Once again, the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford — through madness, or through omission brought on by horrified incredulity — saw fit to expose its students to the nightmarish patterns that descend, fractal-like, endlessly below the surface of mundane reality. This second OII Halloween Lecture drew on the twisted meanderings we travellers have taken through the cryptic verbiage of the Voynich Manuscript. […]
Our past interrogation of the Voynich Manuscript has deconstructed its esoteric symbols into a form more suitable for our ends, subjected its statistical properties to comparison with more mundane texts, and unearthed its hidden internal structures via the esoteric process of topic modelling. In this final post, we […]
Our earlier experiments derived some of the darker statistics of the Voynich Manuscript supporting the conjecture, but not erasing all doubt, that the manuscript’s cryptic graphemes are drawn from some natural, or shudderingly unnatural, language. Despite our beliefs regarding its authenticity, however, the statistical tools we have employed so far can tell us little about the structure, and almost nothing of the meaning, of the Voynich Manuscript. […]
In the previous post in this series we coyly unveiled the tantalising mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript: an early 15th century text written in an unknown alphabet, filled with compelling illustrations of plants, humans, astronomical charts, and less easily-identifiable entities. Stretching back into the murky history of the Voynich Manuscript, however, is the lurking suspicion that it is a fraud; either a modern fabrication or, perhaps, a hoax by a contemporary scribe. […]
While the world abounds with strange phenomena ripe for analysis in their raw state, there is a peculiar pleasure in scrutinising arcane information curated and obscured by the human mind.
The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most well-known and studied volumes of occult knowledge. The book’s most recent history involves its purchase in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich, a rare book dealer, from a sale of manuscripts by the Society of Jesus at the Villa Mondragone, Frascati. […]