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Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name

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Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.

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Speaker 1: Time to go into the old vault. Uh. This time

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Speaker 1: we're following up the episode that played last Saturday, so

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Speaker 1: we're bringing you The Voyage Manuscript, Part two. This was

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Speaker 1: originally published on September nineteen. We hope you enjoy Welcome

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Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey, you welcome to Stuff

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Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and

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Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two

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Speaker 1: of our exploration of the Voyage Manuscript or the Vantage Manuscript.

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Speaker 1: We've been saying both this medieval manuscript that his fascinated

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Speaker 1: UH scholars cryptographers for for decades now, or actually not

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Speaker 1: just decades, for centuries, but especially since it was reintroduced

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Speaker 1: to the world around nineteen twelve and has become the

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Speaker 1: subject of intense interest because it is full of this

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Speaker 1: text that has not been successfully decoded if it is

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Speaker 1: in fact a code, or has not been translated, if

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Speaker 1: it is in fact a language, accompanied with these amazing,

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Speaker 1: strange illustrations of alien plants and and women bathing in

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Speaker 1: these strange horns with crocodile ten drils. Is this absolutely

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Speaker 1: captivating document that is in a library at Yale now

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Speaker 1: and today we wanted to go further by exploring the

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Speaker 1: history of people trying to understand this document, to come

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Speaker 1: up with a theory of its origin, or to explain

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Speaker 1: what it says, if it says anything. Yeah, So again,

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Speaker 1: definitely listen to part one if you have not. Absolutely

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Speaker 1: this is definitely a part one part two scenario. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think you'll probably be very confused if you try

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Speaker 1: to jump in in the middle here, So go back

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Speaker 1: to part one first. But so I thought we should

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Speaker 1: start off today by separating the different theories of of

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Speaker 1: this manuscript into two basic camps, and then within these

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Speaker 1: camps there will be different theories. But the two main camps,

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Speaker 1: I think we should look at our signal theory and

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Speaker 1: noise theory. And so signal theory looks at the Voyage

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Speaker 1: manuscript and proposes that there is some underlying meaning to

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Speaker 1: the text that it could, at least in theory, actually

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Speaker 1: be translated to yield a signal signal or a message.

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Speaker 1: And of course it's not necessarily saying that we have

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Speaker 1: understood what the messages, or that we ever will understand

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Speaker 1: what the messages. But at least in theory it could

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Speaker 1: be understood. It says something that's signal theory. Noise theory,

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Speaker 1: we would say, proposes that there is no underlying message.

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Speaker 1: It's just gibberish, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Yeah, and and

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Speaker 1: and indeed that does cut to the chase. Either this

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Speaker 1: is a document that means something or it means nothing,

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Speaker 1: and and both are are kind of enthralling possibilities and

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Speaker 1: is filled with wonder and old and and gives way

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Speaker 1: to all sorts of you know, conspiracy theories if you

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Speaker 1: gaze into it long enough. And the other is is

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Speaker 1: kind of equally terrifying that this thing that has captivated

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Speaker 1: and just in overwhelmed so many you know, intensely intelligent

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Speaker 1: and in many cases that you know, very well educated individuals.

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Speaker 1: They could old, but they could ultimately be a work

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Speaker 1: of nonsense. That it's just you know, it's kind of

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Speaker 1: like just pure chaos. And there could be multiple reasons

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Speaker 1: why it could be a work of nonsense, or at

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Speaker 1: least nonsense to us. And I think we'll explore these individually.

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Speaker 1: But first I think we should look at some of

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Speaker 1: the possibilities for understanding this document under the signal theory,

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Speaker 1: the theory that it actually does say something. So what

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Speaker 1: would some of these explanations be. Well, one of the

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Speaker 1: big theories is that the cipher theory, the idea that

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Speaker 1: the text is protected by a letter based cipher. Uh.

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Speaker 1: It's a very popular approach to trying to figure out

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Speaker 1: what's going on with a vantage manuscript. Right, So the

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Speaker 1: idea could be that it's something like a letter substitution system. Right.

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Speaker 1: So these characters that we don't recognize, that you know,

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Speaker 1: roughly maybe fifteen to twenty five or up to thirty

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Speaker 1: characters that are used to make the words in this

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Speaker 1: book somehow correspond to letters in a known language, or

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Speaker 1: letters in some coded language or or something like that.

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Speaker 1: That that that there's a way of breaking the code

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Speaker 1: and it de tran and it can be retranslated into

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Speaker 1: a an actual language. Getting into the idea here that

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Speaker 1: it could be in a code and it requires a codebook.

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Speaker 1: And since we don't have the codebook, it's the cryptographers, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, a goal to try and figure out what

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Speaker 1: the code might be. Oh, Okay, So a codebook could

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Speaker 1: mean that it wouldn't even necessarily have to be a

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Speaker 1: straight like letter substitution type cipher. It could just be

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Speaker 1: that there are you know, like known translations of certain

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Speaker 1: word forms or something like that to other known words.

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Speaker 1: Another possibility is that it's written in some form of

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Speaker 1: shorthand that that we have you know, lost understanding of.

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Speaker 1: There's also, uh, the the idea of steganography. This is

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Speaker 1: the idea that the text itself is meaningless, but key

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Speaker 1: signs would indicate hidden useful information, like little details on

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Speaker 1: the illustrations or the text itself or some combination. Um.

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Speaker 1: This would be kind of like, I guess, kind of

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Speaker 1: like a you know, a cheap spy novel. Version of

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Speaker 1: this is like counting the dotted eyes on a page

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Speaker 1: sort of thing, and that tells you something. Sure. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Another variation that is brought up is that you could

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Speaker 1: obtain the necessary info info by placing a plate um

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Speaker 1: over the page with spaces in that plate to reveal

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Speaker 1: the important characters. Oh yeah, okay, so this would be

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Speaker 1: you know, like one of those uh uh, you know,

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Speaker 1: decode or ring kinds of things. Oh no, that that

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Speaker 1: actually I think it has letter substitution. There are there

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Speaker 1: are codes like this like this, and toys and stuff

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Speaker 1: that you can buy that like you put a plate

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Speaker 1: over it's got certain holes on any read the letters

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Speaker 1: that appear in the holes, right, And it's my understanding

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Speaker 1: that if if those plates were random enough, that in

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Speaker 1: and of itself could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible,

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Speaker 1: to crack the code. Uh you know the Vantage manuscript. Sure,

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Speaker 1: But then there are other theories that are less about

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Speaker 1: code and that might still present to us as codes,

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Speaker 1: but maybe it wasn't intended as a code. Yeah. Like

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Speaker 1: a big one is that it is some form of

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Speaker 1: natural language that has been forgotten in various possibilities from

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Speaker 1: Eurasia have been presented. Yeah, So the idea here would

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Speaker 1: just be we've got no other documents written in this

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Speaker 1: language or written in this uh, in this transliteration of

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Speaker 1: the language. Right. And then another idea, to come back

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Speaker 1: to something we discussed in the last episode, is that

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Speaker 1: it could be a constructed language, so like a language

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Speaker 1: that somebody made up on purpose, like Klingon or doth Rocky,

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Speaker 1: but the fifteenth century version of that right now, and

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Speaker 1: now another intriguing idea and This was apparently presented by

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Speaker 1: Jerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill that it could be a

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Speaker 1: what is what is called a gloss a alia. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so this would have been essentially like a work that

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Speaker 1: is a stream of consciousness work that is created via

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Speaker 1: speaking in tongues, similar to the work of Christianistic Hildegard

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Speaker 1: of Bingen. Yeah, this would be uh. I mean you

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Speaker 1: could look at it as a form of automatic writing,

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Speaker 1: you know that. That's so there. There could be a

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Speaker 1: this could be a weird transcription of spoken gloss a

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Speaker 1: alia like speaking in tongues, or it could be a

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Speaker 1: written version of it. Directly, it would be kind of

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Speaker 1: weird if it was a transliteration of sounds made orally

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Speaker 1: by gloss a alia into a script that didn't exist anyway.

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Speaker 1: But you can imagine it's certainly being like automatic writing

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Speaker 1: of some kind. People that the spirits are writing through

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Speaker 1: my hand. And I think that would mean in this

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Speaker 1: case that while it might not be meaningless to the

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Speaker 1: person writing it, it would be meaningless to any re eater.

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Speaker 1: So I think this would fall under the noise category right,

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Speaker 1: that there would be there is no way to understand

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Speaker 1: what this says because there is no underlying signal because

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Speaker 1: in this case, presumably the context for the piece would

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Speaker 1: be very personal and then also would probably deal a

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Speaker 1: lot with personal reevaluation of the text. You know, it's

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Speaker 1: almost like look less than a dream journal in a way,

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Speaker 1: you know, where the dream is not even even taken

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Speaker 1: and put into the into the form of language, but

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Speaker 1: like the dream is is in language. Yeah, it would

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Speaker 1: be like if if you had a dream journal, yeah,

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Speaker 1: where you never translated it into any real language, You

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Speaker 1: just made notes about your dreams in random other symbols

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Speaker 1: that don't mean anything to anybody else. And then, of course,

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Speaker 1: another big idea is that it's simply a hoax, right,

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Speaker 1: that it doesn't mean anything. There's no encoded signals, just

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Speaker 1: noise because somebody was intentionally trying to create an object

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Speaker 1: that would maybe confuse people or trick them, or maybe

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Speaker 1: just trick them into thinking that it did say something. Right,

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Speaker 1: And if and if that is indeed the reason for

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Speaker 1: the origin story of this document, then it is still succeeding.

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Speaker 1: It's it has probably succeeded remarkably well, because if it

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Speaker 1: is a hoax, it is still tricking people to this day.

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Speaker 1: Another idea is that if it were a hoax, if

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Speaker 1: it were a completely fraudulent document, you could also make

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Speaker 1: a case that it was a you know, a way

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Speaker 1: to try and make a quick buck off of you know,

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Speaker 1: a cult fanboys with a lot of money, such as

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Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Emperor who who purchased it. So we

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Speaker 1: know it was sold to Rudolph the Second, we think

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Speaker 1: around fifteen eighty six, that's when the historical records indicate.

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Speaker 1: But the carbon dating of the vellum says that this

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Speaker 1: this this parchment at least was probably produced in like

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Speaker 1: the early fourteen hundreds. Now maybe maybe we think like

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Speaker 1: it's possible to parchment the vellums sat around for a

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Speaker 1: long time before it was made into this document. But

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Speaker 1: if you think that the creation of the pages on

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Speaker 1: which it was written was sometime close to when the

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Speaker 1: document was written, then it would have been written long

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Speaker 1: before there was a chance to sell it to Rudolph

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Speaker 1: the Second, So it would be hard to imagine that

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Speaker 1: it was created specifically for that purpose. Now, one of

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Speaker 1: the things is that people have tried to do various

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Speaker 1: kinds of statistical analysis of the text to say, okay,

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Speaker 1: does even though we can't translate it yet does this

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Speaker 1: look like a natural language? Does it look like it

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Speaker 1: could somehow be decoded to or translated to a natural language?

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Speaker 1: And I would say that the answer there is inconclusive.

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Speaker 1: There are pieces of evidence pointing both ways, right, Like

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Speaker 1: one commonly cited weird feature of the text that really

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Speaker 1: makes it look like not a natural language is the

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Speaker 1: fact that in some cases words are repeated in line

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Speaker 1: up to three times in a row. Is that normal

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Speaker 1: for a language? Is that normal? Normal? Normal? Not really

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Speaker 1: really really, I mean, I don't know poetically uh recally

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Speaker 1: uh shanti shan shan. I mean, we can all think

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Speaker 1: of examples from songs and poetry and writing where that's interesting,

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Speaker 1: you know, there's something maybe said three times to uh,

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Speaker 1: to add emphasis. But I mean, I I am not

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Speaker 1: I'm not the expert comment commenting on this from It's

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Speaker 1: saying Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. This does remind me though, when

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Speaker 1: I was a kid sometimes I would like try and

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Speaker 1: create like documents that looked like they were, you know,

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Speaker 1: magical documents in another language, you know, with weird rooms. Um.

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Speaker 1: And actually I do that still, sometimes, like doodling, you know,

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Speaker 1: in the corners of a page. If I'm supposed to

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Speaker 1: be taking notes on something. Uh but I even even

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Speaker 1: as a kid, I would I would look back at

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Speaker 1: what I had done and I would realize, what this

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Speaker 1: This doesn't look like language like, it doesn't like there's

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Speaker 1: not enough variety in the these the signal, the little

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Speaker 1: signals that I've I've concocted or something I just essentially

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Speaker 1: pulled out of my head. They're like, it's not matching

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Speaker 1: up with what one would expect from any kind of

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Speaker 1: writing or coded writing system. Yeah. So I mentioned in

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Speaker 1: the last episode there was a good article about this

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Speaker 1: from two thousand eleven and skeptical inquirer by the German

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Speaker 1: computer scientist Klaus schmi who who I think he looked

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Speaker 1: at a lot of the statistical qualities of the text

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Speaker 1: from a cryptography point of view, and it seemed like

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Speaker 1: he said, yeah, there there's evidence both ways, and we

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Speaker 1: can continue to talk about some of that evidence as

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Speaker 1: we go on in the episodes. One interesting claim I

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Speaker 1: came across. I'm sorry that I feel like I can't

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Speaker 1: evaluate whether this is a correct claim or not, but

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Speaker 1: at least it's a claim that's made against the noise

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Speaker 1: theory or any theory recommending an interpretation of nonsense is

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Speaker 1: that the document uh at least appears to follow something

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Speaker 1: called Ziff's law, which concerns the statistical distribution of words

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Speaker 1: and natural languages. So basically, Ziff's law claims that in

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Speaker 1: any natural language, the frequency with which a word is

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Speaker 1: used will be directly proportional to how how high it

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Speaker 1: ranks in the ranking of most common words. So the

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Speaker 1: first most common word will be used twice as often

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Speaker 1: as the second most common word, three times as often

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Speaker 1: as the third most common word, and so forth. Now

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Speaker 1: this isn't exactly law in like the physical or mathematical sense,

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Speaker 1: but if for some reason it does appear to hold

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Speaker 1: true for all or almost all natural languages, and so

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Speaker 1: if and and, the document appears to match this So

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Speaker 1: like if you look at it from a Zif's law distribution,

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Speaker 1: it lines up pretty close. So if the frequency count

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Speaker 1: of words in this document follows this law, if that is,

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Speaker 1: if that claim is correct, meaning it has a similar

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Speaker 1: distribution of words to real documents in real languages. That

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Speaker 1: seems to make it a little harder to believe it's

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Speaker 1: just total nonsense generated but out of somebody's head. Another

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Speaker 1: thing is that different words appear with different frequencies in

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Speaker 1: different sections. So remember we've got these different sections of

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Speaker 1: the document, like the astrological stuff versus the herbal stuff,

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Speaker 1: and so you have some words that might appear in

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Speaker 1: the supposed astrological section but not in the plants section,

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Speaker 1: and vice versa. This would I think be expected if

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Speaker 1: these were written in a real language with a real message,

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Speaker 1: like you would image, you would probably expect the words

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Speaker 1: star to appear in the astrological section but not in

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Speaker 1: the plants section. So just looking at the symbols, the

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Speaker 1: frequency distribution of symbols and how they break out, and

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Speaker 1: how well they resemble a real language, it seems like

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Speaker 1: it can push us kind of in both directions that

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Speaker 1: we don't get a clear reading from either way. From that,

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Speaker 1: and and again this just comes back to the what

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Speaker 1: makes this document so mysterious, It's so resistant to unraveling.

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Speaker 1: So and a number of theories have been put forth

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Speaker 1: for the origins and the true nature of the text. Uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, so much so that in when an American

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Speaker 1: cryptologist and computer programmer married, the Imperio composed the Vontage

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Speaker 1: Manuscript and Elegant Enigma for the U. S Military, because

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Speaker 1: by the US military cryptography, I mean, that's a of

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Speaker 1: massive state importance, it is. Yeah, so this is not

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Speaker 1: like some sort of weird, you know, Area fifty one

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Speaker 1: type of Shenanigan going on here. But in this, uh,

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Speaker 1: this paper, which is readily available online you can find

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Speaker 1: a PDF of the full thing, she admits that she

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Speaker 1: quote unwittingly retraced the steps of all my predecessors, rediscovering

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Speaker 1: their sources, repeating their experiments, growing excited over the same

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Speaker 1: promising leads that excited them, and learning only later that

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Speaker 1: all these things had already been tried and had failed,

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Speaker 1: often several times. And I found that to just be very,

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Speaker 1: very fitting, because this does seem to be a theme,

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Speaker 1: uh is that you know, certainly in the last century.

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Speaker 1: Well it's not hard to see why. Again, this is

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Speaker 1: like it's sort of the holy grail of of of decoding, right, Yeah, yes,

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Speaker 1: it's the mount everest of code breaking. If you could

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Speaker 1: crack it, you'd be you'd be like the hottest, you know,

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Speaker 1: code cracker in the world. Yeah, And so crackers have

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Speaker 1: have tried to have taken a shot at it. Linguists

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Speaker 1: have have have taken a shot at it, various scholar

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Speaker 1: all manner of scholars, amateurs, and of course outright quacks

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Speaker 1: that have taken taking their hand to the Vantage manuscript.

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Speaker 1: I think we alluded to this in the last episode,

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Speaker 1: but the internet is full of people who claim to

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Speaker 1: have decoded the Voytage manuscript to the point where when

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Speaker 1: we were preparing for the episode, I mean a lot

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Speaker 1: of these were just like, you know, somebody in the

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Speaker 1: last year or two has published a you know, a

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Speaker 1: YouTube video or or an article somewhere where they're like,

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Speaker 1: I did it. I cracked it. Here's the answer. And

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Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't know. Maybe one of these people

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Speaker 1: actually did and it just hasn't really been analyzed or

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Speaker 1: reported on yet. I have no way of knowing because

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Speaker 1: I don't have an expertise obviously in the relevant fields,

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Speaker 1: so I can't like evaluate it on my own. But

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Speaker 1: it's funny, like there's so many people trying and claiming

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Speaker 1: to have done it that you somebody could have done

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Speaker 1: it and we might not even know for a while

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Speaker 1: because it would just get lost in the sea of

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Speaker 1: of of all these claims. Yeah, all right, on that note,

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Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break when we come back.

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Speaker 1: We're going to discuss the possibility, um pretty much discredited

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Speaker 1: possibility that Roger Bacon actually had a hand in creating this.

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Speaker 1: Than all right, we're back. Time to talk about Mr Bacon. Now,

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Speaker 1: you remember from the last episode the it came with

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Speaker 1: a certificate of authenticity. Originally when Rudolph the Second, the

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Speaker 1: Holy Roman Emperor bought this, uh bought the Voytage manuscript

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Speaker 1: for six hundred ducats or Ducket's he it came along

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Speaker 1: with a letter that said, well, by the way, Roger

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Speaker 1: Bacon made this. Yeah. And according to Josephine Livingstone, who

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Speaker 1: wrote a really nice piece in The New Yorker about this,

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Speaker 1: actually a couple of pieces. One was kind of the

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Speaker 1: follow up where she talked about just internet fascination of

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Speaker 1: the Voytage manuscript. She points out, yeah, that this does

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Speaker 1: not seem to be the case though, uh, though it

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Speaker 1: was kind of a popular idea for a while or

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Speaker 1: its like repopularized and you know, well before the carbon

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Speaker 1: dating actually took play. But one William Romaine Newbold, a

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Speaker 1: professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Speaker 1: He argued in favor of the Bacon origin, believing it

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Speaker 1: to be an anagrammed micrographic shorthand required transposition, abbreviation, and

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Speaker 1: microscopic notation. Yeah. His method, from what I've read, was

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Speaker 1: a little over the end. I mean, it's like he

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Speaker 1: was like looking inside the characters to see little micro

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Speaker 1: like strokes of ink that may have indicated actual letters

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Speaker 1: or abbreviations of word phonemes. And so his his method

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Speaker 1: of decoding it, which he claimed was successful, was incredibly complicated. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: But he claimed that he had translated, and he provided

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Speaker 1: all these details like drawing it into various you know,

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Speaker 1: other writings and ideas of Bacon. Uh. And he was

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Speaker 1: apparently a brilliant individual. But but no one could take

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Speaker 1: his solution and reproduce the same results using these methods, right,

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Speaker 1: it required so many subjective judgment calls about what he

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Speaker 1: was seeing on the page in these micro notation marks

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Speaker 1: and what that was supposed to correlate to. Yeah. Medieval

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Speaker 1: medievalist John Matthews Manly, one of the Army's chief cryptologists

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Speaker 1: during World War One, concluded that the quote decipherments were

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Speaker 1: not discoveries of secret hidden of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon,

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Speaker 1: but the products of new Bold's own intense enthusiasm and

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Speaker 1: his learned and ingenious subconscious. According to Schmay's article and

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Speaker 1: Skeptical Inquire, new Bold's translation had revealed that Roger Bacon

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Speaker 1: already had a telescope in the thirteenth century, predating the

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Speaker 1: known invention of the telescope in the first decade of

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Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds by like centuries, and that Bacon had

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Speaker 1: used this telescope to discover the spiral structure of the

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Speaker 1: Andromeda galaxy. It's just hard to believe though, that like

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Speaker 1: you could generate generate text that complex, you know, just

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Speaker 1: by subjective interpretations of tiny things. And then of course,

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Speaker 1: as we're saying, like nobody else could could come up

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Speaker 1: with the same translations based on what he had. So

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Speaker 1: I don't know, it just seems like he was he

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Speaker 1: was looking for the text he wanted to find, almost

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Speaker 1: like like it spells like new Bold is great. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: you know. Another great, interesting, insightful description of of this, uh,

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Speaker 1: this incident with new Bold comes from Terence mckinna oh, yeah,

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Speaker 1: who wrote about the manuscript for Noses magazine in Night

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Speaker 1: and what he is, by the way, a purely historical

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Speaker 1: linguistic article that has nothing to do with any of

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Speaker 1: his writings on psychedelics. Although I can absolutely see why

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Speaker 1: McKenna would be interested in this subject because it's this.

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Speaker 1: It's this manuscript that seems to sit at the intersection

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Speaker 1: of primitive science and magic and plants. Yeah. Uh, this,

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Speaker 1: this particular article is that you can find it online

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Speaker 1: and PDF form. It's also collected in the Art Kick Revival.

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Speaker 1: It is, you know, dated, It's so he was written

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Speaker 1: prior to carbon dating. But he sums up the new

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Speaker 1: Bold case by saying, quote, the problem with all of

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Speaker 1: this was no one else could extract the same plain

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Speaker 1: text using Professor Newbold's method. It involves so many choices

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Speaker 1: from pools of letters at every given point along the

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Speaker 1: way that one could demonstrate that hundreds of different messages

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Speaker 1: could be extracted from the same passages. New Bold died

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Speaker 1: a broken man, disgraced, his career shattered. He had gone

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Speaker 1: too far in the vantage manuscript had claimed its first victim.

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Speaker 1: Now McKenna is not actually arguing that there's a curse

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Speaker 1: on the document or anything here, but I think he

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Speaker 1: does get a little magic here with it. Later on,

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Speaker 1: I mean a kind will of his talks in this

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Speaker 1: particular paper, he doesn't really tie it into any of

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Speaker 1: his more um you know, spiritual shamanistic ideas. It's it's

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Speaker 1: ultimately pretty straightforward, though again a dated because when it

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Speaker 1: was written. Um but but but but he does touch

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Speaker 1: in this on this idea of that claiming its first

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Speaker 1: victim on a pattern that one sees to this very

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Speaker 1: day in vantage research. It draws so many people in

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Speaker 1: and certainly, while there are quacks and conspiracy theory makers

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Speaker 1: in the mix, you also see a lot of very intelligent,

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Speaker 1: educated and disciplined people diving into the text and initially

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Speaker 1: claiming victory, only to realize that they two have failed

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Speaker 1: to see through its mysteries and and in some cases

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Speaker 1: are kind of broken on the manuscript. Again, Yeah, mckenn

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Speaker 1: I also tell I wish I could remember the name

401
00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:36,680
Speaker 1: of this, but he tells an anecdote. I don't know

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Speaker 1: if this is one of the commonly circulated stories about

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Speaker 1: the translation attempts, but he tells an anecdote about this

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Speaker 1: one aging scholar who was in his nineties who claimed

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Speaker 1: to some colleagues to have cracked the code to you know,

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Speaker 1: to understand what it says and then when somebody was

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Speaker 1: trying to follow up with him about that, they were like, okay,

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Speaker 1: we'll fly down to meet you. But by the time

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Speaker 1: they got there, he had died of a heart attempt. Yes, yes,

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Speaker 1: that's something here. It's in the noses piece as well.

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Speaker 1: So whatever information that UH expert may have had, it

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Speaker 1: was lost with them when they died. Well, I think

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Speaker 1: the the implication is that the expert had not actually

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Speaker 1: solved it and just happened to die right in time

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Speaker 1: to not get found out. Certainly the more likely scenario

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Speaker 1: given everything that we've discussed here. Now I mentioned John

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Speaker 1: Matthews Manly earlier, the War One Army cryptologist. Well, he

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Speaker 1: ends up turning Army cryptographer William F. Friedman onto the manuscript.

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Speaker 1: In William and his wife Elizabeth worked on the project

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Speaker 1: for forty years. Freedman was considered one of the greatest

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Speaker 1: cryptographers of his day. He and his team cracked Japan's

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Speaker 1: Code Purple during World War Two, but they were never

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Speaker 1: able to figure out that the manuscript either um though

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Speaker 1: Freedman did seem to believe that it might have been

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Speaker 1: an attempt to construct an artificial or universal language. Robert S. Brumbach,

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Speaker 1: also of Yale University, took a crack at it as

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Speaker 1: well and produced some confusing decipherings that ultimately lead nowhere um.

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Speaker 1: But also Alan Turing apparently took a crack at it

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Speaker 1: as well, the King of code Breakers, and even Turing

430
00:24:11,160 --> 00:24:15,720
Speaker 1: couldn't make any sense of it. Now another interesting case here.

431
00:24:15,960 --> 00:24:21,840
Speaker 1: In seven one, Dr Leo levit Levitov presented the idea

432
00:24:21,880 --> 00:24:25,439
Speaker 1: that the book was a liturgical manual for the the

433
00:24:25,520 --> 00:24:29,200
Speaker 1: Catherine religion of the Middle Ages, basically the only surviving

434
00:24:29,240 --> 00:24:33,480
Speaker 1: document of the Cather heresy, a sort of Gnostic revival

435
00:24:33,560 --> 00:24:38,159
Speaker 1: movement was effectively decimated by the Alba, Genzi and Crusade

436
00:24:38,200 --> 00:24:41,600
Speaker 1: of the early thirteenth century, and much of our understanding

437
00:24:41,640 --> 00:24:44,800
Speaker 1: of this religion is lost. But Levitov makes the argument

438
00:24:44,800 --> 00:24:48,600
Speaker 1: that it's a book of Catherine sacraments, including a youth

439
00:24:48,680 --> 00:24:52,200
Speaker 1: and asia practice or perhaps in a ritualized act of

440
00:24:52,280 --> 00:24:56,679
Speaker 1: suicide known as endura um, with which of the illustrations

441
00:24:57,080 --> 00:25:01,680
Speaker 1: is supposed to show that the bathtubs so yeah. He

442
00:25:02,359 --> 00:25:05,640
Speaker 1: Levitav argues that we're seeing a discussion of the vantage

443
00:25:05,720 --> 00:25:07,920
Speaker 1: in the vantage of Endeira as a right of ritual

444
00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:10,119
Speaker 1: opening of the veins and a hot bath as a

445
00:25:10,160 --> 00:25:13,640
Speaker 1: means of consentually ending one's life in a sacred fashion.

446
00:25:13,880 --> 00:25:16,760
Speaker 1: And this ties into like ideas of the Catholis believing

447
00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:20,280
Speaker 1: like that the physical body was inherently you know, debased

448
00:25:20,760 --> 00:25:23,560
Speaker 1: and therefore like the it's part of uh, you know,

449
00:25:23,600 --> 00:25:26,760
Speaker 1: the of ensuring that a refined soul, you know, travels

450
00:25:26,800 --> 00:25:29,439
Speaker 1: beyond this plane of being, that sort of thing. But

451
00:25:29,480 --> 00:25:32,920
Speaker 1: then he also connects uh Catholism to the worship of

452
00:25:32,960 --> 00:25:36,880
Speaker 1: the goddess Isis and he uh, you know, he believed

453
00:25:36,880 --> 00:25:40,800
Speaker 1: that that it was not encrypted at all the manuscript,

454
00:25:40,880 --> 00:25:42,560
Speaker 1: but it was written in this uh this you know,

455
00:25:42,600 --> 00:25:46,879
Speaker 1: this this mixture of medieval Flemish and old Fringe and

456
00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:50,000
Speaker 1: old High German Loan words, all kind of you know,

457
00:25:50,520 --> 00:25:55,640
Speaker 1: formed into this amalgamation of language. Um. But while some

458
00:25:55,760 --> 00:25:59,240
Speaker 1: saw promise in Levitov's argument, there were plenty of people

459
00:25:59,240 --> 00:26:02,840
Speaker 1: who had numerous problems with it. A big one is

460
00:26:02,920 --> 00:26:08,680
Speaker 1: that the induro was definitely a thing. According to Coasta Siamus,

461
00:26:08,720 --> 00:26:12,240
Speaker 1: in writing for the journal Religion in Health in twos sixteen, quote,

462
00:26:12,280 --> 00:26:15,800
Speaker 1: the enduro was the prerequisite act of repentance that allowed

463
00:26:15,840 --> 00:26:19,000
Speaker 1: the fallen soul to return to heaven. But pretty much

464
00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:23,119
Speaker 1: everybody agrees that it was. It was basically a fast.

465
00:26:23,400 --> 00:26:28,520
Speaker 1: It was not a ritual suicide or Euthanasiah. So another

466
00:26:28,560 --> 00:26:31,080
Speaker 1: one is this whole isis connection. This doesn't pop up

467
00:26:31,119 --> 00:26:34,359
Speaker 1: anywhere else. And years later, you know, when we'd finally

468
00:26:34,400 --> 00:26:37,600
Speaker 1: get some carbon dating that dismissed. Uh, you know, the

469
00:26:37,640 --> 00:26:40,679
Speaker 1: idea that a bacon a bacon origin was possible, and

470
00:26:40,760 --> 00:26:43,680
Speaker 1: certainly a pre bacon origin of the text was equally

471
00:26:44,600 --> 00:26:49,080
Speaker 1: unlikely or impossible. Yeah, I'd say that's fairly impossible, given

472
00:26:49,080 --> 00:26:52,320
Speaker 1: that the vellum was not from before the early fifteenth century,

473
00:26:53,320 --> 00:26:56,320
Speaker 1: unless again we're dealing with like a copy of an

474
00:26:56,320 --> 00:26:59,840
Speaker 1: earlier text, which again it doesn't necessarily look like. Now,

475
00:27:00,359 --> 00:27:02,199
Speaker 1: when we look at other theories as to you know,

476
00:27:02,200 --> 00:27:05,000
Speaker 1: where it came from, um, you know they're there, have

477
00:27:05,040 --> 00:27:08,120
Speaker 1: been various and most of them haven't really endured. There

478
00:27:08,240 --> 00:27:12,800
Speaker 1: is the interesting notion that sixteenth century occultist mathematician and

479
00:27:12,840 --> 00:27:16,920
Speaker 1: cryptographer John d along with Edward Kelly, may have been

480
00:27:16,920 --> 00:27:21,080
Speaker 1: involved with the manuscript in some some form or another. Now,

481
00:27:21,160 --> 00:27:24,600
Speaker 1: this is mckinnis theory. He's got a complicated argument that

482
00:27:25,160 --> 00:27:28,280
Speaker 1: that like, yes, it probably was John D and Edward

483
00:27:28,400 --> 00:27:33,200
Speaker 1: Kelly who wrote this document. Yeah, yeah, Mickey McKenna did

484
00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,640
Speaker 1: present that idea that he though he also readily admitted

485
00:27:36,680 --> 00:27:39,440
Speaker 1: that it was just more, you know more basically a

486
00:27:39,480 --> 00:27:41,800
Speaker 1: conjecture on his part, and he he had he had

487
00:27:41,840 --> 00:27:43,600
Speaker 1: not done a rigorous work to back it up, and

488
00:27:43,600 --> 00:27:48,000
Speaker 1: there were numerous potential holes in the situation. But but

489
00:27:48,119 --> 00:27:51,960
Speaker 1: Kelly and and D did dabble in not dabble. They

490
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:54,920
Speaker 1: had more than dabble than occult practices. So I mean,

491
00:27:55,119 --> 00:27:57,639
Speaker 1: it's again, it's speculative, but it's not hard to see

492
00:27:57,680 --> 00:28:00,840
Speaker 1: somebody like John D coming up with a with a

493
00:28:00,920 --> 00:28:06,480
Speaker 1: strange constructed document that's got kind of magical suggestions in it. Yeah,

494
00:28:06,480 --> 00:28:08,639
Speaker 1: we have two older episodes of stuff to bule your

495
00:28:08,640 --> 00:28:11,040
Speaker 1: mind about John D that will probably be running his

496
00:28:11,119 --> 00:28:14,879
Speaker 1: vault episodes here in the immediate future. But yeah, he was.

497
00:28:15,040 --> 00:28:16,800
Speaker 1: He was one of the most brilliant minds of his day.

498
00:28:16,800 --> 00:28:21,400
Speaker 1: He was involved in cryptography, spycraft, occultism, and mathematics. Edward

499
00:28:21,480 --> 00:28:24,280
Speaker 1: Kelly has accomplished here with an It was an occultist

500
00:28:24,320 --> 00:28:28,000
Speaker 1: and and most agree a con man or a scoundrel

501
00:28:28,040 --> 00:28:32,680
Speaker 1: of some fashion. Um it is it's generally described that

502
00:28:32,880 --> 00:28:36,679
Speaker 1: Edward Kelly's ears were both missing, uh you know, his

503
00:28:36,760 --> 00:28:41,400
Speaker 1: punishment for some deed in his past. But yeah, but

504
00:28:41,520 --> 00:28:43,520
Speaker 1: between the two of them, I I often have sort

505
00:28:43,560 --> 00:28:45,880
Speaker 1: of tried to figure out, like what what is the energy?

506
00:28:45,960 --> 00:28:49,720
Speaker 1: What is the nature of of their collaboration? You know,

507
00:28:49,760 --> 00:28:51,560
Speaker 1: they're in a way they're they're a perfect duo, but

508
00:28:51,560 --> 00:28:55,320
Speaker 1: they're also kind of the strange duo where uh, you

509
00:28:55,360 --> 00:28:57,880
Speaker 1: know d there's nobody else like him. And then you wondered, like,

510
00:28:57,920 --> 00:29:01,000
Speaker 1: to what extent is uh is Kelly like taking advantage

511
00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:04,920
Speaker 1: of the situation um? Or is he able to to

512
00:29:05,040 --> 00:29:08,280
Speaker 1: actually an a d and in some of his various

513
00:29:08,280 --> 00:29:11,640
Speaker 1: operations here? But again, like the interest in cryptography, was

514
00:29:11,680 --> 00:29:15,160
Speaker 1: there the interest in occultism? They also both wrote of

515
00:29:15,200 --> 00:29:20,720
Speaker 1: communication with angels in the Enochian tongue um, which which

516
00:29:20,800 --> 00:29:22,480
Speaker 1: we have an alph of that for by the way,

517
00:29:22,680 --> 00:29:26,240
Speaker 1: and it is not the Enochian language that we see

518
00:29:26,600 --> 00:29:31,000
Speaker 1: in the Vonage manuscript. But certainly if you're looking for

519
00:29:31,040 --> 00:29:34,280
Speaker 1: people at that time period, people who you know would

520
00:29:34,320 --> 00:29:36,920
Speaker 1: have been traveling in this area and have had contact

521
00:29:37,080 --> 00:29:40,280
Speaker 1: with with the Holy Roman emperor um, you know, these

522
00:29:40,320 --> 00:29:44,200
Speaker 1: are these are two prime suspects. Yeah, and I do think, um,

523
00:29:44,480 --> 00:29:45,520
Speaker 1: maybe you were going to get to the s in

524
00:29:45,640 --> 00:29:49,560
Speaker 1: a minute, But I do think it's a decent hypothesis

525
00:29:49,600 --> 00:29:52,560
Speaker 1: that even if John D didn't write this, that John

526
00:29:52,640 --> 00:29:56,160
Speaker 1: D was the source who brought the Voytage manuscript to

527
00:29:57,280 --> 00:30:00,320
Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second. Yes. In in

528
00:30:00,360 --> 00:30:04,320
Speaker 1: the book by Benjamin Woolley, The Queen's Conjuror, which is

529
00:30:04,360 --> 00:30:06,600
Speaker 1: biography of D that I I read a few years

530
00:30:06,600 --> 00:30:09,000
Speaker 1: back for the Stuff of your Mind episode, the author

531
00:30:09,200 --> 00:30:12,440
Speaker 1: does mention that Rudolph may well have acquired the manuscript

532
00:30:12,520 --> 00:30:15,560
Speaker 1: from D, but he does not entertain or dismissed the

533
00:30:15,560 --> 00:30:18,640
Speaker 1: idea that D was involved in his production. But but

534
00:30:18,720 --> 00:30:21,280
Speaker 1: he at least acknowledges that it's it's possible that D

535
00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:25,480
Speaker 1: is the individual who sold it to the emperor. And

536
00:30:25,520 --> 00:30:27,480
Speaker 1: if that is the case, like well then we can

537
00:30:27,600 --> 00:30:30,640
Speaker 1: we can add one more step, you know, to the

538
00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:33,120
Speaker 1: beginning of the history of the book. But we still

539
00:30:33,200 --> 00:30:36,520
Speaker 1: don't know where D acquired it, so the mystery remains.

540
00:30:36,720 --> 00:30:39,280
Speaker 1: But John D is a fascinating individual. I mean, he

541
00:30:39,360 --> 00:30:42,719
Speaker 1: is is essentially not only is he the Merlin of

542
00:30:42,760 --> 00:30:45,120
Speaker 1: the day, but a lot of our ideas that we

543
00:30:45,160 --> 00:30:50,440
Speaker 1: associate with the mythical and fictional wizard uh Merlin kind

544
00:30:50,440 --> 00:30:53,560
Speaker 1: of stem from d I think it's believed that he

545
00:30:53,640 --> 00:30:57,320
Speaker 1: was the inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero in the Tempest, Right,

546
00:30:57,480 --> 00:31:01,560
Speaker 1: I've read that as well. Uh So, yeah, an astounding figure,

547
00:31:01,880 --> 00:31:04,040
Speaker 1: you know, to whatever degree he was involved with a

548
00:31:04,080 --> 00:31:08,480
Speaker 1: vantage manuscript. Um, there's still plenty of mysterious and wonderful

549
00:31:08,520 --> 00:31:11,240
Speaker 1: things about about the himself. For instance, to what extent

550
00:31:11,320 --> 00:31:15,080
Speaker 1: he was involved, uh in in statecraft and and and

551
00:31:15,280 --> 00:31:17,560
Speaker 1: worked as a spy. Like. There's some that argue that

552
00:31:17,560 --> 00:31:19,840
Speaker 1: he was like totally a spy and that many of

553
00:31:19,880 --> 00:31:22,680
Speaker 1: these occult manuscripts that he was uh, you know, peddling

554
00:31:22,720 --> 00:31:26,160
Speaker 1: around and discussing in occult ideas, they were essentially codes

555
00:31:26,320 --> 00:31:29,560
Speaker 1: for things um and others say that, no, he was

556
00:31:29,600 --> 00:31:31,880
Speaker 1: more purely on the the occultist end of the spectrum.

557
00:31:32,200 --> 00:31:34,840
Speaker 1: I My read, and I think this has been the

558
00:31:34,840 --> 00:31:37,600
Speaker 1: read of other commentators, is that it's probably somewhere in between,

559
00:31:38,080 --> 00:31:40,800
Speaker 1: you know, one of these situations where you know, he

560
00:31:40,840 --> 00:31:45,040
Speaker 1: was definitely fascinating with with the occult. He was definitely

561
00:31:45,200 --> 00:31:48,800
Speaker 1: and he was a poly math, but being a poly

562
00:31:48,920 --> 00:31:51,520
Speaker 1: math of the day and the one that that traveled

563
00:31:51,680 --> 00:31:54,880
Speaker 1: throughout Europe he ended up, you know, and and also

564
00:31:54,920 --> 00:31:57,400
Speaker 1: being a devout servant to Elizabeth the first you know

565
00:31:57,440 --> 00:31:59,680
Speaker 1: he was, he was more than happy to engage in

566
00:31:59,720 --> 00:32:02,440
Speaker 1: a little spycraft from time to time. Another weird connection.

567
00:32:02,520 --> 00:32:05,080
Speaker 1: I believe John d is also supposed to be the

568
00:32:05,120 --> 00:32:10,920
Speaker 1: inspiration for Christopher Marlowe's incarnation of Dr faust Us from

569
00:32:10,960 --> 00:32:12,880
Speaker 1: from of course Dr you know, who makes a deal

570
00:32:12,920 --> 00:32:15,520
Speaker 1: with the devil to get all knowledge and you know,

571
00:32:15,600 --> 00:32:19,600
Speaker 1: all earthly scientific power. And then Christopher Marlowe, who wrote

572
00:32:19,680 --> 00:32:23,080
Speaker 1: the English play Dr faust Us, was also I believe

573
00:32:23,120 --> 00:32:26,840
Speaker 1: involved in state craft and being a spy. Fascinating, all right,

574
00:32:26,920 --> 00:32:30,600
Speaker 1: So there are various other um origin stories that we're

575
00:32:30,600 --> 00:32:33,000
Speaker 1: not going to get into, but but just to really

576
00:32:33,080 --> 00:32:36,440
Speaker 1: drive home how this is still a thing, How how

577
00:32:36,480 --> 00:32:39,280
Speaker 1: people are still not, you know, not only attempting to

578
00:32:39,280 --> 00:32:43,600
Speaker 1: crack but claiming that they did, we should discuss two

579
00:32:43,880 --> 00:32:48,000
Speaker 1: recent attempts, one extremely recent attempts to crack it that

580
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:51,040
Speaker 1: have also fallen short. Yeah, it seems like there's at

581
00:32:51,120 --> 00:32:54,200
Speaker 1: least one claim every couple of years that gets picked

582
00:32:54,280 --> 00:32:56,800
Speaker 1: up by real like news sites and then it always

583
00:32:56,840 --> 00:32:59,400
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh no, never mind. Well, in two

584
00:32:59,440 --> 00:33:02,800
Speaker 1: thousands seven, team we saw just such a case. Um.

585
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:06,320
Speaker 1: There was a history researcher and television writer by the

586
00:33:06,360 --> 00:33:10,600
Speaker 1: name of Nicholas Gibbs, and he published it was published

587
00:33:10,600 --> 00:33:14,640
Speaker 1: in The Times Literary Supplement. Uh. He believed he'd identified

588
00:33:14,720 --> 00:33:18,080
Speaker 1: quote a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations often used

589
00:33:18,080 --> 00:33:21,360
Speaker 1: in medical treatises about herbs, and this led him to

590
00:33:21,400 --> 00:33:23,960
Speaker 1: illustrations in other texts, and he believed resemble those in

591
00:33:23,960 --> 00:33:27,280
Speaker 1: the Vonage manuscript. And so this guy. This was widely covered,

592
00:33:27,480 --> 00:33:30,040
Speaker 1: in large part, of course, because it was initially published

593
00:33:30,040 --> 00:33:32,840
Speaker 1: in The Times Literary Supplement, was picked out by picked

594
00:33:32,880 --> 00:33:36,680
Speaker 1: up by numerous media outlets, including UH, Ours Technica SO

595
00:33:36,760 --> 00:33:40,960
Speaker 1: and initially at Ours Technica editor Annalie Knewitz wrote quote

596
00:33:41,640 --> 00:33:45,200
Speaker 1: this is again before it became discredited. Quote. Gibbs concluded

597
00:33:45,320 --> 00:33:48,680
Speaker 1: that it's likely the Vontage Manuscript was a customized book,

598
00:33:48,720 --> 00:33:52,120
Speaker 1: possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine.

599
00:33:52,320 --> 00:33:55,000
Speaker 1: Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in,

600
00:33:55,040 --> 00:33:58,240
Speaker 1: but the sheer uh mondanity of gibbs discovery makes it

601
00:33:58,280 --> 00:34:02,040
Speaker 1: sound plausible. Okay, so it's always like it helps you

602
00:34:02,080 --> 00:34:04,400
Speaker 1: with the claim to have decoded something. If the message

603
00:34:04,440 --> 00:34:07,520
Speaker 1: you decoded is not delicious, I think it does help

604
00:34:07,520 --> 00:34:09,759
Speaker 1: the other believability because I think that's that's ultimately part

605
00:34:09,760 --> 00:34:12,279
Speaker 1: of the mystery, right, And the allure and danger of

606
00:34:12,280 --> 00:34:15,160
Speaker 1: the mystery is that if that it is solved, is

607
00:34:15,200 --> 00:34:17,800
Speaker 1: it is, it's not going to be ground baking anymore

608
00:34:17,880 --> 00:34:20,040
Speaker 1: like the groundbreaking. And the amazing thing about the Vontage

609
00:34:20,040 --> 00:34:23,440
Speaker 1: manuscript is not that it contains something definite, but that

610
00:34:23,480 --> 00:34:26,680
Speaker 1: we just have no ability to grasp what it contains. Right,

611
00:34:26,719 --> 00:34:29,160
Speaker 1: You'd have to be more suspicious if it says, like

612
00:34:29,280 --> 00:34:33,240
Speaker 1: I know the location of the Holy Grail or something. Yeah,

613
00:34:33,560 --> 00:34:36,360
Speaker 1: but okay. But after this piece came out then experts

614
00:34:36,360 --> 00:34:38,799
Speaker 1: began to weigh in and knew it also wrote an

615
00:34:38,840 --> 00:34:43,480
Speaker 1: excellent retraction piece, UH which you know, citing the various

616
00:34:43,480 --> 00:34:47,800
Speaker 1: experts who responded to that initial Uh Times Literary Supplement paper,

617
00:34:48,239 --> 00:34:50,920
Speaker 1: and the various experts concluded that while they think the

618
00:34:50,960 --> 00:34:53,840
Speaker 1: text might actually turn out to be a medical treatise

619
00:34:53,840 --> 00:34:57,440
Speaker 1: on women's health, like that's not impossible, but they think

620
00:34:57,440 --> 00:35:00,840
Speaker 1: that his translations were not grammatically correct and it according

621
00:35:00,880 --> 00:35:05,000
Speaker 1: to Medical Academy of America director Lisa Fagan Davis in

622
00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:07,880
Speaker 1: the Atlantic quote, if they had simply sent it to

623
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:11,440
Speaker 1: the Banecki Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat.

624
00:35:11,800 --> 00:35:13,920
Speaker 1: And this is the library Yale that actually has the

625
00:35:13,960 --> 00:35:17,879
Speaker 1: Vontagey script. I think they do WANTAGE scholarship there right, So,

626
00:35:18,040 --> 00:35:20,200
Speaker 1: um so, just I guess that's a little bit of

627
00:35:20,239 --> 00:35:22,880
Speaker 1: advice out there. If you were an editor potential of

628
00:35:22,920 --> 00:35:27,040
Speaker 1: any kind of publication and you're potentially um publishing something

629
00:35:27,080 --> 00:35:30,440
Speaker 1: about someone cracking the Vonage manuscript, Um, make a phone call,

630
00:35:30,480 --> 00:35:33,400
Speaker 1: send an email to the Bnecki Library and see if

631
00:35:33,440 --> 00:35:36,080
Speaker 1: you can get somebody to to to weigh in on

632
00:35:36,120 --> 00:35:38,200
Speaker 1: it before you publish. Yeah. I think that would be

633
00:35:38,239 --> 00:35:41,920
Speaker 1: a smart move. Now, have there been any cases this year? Yes,

634
00:35:42,080 --> 00:35:45,319
Speaker 1: into in twenty nineteen, um, this one prop popped up.

635
00:35:45,320 --> 00:35:49,520
Speaker 1: You might have seen this headline Bristol academic cracks Vontage code,

636
00:35:49,719 --> 00:35:52,800
Speaker 1: solving century old mystery of a midie of medieval text.

637
00:35:53,320 --> 00:35:55,840
Speaker 1: And yeah, I remember seeing this one. I want to

638
00:35:55,840 --> 00:35:58,920
Speaker 1: say that it even popped up on a fairly notable

639
00:35:59,000 --> 00:36:02,680
Speaker 1: like Science Release website that I use and was but

640
00:36:02,800 --> 00:36:07,520
Speaker 1: then was later removed. Dr Gerard Cheshire, research assistant at

641
00:36:07,560 --> 00:36:11,200
Speaker 1: Bristol University, claimed that it was a therapeutic reference book

642
00:36:11,239 --> 00:36:14,000
Speaker 1: written in a lost language called proto Romance, and this

643
00:36:14,120 --> 00:36:16,960
Speaker 1: article appeared on the university's website, but then was later

644
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:21,080
Speaker 1: taken down after experts chimed in and question the validity

645
00:36:21,120 --> 00:36:24,880
Speaker 1: of the research and uh another there had I looked.

646
00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:27,560
Speaker 1: There hasn't been like an additional follow up on that,

647
00:36:27,640 --> 00:36:30,800
Speaker 1: but it would it would seem to be the case

648
00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:35,000
Speaker 1: that it is another situation where, um, you know, someone

649
00:36:35,080 --> 00:36:37,480
Speaker 1: thought they'd cracked it and they had not that they

650
00:36:37,480 --> 00:36:41,719
Speaker 1: had perhaps, in the words of Mary the Imperio, you know,

651
00:36:42,680 --> 00:36:45,480
Speaker 1: recreated the same steps and missteps of those that came

652
00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:49,480
Speaker 1: before trying to crack the Vantage manuscript. And of course,

653
00:36:49,480 --> 00:36:51,239
Speaker 1: in addition to this, like we said, there's just a

654
00:36:51,239 --> 00:36:55,480
Speaker 1: lot of baseless speculation surrounding the manuscript. Online. It features

655
00:36:55,480 --> 00:36:58,520
Speaker 1: into historical conspiracy theory. Yeah, you'll find it on the YouTube,

656
00:36:58,520 --> 00:37:02,960
Speaker 1: you'll find it on various Reddit words. Um. According to

657
00:37:03,440 --> 00:37:06,600
Speaker 1: Raymond Clemens, a curator of early books and manuscripts at

658
00:37:06,600 --> 00:37:10,799
Speaker 1: the Banecky Library, one of the most fun examples that

659
00:37:10,800 --> 00:37:13,440
Speaker 1: they've run across is that the Vontage manuscript is an

660
00:37:13,440 --> 00:37:16,040
Speaker 1: alien is the work of an alien visitor to Earth

661
00:37:16,120 --> 00:37:19,399
Speaker 1: from the Andromeda galaxy who was making notes about our

662
00:37:19,400 --> 00:37:23,000
Speaker 1: planet and then dropped their notebook before they return. But wait,

663
00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:25,080
Speaker 1: why would it be notes about our planet if none

664
00:37:25,080 --> 00:37:30,040
Speaker 1: of the plants can be identified? Maybe the alien vision

665
00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:32,400
Speaker 1: I vision, you know, it's weird. I don't know, you know,

666
00:37:32,480 --> 00:37:35,120
Speaker 1: maybe they were. There are a lot of holes in

667
00:37:35,120 --> 00:37:37,880
Speaker 1: this theory, Joe's what I'm saying. Yeah, all right, we

668
00:37:37,920 --> 00:37:39,360
Speaker 1: need to take one more break, but we will be

669
00:37:39,440 --> 00:37:44,160
Speaker 1: right back with more where we're back now, We've talked

670
00:37:44,200 --> 00:37:46,640
Speaker 1: about evidence going in both directions of people who just

671
00:37:46,719 --> 00:37:50,759
Speaker 1: try to look at the text statistically or mathematically as

672
00:37:50,760 --> 00:37:53,400
Speaker 1: a text and say, does it look like a text

673
00:37:53,560 --> 00:37:56,759
Speaker 1: in a real language, even coded in a real language,

674
00:37:57,280 --> 00:38:01,200
Speaker 1: and the answer there is some indications kind of point

675
00:38:01,200 --> 00:38:03,440
Speaker 1: to yes, and some indications kind of point to know.

676
00:38:03,920 --> 00:38:05,879
Speaker 1: I think one thing I wanted to look at now

677
00:38:05,960 --> 00:38:07,960
Speaker 1: is something that was pointed out in that in that

678
00:38:08,040 --> 00:38:12,400
Speaker 1: Skeptical Inquirer article by Klaus Schmay who was who he

679
00:38:12,520 --> 00:38:15,560
Speaker 1: pointed out some interesting research from the early two thousands

680
00:38:15,600 --> 00:38:18,640
Speaker 1: by the British linguist Gordon Rugg. So I'm just going

681
00:38:18,719 --> 00:38:22,000
Speaker 1: to read this section from MS article, smy writes quote

682
00:38:22,080 --> 00:38:25,120
Speaker 1: the British linguist Gordon Rugg is among the most reputable

683
00:38:25,200 --> 00:38:30,160
Speaker 1: voytage researchers. He conducted a most interesting cryptological experiment. For

684
00:38:30,280 --> 00:38:34,480
Speaker 1: his experiment, Rugg generated a table with random combinations of

685
00:38:34,600 --> 00:38:39,040
Speaker 1: characters that he used as prefixes, roots, or suffixes of

686
00:38:39,120 --> 00:38:42,960
Speaker 1: new words. He positioned a quadratic stencil, like the one

687
00:38:43,080 --> 00:38:46,400
Speaker 1: used for encryption in the sixteenth century over the table.

688
00:38:46,719 --> 00:38:49,480
Speaker 1: In this manner, he obtained a sequence of letters that

689
00:38:49,560 --> 00:38:53,160
Speaker 1: bore great resemblance to the text of the Voyage manuscript.

690
00:38:53,520 --> 00:38:57,640
Speaker 1: Rugg's experiment supports the hypothesis that the manuscript is nothing

691
00:38:57,719 --> 00:39:01,360
Speaker 1: but a compilation of meaningless line and letters, which is

692
00:39:01,600 --> 00:39:05,400
Speaker 1: of course the hoax hypothesis. And then Schmidt also points

693
00:39:05,400 --> 00:39:10,200
Speaker 1: out a study by the Austrian physicist Andreas Shinner that

694
00:39:10,360 --> 00:39:13,279
Speaker 1: also supports the idea that even though there are some

695
00:39:13,320 --> 00:39:16,320
Speaker 1: things about this that do look like a text, it's possible,

696
00:39:16,640 --> 00:39:19,600
Speaker 1: like a real text and a real natural language, it's

697
00:39:19,640 --> 00:39:22,839
Speaker 1: possible to generate a text like this without it being

698
00:39:22,880 --> 00:39:25,799
Speaker 1: based on a real language. And and Shinner's analysis, I

699
00:39:25,800 --> 00:39:28,560
Speaker 1: think was primarily based on the fact that there are

700
00:39:29,160 --> 00:39:33,960
Speaker 1: unnatural regularities in the order of words appearing in the

701
00:39:33,960 --> 00:39:38,319
Speaker 1: manuscript that don't mirror sequences of words that appear in

702
00:39:38,440 --> 00:39:41,560
Speaker 1: real languages. So I don't think that completely settles it.

703
00:39:41,600 --> 00:39:43,800
Speaker 1: But that's more fuel back on the on the fire

704
00:39:43,840 --> 00:39:45,799
Speaker 1: of the side that says, Okay, this is just a

705
00:39:45,840 --> 00:39:49,240
Speaker 1: hoax document or glossal alia or something something that somebody

706
00:39:49,320 --> 00:39:53,280
Speaker 1: made up and doesn't correlate to real words. That makes sense.

707
00:39:53,719 --> 00:39:56,000
Speaker 1: But and then ultimately this, yeah, this gives credence to

708
00:39:56,200 --> 00:39:59,759
Speaker 1: just the its power to break those that that desperately

709
00:40:00,280 --> 00:40:02,839
Speaker 1: to find meaning in it. Like it just kind of

710
00:40:03,080 --> 00:40:05,520
Speaker 1: it almost seems like it does point people to the

711
00:40:05,840 --> 00:40:08,879
Speaker 1: you know, near the threshold of madness where they they

712
00:40:08,920 --> 00:40:11,000
Speaker 1: make that leap and they say I've done it, I

713
00:40:11,040 --> 00:40:14,080
Speaker 1: figured it out, and and believe that they have you know,

714
00:40:14,160 --> 00:40:17,000
Speaker 1: I mean, uh, none of the none of the individuals

715
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:20,160
Speaker 1: that we've we've named here, um you know, from from

716
00:40:20,200 --> 00:40:23,680
Speaker 1: the Avontage manuscripts, uh, you know, recent history. You know.

717
00:40:23,719 --> 00:40:25,880
Speaker 1: I don't think any of them have, you know, have

718
00:40:26,280 --> 00:40:28,719
Speaker 1: been trying to pull anything over on anyone. I think

719
00:40:28,760 --> 00:40:31,439
Speaker 1: they have. They've reached a point where they genuinely think

720
00:40:31,480 --> 00:40:36,280
Speaker 1: they found the clue they found, you know, the missing

721
00:40:36,400 --> 00:40:39,040
Speaker 1: piece that has enabled us to understand this document. Well.

722
00:40:39,080 --> 00:40:41,480
Speaker 1: As satisfying as it is to solve a puzzle, it

723
00:40:41,600 --> 00:40:45,200
Speaker 1: is equally maddening to work on a puzzle without solving it.

724
00:40:45,520 --> 00:40:48,000
Speaker 1: And I think that can kind of drive people like

725
00:40:48,120 --> 00:40:52,960
Speaker 1: it creates unreasonable incentives in the mind to toil over

726
00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:55,759
Speaker 1: a puzzle or a code for so long without breaking it.

727
00:40:55,840 --> 00:40:59,880
Speaker 1: Like you, the desire to have broken it becomes incredibly strong.

728
00:41:00,760 --> 00:41:03,040
Speaker 1: I will say this one lesson I've taken home from

729
00:41:03,080 --> 00:41:06,040
Speaker 1: all of this is friends. Don't let friends claim they've

730
00:41:06,239 --> 00:41:10,080
Speaker 1: cracked the Vontage manuscript. That's right if you if you

731
00:41:10,120 --> 00:41:12,160
Speaker 1: know somebody and they're like, hey, you know, I think

732
00:41:12,200 --> 00:41:15,360
Speaker 1: I've I've translated the Vontage manuscript. I'm going public with

733
00:41:15,360 --> 00:41:18,200
Speaker 1: this tomorrow, you know, talk him down from that. Maybe

734
00:41:18,680 --> 00:41:22,120
Speaker 1: maybe you know, to ask him just to settle down

735
00:41:22,120 --> 00:41:24,720
Speaker 1: a little and uh and rethink before you go public

736
00:41:24,800 --> 00:41:27,239
Speaker 1: with this this new translation. I just want to say,

737
00:41:27,360 --> 00:41:30,520
Speaker 1: though this is not conclusive, from that interesting article by

738
00:41:30,800 --> 00:41:35,080
Speaker 1: by Schmi about his conclusion, just his opinion is that

739
00:41:35,200 --> 00:41:38,160
Speaker 1: it's very likely, it's it's possible that it's a hoax.

740
00:41:38,200 --> 00:41:41,279
Speaker 1: Of course, he thinks the author was probably an anonymous

741
00:41:41,400 --> 00:41:44,640
Speaker 1: artist living in the first half of the fourteen hundreds. Uh,

742
00:41:44,640 --> 00:41:47,240
Speaker 1: and if it is actually encrypted. One thing he points

743
00:41:47,239 --> 00:41:49,040
Speaker 1: to that I think is interesting is he says it's

744
00:41:49,080 --> 00:41:53,279
Speaker 1: easier to encrypt a text if the encrypted text generates

745
00:41:53,320 --> 00:41:57,160
Speaker 1: far more characters than the original text. So if a

746
00:41:57,280 --> 00:42:00,520
Speaker 1: fifty thousand character original document was in ripted in a

747
00:42:00,520 --> 00:42:03,879
Speaker 1: way that generates a hundred and seventy thousand characters, then

748
00:42:03,920 --> 00:42:06,640
Speaker 1: it's easier to see how it could still be hiding

749
00:42:06,640 --> 00:42:09,279
Speaker 1: its meaning, right if there's there's tons of if there

750
00:42:09,280 --> 00:42:11,399
Speaker 1: are tons of characters in there that don't code out

751
00:42:11,400 --> 00:42:14,360
Speaker 1: to anything, like, how do you separate the coding letters

752
00:42:14,400 --> 00:42:17,400
Speaker 1: from the filler letters. So that's a possible explanation for

753
00:42:17,560 --> 00:42:19,520
Speaker 1: if there is a code in there, why it hasn't

754
00:42:19,520 --> 00:42:22,880
Speaker 1: been cracked. Yet, another thing that he does find plausible

755
00:42:22,960 --> 00:42:25,200
Speaker 1: is he finds it plausible that this is an artificial

756
00:42:25,560 --> 00:42:29,080
Speaker 1: created language. Somebody just made up a language of their own,

757
00:42:29,600 --> 00:42:32,760
Speaker 1: and that's why it doesn't translate to anything else based

758
00:42:32,800 --> 00:42:35,680
Speaker 1: on whatever. That also seems plausible to me. I can

759
00:42:35,719 --> 00:42:40,000
Speaker 1: imagine this being I don't know, a language unique to

760
00:42:40,120 --> 00:42:42,560
Speaker 1: one person who was you know, toiling away in their

761
00:42:42,600 --> 00:42:45,600
Speaker 1: turret or something in a monastery, or maybe shared by

762
00:42:45,600 --> 00:42:48,400
Speaker 1: a small number of people for some kind of esoteric

763
00:42:48,480 --> 00:42:51,840
Speaker 1: purpose or some kind of a cult purpose maybe, But

764
00:42:51,920 --> 00:42:54,600
Speaker 1: the key being if it's an invented language rather than

765
00:42:54,640 --> 00:42:57,919
Speaker 1: a code for an existing language, that would explain why

766
00:42:57,960 --> 00:43:02,000
Speaker 1: it doesn't code out whatever it's origins, whatever it's meaning

767
00:43:02,280 --> 00:43:05,920
Speaker 1: or lack of meaning, it continues to enthrall us and

768
00:43:06,000 --> 00:43:10,480
Speaker 1: perplexus and uh and I'd likely will continue to do so.

769
00:43:11,200 --> 00:43:13,879
Speaker 1: I don't I do not expect that we will reach

770
00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:17,120
Speaker 1: the point where we need to you know, add there

771
00:43:17,160 --> 00:43:20,520
Speaker 1: may be additional you know, arguments, there's some new ideas

772
00:43:20,560 --> 00:43:23,000
Speaker 1: that are brought up. But I am not expecting to

773
00:43:23,040 --> 00:43:25,960
Speaker 1: see anybody cracked this uh in in the future. Yeah,

774
00:43:26,000 --> 00:43:27,480
Speaker 1: I will say, as much as I would like to

775
00:43:27,520 --> 00:43:31,880
Speaker 1: see it cracked, my the walls of my skeptical fortress

776
00:43:31,920 --> 00:43:35,600
Speaker 1: here have been fortified. And I now when I see

777
00:43:35,600 --> 00:43:37,879
Speaker 1: an article, as they do tend to pop up once

778
00:43:37,920 --> 00:43:40,480
Speaker 1: every year or two, an article about how somebody has

779
00:43:40,480 --> 00:43:45,040
Speaker 1: cracked the Voyage manuscript, I think now I will probably conclude, Okay,

780
00:43:45,040 --> 00:43:48,279
Speaker 1: I bet that's not right, right, and then then I'll

781
00:43:48,280 --> 00:43:50,600
Speaker 1: go another thing about it too, is like if it

782
00:43:50,680 --> 00:43:52,839
Speaker 1: was cracked, the magic would be gone, like the part

783
00:43:52,840 --> 00:43:55,719
Speaker 1: of the man that the whole reason we're enthralled by

784
00:43:55,760 --> 00:43:58,280
Speaker 1: this document is that we don't know what it's meaning

785
00:43:58,440 --> 00:44:02,200
Speaker 1: or meaninglessness really consists of. Well, it's about it's It's

786
00:44:02,239 --> 00:44:04,200
Speaker 1: like how you know, the best part of a mystery

787
00:44:04,239 --> 00:44:07,160
Speaker 1: is always the middle. It's almost never the end. When

788
00:44:07,200 --> 00:44:08,600
Speaker 1: you get to the end and you find out who

789
00:44:08,680 --> 00:44:11,719
Speaker 1: done it, it's almost always disappointing. Yeah, because there're only

790
00:44:11,760 --> 00:44:14,279
Speaker 1: so many ways it can go right, I'd say. Actually, though,

791
00:44:14,320 --> 00:44:16,200
Speaker 1: to tie it back to the subject, one of the

792
00:44:16,239 --> 00:44:19,040
Speaker 1: only example counter examples I can think of is the

793
00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:21,200
Speaker 1: Name of the Rose, where the solution of the mystery

794
00:44:21,360 --> 00:44:25,640
Speaker 1: is supremely satisfying. Yeah. Yeah, I think that there's a

795
00:44:25,640 --> 00:44:29,000
Speaker 1: strong case to be made there. Yeah. Um. Interesting to

796
00:44:29,239 --> 00:44:32,960
Speaker 1: the other mystery book that I mentioned, um, The Club

797
00:44:33,080 --> 00:44:37,000
Speaker 1: Dumb by Perez Roverta, also a mystery. That's the book

798
00:44:37,080 --> 00:44:40,600
Speaker 1: that The Ninth Gate was based on. Uh. And It's

799
00:44:40,600 --> 00:44:42,200
Speaker 1: been a while since I've seen The Ninth Gate, but

800
00:44:42,440 --> 00:44:46,080
Speaker 1: I definitely remember enjoying the book. It's a fun little uh,

801
00:44:46,160 --> 00:44:48,680
Speaker 1: you know, a cult themed filler, a thriller, I've never

802
00:44:48,680 --> 00:44:50,960
Speaker 1: read it. I actually check that out. How's the ending

803
00:44:51,760 --> 00:44:54,200
Speaker 1: um pretty good as I recall, Yeah, it's different from

804
00:44:54,239 --> 00:44:58,200
Speaker 1: the movie again based on my my fading memory of it.

805
00:44:58,840 --> 00:45:01,520
Speaker 1: But I'd love to clo Is out here with the one.

806
00:45:01,719 --> 00:45:06,040
Speaker 1: One more quote from that Terence mckinnipie's from from Moses Magazine,

807
00:45:06,200 --> 00:45:08,440
Speaker 1: which I think he sums up a lot of the

808
00:45:08,560 --> 00:45:12,120
Speaker 1: like the power and the you know, our fascination with

809
00:45:12,160 --> 00:45:15,360
Speaker 1: this document, he said, quote it is a kind of

810
00:45:15,400 --> 00:45:20,080
Speaker 1: Borhesian concept that there must be somewhere an unreadable book,

811
00:45:20,480 --> 00:45:24,359
Speaker 1: and perhaps this is it. The unreadable book hints at

812
00:45:24,400 --> 00:45:27,440
Speaker 1: an idea, at the idea that the world is in information.

813
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:30,880
Speaker 1: We have cognizance of the world by ordering all of

814
00:45:30,920 --> 00:45:34,120
Speaker 1: the information we can't we come upon in relation to

815
00:45:34,239 --> 00:45:39,440
Speaker 1: information that we have already accumulated through patterns. An unreadable

816
00:45:39,440 --> 00:45:42,960
Speaker 1: book in a non English script with no dictionary attached

817
00:45:43,040 --> 00:45:47,520
Speaker 1: is very puzzling. We become like linguistic oysters. We secrete

818
00:45:47,520 --> 00:45:51,520
Speaker 1: around it, we insisted into our metaphysics, but we don't

819
00:45:51,520 --> 00:45:54,279
Speaker 1: know what it says, which always carries with it the

820
00:45:54,320 --> 00:45:57,919
Speaker 1: possibility that it says something that would unhinge our conceptions

821
00:45:57,920 --> 00:46:01,839
Speaker 1: of things. Or that it's real message is its unreadability.

822
00:46:02,160 --> 00:46:05,120
Speaker 1: It points to the otherness of the nature of information,

823
00:46:05,560 --> 00:46:08,680
Speaker 1: and it's what is called in structuralism, a limit text.

824
00:46:09,040 --> 00:46:13,200
Speaker 1: Certainly the Vontage Manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism.

825
00:46:13,239 --> 00:46:16,279
Speaker 1: It is truly an occult book, one that no one

826
00:46:16,440 --> 00:46:20,439
Speaker 1: can read the literal meaning of a cult. Yeah's it's

827
00:46:20,480 --> 00:46:24,080
Speaker 1: a mystery in the dark. Absolutely, all right, So there

828
00:46:24,120 --> 00:46:27,680
Speaker 1: you have it, the Vontage Manuscript. Obviously we would love

829
00:46:27,719 --> 00:46:30,960
Speaker 1: to hear from everybody out there because if you have

830
00:46:30,360 --> 00:46:33,520
Speaker 1: you cracked it. I there's it's very possible we will

831
00:46:33,560 --> 00:46:36,160
Speaker 1: hear from someone who believes that they have or at

832
00:46:36,160 --> 00:46:38,040
Speaker 1: the very least, perhaps you can turn us on to

833
00:46:38,160 --> 00:46:41,720
Speaker 1: some other wild theories. Uh, some of the crazier theories

834
00:46:41,719 --> 00:46:44,399
Speaker 1: that we didn't get into, uh you know, involving it's

835
00:46:44,440 --> 00:46:46,680
Speaker 1: its origin. Uh yeah, there's there are some other ones

836
00:46:46,719 --> 00:46:50,239
Speaker 1: we didn't discuss. And what involving like the uh you

837
00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:53,920
Speaker 1: know what, the various other like a cult, conspiracy theories,

838
00:46:54,400 --> 00:46:59,120
Speaker 1: the Rosicrucians and stuff. McKenna talks about that. So certainly,

839
00:46:59,160 --> 00:47:00,839
Speaker 1: if you have I do you have any of those

840
00:47:00,840 --> 00:47:03,279
Speaker 1: ideas who want to chat with us about you can

841
00:47:03,320 --> 00:47:04,960
Speaker 1: reach out to us in the meantime. Check out more

842
00:47:04,960 --> 00:47:06,960
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind at stuff to

843
00:47:07,000 --> 00:47:09,319
Speaker 1: bow your Mind dot com and make sure that you

844
00:47:09,360 --> 00:47:12,000
Speaker 1: have subscribed to the podcast. Make sure you've subscribed to

845
00:47:12,040 --> 00:47:15,800
Speaker 1: Invention as well. Invention is our our step by step

846
00:47:15,880 --> 00:47:18,680
Speaker 1: journey through human techno history, and you can find that

847
00:47:18,719 --> 00:47:21,920
Speaker 1: an Invention pod dot com. Wherever you listen to our shows,

848
00:47:21,960 --> 00:47:24,399
Speaker 1: just make sure that you have rate, rated and reviewed them,

849
00:47:24,440 --> 00:47:27,760
Speaker 1: because that helps us out immensely huge thanks as always

850
00:47:27,800 --> 00:47:31,680
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producers, Maya Cole and Seth Nicholas Johnson.

851
00:47:32,080 --> 00:47:33,520
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us

852
00:47:33,600 --> 00:47:35,960
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest

853
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Speaker 1: a topic for the future, to show us your code,

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Speaker 1: your your method of decoding the Voytage manuscript, you can

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Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind

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Speaker 1: dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind as a production

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Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts

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Speaker 1: from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.