The Aardvark Blog

The Voynich Effect
30/08/2024

The other day we got in a new book on the Voynich manuscript which included the highest quality facsimiles of the pages I have seen. I have been obsessed by the VM for twenty years since I read a thriller that was inspired by the work (if you too want to read it, visit uk.bookshop.org and buy a copy at https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/codex-lev-grossman/762893?ean=9780099491224 ).

But, looking through the text and images, I felt myself having a different feeling. The way in which some pictures show things that we all know, and others feature imaginary plants and creatures, made me think that perhaps Voynich can provide us with the greatest metaphor for our modern AI world. No image can now be relied upon, and superficially all images have the same degree of authenticity.

And then there is the strange language that the Codex is written in. A language which nobody has ever managed to transcribe - despite some of the most brilliant minds trying for decades - but which we know from computer analysis operates like a language and is not therefore purely gibberish.

Is Voynich a hoax as some have claimed? Well, we know from modern scientific analysis that both the vellum it is written on, and the inks are authentically of the period (that period being the late medieval/early Renaissance world). My old tutor Eamonn Duffy has said that it is impossible, given the amount of unused vellum from the period that the manuscript uses, that  enough materials could have been found to prepare a modern hoax. Others have suggested that it is a medieval hoax - if so, it is the only one known.

And what of the dealer Wilfred Voynich himself. He spent a lifetime trying to authenticate the manuscript and sell it for an ever increasing amount, only in the end to turn round and give it to the Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for nothing.

I confess that much of the modern world is equally impenetrable to me. This week my friend Stephen has had a similar experience to ours of some years ago, trying to convert his phone and broadband from analogue to digital. The many frustrating conversations he has had, bring back my own experience from 18 months ago when I could not stop a household name communications company from repeatedly raiding our bank account for thousands of pounds, for apparently breaking a contract that we had not broken. More recently I have had ten conversations with a credit card company over problems with our payment terminal. Each time I think I have got the problem across to them, they act as if they have a solution, and each time the problem persists. It is as if I am stuck speaking Voynich's language - never really understanding the world in which I am now operating, and speaking in a different tongue.

The digital world of today is so complex and so ungoverned, that I do not believe that any of us can truly understand it. When we literally cannot trust our own eyes and ears, what are we left with? Literature has prepared us for this world, but nothing can truly equip us to live in it. The biggest changes that will be made in the next few years will not be made by politicians, but by those planning our digitial future.