If there’s one thing that most people appreciate, it’s a good mystery with a clever solution. It is no accident that Agatha Christie is listed as the Guinness World Records’ best-selling fiction writer of all time. A genuine mystery that disorientates, befuddles and demands unsatisfied obsession, however, is more of an acquired taste. A brief look into the Voynich Manuscript and the Codex Seraphiniananus will prove this.
The idiom ‘sink one’s teeth into’ originates from a 1832 Belfast News letter to describe an animal literally biting a stick and then in 1935 in Magazine Women’s City Club (Detroit) to refer to a woman reading Europa. It means to tackle something ‘energetically’ as well as ‘productively’. Both manuscripts (I use ‘book’ liberally in the title of the article), can be ‘energetically’ but not ‘productively’ attended to. Though both leave tantalising aromas, they remain inedible and unsolvable.
How to write a baffling manuscript (with the Voynich manuscript as an example):
First, be completely obscure. The manuscript has been carbon dated back to the early 15th century (between 1404-1438). It was written in an unknown language, by an unknown author, in an unknown place. It is especially useful if you get someone who is excitingly secretive to find it. Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish Socialist revolutionary-turned-bookseller found the manuscript, which was then named after him. He was famously cagey about the exact details about its acquisition, but it has since been confirmed he acquired it from Villa Mondragone, outside of Rome, sometime in 1910-1911.
Next, make the manuscript seem like a hoax but then rip the rug under your reader by actually making the language coherent. With its strange language and bizarre plant drawings, it comes as no surprise that many think that the manuscript may be a hoax. Linguists Claire Bowen and Luke Lindemann say it cannot be gibberish, because the word and line level metrics show it to be ‘regular natural language’, although potentially ciphered. They argue that it is ‘natural’, as in occurring without premeditation, and ‘unlikely to be manufactured’ because of its predictability, sequence and structure. They mention that linguist WR Bennett shows that character sequences are more predictable in the Voynich text than European languages, and are comparable to Polynesian languages. The manuscript also contains ‘Voynichese’ but also a little Latin script at the end.
Once you have made your reader believe you, confuse them with your strange, scientific-seeming diagrams. Bring together what look like protocols, analyses, and conclusions together. Add illustrations that make it seem like you are studying something. Already on the third page, there is a picture with red lines that connect its flowers and roots that look like some kind of primitive vascular system, or maybe just a connect-the-dots. The Voynich manuscript has 112 folios of herbal drawings, 21 astronomical ones, 20 balneological (study of medicinal springs and their therapeutic effect), 12 cosmological, 34 pharmaceutical and 22 recipe folios. 232 pages and 116 folios in total, some pictures overlap in the same folio. Most seem to function like normal plants but are not like anything on earth. This has likely given it the name ‘extraterresterial’s travel diary’ by the more extreme conspiracy theorists. The zodiac charts have stars on the peripheries and faces and goats in the middle. There are also, naturally, many drawings of naked women.
Finally, just be indecipherable. Egyptologist Rainer Hannig suggested he cracked the code and that the manuscript was written in a Semitic language in 2020. Dr Gerard Cheshire of Bristol University also suggested that he broke it before and that it was a proto-Romance language. Neither have actually translated the text and any identification is unsubstantiated. The researchers themselves agree.
Embrace the gibberish with Luigi Serafini:
The Codex Seraphinianus is much less mysterious, although no less weird. It is an encyclopaedia depicting an imaginary world, written and illustrated by Luigi Serafini in 1981. The writing is also in an imaginary language which is cursive, accented and asemic, basically meaningless. ‘Asemic’ was coined by philologist Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901) to mean unable to communicate. One originator of this writing style was the Tang dynasty’s ‘drunk’ monk Huaisu (737-799), who drank to ensure uninhibited calligraphy and shone at illegible calligraphy (‘grass style’ writing). Serafini continues this trend, and the words are more ornament than substance. In an interview for Bird in Flight in 2015, Serafini said that there was no hidden meaning to the text, that he ‘wanted an understanding without the text, a more profound and personal understanding’. Indeed, the words in Serafini’s text are not as important as its illustrations. The most famous picture from the book is likely the couple who turn into a crocodile, but it is filled with even stranger illustrations. For example, the mechanical creature that looks like two chickens stuck together going backwards and forwards at the same time, or the creature that is part bat, part ice cream cone, part screw.
Although created hundreds of years apart, this document can be compared to the Voynich manuscript, because it also looks scientific (although in this case we definitely know it is not) and immediately invests the imagination. The lines measuring creature’s diameters, various arrows that point out specifics in diagrams and pages of writing ensure that it looks like an encyclopaedia. Serafini worked on it in a ‘feverish state’ with the attempt to convey his emotions, perhaps also the excitement of an imaginary world or the way a child would see the world.
The Codex Seraphinianus wins most satisfying read between the two. Not just because we know where it comes from because it successfully portrays wonder. The creatures move surprisingly or are in vibrant colours. The pages that act as imaginary analyses look complete and confident. The Voynich manuscript leaves much to be desired. It cannot decide if it’s an encyclopaedia or a work of art. It looks more like a mishmash of information rather than the standardised, though strange, imaginary encyclopaedia. Of course, this is just based on appearance.
In the spirit of nonsense (or at least bafflement, as the Voynich manuscript may one day make sense), I end with a line from Edward Lear’s ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’:
‘And all were happy as happy could be,
With the Quangle Wangle Quee.’
Have a look at the Voynich manuscript and the Codex Seraphinianus!
