The year was 1637, and Georg Baresch, an alchemist and renowned collector of antiquities based in Prague, had a baffling mystery on his hands. For years now, he had been in possession of a most unusual item: a bizarre manuscript filled with strange imagery of plants, astrological diagrams, curious structures, human figures, and a range of other curiosities.
This “Sphinx,” as Baresch characterized it, was so strange that it prompted him to reach out to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, known for his success in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, with hopes of obtaining information that might lead to a breakthrough in solving the mystery of the puzzling manuscript.
Today, the same bizarre treatise first obtained by Baresch in the seventeenth century is known throughout the world as the Voynich Manuscript, and despite the efforts of many since Baresch’s time who have sought to decode it, the document still refuses to give up its secrets. After more than a century of scrutiny, no one has convincingly explained who wrote it, what it says, or even whether its text carries any real meaning at all.
However, new research may finally offer scholars a fresh perspective on this confounding mystery. According to a recent peer-reviewed study, while the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript endures, a new theory strengthens the possibility that the text in a document often referred to as “the most mysterious book in the world” may have once served as a cipher system.
The hypothesis, detailed by researcher and science journalist Michael A. Greshko in the journal Cryptologia, indicates that the famous manuscript bears qualities that seemingly match the technological capabilities of scholars in the Middle Ages, potentially helping to reframe questions about the manuscript that have long perplexed researchers.
Hellbound and Down 