Speaker 1: Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And today we have a conundrum to consider
Speaker 1: a book that cannot be read by anyone. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of a riddle in the dark, isn't it like
Speaker 1: something that Gollum might ask of of Bilbo, or Bilbo
Speaker 1: might cunningly ask of Gollum. Right, it's like I walk,
Speaker 1: but I have no feed. I stand, but I have
Speaker 1: no legs. So it but but, but it is an
Speaker 1: intriguing kind of riddle. Why can't the book in question
Speaker 1: be read? So we instantly can think to some of
Speaker 1: like the tricks of riddles. Right, Well, perhaps the book
Speaker 1: does not exist. You cannot read a non existent fictional
Speaker 1: book such as your hey, Luis Borges, the Book of
Speaker 1: sand or a thorough Perez rovertas the Book of Nine
Speaker 1: Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows. These are books that
Speaker 1: exist within stories or within other works that have no
Speaker 1: reality in our world. Likewise, you cannot read a book
Speaker 1: that no longer exists. You know, a book that has
Speaker 1: become lost, such as you know, the various destroyed Maya
Speaker 1: Codices or aristotle Second Book of Poetics, which, of course
Speaker 1: the major plot point in burto Echo is the Name
Speaker 1: of the Rose. But no, the book that we're talking
Speaker 1: about here, it is real and it definitely exists. So
Speaker 1: that might lead you to the next like level of
Speaker 1: of contemplation here. Okay, Well, perhaps this book cannot be
Speaker 1: read because it is forbidden. You know, some powerful librarian
Speaker 1: or clerk keeps it hidden, perhaps alongside the Ark of
Speaker 1: the Covenant or something. Right, Okay, so like that same
Speaker 1: Aristotle text, but in the Name of the Rose, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: where where somebody just preventing you from viewing it and
Speaker 1: reading it. No, that's not the case with this book,
Speaker 1: because plenty of p wooll have attempted to read it
Speaker 1: and still attempt to. Any serious scholar, can you know,
Speaker 1: they can actually travel to its physical location and and
Speaker 1: go through the you know, the necessary of paperwork one presumes,
Speaker 1: can examine it physically, and you, you, the listener, can
Speaker 1: even attempt to read it on the internet, or you
Speaker 1: can you can acquire a printed fac simile, many of
Speaker 1: which are very nice to understand. Okay, I got one. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of texts from the ancient world
Speaker 1: that only exist in some incredibly degraded format. Right. So
Speaker 1: there we have evidence that a book existed, but you
Speaker 1: you can't make out what's on the page anymore. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's only a scrap of it left, right, it's been destroyed,
Speaker 1: or it's been or perhaps you know, it's been scraped
Speaker 1: away and other things have been printed on top of it.
Speaker 1: But nope, that's not the case with this book. It's
Speaker 1: it's actually quite well preserved for a centuries old manuscript. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's one. Maybe you can't read it because it's not
Speaker 1: made of language. Ah, that's that's a that's a clever,
Speaker 1: clever guest picture book or something. Yeah, But at the
Speaker 1: book actually contains quite a bit of text, okay, And
Speaker 1: so that that leads us to the next level of
Speaker 1: a contemplation here. Okay, then the text must be in
Speaker 1: a language that is forgotten, or a nonsensical representation of language,
Speaker 1: or perhaps what appears to be language is actually a
Speaker 1: code for something else. Okay. So there is a book.
Speaker 1: You can look at it, there is text in it,
Speaker 1: but for some reason you can't make sense of the text. Right,
Speaker 1: And in this we are getting to like the heart
Speaker 1: of many of the discussions surrounding the book we're going
Speaker 1: to be discussing today. This book is written in a
Speaker 1: language or code or some other manner of textual form
Speaker 1: that no one at least no one living or no
Speaker 1: one that has lived in the in the previous centuries,
Speaker 1: is capable of understanding. In fact, while various people have
Speaker 1: claimed to have cracked it, or translated it, or figured
Speaker 1: out some or all of its secrets, we can state
Speaker 1: with a fair amount of certainty as of this recording,
Speaker 1: and probably of you know, for you know, the duration,
Speaker 1: for the shelf life of this episode, no one has
Speaker 1: been able to read this book at least not for
Speaker 1: many many centuries at least as far as we know.
Speaker 1: And unless one of these people on like YouTube or
Speaker 1: read it is onto something and nobody has really uh
Speaker 1: nobody's given them credit yet. Yeah, where somebody has figured
Speaker 1: it out but decided not to share it with anyone,
Speaker 1: which is generally not the case. Generally, there are plenty
Speaker 1: of people even today that are claiming to have some
Speaker 1: theory as to h you know, that they have some
Speaker 1: angles some in that's going to allow them to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, to crack this nut. So what we're talking
Speaker 1: about today is a real manuscript that exists in the world.
Speaker 1: Some of you may well have heard of it. It's actually,
Speaker 1: I think if you go back, it's something that listeners
Speaker 1: have requested us to cover in the past. I don't
Speaker 1: know if we've got to request recently, but in the
Speaker 1: years I've been on the show, I know people have
Speaker 1: written to us asking like, hey, what's your take on it?
Speaker 1: And it is a manuscript known as the Voytage Manuscript
Speaker 1: or the I've also heard it pronounced Vonage, but I
Speaker 1: think we'll say Voytage v O y n I c H.
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's just describe it to everyone. For starters,
Speaker 1: we should just drive home that again, you can look
Speaker 1: up a copy of this, it's what it's a bit
Speaker 1: readily available on what our archive dot organ exactly, and
Speaker 1: not only you can you should Well we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about the contents of it in a minute, but maybe
Speaker 1: we should start with just the base physical reality of
Speaker 1: what this codex is. It's in the form of a codex, right,
Speaker 1: so it's not a scroll. It's like a you know,
Speaker 1: a folding book with pages that you can leave through. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a roughly seven by ten inches, not a huge tone, right,
Speaker 1: not huge. So a lot of these older books you
Speaker 1: think of as being this big thing that you put
Speaker 1: up on a lectern and you open the giant uh
Speaker 1: cover of it that may be made of wood or whatever,
Speaker 1: and you leave through the huge pages with their illuminations.
Speaker 1: But no, this is a little thing, maybe to be
Speaker 1: cradled in a wizard's knobby fingers. Uh. The precise dimensions
Speaker 1: I was reading are it's like twenty three point five
Speaker 1: meters by sixteen point two centimeters and about five centimeters thick.
Speaker 1: So it's a little yeah, and that's what What was
Speaker 1: the page count some of some of the neighborhood of
Speaker 1: two forty seventy Yeah, it's so the number of pages
Speaker 1: existing today. I've seen a couple of different counts of
Speaker 1: two forty or two forty six pages. I think that
Speaker 1: might be depending on what types of leafs you're counting
Speaker 1: on the edges. But it's believed that some original pages
Speaker 1: of this manuscript are lost. It may originally have had
Speaker 1: around two hundred and seventy pages or so, but we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure. And these pages are made of
Speaker 1: parchment specifically of vellum, which was a common medieval writing material.
Speaker 1: Parchment means a prepared version of an animal skin that
Speaker 1: was used for writing vellums. Specifically, I think it's calf skin,
Speaker 1: so these are calf skin pages with ink writing on them.
Speaker 1: Also about the pages in this book, we should note
Speaker 1: that in the format we have it today, some pages
Speaker 1: appear to be out of order. So I think at
Speaker 1: some point this manuscript was not fully bound. It's bound now,
Speaker 1: but I think it has been through different binding over
Speaker 1: the ages, and at some point it looks like some
Speaker 1: pages got shuffled out of order, and the version we
Speaker 1: have it now has pages that look like they're from
Speaker 1: the wrong section in which they're currently placed. So that's
Speaker 1: just just how it is as we have it. It's
Speaker 1: probably due to some owner throughout the centuries making an
Speaker 1: error and rearranging them when the pages became loose. The
Speaker 1: text in the book is closely written and freerunning alphabetic script.
Speaker 1: The number of letters, Uh, one source I was looking
Speaker 1: at said nineteen to twenty eight letters. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you found a different figure. Yeah, I've seen several
Speaker 1: different estimates of like fifteen to twenty five or estimates
Speaker 1: of thirty letters. I think it's difficult because there are
Speaker 1: some symbols in there which could be copies of the
Speaker 1: same letter you've already seen, or could be slightly different letters. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it's hard to tell if you're not working with
Speaker 1: a known alphabet, right, And that's part of it is
Speaker 1: that like these for the most part, don't seem to
Speaker 1: have real counterparts and European letter systems. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: at first glance, it looks like like just standard texts
Speaker 1: that should relate to some European language. But upon closer
Speaker 1: inspection and things become more difficult. The letters have a
Speaker 1: lot of fascinating loops and yeah, like they're they're full
Speaker 1: of these uh, these knots and lassos. And then the illustrations,
Speaker 1: of course, which have already alluded to, they has all
Speaker 1: these these strange line drawings that have been colored in
Speaker 1: with watercolors, and they consist of you know, plants, possible
Speaker 1: astrological drawings, weird illustrations of naked women, uh seeming debay
Speaker 1: their shower and what might be giant plants or other things. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll get more into what the illustrations represent later on. Um.
Speaker 1: Now it was it's written in ink. I think it
Speaker 1: has watercolors in it. Yeah, the watercolors definitely to color
Speaker 1: the illustrations. But then the ink itself I read was
Speaker 1: a brown ink, and it seems to have been like
Speaker 1: an inexpensive inc of the time. So nothing particularly notable. Okay,
Speaker 1: now we've already mentioned that it is not a readable document.
Speaker 1: It is in a language. If it is a language,
Speaker 1: the language is unknown. Yes, sometimes called voia cheese, which
Speaker 1: is just a modern appellation because we don't know what
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah, and uh, it's something like a hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy thousand characters in the book. Some you know,
Speaker 1: we already talked about the number of alphabetic characters, maybe
Speaker 1: somewhere in the range of thirty uh, depending on what
Speaker 1: you define as being a distinct alphabetic character. And then
Speaker 1: roughly what thirty five thousand strings of characters of varying length,
Speaker 1: which can be interpreted as words. These are usually thought
Speaker 1: of as words, whether by the you know, cryptographers who
Speaker 1: look at this, there are something like thirty five thousand
Speaker 1: or like thirty seven thousand words, and they might not
Speaker 1: correlate to real words. Now where you will where will
Speaker 1: you find this book? Now? Well, you'll find it in
Speaker 1: the United States. Yes, we'll get into the history of
Speaker 1: the book that brought it to the United States, but
Speaker 1: it is currently housed at the banecky Rare Book Whom
Speaker 1: at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah, so it's in a
Speaker 1: library at Yale and it is open to being looked
Speaker 1: at by scholars. I remember I read a couple of
Speaker 1: sources talking about how later in his life Umberto Echo
Speaker 1: went to view it personally. Yeah, he was visiting the library.
Speaker 1: It's the only book in the library that he asked
Speaker 1: to view, and you can find it the photos of
Speaker 1: him Burto Echo reading or well looking at the book.
Speaker 1: And of course it's a perfect thing for Umberto Echo
Speaker 1: to show interest in. If you've read The Name of
Speaker 1: the Rose, you know his love for mysterious manuscripts of
Speaker 1: unknown medieval origin. And that gets to one of the
Speaker 1: real mysteries of this text. This text is one of
Speaker 1: the great standing mysteries of I don't know, I guess,
Speaker 1: of medievalism, of of linguistics, of cryptography. It's just this
Speaker 1: wonderful enigma that's still out there. And part of the
Speaker 1: enigma is we don't know its actual origin. We we
Speaker 1: pick up with it in history at a certain point
Speaker 1: where we we know we're at first a i'ved and
Speaker 1: was recorded, but we don't know who made it, or
Speaker 1: how why they made it, or how they made it. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the longest there was also no carbon dating of
Speaker 1: the book, so estimates used to range. You know, usually
Speaker 1: people were saying fifteenth century, so uh, some were saying
Speaker 1: thirteenth century. And I think there's a reason for that
Speaker 1: because it was originally attributed to the English monk and
Speaker 1: philosopher Roger Bacon, you know, of course, considered by many
Speaker 1: to be one of the fathers of modern science. And
Speaker 1: since Roger Bacon lived in the thirteenth century, if he
Speaker 1: had written it, this would place its origin in the
Speaker 1: thirteenth century. But I don't think any modern scholars actually
Speaker 1: believe Roger Bacon wrote it, and later radio carbon dating
Speaker 1: would prove that right. And we'll get back to the
Speaker 1: Roger Bacon connection in a bit. But yeah, in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, the vellum that it's printed on was carbon
Speaker 1: dated to the University of Arizona, and it was carbon
Speaker 1: dated to the early fifteenth century, so fourteen o four
Speaker 1: to fourteen thirty eight roughly, and So one note on
Speaker 1: how carbon date works, of course, is that carbon dating
Speaker 1: is used to date things that were at some point
Speaker 1: alive or at some point had carbon from carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere fixed into them. Because a certain because
Speaker 1: a certain known proportion of this carbon is radioactive, it
Speaker 1: decays at a known rate. So therefore you can tell
Speaker 1: basically if it comes from a thing that was once alive,
Speaker 1: when did the thing that it was made out of die? Right,
Speaker 1: when did it stop incorporating new gas from the atmosphere
Speaker 1: into itself. So you could say that it could have
Speaker 1: been no earlier than this time that the document was produced,
Speaker 1: but it could possibly have been later that the document
Speaker 1: was produced, just as long as the vellum was actually
Speaker 1: this old. Yeah, it kind of depends on how long
Speaker 1: the vellum was sitting on the shelf. Right. Also, it's
Speaker 1: bound in goat skin, though it also seems to have
Speaker 1: once had a wooden cover based on some of the
Speaker 1: details in the manuscript. Yeah, I think it's a different
Speaker 1: binding over the centuries. Now. There used to be some
Speaker 1: theories this was a modern forgery, maybe by the very
Speaker 1: book collector it's now named after, who will discuss later on.
Speaker 1: But that really seems unlikely now, given that it has
Speaker 1: been carbon dated to the fifteenth century. Right now, in
Speaker 1: terms of the author, well, that's part of the unknown origins.
Speaker 1: Nobody signed it. Yeah, handwriting analysis has suggested as few
Speaker 1: as two or many or as many as eight writers,
Speaker 1: which of course I wouldn't really be that uncommon for
Speaker 1: a you know, a book of this time period. Okay,
Speaker 1: but at least the illustrations are signed. Right now, nobody
Speaker 1: knows who made the illustrations. Uh, you know, the origin
Speaker 1: is ultimately unknown. And when it comes to you know, copies, this,
Speaker 1: this is it. This is the one copy of the
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript. Now we mentioned, of course that Voytage that
Speaker 1: what we call it now is the Voyage Manuscript, and
Speaker 1: that name comes from a modern person, not from you know,
Speaker 1: a medieval person. So what this book was originally called
Speaker 1: was well, we don't know, unknown, Yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: had various sort of catalog numbers along the way, but
Speaker 1: he knows what will come back to. Voytage refers to
Speaker 1: Wilfred Michael Vonage. Uh, and it dates back to nineteen twelve.
Speaker 1: So given the history of the book, uh cause it's
Speaker 1: it's it's current name is relatively recent. I think maybe
Speaker 1: we should take a quick break and when we come
Speaker 1: back we can discuss more of the mystery of this
Speaker 1: fascinating text. Alright, we're back. So we're talking today about
Speaker 1: the Voyage Manuscript, a classic enigmatic text to believe now
Speaker 1: to be from the fifteenth century or so due to
Speaker 1: carbon dating. But we don't know who wrote it. We
Speaker 1: don't know where it came from. We just know it's
Speaker 1: sort of shows up at one point in history and
Speaker 1: then trades hands for a while until it resurfaced around
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve. Now, if you have never browsed through this book,
Speaker 1: do yourself a favor and just pause the episode and
Speaker 1: go do that. Now, a scan of it is of course,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously not if you're driving or whatever. But
Speaker 1: then just get the audio pot. Oh would that'd be great?
Speaker 1: An audio version of the point, Yeah, amazing, we gotta
Speaker 1: cash in on that. But so that you can look
Speaker 1: it up on the internet, there's a full scan of
Speaker 1: it that's hosted on archive dot org. You can flip
Speaker 1: all the way through the book. I would say it
Speaker 1: is almost a necessary experience, just the same way that
Speaker 1: if you have the means, you should try to travel
Speaker 1: and like expand your mind through seeing other cultures. If
Speaker 1: you have the Internet, you should try to expand your
Speaker 1: mind through this esoteric document. Yeah, I mean really, this
Speaker 1: stuff like this is the reason we have the Internet.
Speaker 1: That's the one on the benefits of the Internet is
Speaker 1: being able to you know, a document like this can
Speaker 1: be accessed by everybody. Yeah, now there are a few
Speaker 1: things we can't if we're gonna be chasing the mystery
Speaker 1: of who created this document? Can it be translated? What
Speaker 1: does it mean? We should look at a few other
Speaker 1: facts about the text itself. So it's in a script
Speaker 1: that is clearly written from left to right and from
Speaker 1: top to bottom, so much like English or like many
Speaker 1: other European languages. But not all languages are like this.
Speaker 1: Arabic is not like this, Rudu farci. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are a bunch of examples of languages that go from
Speaker 1: the right to the left, so it is probably not
Speaker 1: drawing from that kind of tradition unless they just switched
Speaker 1: it for no reason. No. Another fact that might seem
Speaker 1: interesting to us about the text is that there are
Speaker 1: no punctuation marks, But it turns out that's not necessarily
Speaker 1: all that interesting. Given the time from which it comes,
Speaker 1: because it's extremely common in older documents in many languages
Speaker 1: for their not to be punctuation. Another thing is that
Speaker 1: there are no chapter markings or subheadings, but based on
Speaker 1: the illustrations, it's clear that there are sections that appear
Speaker 1: to be about different subjects if they're about anything, and
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should talk about some of those
Speaker 1: different sections of the manuscript to try to help us
Speaker 1: understand it as well. The first half of the book
Speaker 1: is the the herbal section, and it's full of botanical illustrations.
Speaker 1: You could say that, yeah, I mean, they clearly are
Speaker 1: supposed to be plants, but we should stress that while
Speaker 1: some of the illustrations of plans look kind of like
Speaker 1: plants you would recognize, I'm not necessarily saying they are
Speaker 1: illustrations of real plants, but they at least look like
Speaker 1: terrestrial plants. Some of these illustrations do not look like
Speaker 1: terrestrial plants. Some look like green ice snakes from the
Speaker 1: methane likes of Titan, or like strange constricter caterpillars from
Speaker 1: the heart of a comet. That truly weird alien drawings,
Speaker 1: things that are sort of green and look like they
Speaker 1: have leaves, but also have what looked like tentacles or eyeballs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are. They are strange to be held. And this
Speaker 1: is the most normal section of the script. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is so. The German computer scientist Klaus Schmi who wrote
Speaker 1: a two thousand eleven article for Skeptical Enquirer about the
Speaker 1: Voyage Manuscript. I'm gonna refer back to that article quite
Speaker 1: a few times. But but he was writing about this section,
Speaker 1: and he writes that none of the illustrations of plants
Speaker 1: in the document have been conclusively identified by botanists, so
Speaker 1: nobody has been able to look that and say, yep,
Speaker 1: that is definitely a geranium. One theory by the botanist
Speaker 1: Hugh O'Neill claimed to have identified two of the illustrations
Speaker 1: as the sunflower and the capsicum plant, And of course
Speaker 1: capsicum is a genus of plants in the night shade
Speaker 1: family that produced peppers. Peppers are great, right, Except peppers
Speaker 1: are not European, so both of these plants did not
Speaker 1: spread to Europe until after contact with the America's which
Speaker 1: would date the document a little bit later. But there
Speaker 1: is not a general consensus that O'Neill's identification of these
Speaker 1: illustrations is correct. It's just not clear at all that
Speaker 1: these are actually drawings of sunflowers and pepper plants. So
Speaker 1: generally the botanical section is big old question marks. Some
Speaker 1: of them look like they could be real plants, but
Speaker 1: there's none you can point to. There there are none
Speaker 1: you can point to and say, yep, we know what
Speaker 1: that is. Well, this trend kind of continues in the
Speaker 1: next section, which is the astrological section, which is full
Speaker 1: of circular illustrations that are often interpreted as being perhaps
Speaker 1: astra logical in nature. But as as pointed out by
Speaker 1: Josephine Livingstone in her New York Or article The Unsolvable
Speaker 1: Mysteries of the Vantage Manuscript, of which I'll also refer
Speaker 1: back to, she says that to call this section astrological
Speaker 1: is generous, yes, because it doesn't. Now, there are illustrations
Speaker 1: in it that do seem to correlate to classic astrological imagery,
Speaker 1: but then again there are depictions of like astronomical objects
Speaker 1: that don't appear to correlate to anything. For about eight
Speaker 1: or nine years now, I should just say I've had
Speaker 1: a page of the Voytage manuscript pinned up on the
Speaker 1: backboard of my desk at work. I don't see it
Speaker 1: as much now because now it's under the raised part
Speaker 1: of my desk. Um. But it's a it's a page
Speaker 1: from what is believed to be the astrological section. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it's a page that just has a bunch of concentric
Speaker 1: circles of these untranslatable words between megas looking dudes sitting
Speaker 1: in buckets or dunk tanks or something with stars coming
Speaker 1: out of their fingertips, and they're all ringed as if
Speaker 1: in reverence, around the figure of a prancing goat with
Speaker 1: a mouthful of green plant matter. And I figured that's
Speaker 1: a good enough metaphor, is anything for the work we do? Alright?
Speaker 1: The next section is often referred to as the baliological section, right,
Speaker 1: and of course that refers to the study or field
Speaker 1: of bathing, which if that sounds like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: could there be a field of that? Yeah, medieval text
Speaker 1: there were a lot of thoughts about bathing. There were
Speaker 1: thoughts about the restorative powers of certain types of waters
Speaker 1: or mineral baths and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's you know, it's it's an important subject.
Speaker 1: You're getting into the issues of hygiene, which of course
Speaker 1: influence overall bodily health public health, but also hygiene has
Speaker 1: has long been intertwined with our ideas of spiritual purity
Speaker 1: as well. Now you might think, okay, well, this section
Speaker 1: has got to be kind of normal because it's just
Speaker 1: depicting people bathing, right, Bathing can't get that weird? Uh
Speaker 1: It this is maybe the weird section of all Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there are all these images of nude female figures
Speaker 1: in pools of liquid I mean, or tubs of liquid,
Speaker 1: but also possibly like large oversized flowers. And then there's
Speaker 1: tubular plumbing that suggests plants or even like viscera of
Speaker 1: some sort. Yeah, it's a very strange section of the manuscript.
Speaker 1: The writing in this part, I noticed, suddenly gets very dense.
Speaker 1: Whereas in previous pages there might have been a large
Speaker 1: illustration of the plant and then some small, you know
Speaker 1: if some lines of text around it. Here you've got
Speaker 1: some densely packed text. And again I want to stress
Speaker 1: that some of the illustrations of the section look like
Speaker 1: they could be referring to real world objects and practices,
Speaker 1: like some appear to just show nude women bathing, maybe
Speaker 1: in mineral baths. Or in streams or in aqueducts or
Speaker 1: along waterfalls. But others show things that I don't even
Speaker 1: know how to describe. What Like I've got an example
Speaker 1: here for Robert to look at that is it's like
Speaker 1: a woman's standing in what looks like a giant instrument
Speaker 1: horn that's growing out of something. It's the spreading horn
Speaker 1: that I think maybe it's supposed to have water flowing
Speaker 1: in it. But then also growing out of this horn
Speaker 1: is like this alligator pod that, yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: how to I mean, the sort of green gray brown
Speaker 1: with like holes that have water coming out of them,
Speaker 1: but like a space tentacle with shower heads like bio
Speaker 1: shower heads coming out of it, with like ridged alligator
Speaker 1: scales on its back, and and yeah, like like lotus
Speaker 1: like lotus pods that have water. Yeah, yeah, Like it
Speaker 1: almost has kind of like a Susian or even like
Speaker 1: a gigeras quality to it. I was noticing in this
Speaker 1: section how much the Voytage Manuscript, and I think this
Speaker 1: is not an accident, how much it reminds me of
Speaker 1: another book that I've liked for years, the Codex Seraphninus,
Speaker 1: which is an entirely fictional and intentionally fictional encyclopedia created
Speaker 1: by the Italian artist Luigi Serafini in the late night
Speaker 1: teen seventies. I think it was published in nine. Basically,
Speaker 1: it is like an artist's attempt to create a new
Speaker 1: voyage manuscript type document. It's got a constructed language, lots
Speaker 1: of alien illustrations of plants, animals, objects and processes that
Speaker 1: don't exist on Earth. It's like an encyclopedia from another world.
Speaker 1: But that is basically what the voytage manuscript sort of
Speaker 1: appears to be. All Right, So we've had plants, We've
Speaker 1: had possible charts of the stars and so forth, we've
Speaker 1: had weird alien showers, and then at the at the
Speaker 1: end here and that this final section is what, according
Speaker 1: to Livingstone, seems to be related to practical instructions for
Speaker 1: the use of the mysterious plants from earlier. It basically
Speaker 1: looks like it has recipes at the end. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think this breaks down into multiple sort of subsections,
Speaker 1: like there it is believed that there're some parts of
Speaker 1: it are supposed to be pharmaceutical, like they depict the
Speaker 1: creation of medicines and storage and viols, and other parts
Speaker 1: appear to be about cooking or something. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: just as mysteri is the rest of it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but at this point you don't really encounter any illustrations.
Speaker 1: It's more it's more textual in nature. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is the book, and the book is is just
Speaker 1: so unique in its style. It does not seem to
Speaker 1: have any true surviving peers. It is not cleanly fit
Speaker 1: with late medieval alchemical texts, because certainly there were other
Speaker 1: weird texts. Oh yeah, I mean that's something we should
Speaker 1: point out. I mean, if you're thinking, well, how could
Speaker 1: a text be about plants and astrology and bathing and
Speaker 1: hygiene and medicine and cooking all at the same time,
Speaker 1: that's a weird combination of subjects, I would say, Actually,
Speaker 1: this is not unusual at all for the time it
Speaker 1: was written. There were plenty of encyclopedia type documents that
Speaker 1: collected diverse subject matter at the time, and there was
Speaker 1: a general blurring of the lines between science, medicine, magic,
Speaker 1: and household advice. All right, And if you were the
Speaker 1: type of individual that either wrote or contributed to the
Speaker 1: writing of a book, you likely had a lot to
Speaker 1: say about various topics or a lot to crib from
Speaker 1: earlier encyclopedias, and a lot of times what you'll find
Speaker 1: in some of these medieval encyclopedias is a mixture of
Speaker 1: original observations with people like I don't know, reproducing encyclopedia
Speaker 1: entries by plenty or something and just saying like, and
Speaker 1: here's the ancient wisdom of Scipio Africanus. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it comes back to a quote from burn Burno Ecco
Speaker 1: in the name of the roads. The observation that books
Speaker 1: speak to other books, you know that translations from other books,
Speaker 1: ideas from other books. But it does not seem that
Speaker 1: there were there were a lot of books, at least
Speaker 1: books that have survived, you know, that we're speaking to
Speaker 1: the voyage manuscript like it. It does seem to be
Speaker 1: this singular thing that's left out. That's you know, that's
Speaker 1: it doesn't really fit in with manuscripts of the period. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, it's in many ways it's kind of like
Speaker 1: an outside context book, at least to most of those
Speaker 1: who have viewed it over the last several centuries. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, to be clear, many books of the past
Speaker 1: were lost, many languages were lost, Whole cultures have perished.
Speaker 1: So just because it's one of a kind now does
Speaker 1: not necessarily mean it was always one of a kind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there could have been a whole library of voyage type
Speaker 1: books that just all got lost except for this one.
Speaker 1: And then likewise, the context of our texts are always
Speaker 1: fading away. And that's why it's always instructive too. If
Speaker 1: you pick up, say the works of William Shakespeare or uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you pick up a copy of you know,
Speaker 1: Dante is the Divine Comedy, it generally pays off to
Speaker 1: have some sort of reference guide if unless you were
Speaker 1: just schooled, say in Dante's case, in like you know,
Speaker 1: in medieval culture and Italian politics and so forth, like
Speaker 1: you need something to help you make sense of all
Speaker 1: the references, you know, the cultural context, any symbols that
Speaker 1: are trotted out, or the religious context. Yes, uh, in
Speaker 1: a similar case can be it can be made for
Speaker 1: the arts. You know, there are some of the stranger
Speaker 1: works of art from the past. Um, you know, they
Speaker 1: look extra strange to us because we generally don't have
Speaker 1: the same you know, textual understanding for the references and
Speaker 1: for the symbols, uh, you know, symbols and references that
Speaker 1: would have probably been known to the original intended audience,
Speaker 1: like we are not the intended audience of of those works.
Speaker 1: And then I think, along with most theories regarding the
Speaker 1: Vontage Manuscript, you can say that we are certainly not
Speaker 1: the intended audience of it today. Um, though there's at
Speaker 1: least one I don't know, there's at least one theory
Speaker 1: that maybe supports the idea that that the way that
Speaker 1: we are reacting to the Vontage manuscript is appropriate. But
Speaker 1: but we'll get back to that, right. We are going
Speaker 1: to go on to try to parse out the different
Speaker 1: theories that could explain its origin, all right, So I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about a few more observations about the
Speaker 1: Voytage Manuscript or the Vantage Manuscript. From that article I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier by from two thousand eleven and Skeptical Inquirer
Speaker 1: by the German computer scientists Claus Schmi, I thought it
Speaker 1: made quite a few good points, and one of the
Speaker 1: most interesting points that made I don't know why this
Speaker 1: stuck out to me so much, but I I suspect
Speaker 1: will end up referring back to it. He pointed out
Speaker 1: that there are no visible corrections in the Voytage manuscript.
Speaker 1: And this is pretty strange for a document produced by hand.
Speaker 1: Think about it. Could you write out a document of
Speaker 1: thirty five thousand words in ink with no mistakes at all,
Speaker 1: no cross throughs or scratch outs. No, I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it would certainly have. You would have to
Speaker 1: be something that was just so you know, wrote for you,
Speaker 1: that was just so uh, you know, formed in your
Speaker 1: mind that you could just do it without any mistakes,
Speaker 1: or it would have to be something where mistakes didn't matter,
Speaker 1: such as if you were just making it all up exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I feel like this is a significant point because
Speaker 1: when you look at handwritten or hand copied documents from
Speaker 1: the ancient world, there are tons of emendations. You see,
Speaker 1: word is scratched out or cross through or or fixed.
Speaker 1: I mean this is just common at a time when
Speaker 1: documents were handwritten instead of produced by a printing press
Speaker 1: or a computer. Yeah, it took a lot of time
Speaker 1: to make these, took a lot of skill, and paper
Speaker 1: was expensive. Ink was expensive. Ultimately, if you had to
Speaker 1: cross out of words, you crossed out of work. And
Speaker 1: humans are imperfect copying machines. Now, again, we don't know
Speaker 1: whether the voindage manuscript is an original document and that's
Speaker 1: like the original copy from the author, or it's a
Speaker 1: copy of another document. I would say this, this to
Speaker 1: me very much argues against it being a copy from
Speaker 1: another document, just because, I mean, scribes, scribes make mistakes.
Speaker 1: You're going thirty five thousand words, You're going to make
Speaker 1: some mistakes and end up having to scratch them out
Speaker 1: and rewrite the word. Yeah. So so this would this
Speaker 1: would seem to argue for the idea that this was,
Speaker 1: if not one of a kind, like this was at
Speaker 1: least a singular piece, right, yes, Or it might go
Speaker 1: for one of the theories we'll talk about later on,
Speaker 1: the theory that there is not actually a meaning or
Speaker 1: message in the text. But then again, there are arguments
Speaker 1: against that, so we should not get committed to that.
Speaker 1: That that endpoint. Another thing that she may points out
Speaker 1: is that people have tried to source the book by
Speaker 1: looking at the astrological imagery in it, but this hasn't
Speaker 1: really turned up anything solid either. But a great note
Speaker 1: he has that some researchers believe to identify illustrations in
Speaker 1: the book as Andromeda like or as Andromeda fog like
Speaker 1: the galaxy Andromeda or as the PLI E d s.
Speaker 1: But again he says that this is just it's speculation,
Speaker 1: kind of like the botanical thing, you know, where somebody
Speaker 1: looks at an illustration and says, I think that could
Speaker 1: be a capsicum plant, that could be a pepper, but
Speaker 1: it's not clear enough that other scholars look at it
Speaker 1: and say, yeah, that's definitely what it is. And this
Speaker 1: is touching on a trend that will continue to discuss.
Speaker 1: And I mean this in the in a completely non magical,
Speaker 1: non speculative way, right, But it does seem to be
Speaker 1: the case that the longer you stare at the Advantage manuscript,
Speaker 1: the longer you deal with it, the more likely you
Speaker 1: are to find connections, the more likely you are to
Speaker 1: see things. It's certainly encourages the conspue oratorial cast of
Speaker 1: mind or the well, I don't know. Again, there's a
Speaker 1: nice way to frame that, in a in a bad
Speaker 1: way to frame that, like when when you want to
Speaker 1: make connections between things. I mean, on one hand, I
Speaker 1: feel like that's something I love doing on this show,
Speaker 1: is making a connection you might not have expected between
Speaker 1: one idea or one thing and another, right, And it's
Speaker 1: how we solve that's how we figure out so many
Speaker 1: ancient uh, you know, works of art or works of literature,
Speaker 1: to go back to the Rosetta stone. That is how
Speaker 1: we eventually were able to do to solve the riddle
Speaker 1: of Egyptian hieroglyphics. So yeah, this is the exercise of
Speaker 1: figuring things out. But the Vontage manuscript seems remarkably resistant
Speaker 1: to such unraveling. Well right, I mean, and it seems
Speaker 1: to encourage a perhaps unhealthy type of obsession also where
Speaker 1: I mean, if you take this principle of making connections
Speaker 1: too far, of course, where you end up is conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory world right, like you're just finding crazy coincidences between things,
Speaker 1: or you even get into numerology. You know, oh it
Speaker 1: looks it looks like there are you know, seventeen line
Speaker 1: breaks on this page, and and that corresponds to the
Speaker 1: number of wounds on Christ in this painting or something.
Speaker 1: You know, that that kind of thing where you can
Speaker 1: find connections if you are determined to find connections, no
Speaker 1: matter how tenuous the link. Anyway, So to get back
Speaker 1: to uh, a few of these observations that I noted
Speaker 1: from Schmid's analysis. One is that the clothing and hairstyles
Speaker 1: worn by the people in the illustrations in the voyage
Speaker 1: manuscript seem to date the document to Europe in the
Speaker 1: period of about fourteen fifty to fifteen twenty, but it's
Speaker 1: hard to be sure. But this is something that that
Speaker 1: is done with other documents sometimes, like if you look
Speaker 1: at the illustrations of people, what they're wearing, how they
Speaker 1: wear their hair, that will tend to correlate to certain
Speaker 1: styles from certain periods in places in history. A. Schmidt
Speaker 1: points out that the average word length in the document
Speaker 1: is about four to five letters, and this doesn't help
Speaker 1: us a whole lot because that could be consistent with
Speaker 1: a number of European languages. It just sort of makes
Speaker 1: it look like, yes, this is plausibly a language, but
Speaker 1: there there are some other things, Like one is that
Speaker 1: it has fewer recurring words uh than would appear to
Speaker 1: be expected for a natural language, And this sort of
Speaker 1: argues against the idea of the text being a simple
Speaker 1: letter substitution. But then again, maybe if it is a
Speaker 1: real language, or if it is something in code, it's
Speaker 1: not a simple letter substitution. Maybe it's a more complex
Speaker 1: type of cipher. But ultimately, Schmai concludes that no theory
Speaker 1: has held up under scrutiny yet, which is a great
Speaker 1: place to be because now we get to discuss them absolutely.
Speaker 1: So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take another break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna first take us
Speaker 1: to take us through the known history of the Vantage Manuscript,
Speaker 1: like when when it first occurs, and some of the
Speaker 1: key points in history that we're we're you know, relatively
Speaker 1: sure of. Okay, alright, we're back, all right. So, as
Speaker 1: we've mentioned before, we don't know who created the Voantage Manuscript.
Speaker 1: That is one of the great mysteries. We don't know
Speaker 1: who wrote it. We don't know if it was the original,
Speaker 1: if the version we have now is the original copy,
Speaker 1: or if it's a copy of something. We don't know
Speaker 1: for sure. But some point in history this document just
Speaker 1: shows up and and I guess that's where we should
Speaker 1: dive in. So we're going to dive in in the
Speaker 1: sixteenth century. Right, the year is fifty six, and this
Speaker 1: is when the manuscript first pops up in the court
Speaker 1: of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second of Bohemia, who,
Speaker 1: by my most accounts, was an eccentric monarch, which is
Speaker 1: it's not hard to be an ecentric monarch. Monarchy tends
Speaker 1: to invite eccentricity, and uh and but but this is
Speaker 1: an individual who's very interested in the occult, in alchemy
Speaker 1: and kept a great library, and I've also read was
Speaker 1: was very fascinated by by giants and dwarves as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he apparently collected little people. That seems like a strange
Speaker 1: kind of medieval monarch fascination. I guess Renaissance monarch here. Ye.
Speaker 1: So in many ways is weird as a weird guy,
Speaker 1: but he's also sort of the character that you would
Speaker 1: expect from a medieval monarch. So the this document shows
Speaker 1: up in his possession right and the we're not sure
Speaker 1: who sold it to him, but the the the unknown
Speaker 1: seller sold it for six hundred gold. Duckets and duckets
Speaker 1: are docts cats. I think it's gonna be duckets. Duckets.
Speaker 1: I like thinking doct do cats? Yeah, well I always
Speaker 1: I always think ducketts. So six hundred, six hundred gold
Speaker 1: anyway to put it more like dungeons and dragons level. Now,
Speaker 1: this came with like a certificate of authenticity, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: essentially it came with a letter stating that it was
Speaker 1: written by Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon, as we already alluded to, UH,
Speaker 1: was Franciscan Friar who lived twelve nineteen through twelve two roughly,
Speaker 1: and uh. He was also said to be a wizard.
Speaker 1: Of course, this is kind of common with with learned individuals,
Speaker 1: and you know of that time, right like later on
Speaker 1: their stories about them, they not only were they learned,
Speaker 1: but perhaps they had powers as well well. As we've
Speaker 1: discussed on the show many times, in the medieval period
Speaker 1: and the Renaissance period, there was a significant amount of
Speaker 1: blurring between the lines of science and magic. People who
Speaker 1: were genuinely making scientific observations about the world and about
Speaker 1: natural phenomena also sometimes believed in demonology and and just
Speaker 1: kind of like grouped all this knowledge together. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: at any rate, Bacon was an individual who in many
Speaker 1: ways he was an early advocate of what would become
Speaker 1: the scientific methodism. Yeah. The on the other hand, you know,
Speaker 1: he was also interested in codes and secrets and uh,
Speaker 1: and certainly later on became very associated with the occult,
Speaker 1: became sort of a focus of of occult interest. Now
Speaker 1: we've already mentioned that modern scholars do not think that
Speaker 1: the Vointage Manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, and it
Speaker 1: also seems almost conclusively argued against by the carbon dating
Speaker 1: of it, which put it in the fifteenth century, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess, I mean about the only thing
Speaker 1: you could make a case for would be what if
Speaker 1: Roger Bacon had written it and this was like a
Speaker 1: copy of that text, and but then we lost all
Speaker 1: references to the original, you know, more leaps of of
Speaker 1: believability there. But in anyway, yeah, pretty pretty much nobody
Speaker 1: is saying that Bacon had anything to do with the
Speaker 1: Vantage Manuscript other than him being cited in this letter
Speaker 1: that accompanied it on sale to the Holy Roll Roman Emperor.
Speaker 1: So it would be like if you showed up with
Speaker 1: a document and you know, it's a weird document that
Speaker 1: nobody can read, and you just said, George Washington wrote this.
Speaker 1: You can easily see how attaching the name of a
Speaker 1: famous person to something could make the could get you
Speaker 1: more money for it. So Rudolph the Second was, you know,
Speaker 1: the type of individual who was you know, very excited
Speaker 1: to to obtain this document. He probably put some of
Speaker 1: his best minds to figuring it out, but nobody was
Speaker 1: able to crack it. He was a sixteenth century reditor. Definitely,
Speaker 1: he's on the case, but but nobody was able to
Speaker 1: figure it out. You know, it alluded experts of the time,
Speaker 1: just as it has always alluded to experts. So he
Speaker 1: it ends up being passed on uh to a botanist
Speaker 1: by the name of jacob Um Horriki. I think the
Speaker 1: Latin name would be uh Jacobus Sinapius. But it was
Speaker 1: passed on to a botanist essentially because it does contain
Speaker 1: a number of what seemed to be botanical illustrations. And
Speaker 1: then the botanist keeps it for twenty years uh. And
Speaker 1: during this time, Rudolph himself dies in sixteen twelve, and
Speaker 1: then the book passes on to an unknown person who
Speaker 1: keeps it for yet another twenty years. And then in
Speaker 1: the sixteen twenties, the book enters the possession of Athanaceous Kircher,
Speaker 1: who lives sixteen two through sixtight. And this is this
Speaker 1: is another just fascinating character. A German scholar and polly
Speaker 1: math who who also set out to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics
Speaker 1: at one point, and his assumptions ended up being incorrect,
Speaker 1: but he actually made some correct connections between the Egyptian
Speaker 1: hieroglyphics in the in the Coptic languages. He also studied
Speaker 1: Chinese language as well as various artificial languages. His letters
Speaker 1: show that he was quite interested in this particular book
Speaker 1: acquired prior to obtaining it, but then five years after
Speaker 1: acquiring it, he published a Universal Study of Artificial Languages
Speaker 1: and apparently makes no mention of the Manage Manuscript. So
Speaker 1: presumably it perplexed him, just as it perplexed so many others.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. So he's interested in this book, he's interested
Speaker 1: in artificial languages. That would make it seem like either
Speaker 1: he did not conclude that this was an artificial language,
Speaker 1: or that he had to stay silent about it for
Speaker 1: some reason. Well, and this is just my take. I
Speaker 1: wonder I would think that maybe another reason would be
Speaker 1: if he could not figure it out, Like he didn't
Speaker 1: mention it, because who wants to be the expert on
Speaker 1: artificial languages and say, you know I couldn't crack this, well, right,
Speaker 1: he could have the Isaac Newton mentality, where you know
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton said, like, here's what I've figured out as
Speaker 1: for these other as for the cause of gravity, the
Speaker 1: underlying cause. He just said, I do not feign hypotheses.
Speaker 1: Now you can kind of respect that. Now I do
Speaker 1: think it's something we should come back and discuss artificial
Speaker 1: languages at some point on the show, because it is
Speaker 1: is fascinating to to realize that here's this book on
Speaker 1: the study of artificial languages, and of course this is
Speaker 1: centuries before you know, we encountered cling On or doth
Speaker 1: Racki or any of the or Esperanto. So it would
Speaker 1: be fun to come back to that. Well, I've actually
Speaker 1: thought about the idea of covering artificially invented languages on
Speaker 1: Invention on our other podcast. That would be a good one.
Speaker 1: So keep keep an eye out over there. Invention, the
Speaker 1: other podcast that we do. You can find it at
Speaker 1: an engine pod dot com. Uh, you can subscribe wherever
Speaker 1: you subscribe to your podcast. It is uh, it is
Speaker 1: human Techno His Street, One invention at a time. All right,
Speaker 1: So Athanasious Kircher, He's got the Vointage manuscript and what
Speaker 1: happens to it? Then, well, he has it for a while,
Speaker 1: but then he becomes a Jesuit monk and he gives
Speaker 1: away all of his earthly possessions, which includes his books
Speaker 1: and so his his library, and the Vontage manuscript itself
Speaker 1: lands in the library of a Jesuit seminary, which I
Speaker 1: believe it is a Collegio Romano, just south of Rome,
Speaker 1: and it remains there for something like two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years. Though according to Livingstone, the book quote appears
Speaker 1: to have bounced around Prague for a while. In sixty nine,
Speaker 1: a person named uh Barcius described it as a is
Speaker 1: quote a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of
Speaker 1: writing and unknown characters unquote, and guests that quote the
Speaker 1: whole thing is medical unquote. The book's historical trail vanishes
Speaker 1: in sixteen seventy up until the time that Vantage purchased it.
Speaker 1: And that's from that New Yorker article. Yes, that's from
Speaker 1: the New Yorker piece. Okay, So then we get up
Speaker 1: to the twentieth century and this is it shows up
Speaker 1: with the guy actually named Voyage, yet another fascinating weird
Speaker 1: individual to enter into the history. And we haven't even
Speaker 1: covered some of the other weird individuals that factor into
Speaker 1: its history. So it ends up in the sort of
Speaker 1: along with a purchase of other books in the hands
Speaker 1: of this eccentric book dealer named Wilfred Michael Voynage, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who lived eighteen sixty five through nineteen thirty And yeah,
Speaker 1: he publishes the entire library and uh and it ends
Speaker 1: up being moved to America. And this of course includes
Speaker 1: the book that would take his name. So yeah, Polish born.
Speaker 1: He's an interesting fellow to say the least. He knew.
Speaker 1: He allegedly knew twenty different languages. Was at one point
Speaker 1: investigated by the FBI for possessing Bacon cipher, an actual cipher,
Speaker 1: for creating coded message that was devised by Roger Bacon
Speaker 1: just to bring Roger Bacon back into everything. And he
Speaker 1: even apparently sold a forgery to the British Museum at
Speaker 1: one point, though perhaps by accident. Yeah, there there are
Speaker 1: whole story. He was a very well traveled, adventuring individual.
Speaker 1: At some point, I think he was sent to a
Speaker 1: prison in Siberia for his political activities. Uh. He somehow
Speaker 1: escaped to England at some point and became a book collector.
Speaker 1: In that h that Josephine Livingstone article, she talks about
Speaker 1: this story that he would he would delight in showing
Speaker 1: off his wounds to people, and he would like lift
Speaker 1: his shirt up and he would say here by sword,
Speaker 1: here by bullet. But yeah, so Voinice is a really
Speaker 1: interesting guy. And at one point in hyping his manuscript,
Speaker 1: this is also quoted in in Josphine Livingstone's piece, he
Speaker 1: was talking to the times and he said, when the
Speaker 1: time comes, I will prove to the world that the
Speaker 1: black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far
Speaker 1: in advance of twentieth century science. And I think speaks
Speaker 1: to a certain kind of attitude that documents like this
Speaker 1: inspire and other historical mystery reads all kinds of things,
Speaker 1: you know, the anti kate through a mechanism or untranslated documents.
Speaker 1: Anytime you've got this object from history that seems to
Speaker 1: contain information or learning or indicate information or learning, but
Speaker 1: it's not fully solved at the time people are looking
Speaker 1: at it, it tends to to make people want to
Speaker 1: go toward these almost conspiracy theory level ideas of like
Speaker 1: lost knowledge and and you know, like like ancient aliens
Speaker 1: kind of territory. Why do we have such a tendency
Speaker 1: in those directions like why why is it? Why are
Speaker 1: our brains wired to go to that conclusion rather than like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's a strange document in code. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess at one level, you know, we look to the
Speaker 1: modern age and we we we had we tend to
Speaker 1: regard our current scientific, technological understanding the world is superior
Speaker 1: to that of the past. Um, you know, by and large,
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly there are areas where and we've discussed
Speaker 1: some of these in the show, where we can point
Speaker 1: to things in the modern world that are perhaps inferior
Speaker 1: to ways of dealing with things in the past, you know,
Speaker 1: generally things that are more cultural or interpersonal. Uh. But
Speaker 1: we we tend to think, you know, when it comes
Speaker 1: to like figuring out how the world works, especially in
Speaker 1: the natural world, like today is the day, and then
Speaker 1: never have we had a greater understanding. And yet at
Speaker 1: the same time, there are things that we do not
Speaker 1: understand about the world yet. And there are things, particularly
Speaker 1: details from the past, details from history, that we can
Speaker 1: never fully understand, you know, that are going to just
Speaker 1: remain you know, gaps essentially gaps in the fossil records
Speaker 1: of of our literary and historical legacy. I've said this
Speaker 1: on the show before, but I remain committed to to
Speaker 1: a middle position here between the sort of the condescending
Speaker 1: modern idea that looks at the past and says ancient
Speaker 1: and medieval people's they were just stupid, they didn't know anything,
Speaker 1: versus the one on the other hand, that tends toward
Speaker 1: believing in some lost golden age, you know, ancient loss
Speaker 1: knowledge that far surpasses our own. I think the reality
Speaker 1: is that it's not like there's an ancient lost Golden age.
Speaker 1: There wasn't an Atlantis where they had flying cars and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. It's more like that people in the
Speaker 1: past were struggling with limitations that we don't face. They
Speaker 1: had they didn't have the technology we have, but they
Speaker 1: were also incredibly smart. They were super clever and came
Speaker 1: up with amazing workarounds and methods for things using the
Speaker 1: limited technology they have. This is what I always think about,
Speaker 1: you know, the classic construction of the Pyramids example. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that they had like alien technology. Just
Speaker 1: means that, like, these are smart people and they had
Speaker 1: to figure out how to solve big problems with limited tools.
Speaker 1: I think also we sometimes fall into this trap of
Speaker 1: thinking thinking about the you know, our modern world's contemplation
Speaker 1: of the past is kind of a battle between the
Speaker 1: present and past, Like the past is an enemy to
Speaker 1: be defeated in our attempt to understand it, and they
Speaker 1: kind of make an adversary out of it. And I
Speaker 1: guess part of that is maybe, like you know, maybe
Speaker 1: this part of it is just found in all cultures
Speaker 1: where the past is something an enemy to be overcome.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's part of the colonial legacy, or maybe it's
Speaker 1: because of Indiana Jones, you know, with uh, you know,
Speaker 1: this idea of somebody like like physically combating the past
Speaker 1: in order to acquire its secrets. And then if something
Speaker 1: is resistant to this assault, then it must it must
Speaker 1: have some sort of secret knowledge. It must there must
Speaker 1: be something more than like the fault cannot be our own.
Speaker 1: It must be some hidden power of the past. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we gotta get back to what happened
Speaker 1: to the Voytage manuscript, all right. So it was in
Speaker 1: Vonic's possession, and then he dies and it passes to
Speaker 1: his widow, Ethel, and he died in nineteen thirty, yes,
Speaker 1: nine thirty, and then it passes from Ethel to a
Speaker 1: close friend who then sells the book to an anti
Speaker 1: antique book dealer by the name of hands P. Krauss
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty one. So Krauss, he tries to find
Speaker 1: a buyer for the book but cannot find a suitable buyer.
Speaker 1: What nobody wanted it? Well, maybe not for his price. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know the details. I don't know if he
Speaker 1: was maybe if he was asking too much, or he
Speaker 1: wanted to sell it to the right type of collector,
Speaker 1: I mean, who knows, but not somebody who's gonna chop
Speaker 1: it up and make make voytage manuscript sausage out of it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean he ends up donating it
Speaker 1: to get Yale University in nine nine. So without without
Speaker 1: knowing the details of a cross myself, and perhaps there's
Speaker 1: better documentation out there, you know, I would presume it
Speaker 1: was a situation of where he's like, I can't sell
Speaker 1: it to the type of client, you know, the type
Speaker 1: of purchaser I want, so I'll sell it to Yale.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps he reached the point where he's he realized
Speaker 1: like this book is is a truly fascinating historical specimen.
Speaker 1: It does not belong in the hands of you know,
Speaker 1: a rare occult book. It doesn't need to be in
Speaker 1: another rare book dealers antique stash. It needs to be
Speaker 1: with a university. All right. Well, I guess that sort
Speaker 1: of brings us up to the modern period in which
Speaker 1: there's been an enormous amount of scholarship on the Voyage Manuscript,
Speaker 1: of people trying to both to to translate it or
Speaker 1: decrypt it, which in some ways are similar jobs, or
Speaker 1: people trying to to figure out what it means or
Speaker 1: where it came from, who wrote it. A lot of
Speaker 1: these mysteries remain, and there have been huge, hugely interesting
Speaker 1: attempts to solve these questions over the decades. But on
Speaker 1: that note, we're actually gonna have to call this episode
Speaker 1: and return in a second episode where we'll get into
Speaker 1: these various attempts to unravel the manuscript. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: you can check out other episodes of Stuff Toblew Your
Speaker 1: Mind at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You
Speaker 1: can also, of course find this podcast wherever you get
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Speaker 1: And uh, you know, if you want to discuss this
Speaker 1: episode with other users, other listeners. There's actually a Facebook
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Speaker 1: Mind Discussion Module that's kind of a fun place to
Speaker 1: check out. Hey, have you subscribed to our other podcast,
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Speaker 1: Maya Cole and Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
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