Yale’s Beinecke Library holds a 240-page book written in an alphabet no one has ever identified, illustrated with plants that don’t exist. Radiocarbon dating puts the vellum between 1404 and 1438. Over a century of professional cryptographers, linguists, and historians have failed to crack it.

The text isn’t random. The symbols repeat at frequencies similar to natural languages. Words cluster in ways that suggest grammar. Yet it matches no known script. Proposals include encoded Latin or Hebrew, an unknown natural language, or an artificial one invented by the author.

The hoax theory has a problem. The most detailed version pins it on Edward Kelley, a sixteenth-century forger who supposedly fleeced Emperor Rudolf II for 600 gold ducats. Except the manuscript predates Kelley by more than a century.

The illustrations don’t help. The botanical section shows plants matching no known species. The strangest sections depict naked women bathing in interconnected pools linked by elaborate tubes—interpreted as everything from anatomy diagrams to pure fantasy.

Computer analysis says the text has meaningful structure. Pattern-matching against known languages has failed. One claim identified possible Hebrew words; it hasn’t been widely accepted. I’ll take the honest position: nobody knows.

As a writer, I wonder if it’s nothing more than a work of fiction, created at the appropriate time by someone with a vivid imagination. Storytelling is one of the world’s oldest professions.

The Voynich Manuscript is one of 100 entries in The Little Black Book of Ancient Mysteries. https://amzn.to/4pSLpH6