kaos

Slippery steps down into the
enigma of the Voynich MS.
by Joel Biroco
The allure of a strange undeciphered manuscript that has taxed the minds of
medievalists and cryptographers alike and ruined at least one scholarly reputation
From time to time I go back to toying with studying the Voynich manuscript, catalogue
entry #408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, 204
pages on vellum, the book that no-one can read. The last time I got excited about it was
when Dana F Scott on the Voynich ms. mailing list said she had identified the waratah
[Telopea speciosissima] as a “wonderful match” for folio 50 v ( June 9, 2001). I was
coincidentally writing about Aleister Crowley’s poem in The Book of Lies, “Waratah-
Blossoms”, at the time, so Dana’s message caught my attention. Crowley uses the waratah
to allude to the Scarlet Woman, given that it is a brilliant scarlet flower. The waratah is
indigenous to New South Wales and was known to have been first introduced into
Europe by Sir James Smith in 1793. Or possibly the Dutch navigator Plesart could
have brought seeds back after he explored Western Australia in 1629. So I immediately
thought to myself if this identification is correct then it could have dating implications
along the lines of the “O’Neill sunflower hypothesis”, which suggested that the Voynich
ms. must have been written after 1493 when Columbus brought the seeds to Europe,
thus ruling out Roger Bacon as the supposed author (the plant depicted on folio 93 r
looks like the sunflower—see Speculum 19 [1944]). But on turning to folio 50 v I was
crestfallen, alas the flower wasn’t scarlet! A wonderful match, except in colour. It was
blue. Dana had been working from a black and white copy and had been premature.
But rather than let go of the idea immediately, I found myself indulging the most
bizarre speculation that maybe the plant had been painted in an ink that reacted to acid
and alkali like litmas paper, blue in alkali but red in acid. After all, those art historians
who argued on the whys and wherefores of Van Gogh’s strange choice of yellow for his
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