Decoding the Enigma of the Voynich Manuscript

Imagine cracking open a centuries-old book and staring at pages filled with bizarre plants, naked women in bathtubs, and lines upon lines of text in a language no one on Earth can read. That’s the Voynich Manuscript—and for more than a hundred years, it’s been the internet’s favorite unsolved mystery. Coders, cryptographers, and conspiracy theorists have all tried to crack it, and none have even come close.

Here’s what we know: the Voynich Manuscript is about the size of a hardcover novel—23.5 centimeters tall, 16.2 centimeters wide, and about 5 centimeters thick. That’s like a large paperback, but much heavier. It consists of around 240 vellum pages, although evidence suggests at least 14 folios are missing. Some of the pages even fold out like a medieval pop-up book. The parchment itself was carbon-dated in 2009 by the University of Arizona, pinpointing its creation between 1404 and 1438. That’s right in the middle of the European Renaissance.

Who wrote it? No one knows, and that’s not for lack of trying. The very first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch, a 17th-century alchemist living in Prague. He wrote a letter in 1639 to Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome, begging for help deciphering this “Sphinx” that had “taken up space uselessly in his library.” Kircher, by the way, was famous for boasting he could translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. Spoiler: he couldn’t crack the Voynich, either.

The manuscript itself is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish rare book dealer who bought it in 1912. He got it as part of a secret, under-the-table deal involving 30 rare manuscripts from the Jesuits at the Villa Mondragone near Rome. After that, the Voynich became an obsession for codebreakers, linguists, and even U.S. and British intelligence officers from both World Wars. None of them could translate so much as a single page.

Let’s talk about what’s actually in this thing. Open it up, and you’ll see hand-drawn illustrations divided loosely into six sections: herbal, astronomical, balneological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and a section filled with what looks like recipes. The herbal section has 126 pages, each with a strange plant and paragraphs of text. None of these plants are unambiguously identifiable—they’re either fantastical or composites, with roots from one species, leaves from another, and flowers from a third. Some scholars think these are just made-up, or maybe encoded references to real medicinal herbs.

Next are the astronomical and zodiac diagrams—strange circles filled with stars, suns, moons, and bands of nude female figures. The balneological section is perhaps the weirdest: it’s packed with drawings of nude women, some wearing crowns, lounging in tubs or pools connected by an elaborate network of pipes. Imagine an ancient spa brochure crossed with a fever dream. The cosmological section stretches across giant foldouts, one of which—the “Rosettes folio”—spans six pages and shows nine islands linked by bridges, with castles and what looks like a volcano thrown in.

The pharmaceutical section features drawings of plant roots and what appear to be apothecary jars, some mundane, some totally surreal. The recipe section contains 25 pages of dense text, broken into short paragraphs, each marked with a star in the margin. Even today, no one knows what any of these recipes are for.

But the real enigma is the text itself. Written from left to right, it uses roughly 20 to 25 distinct symbols, sometimes with a few dozen rarer glyphs tossed in. The language, nicknamed “Voynichese,” has about 38,000 words, of which 9,000 are unique. For comparison, that’s about the size of the vocabulary in a short novel. There’s no obvious punctuation, and the script is totally unique—some symbols look vaguely like Latin letters or Arabic numerals, but the combination is like nothing else from the medieval world.

The structure of the language adds even more intrigue. Certain characters only appear at the beginnings or ends of words, some in the middle, and the pattern actually follows a kind of logic—just not one anyone recognizes. The words themselves follow Zipf’s law, a principle of linguistics found in natural languages: the most common word appears twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. This has led some linguists to think the Voynich text isn’t just gibberish, but might be a real language, an encoded message, or maybe even a constructed language designed to mimic real ones.

In 2014, a team led by Diego Amancio at the University of São Paulo used statistical analysis to compare the Voynich to known books. They found that in 90% of cases, the structure of the Voynich text resembled real language, not random symbols. And yet, the manuscript’s “entropy”—a measure of unpredictability in the text—is lower than most languages, meaning the symbol combinations are bizarrely predictable.

So what’s the debate? Some researchers argue the manuscript is a sophisticated hoax, possibly created to impress or swindle someone rich, like Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor. According to a letter from 1665 by Johannes Marcus Marci, Rudolf supposedly bought the book for 600 ducats—about 2.1 kilograms of gold. There’s no official record of the purchase, but that’s a fortune, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today. The book then passed to Jacobus Horčický de Tepenec, one of Rudolf’s royal pharmacists, whose faded signature is visible on the first page, but only under ultraviolet light.

Others think the author could have been a real scholar or mystic. For years, people suspected Roger Bacon, a 13th-century English friar and scientist, until carbon dating ruled that out. Some theorists have pointed to John Dee and Edward Kelley, two infamous alchemists and occultists. Others even suggested it’s a work of group authorship, with up to five different scribes, based on handwriting analysis by medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis in 2020.

For over a century, the world’s best codebreakers, including William Friedman—the man who led the team that broke Japan’s Purple cipher in World War II—have tried and failed to unlock the Voynich. Not one solution has ever been independently verified. Every few years, a new claim hits the news: “Voynich Deciphered!” Each is quickly debunked or ignored by experts.

What keeps people up at night is not just the code, but the meaning. Is it a practical medical manual, as the thumbed pages and workmanlike parchment suggest? Or is it a fantastical compendium, a secret alchemical text, or the world’s greatest literary troll?

Here’s one last twist: in 2020, Yale University published the entire Voynich Manuscript online for anyone to study. Now, anyone with an internet connection can flip through those perplexing pages and try their hand at solving a puzzle that’s confounded the best minds for 600 years. The most common word in the manuscript appears over 800 times, but to this day, no one knows what it means.