreciate arrogance. Yeah, I think that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you, okay, find whatever you're going to receive a
Speaker 1: prophecy from God, sure I should come with a little
Speaker 1: humility because don't say you're the greatest person in the
Speaker 1: world exactly, because I leave that to your your followers
Speaker 1: to do. And I've now set up a website where
Speaker 1: you can donate at because I know, and if I've
Speaker 1: got a direct line to God, I don't want to
Speaker 1: piss God off. And you know, queer that whole deal,
Speaker 1: you know, So I'm gonna I'm gonna totally be you know,
Speaker 1: humble about the whole thing. I don't know, it's just
Speaker 1: a weird Yeah, that situation, that's a really incoherent theory.
Speaker 1: What about what about the lizard people. Dr Backs suggested
Speaker 1: this theory. Yeah, yeah, he suggested this theory. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: there's like subterranean lizard people. What do you think? Do
Speaker 1: you want to let him tell it? Yeah, let's let's
Speaker 1: have this. He had a pretty good take on it. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well a recent one. I actually appeared on Coast to
Speaker 1: Coast Radio on US Radio a few nights ago, and
Speaker 1: someone emailed me and suggested that they're convinced that the
Speaker 1: manuscript was written by lizards, lizards from having inside living
Speaker 1: inside the earth. Yeah, now that was me just kidding. Now,
Speaker 1: I said to them, I hope not, because that means
Speaker 1: that we may be we may be somebody's lunch quite soon.
Speaker 1: But that that was That was one idea which I
Speaker 1: haven't seen before. Okay, well, so much for the lizard people.
Speaker 1: So next theory is that it's a hoax. There's a
Speaker 1: couple of a couple of different theories out there. One
Speaker 1: is that Voyage himself wrote this, created this entire thing,
Speaker 1: and made up that he bought it somewhere in Italy.
Speaker 1: And I think that's kind of unbelievable because never one
Speaker 1: why would anybody bother? But never But more importantly the
Speaker 1: age of the materials. Did he happen to stumble across
Speaker 1: some vellum and some ink that was like five years old? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember back had a pretty interesting take on this.
Speaker 1: We're illuminating. Let's let's go to him. A few years ago.
Speaker 1: The Yale Library which owns the manuscript now, and they
Speaker 1: got some people from the University of Arizona to look
Speaker 1: at the vellum and study it. So they took very
Speaker 1: tiny samples of the velom from different parts of the manuscript,
Speaker 1: and they analyze them and found that they're very consistent
Speaker 1: in their dating to round about four four thirty, with
Speaker 1: a certain range, of course, but definitely it's fifteenth century,
Speaker 1: and that throughout a lot of the other series. There
Speaker 1: were theories that it was made in the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: or that it was a twentieth century hoax and so on.
Speaker 1: But unless somebody kept a large amount of expensive vellum
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years without using it, which seems a
Speaker 1: bit unlikely, I reckon it's a fifteenth century manuscript. And
Speaker 1: also the ink, and I've analyzed the ink and that's
Speaker 1: all entirely consistent with that date. That no kind of
Speaker 1: modern chemicals, innocent song. So it seems to me that's
Speaker 1: one of the few things we can be pretty sure
Speaker 1: about it. It's the fifteenth century manuscript. Another theory is
Speaker 1: that it was a hoax by Roger Bacon. Sir Roger Bacon,
Speaker 1: was he, sir? Well he was a night, wasn't he.
Speaker 1: I think so, yes, Sir Roger Bacon. Uh. Some people
Speaker 1: have theorized that it was created by Roger Bacon. Bacon,
Speaker 1: as you know, it's one of the original fathers of
Speaker 1: the scientific method, and Voyage himself believed that Bacon wrote
Speaker 1: the book and only Bacon would have the capability of
Speaker 1: doing so. The problem with this theory is that Bacon
Speaker 1: died in twelve nine, which is long before the Board
Speaker 1: the book was created. Yeah, so that unless somebody was
Speaker 1: copying his work like you would suggested, it could have
Speaker 1: been Bacon. Somebody could have copied, but it wasn't Bacon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't Bacon. I'll tell you why. Well, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Bacon didn't do it. Somebody. It could have been a hoax.
Speaker 1: Somebody could have done it. Somebody could have done this
Speaker 1: as a hoax. The reason I don't think it was
Speaker 1: a hoax is this, if previously I mentioned page seventy five,
Speaker 1: and I found other pages that have some some recurring words.
Speaker 1: So there's a word on here that I'll call golf
Speaker 1: C C eight G. So if you look at it,
Speaker 1: look at the actually yeah, yeah, yeah, um, So this
Speaker 1: is what I was talking about that recurred a couple
Speaker 1: of times in the page that you wouldn't expect to
Speaker 1: in any sort of space. Right. Well, on the same page,
Speaker 1: this word appears like about nineteen times, and I was
Speaker 1: noticing that, and small variations on the word I've underlined
Speaker 1: them in different the word itself of an alige in origin,
Speaker 1: and the variations i've an aligned in green. And so
Speaker 1: I have a look. Yeah, so it looks it looks
Speaker 1: a bit like there's the the a, but also maybe
Speaker 1: it's like a ce, but maybe it's like two seeds.
Speaker 1: So it's a question of like, yeah, is this a
Speaker 1: small variation. It's it's just bad handwriting, variations in handwriting,
Speaker 1: because they're all slightly different. But it looks to me
Speaker 1: like just differences in handwriting. So the word the word
Speaker 1: appears like many, many, many times on this page, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it appears one right after the other. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so if you're trying to concoct a convincing hoax, especially
Speaker 1: if you're Sir Roger Back and a smart guy, then
Speaker 1: you're not going to do something as stupid as this
Speaker 1: unless you have utter contempt for your the people you're
Speaker 1: trying to fool. Uh. And I think it goes for
Speaker 1: pretty much any hoaxter that you're not going to repeat
Speaker 1: the word forty times on a single paget looks really well.
Speaker 1: And I and I know Joe and I briefly discussed
Speaker 1: this is. I see in the words that you've pointed
Speaker 1: out some similarities, but they're they're not entical to me.
Speaker 1: And when I look at them, let's say, let's just
Speaker 1: call it. The last three characters are seemed to be
Speaker 1: relatively consistent with the small variants, but let's just call
Speaker 1: them consistent. But I don't see that that means it's
Speaker 1: the same word. To me, it's the same thing as
Speaker 1: having I N G at the end of something. So
Speaker 1: I am seeing being believing those all in in the
Speaker 1: same I guess for me to like take Joe side
Speaker 1: on this, the first part looks really really similar. In words,
Speaker 1: there's just the middle like one or two letters depending
Speaker 1: on the word that are a little different. And I
Speaker 1: think that, like, okay, so right, believing twelve times in
Speaker 1: a row, it's not going to look these. No, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna look identical. You're right. So that's what I
Speaker 1: think we're seeing is small handwriting variations and when and
Speaker 1: I I know that that you're looking at these and
Speaker 1: some of these I'm looking at the same page as
Speaker 1: you are, and I don't think that they are identical.
Speaker 1: And and let me just just explain why is if
Speaker 1: you look at words that are written in an older
Speaker 1: handwriting or even type setting style, you can see, let's say,
Speaker 1: the letter F, there's what's known as a ligature where
Speaker 1: two letters are joined. So if you have an F F,
Speaker 1: it can be just right lower case, lower case, right
Speaker 1: next to each other, or there's a ligature where the
Speaker 1: fs are actually connected to make what looks like one character,
Speaker 1: but it is one character in a type setting personally,
Speaker 1: but they're they're two different. Some of those look like
Speaker 1: the cross of what we're saying is the F of
Speaker 1: golf sometimes too seems to be short and contained, sometimes
Speaker 1: seems to come across the L. And I don't disagree
Speaker 1: that maybe that is just handwriting, but to me, in
Speaker 1: a way. I almost wonder if they are different and
Speaker 1: distinct characters. I'm not just I'm not, you know, disavowing
Speaker 1: what you're saying. I just I see intricacies in the
Speaker 1: letter forms that I don't know mean that they're the same.
Speaker 1: But you're writing it's hard to say. It is hard
Speaker 1: to say that I have just drawn on this. Do
Speaker 1: you know how much that's worth? I collection, I've been
Speaker 1: going over with a highlighter. I'm gonna mail it back
Speaker 1: to them. The way that the author forms the a
Speaker 1: kind of it's kind of like two CS and I
Speaker 1: just drew on their Joe's looking at it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: see what you're saying. It's like I think that that's
Speaker 1: just handwriting. Like this one here, for example, there's two cs,
Speaker 1: but they're sort of like the second sea is drawn.
Speaker 1: It's so close it almost looks like the one character.
Speaker 1: But I think they're two se us. This is not
Speaker 1: and this is why this has been going on for
Speaker 1: at least a hundred years that we know of for sure.
Speaker 1: If not therefore, yeah, I know exactly. But but but
Speaker 1: what I'm saying is that, like as far as the
Speaker 1: hoax thing goes, the fact that this same word, and
Speaker 1: it appears to me to be the same word. Let's
Speaker 1: let's accept but okay, well i'm let's but you know,
Speaker 1: let's just accept that if you're doing a hoax, you're
Speaker 1: not going to do words that look exactly look look
Speaker 1: very very similar to the word right next to them,
Speaker 1: over and over again in your text. You're not going
Speaker 1: to do that because you want to you want to
Speaker 1: have a really convincing hoax, you know, So this is
Speaker 1: not the way to do it. So obviously these are
Speaker 1: these people were either very incompetent hoaxters or it was
Speaker 1: not a hoax. Alright, well, so much for the hoax.
Speaker 1: We've conclusively proven it's not a hoax. And so well,
Speaker 1: not exactly because I mean, actually, if you're a hoaxter,
Speaker 1: you're probably you're probably kind of convincing. Your readers are lazy.
Speaker 1: You're not going to get that from the page. And
Speaker 1: that's just Gonn glanced at it. Look at the pictures,
Speaker 1: especially the naked bodies, you know, stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's the blah blah blah. We shouldn't know that
Speaker 1: the words that we were just talking about are literally
Speaker 1: right next to a pool with a bunch of naked
Speaker 1: women in Yeah, so onto our next theory. The next
Speaker 1: theory is it's just gibberish. Gordon Rugg a British psychologist,
Speaker 1: and says that there's a case that it might just
Speaker 1: be entirely made up and just gibberish. He published a
Speaker 1: paper in two thousand four saying that it's a hoax
Speaker 1: most likely, and he had come up with the system
Speaker 1: that used uses a grill of words. Basically, so he's
Speaker 1: got three tables side by side, uh prefix, root, suffix,
Speaker 1: and then a piece of cardboard that's got three little
Speaker 1: rectangles cut in it. You move this thing around on there,
Speaker 1: and wherever you light upon you've got three, you know,
Speaker 1: one or two characters for the prefix and maybe three
Speaker 1: for the root and one or two for the suffix.
Speaker 1: You just copy those down ontoor manuscript and then move it,
Speaker 1: copying the next set down, copying the next set down.
Speaker 1: You can get up. You can come up with a
Speaker 1: gibberish system that is very consistent and kind of convincing,
Speaker 1: and so that and uh so, basically he made up
Speaker 1: gibberish language to prove that though this looks like regular language,
Speaker 1: it's just who or it could be it's a it's
Speaker 1: a uh. He He also named the suspect, which is
Speaker 1: Edward Kelly was a con artist. Yeah, yeah he uh.
Speaker 1: If you're one of our listeners, you might want to
Speaker 1: do a Google on this. There's a language that Edward
Speaker 1: Kelly and this other guy created. Andrea Schinner I believe
Speaker 1: was him. Uh. They created a language they called Enokian,
Speaker 1: which is spelled e n O c h I A
Speaker 1: n He was. He was close friends with Queen Elizabeth
Speaker 1: the first Yeah, just throw that, yeah, and okay and
Speaker 1: so and Okian is uh if there's there's a wicky
Speaker 1: on it and you can read all about it. It
Speaker 1: doesn't the characters don't look like this, but it's it's
Speaker 1: entirely conceivable that this guy maybe could have made up
Speaker 1: another bogus language besides the nokiin so, but besides fraud.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're back into the fraud thing again. Another
Speaker 1: theory is that it's gibberish because it was just basically
Speaker 1: somebody who was autistic did this, and so some of
Speaker 1: somebody was just like just sat down and you know,
Speaker 1: maybe from a wealthier family. So they actually had some
Speaker 1: envelopment ink for him to write with. So if you're
Speaker 1: a peasant, you probably don't have that. And h or
Speaker 1: maybe he was an autistic monk and he just wrote
Speaker 1: a lot of gibberish and drew a lot of weird
Speaker 1: drawings and stuff. And I think that the autistic based
Speaker 1: on my based on my looking at some of these pages.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna show you guys another one here on
Speaker 1: page seventy five, we saw the recurrence of a particular
Speaker 1: word in my opinion and Devon's I think, many times.
Speaker 1: And you get along to page eighty, it's another one
Speaker 1: who randers it randomly selected and the word of the
Speaker 1: day on that one is one that I called gulf
Speaker 1: a g O L F A W and that appears
Speaker 1: many many times on this page. Uh. The other one,
Speaker 1: golf c C A G appears on here too, but
Speaker 1: it seems to not appear quite as much. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: would suggest to me as somebody who is possibly artistic
Speaker 1: and somebody who's a little ow c D. He'll fixate
Speaker 1: on a set of characters and reproduce us over and
Speaker 1: over again until another one comes along. It catches sort
Speaker 1: of catches his interest and he starts writing those. I
Speaker 1: can see that that that makes sense and it's not.
Speaker 1: And we've seen things like that and you know today, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and the fact and the fact of the matter
Speaker 1: is is that I can't think of any comprehensible language,
Speaker 1: any language that we know about, that would have this
Speaker 1: kind of repetition in it. This is not I don't
Speaker 1: believe that this is language. I think it's gibberish. And
Speaker 1: and and so I'm basically what I'm putting forth is
Speaker 1: the autistic month month theory. Yeah, I can see that,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to disparage that at all. What
Speaker 1: I do wonder, though, is if we look at this,
Speaker 1: some people have said, well, this is a scientific manual
Speaker 1: of some kind, and have you have any of you
Speaker 1: ever cracked open a biology book and you'll see the
Speaker 1: Latin name followed with the derivative that's more of a
Speaker 1: general name, and you'll see that word every couple of
Speaker 1: words in there. You know, it's the genus blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: genus blah blah blah, genus blah blah blah, genus in
Speaker 1: different variants. So I almost wonder if it's let's just
Speaker 1: say it was the soap plant, because that was in
Speaker 1: the New Spain theory is it's the soap plant something
Speaker 1: something soap plants plural, and then something something soap planting.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but
Speaker 1: I could see why that repetition might be in there
Speaker 1: for that one, because they're referencing it's specifically over and over.
Speaker 1: And I know that what people prescribe as the names
Speaker 1: of the plants on the pages aren't the words that
Speaker 1: you're pulling out. But I'm just I'm kind of I'm
Speaker 1: looking at it. I'm wondering if maybe that's a possible
Speaker 1: reason for this frequency that you're seeing. To further that, right,
Speaker 1: if we're going to take like the Latin name of
Speaker 1: a plant, somewhat in that Latin names of plants, are
Speaker 1: this word repeated, this word right, like brutus, brutus or something. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that's so that would help explain why I'd be like
Speaker 1: in succession. I honestly like just throw that out there.
Speaker 1: Don't know where I land on this theory. Somewhere between
Speaker 1: the two of you. Well, I gotta tell I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell you, I have not had a chance to review
Speaker 1: um a huge amount of this manuscript. I'll probably look
Speaker 1: at some more of it. I'm not going to devote
Speaker 1: my life to it. I haven't had that much time.
Speaker 1: So I went out and basically randomly pick some pages
Speaker 1: and just started looking at looking at stuff and looking
Speaker 1: at patterns, and I started noticing repetition in the world,
Speaker 1: and and and so I would encourage our listeners to
Speaker 1: go out and look at page seventy five and page
Speaker 1: a D and look at look for the repetition, but
Speaker 1: also look at other pages, but also look at other
Speaker 1: pages and tell us what you think. Tell us what
Speaker 1: you think about about the theory. See if you find
Speaker 1: a similar sort of pattern of repetition of words over
Speaker 1: and over again, which would kind of support the theory
Speaker 1: that I think. And there's a true crowdsourcing here to
Speaker 1: support my theory that this was some person with O
Speaker 1: c D or a person with autism who was sat
Speaker 1: down in a little room somewhere with some vellom and
Speaker 1: some ink and just did his thing, just obsessed over,
Speaker 1: just kept doing. And yeah, and so uh, there is
Speaker 1: another theory. This is uh. This is also from page
Speaker 1: seventy five. There's a four letter grouping that appears repeatedly
Speaker 1: also in some of the words that we've talked about,
Speaker 1: like saying golf c C h G for the first
Speaker 1: four letters of that word, which really do look too
Speaker 1: to my eyes like golf, geo lf. They really do
Speaker 1: appear many many times in that pain. I can just
Speaker 1: imagine ancient plaid shorts. Yeah, for you know, as we
Speaker 1: saw recently pbr shorts. Yeah. So anyway, take a look
Speaker 1: at that, telling what you think. Uh, would you agree
Speaker 1: that it appears there a lot? Oh? Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: guess for me, there are a lot of languages in
Speaker 1: this world that instead of doing like I n G
Speaker 1: like we do, right, do a prefix like that's possible
Speaker 1: to it? Doesn't Arabic do something like that. It's it's
Speaker 1: a suffix in Arabic. Uh No, anyway, But if you
Speaker 1: look at it, though, it does look like golf, which
Speaker 1: leads me to believe that this was actually a text
Speaker 1: written by and a medieval golf pro plans to avoid. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And and and in this particular spot, he's got the
Speaker 1: naked chicks on the on the golf green. Do you
Speaker 1: see that it's green and they're naked. Yeah. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how you distract your rivals at the game. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: it's a medieval golf bro. So do we have any
Speaker 1: other theories? We do? Another one? We do? We do?
Speaker 1: We have? I think we have one more. It's just
Speaker 1: the one more left, which is opening the gates to
Speaker 1: crazy town. We talked about the lizard people a little bit. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of people are putting forth that they think
Speaker 1: that this is a book written in an alien language
Speaker 1: by an alien people who have left it for us
Speaker 1: to teach us one. I don't know. I you know what,
Speaker 1: I gotta be honest with you. I am so glad
Speaker 1: that our listeners like that we hate the alien theories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's here's the thing about the alien theory. And this
Speaker 1: this I actually this is pretty interesting when you get
Speaker 1: it into is it the I think it's the cosmological
Speaker 1: section where there's kind of what seems to be almost
Speaker 1: like celestial bodies. Well, there's illustrations that appear to be
Speaker 1: the Milky Way galaxy, the spiral of the Milky Way,
Speaker 1: and they also appear to be the Andromeda galaxy. And
Speaker 1: and the thing is we can because we have the
Speaker 1: technological capability Havelogy have the technology to look at these galaxies.
Speaker 1: We can see what they look like. The problem is
Speaker 1: is that if this was written in the early to
Speaker 1: mid four hundreds, we didn't have the technology to see that.
Speaker 1: We know, the telescope to be able to focus on
Speaker 1: a galaxy that is so far away, or to have
Speaker 1: something that can see our own galaxy, we didn't have that.
Speaker 1: I mean the regular telescope using lenses that came about
Speaker 1: in the sixteen hundreds about right, I think even earlier
Speaker 1: than that. But I mean, but it wasn't such a
Speaker 1: high quality that you could you could see a blob. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly at the time that this was written, people were
Speaker 1: already looking at Andromeda and had already been noted. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you couldn't make out the spiral arms, right, we didn't.
Speaker 1: We couldn't clear, we couldn't get the clarity. So that's
Speaker 1: where people say, well, we didn't. We couldn't see it
Speaker 1: that well to note all that detail to then draw
Speaker 1: and record that, which means that somebody else was out
Speaker 1: there and able to see that. Yeah. Yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: mean Galileo was around in like the late fifteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know how accurate carbon dating is.
Speaker 1: I don't know how sure we are about this stuff.
Speaker 1: That is like that's within a hundred years. I feel
Speaker 1: like that's maybe within the margin of error. But now,
Speaker 1: Galileo and I don't think I ever ever made out
Speaker 1: the spiral arms of Andromeda. He personally probably not. But
Speaker 1: but that's that's I don't think. Yeah, that's fair, yea.
Speaker 1: But also, who's to say I am apparently playing Devil's
Speaker 1: advocate on this one today? Are apparently who's to say
Speaker 1: that that wasn't just like a artistic license exactly, somebody
Speaker 1: just made up a spiral so the spiral um and
Speaker 1: I missed this particular port, this particular illustration. Is it
Speaker 1: a spiral s seen from above or is it as
Speaker 1: sort of an oblique angle? It's from above, yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: it's from above, yeah exactly. So it could very easily
Speaker 1: be people again seeing what they want to see and
Speaker 1: applying it to what we now know, yeah exactly. And
Speaker 1: so the Aliens might have shared with us the Andromeda
Speaker 1: or you know, are we also live in a spiral galaxy,
Speaker 1: and so the Aliens might that might be a depiction
Speaker 1: of our own galaxy. You know, Devon, just tell up
Speaker 1: a picture of it to me. This is obviously a garden.
Speaker 1: It's obviously it looks a bit like a labyrinth. It's
Speaker 1: a plan for a garden. Okay, no galaxy, never mind
Speaker 1: ancient landscape architect. It might have been that the Aliens
Speaker 1: came down to us and basically bought brought us tributes
Speaker 1: of shrubbery. That this looks like, Hey, I just pulled
Speaker 1: up another picture of it, of course, but I maintain
Speaker 1: that it looks a lot like a video game map
Speaker 1: of the world, or like like I don't know, like
Speaker 1: a blueprint for buildings or something. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it could be a lot of things. You kind of say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's stars, but again it's something where you don't know
Speaker 1: what the hell of the text is describing. I can
Speaker 1: make it anything I want. This is why I like
Speaker 1: the approach that dr Backs is taking someone because he's
Speaker 1: trying to figure out the word, because he figure out
Speaker 1: what they are. He has been presented right with so
Speaker 1: many different theories about like, oh, maybe this person wrote it,
Speaker 1: maybe it's about this, and he keeps saying, that's very interesting.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to approach the text linguistically. A smart
Speaker 1: move because you can say, yes, the minute you say
Speaker 1: this is about biology, you start to decode the text
Speaker 1: and it's about biology because you can make it be
Speaker 1: whatever you want it to be. So again, that's why
Speaker 1: I think like his approach is really the most interesting
Speaker 1: and probably the the best that we have right now. Yeah, though,
Speaker 1: dr backs, if you're listening, please look at page We
Speaker 1: spend too much more time on this. I'm a little
Speaker 1: disturbed by what I see there. Yeah, and I feel
Speaker 1: kind of bad about this. I've been pretty busy lately
Speaker 1: and I didn't have time to start attacking this until
Speaker 1: pretty recently. And if I had more time, I would
Speaker 1: have been looking at more pages to find more of
Speaker 1: this stuff. But that's what our listeners for. They're going
Speaker 1: to go out and do this, and that's what the
Speaker 1: last couple of hundred years of people trying to figure
Speaker 1: it out before you have also been doing. So there's
Speaker 1: a ton of legwork already done for us. Yeah. Does
Speaker 1: anybody else have any last minute theories to to put
Speaker 1: out on this one before we put it to bed
Speaker 1: pod people? No? No, no, no, let's say perfect spheres
Speaker 1: the Tyler. No, it's definitely not him. So which, Joey,
Speaker 1: what do you believe that it's? Yeah? I think that
Speaker 1: it's gibberish written by an autistic person most likely. Okay, Devin,
Speaker 1: how about how about you? Where do you follow that?
Speaker 1: I honestly don't fall anywhere on this. I think that
Speaker 1: you know, as I was just saying that Dr Facts's
Speaker 1: approach is kind of probably the most solid approach, is
Speaker 1: that you just kind of have to say, uh, but
Speaker 1: let's see if we can decipher the text. Although I
Speaker 1: do like the theory that was floated in the A
Speaker 1: M A that it was this like family that wrote
Speaker 1: this thing. They're all really smart. It has kind of
Speaker 1: HINDI flares. It might have been Italian, but of me says,
Speaker 1: I don't know, got it? Well? I I also really
Speaker 1: I like the direction that Dr Max is going, and
Speaker 1: it seems the most solid and concrete. I also appreciate
Speaker 1: the different approach that Dr Tucker took with the way
Speaker 1: of a Spana that seems to have some credence. I
Speaker 1: see holes in it, but I see holes in just
Speaker 1: about everything that's done, and so I I unfortunately I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not settled on one particular theory. I see
Speaker 1: things that I like that are promising, and that's as
Speaker 1: far as I'm willing to go. Yeah, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, if you have any theories. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you do, then we would love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: There's if you want to see any of the research
Speaker 1: that we've got, and we'll put up a bunch of
Speaker 1: this research. There's a lot of it. Yeah, seventeen hours
Speaker 1: later we're done recording, we will put up a bunch
Speaker 1: of the links. Those links are gonna be on our
Speaker 1: website as always. That is going to be Thinking Sideways
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. You can listen to the episodes while
Speaker 1: you're on the website. I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: are doing that, and then some people like to download
Speaker 1: them and a lot of people go to iTunes to
Speaker 1: get those. If you're on iTunes, go ahead and take
Speaker 1: the time to subscribe, leave this comment and rating if
Speaker 1: you get the chance. A lot of folks are leaving
Speaker 1: comments on the website as well, which is fantastic. You
Speaker 1: can always get us on stitchers, so if you don't
Speaker 1: have the time to go to the you don't not
Speaker 1: able to get the website, and you use stitcher for
Speaker 1: many mobile device, you can stream the episodes right there.
Speaker 1: We're on Facebook, so you can find us. You can
Speaker 1: like us at the suggestion of a listener. We recently
Speaker 1: created a Facebook group for our listeners to get together
Speaker 1: and chat about stories stuff like that, which seems to
Speaker 1: slowly be building a little momentum. So it's starting to
Speaker 1: gain some momentum. It a little slow right now, but
Speaker 1: it's brand that's that's exactly the problem. A lot of
Speaker 1: people okay, now, yes, now they know um. And if
Speaker 1: you want to go ahead and tell us your theories,
Speaker 1: you can just write us an email. That email address
Speaker 1: is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. We try
Speaker 1: to respond pretty pretty quickly. Yeah, we try to stay
Speaker 1: up on topic. Usually it's an intern, but he loves
Speaker 1: the idea of an intern. But now we do try
Speaker 1: to get back to everybody as quickly as possible. And
Speaker 1: I know there's a few folks who probably haven't gotten
Speaker 1: a reply yet. That's I apologize. We've just been a
Speaker 1: little swamped with this story. But we will get to Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all have jobs. Yeah there's that so yeah. But
Speaker 1: that having been said, that is the mystery of the
Speaker 1: Voyantage Manuscript. It's a lot of information. Thank you everybody
Speaker 1: for staying with us for the whole time. It's a
Speaker 1: lot I understand, but hopefully you've got some of the
Speaker 1: things that you hadn't heard before, because that's what we're
Speaker 1: trying to do, is get you as many as we can. Definitely,
Speaker 1: I feel like I feel like we should put an
Speaker 1: East dragon for all the people who made it to
Speaker 1: this point. That's a good point. We're awesome, and so
Speaker 1: are you. That's a good one. Verified or were all right?
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you
Speaker 1: next week. And you're special, just so special.