The Bacon Manuscript

Author: Yvette Lopez

In 1586 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II paid a mighty sum for the possession of a manuscript that was to become the object of mystery for centuries to come. The manuscript itself was a small volume of 8.5" x 5.75". It contained nearly 300 pages written in heavy black ink on vellum. Included were many colored illustrations of plants, leaves, roots, astrological diagrams, realistic and symbolical representations of cell development, and unusual pictures of nude women. Its content was a concealment of some kind of secret code believed by Rudolf II to have been the work of Roger Bacon, because on the first line of a three-line "key" written on the last leaf stated: "To me, Roger Bacon."

Roger Bacon was a 13th century English philosopher also known for having had a reputation for being a magician. He took a great interest in experimental science, but his discoveries were condemned as being black magic. He was persecuted by the Church and was forbidden to write; so he devised a strategy to conceal the documentations of his work--he recorded them in cipher.

After the abdication of Rudolf II in 1611, the manuscript was passed on to his botanist, Jacobus de Tepenecz of Prague, who, for some reason, autographed the manuscript itself. Like many others of the former Emperor's scholar's, De Tepenecz could not decipher the script; neither could anyone else who got hold of the manuscript thereafter. It was finally put away as a secret for many years until a rare-book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, found it in an ancient castle in southern Europe in 1912. He brought it to the United States to have it deciphered, but to no avail.

It was not until 1921 that someone finally claimed to be able to read it. His name was Professor Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. He stated that the manuscript established that Roger Bacon had used both a telescope and a microscope in his experiments, and that the drawings were his observations of nebulae and spermatozoa in a symbolical or allegorical manner.

It was not until after his death in 1928 that another scholar (John M. Manley), who was an expert in manuscripts and also in codes and ciphers, showed Newbold's supposed "decipherments" to be completely imaginary. He claimed that Newbold's system of deciphering could have led to any number of plain text solutions; therefore, his claims were based on false illusions.

Although Manley may have been proven correct, Newbold's intuitions regarding the themes being illustrations, the last key page, the characteristic of star names (named after famous men of antiquity), were all correct. Experts also know that the "alphabet" of the manuscript (identified by Robert S. Brumbaugh himself) derives from a type of numerology. It is an unknown alphabet, perhaps Arabic in origen, with an artificial language, thought to be a variation of Latin. As it is deciphered, however, the message is unclear and is repititious of names of countries and chemicals that appear and disappear. Botanists cannot even identify most of the plants in the illustrations. The manuscript itself is so long enough to suggested that it may indeed conceal a second cipher.

Roger Bacon's manuscript has been one of the most enigmatic and interesting manuscripts ever to challenge the knowledge, patience, and ambition of scholars around the world.

References

Brumbaugh, Robert S. ed. The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich
"Roger Bacon" Cipher Manuscript. Carbondale and Edwardsville,
Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.