Voynich Manuscript

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So who's heard of this? It could almost have been created specifically to puzzle and delight Wikipedia addicts six hundred years after it was written. Maybe it was. Anyway, for those who don't know it's a largeish manuscript created somewhere in Europe in the 15th century (both the vellum and the inks have been reliably dated) and appears to be some sort of herbal or encyclopedia of natural history. Thing is, it's written in a 'script' that resembles no known language and has defeated the efforts of many expert cryptographers to decypher it. It also contains drawings of plants that resemble no known species. Astronomical diagrams include constellations that don't exist, and some drawings have been interpreted as showing galaxies, which weren't discovered until the advent of powerful telescopes centuries later (although this is disputed).

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Some people think the book encodes genuine knowledge, or at least information, encrypted in such a clever way that it simply hasn't been decyphered yet. Others think it's a hoax, perhaps by an alchemist and mate of John Dee's called Edward Kelley, who sold the book to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, although this happened over a hundred years after the date given by radiocarbon analysis. Other suspected authors include Francis Bacon. Another hypothesis is that it's a written equivalent to glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues', in other words it meant something to the person who created it but is necessarily meaningless to anyone else, being an artefact of mental illness.

Pretty fucking cool, though.
 

Leo

Well-known member
does this have anything to do with witch house?

but seriously...yeah, crazy shit.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
does this have anything to do with witch house?

Ha , I dunno - have a look on 'you''s blog, he's yer man for that side of things.

Also cool is the Codex Seraphinianus, which I think might be inspired by the Manuscript. It's a sort of visual encyclopedia of an imaginary world, complete with meaningless (OR IS IT???) made-up writing. By an Italian architect in the '70s. Wicked stuff.

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Escher meets Bosch, anyone?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
it also sounds exactly like the later Codex Seraphinianus I found out about on here, I've got a pdf of it on my computer somewhere.

Beaten to it while C/Ping the image URLs. :) Yeah, I heard about that book from the Wiki article on the Manuscript, which I in turn heard about from xkcd.com. I'd love to have a look at the complete PDF if you can host it somewhere that won't get you thrown in jail.
 

dd528

Well-known member
Beaten to it while C/Ping the image URLs. :) Yeah, I heard about that book from the Wiki article on the Manuscript, which I in turn heard about from xkcd.com. I'd love to have a look at the complete PDF if you can host it somewhere that won't get you thrown in jail.


The Code Seraphinianus used to be available on the Internet Archive here, but the file doesn't seem to be hosted on the server anymore. Maybe submit an error report and it might get reposted?
 

muser

Well-known member
you can try here, not uploaded by myself of course just found it. If I am wealthy at any point I'd love to have a real copy to put in the toilet so people can look at it whilst they wallow in their own stench
 

slowtrain

Well-known member
Yes I have encountered this on the internet before.

IT is very cool.

The alchemical stuff and the pics of naked ladies are really sweet.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
best thread of 2012, sick cthulhu finds there tea....

I know C-boy tends to crop up pretty much everywhere on the internet where people are interested in weird or unexplained things, but there is something Lovecraftian about both the Manuscript and the Codex, I think. Not just the obvious link to HPL's fetish for ancient books of forbidden knowledge, blah blah, but in the Codex's oeneiric world of paradox and anti-reality...reminds me of the 'Dreamlands' cycle rather than the outright cosmic horror of the Cthulhu mythos proper, if anyone here gets me.

Glad people are digging it!
 

you

Well-known member
in true muso-jorno fashion with the ZxY analogies it's like cyclonopediaXpaul nobel

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Had heard of the Voynich manuscript before, but never heard of the Codex. Wish I'd seen that when I was 8, would have fired up the imagination brilliantly and forever. So my 3.5 year old is going to receive it as a birthday present one year. Only Dissensus could bring this to light.

The weird 7 foot high UFOam in the other thread resembles something out of the Codex.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Had heard of the Voynich manuscript before, but never heard of the Codex. Wish I'd seen that when I was 8, would have fired up the imagination brilliantly and forever. So my 3.5 year old is going to receive it as a birthday present one year. Only Dissensus could bring this to light.

Brilliant! It would make such a good present for a kid, I reckon.

Another great book to just pore over for hours is the Ultimate Alphabet. I never had this as a kid but a mate of mine has a copy - amazingly dense, beautifully rendered paintings, each one of loads of things all starting with the same letter. And each page has a number associated with it, which is the number of things starting with that letter, so you can count how many things you've spotted and see how many you still have left to get. It's mesmerising.

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