[00:00:00 - 00:00:08]	 [Music]
[00:00:08 - 00:00:15]	 Today I'm going to be discussing the Vonage manuscript, which is certainly one of the most interesting
[00:00:15 - 00:00:19]	 and has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world.
[00:00:19 - 00:00:25]	 I will describe the physical manuscript, place it in a historical context,
[00:00:25 - 00:00:33]	 and then discuss my own ideas about the people who may have been its authors.
[00:00:33 - 00:00:42]	 First of all, the manuscript itself is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist.
[00:00:42 - 00:00:51]	 It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from 19 to 28 letters,
[00:00:51 - 00:00:59]	 none of which bearing any relationship to any English or European letter system.
[00:00:59 - 00:01:09]	 The manuscript is small, 7 by 10 inches, but thick, nearly 170 pages, closely written in a free-running hand,
[00:01:09 - 00:01:15]	 copiously illustrated with bizarre line drawings that have been water-colored,
[00:01:15 - 00:01:23]	 drawings of plants, drawings of little naked ladies appearing to take showers in a strange system of plumbing,
[00:01:23 - 00:01:30]	 which has been variously identified as organs of the body or a primitive set of fountains,
[00:01:30 - 00:01:36]	 and astrological drawings, or what have been interpreted as astrological drawings.
[00:01:36 - 00:01:38]	 But more about all this later.
[00:01:38 - 00:01:43]	 First of all, the known facts of the manuscript are few.
[00:01:43 - 00:01:51]	 They are that it appears in 1586 that the court of Rudolf II of Bavaria
[00:01:51 - 00:01:57]	 was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period.
[00:01:57 - 00:02:04]	 This is the same Frederick who collected dwarfs, who collected, had a regiment of giants in his army.
[00:02:04 - 00:02:12]	 He was surrounded by astrologers. He was fascinated by games and codes and music.
[00:02:12 - 00:02:20]	 He was the typical of the occult-oriented Protestant intellectual of this period.
[00:02:20 - 00:02:30]	 Anyway, to his court and among his courtiers came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king
[00:02:30 - 00:02:37]	 for 300 gold ducats, which translated into modern monetary units is about $14,000,
[00:02:37 - 00:02:44]	 which is an astonishing amount of money to have been paid for a manuscript at that time,
[00:02:44 - 00:02:51]	 and immediately signals that the emperor must have been highly impressed by this object
[00:02:51 - 00:02:54]	 if he was willing to put out that kind of money for it.
[00:02:54 - 00:03:05]	 Accompanying the manuscript is a letter which states that it is a manuscript of the Englishman Roger Bacon,
[00:03:05 - 00:03:15]	 who flourished in the 13th century and who was a noted pre-Copernican astronomer.
[00:03:15 - 00:03:23]	 Now, at that time in Prague, which was where the court of the emperor was being held,
[00:03:23 - 00:03:29]	 the reputation of Roger Bacon was at a great height.
[00:03:29 - 00:03:33]	 The court was a hotbed of alchemy, and among all these alchemists,
[00:03:33 - 00:03:38]	 the reputation of the Englishman Roger Bacon was held very high.
[00:03:38 - 00:03:48]	 This is because two years previously, the sale of the Vonage Manuscript to the emperor being dated to 1586,
[00:03:48 - 00:03:58]	 two years previously, John Dee, the great English navigator, astrologer, magician, intelligence agent, occultist...
[00:03:58 - 00:04:01]	 I still am back on Frederick.
[00:04:01 - 00:04:03]	 You mean what was his relationship to all this?
[00:04:03 - 00:04:05]	 Could you develop him a little bit more? You say he was typical.
[00:04:05 - 00:04:14]	 Well, he epitomized the liberated northern European prince who was a patron of alchemy,
[00:04:14 - 00:04:19]	 gave money to all these printing presses that were printing all this alchemical literature.
[00:04:19 - 00:04:24]	 The Rosicrucian conspiracy, about which I will say more later,
[00:04:24 - 00:04:29]	 was fomenting at this very period right under the surface.
[00:04:29 - 00:04:34]	 Frederick patronized astrologers, magicians, alchemists.
[00:04:34 - 00:04:41]	 The reason John Dee had such a long stay at Frederick's court was because his companion Edward Kelly
[00:04:41 - 00:04:45]	 claimed to be able to perform the alchemical opus,
[00:04:45 - 00:04:49]	 and the king more or less placed them under house arrest
[00:04:49 - 00:04:56]	 and asked them to do this for him as a favor since he had patronized them very heavily.
[00:04:56 - 00:05:01]	 And when they were unable to, Dee was able to talk his way out of it.
[00:05:01 - 00:05:04]	 Kelly had been the one who had made the major claims,
[00:05:04 - 00:05:09]	 and he was kept there and actually died in an effort to escape.
[00:05:09 - 00:05:17]	 He fell when the shale roofing on a high parapet of this castle slid way underneath his feet
[00:05:17 - 00:05:22]	 one moonlit night when he was trying to sneak out of the castle.
[00:05:22 - 00:05:29]	 But I anticipate my story because I think John Dee and Edward Kelly are probably,
[00:05:29 - 00:05:36]	 if they were not the, I certainly think they were the people who sold the emperor the Vonage manuscript
[00:05:36 - 00:05:41]	 because of circumstantial evidence surrounding their interest
[00:05:41 - 00:05:46]	 in subjects similar to those being covered by the manuscript and...
[00:05:46 - 00:05:53]	 Frederick, Frederick, is the same one, is that the winter summer queen, king and queen, is that Frederick?
[00:05:53 - 00:06:01]	 No, this, we're talking about Rudolf II. He was succeeded by this guy, Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia,
[00:06:01 - 00:06:10]	 who was also in this mold as a patron of Protestant alchemical aspirations in Central Europe.
[00:06:10 - 00:06:20]	 But anyway, the Vonage manuscript was accompanied by this letter stating that it was a bacon manuscript,
[00:06:20 - 00:06:27]	 and the best astrologers and cryptographers in this court looked at it and could make nothing out of it.
[00:06:27 - 00:06:34]	 And it, and along with a great deal of other weird collections and material
[00:06:34 - 00:06:41]	 that Rudolf had gathered together from all over the world was passed to various people at his death.
[00:06:41 - 00:06:49]	 And this book, because it contained botanical illustrations, passed to his botanist, who was a man named Marsisi.
[00:06:49 - 00:06:57]	 And he had it for 20 years. Then it passed to an unnamed party who had it for 20 years,
[00:06:57 - 00:07:03]	 and by this time we're up to the 1620s. And then it passed to Athanasius Kircher,
[00:07:03 - 00:07:09]	 who was one of the great polymaths of the mid-17th century.
[00:07:09 - 00:07:16]	 He was a Catholic intellectual, an alchemist, a person who experimented with artificial languages.
[00:07:16 - 00:07:24]	 And before he obtained the Vonage manuscript, we know of letters of his to various people asking about it.
[00:07:24 - 00:07:29]	 And in fact, he was sent small portions of it reproduced that he struggled over.
[00:07:29 - 00:07:36]	 But once he actually had the manuscript in his possession, his diaries are silent about it.
[00:07:36 - 00:07:40]	 And he says nothing, even though five years after he acquired it,
[00:07:40 - 00:07:48]	 he published a book called "A Universal Study of Artificial Languages" that nowhere mentions the Vonage manuscript.
[00:07:48 - 00:07:56]	 Well, maybe he called it something else. There's no reference of any sort to anything that he possessed that was like that.
[00:07:56 - 00:08:06]	 That's right. And he decided to become a Jesuit in about 1660 and had to give away all of his worldly goods.
[00:08:06 - 00:08:15]	 So he gave his library to this Jesuit seminary south of Rome, and in among his books was the Vonage manuscript.
[00:08:15 - 00:08:28]	 And he sat on a shelf in the seminary from 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960, 220, 320 years. No, no, 280 years.
[00:08:28 - 00:08:36]	 Till Alfred Vonage, a New York book dealer, bought the entire library on a trip to Europe in 1912.
[00:08:36 - 00:08:41]	 And we got it all back to New York and sorted through it among all this easily catalogued,
[00:08:41 - 00:08:53]	 late Renaissance, Italian theological material was this peculiar book, more than peculiar, totally anomalous book.
[00:08:53 - 00:09:04]	 And it's very strange because the store of images, even as late as the period when we first hear of the Vonage manuscript in the 1580s,
[00:09:04 - 00:09:13]	 the store of images in the European mind was very limited. For instance, speaking of the biological sections of the Vonage manuscript,
[00:09:13 - 00:09:24]	 here you get 120 drawings of plants. And yet there were only 10 or 15 herbals in circulation among the educated people of Europe of that time.
[00:09:24 - 00:09:34]	 And none of the Vonage images can be directly traced to any of these previously printed or circulated manuscripts.
[00:09:34 - 00:09:42]	 Likewise, the script itself, it has no antecedents and it spawned no imitators.
[00:09:42 - 00:09:51]	 Codes from the early 16th century onward were in Europe, were all derived from a book called
[00:09:51 - 00:09:59]	 the Stenographica of Johannes Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim, who was an alchemist of Sponheim,
[00:09:59 - 00:10:09]	 who was wrote on the encipherment of secret messages. And he had about three methods.
[00:10:09 - 00:10:18]	 And no military or alchemical or religious or political code was composed by any other means
[00:10:18 - 00:10:30]	 throughout a period which lasted well into the 17th century. Yet the Vonage manuscript does not appear to have any relationship to the Trithemian codes.
[00:10:30 - 00:10:33]	 Trithemian codes?
[00:10:33 - 00:10:38]	 The codes derivative of Johannes Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim.
[00:10:38 - 00:10:44]	 Is that a, I mean, is there something, do people research the Trithemian codes?
[00:10:44 - 00:10:54]	 Oh, the literature is voluminous on the Trithemian codes. Sure, there's a book by Walker called
[00:10:54 - 00:11:00]	 Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella that covers all of this very well.
[00:11:00 - 00:11:05]	 Or Francis Yates' book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, although they neither of them...
[00:11:05 - 00:11:07]	 Have you talked about Rosicrucians yet?
[00:11:07 - 00:11:09]	 Not quite yet.
[00:11:09 - 00:11:10]	 Okay.
[00:11:10 - 00:11:23]	 First of all, let's see, more about D and why I think that D is the obvious candidate for being the author
[00:11:23 - 00:11:28]	 or being the purveyor if not the author of the Vonage manuscript.
[00:11:28 - 00:11:39]	 D, first of all, Trithemius' book, the Stenographica, didn't circulate as a printed book until the 1580s.
[00:11:39 - 00:11:44]	 But it circulated in manuscript form from about 1530 onward.
[00:11:44 - 00:11:50]	 And when D visited the continent as a fairly young man, he records in his diary that he spent three days
[00:11:50 - 00:11:57]	 hand copying the relevant chapters of a manuscript copy of the Stenographica that he was shown in Paris.
[00:11:57 - 00:12:06]	 So from very early in his intellectual life, he was in possession of the Trithemian code making machinery.
[00:12:06 - 00:12:15]	 The next important event in his life, for my argument, and one of the most puzzling events in the whole history of science generally,
[00:12:15 - 00:12:25]	 is the afternoon in July of 1582 when at Mortlake in his study, John D was distracted by a brilliant light outside his window
[00:12:25 - 00:12:31]	 and stepped outside to receive from a creature he described as the angel Gabriel
[00:12:31 - 00:12:42]	 a polished lens of Lancasterian coal which he described in his diary from thence forward as the shoe stone.
[00:12:42 - 00:12:47]	 That's S-H-E-W, the shoe stone.
[00:12:47 - 00:12:57]	 And he was able by meditating on this stone to induce visions and dialogues with spirits.
[00:12:57 - 00:13:03]	 However, this ability seemed to fade in the months after he received the stone,
[00:13:03 - 00:13:14]	 until a strange personage came into his life in the spring of 1584, and this was Edward Kelly.
[00:13:14 - 00:13:22]	 Now Kelly was a much younger man than D, and D was married to a much younger woman, Ann D.
[00:13:22 - 00:13:32]	 And Kelly was of the rascal class, and he in fact in one account is described as being earless,
[00:13:32 - 00:13:38]	 having had his ears removed for some petty crime in the provinces.
[00:13:38 - 00:13:45]	 Anyway, he arrived at D's place in Mortlake, pop-eyed and breathless,
[00:13:45 - 00:13:53]	 with a wild story about how he had fallen asleep in a ram-sacked tomb in a monastery in Wales,
[00:13:53 - 00:13:59]	 and when he had awakened, beneath him in the tomb had been a vial of red powder,
[00:13:59 - 00:14:06]	 which was the transformative elixir, and a book in an undecipherable language,
[00:14:06 - 00:14:12]	 which he called the Gospel of St. Dunstable,
[00:14:12 - 00:14:18]	 and said that he had been told around in the village that it was in Seyford, Welsh.
[00:14:18 - 00:14:25]	 Now, we actually hear no more in anybody's diaries or letters of the Gospel of St. Dunstable.
[00:14:25 - 00:14:31]	 However, Arthur D., the son of John D., writing some 30 years later and reminiscing about his father,
[00:14:31 - 00:14:38]	 said that from the time he met Kelly, he spent a great deal of time trying to unravel a book
[00:14:38 - 00:14:43]	 covered all over with hieroglyphics.
[00:14:43 - 00:14:51]	 And perhaps this is the Gospel of St. Dunstable, and perhaps it is, in fact, the Vonage Manuscript,
[00:14:51 - 00:14:54]	 and that these two things are the same thing.
[00:14:54 - 00:15:02]	 In any case, Kelly's entrée to D. was the undecipherable manuscript and the alchemical potion,
[00:15:02 - 00:15:11]	 and he quickly, from his conversations with D., determined the story about the show stone,
[00:15:11 - 00:15:21]	 and they set up a seance situation, and Kelly proved himself to be a very adept scryer of the stone.
[00:15:21 - 00:15:28]	 From the very first instance, he could describe vast theatrical other-takings,
[00:15:28 - 00:15:32]	 and speak all the parts of the characters.
[00:15:32 - 00:15:38]	 Oh, the show stone is in the British Museum. You can see it. There it sits. They still have it.
[00:15:38 - 00:15:48]	 Anyway, so then begins a period in D.'s diaries, which were published in 1658 by Marie-Cassabonne
[00:15:48 - 00:15:55]	 as a true and faithful relation, a series of diary entries that span the next ten years,
[00:15:55 - 00:16:06]	 dozens, hundreds of spirit conversations, and the delivering unto D. and Kelly of an angelologic language
[00:16:06 - 00:16:15]	 called Enochian, which was composed of non-English letters, but which computer analysis has recently shown
[00:16:15 - 00:16:19]	 has a curious grammatical relationship to English.
[00:16:19 - 00:16:26]	 But over 4,000 words are known in Enochian, and they were transmitted by the ghostly apparitions
[00:16:26 - 00:16:34]	 which Kelly channeled to D., and D., and some of the messages were theological in nature,
[00:16:34 - 00:16:41]	 many were political, and came to them as they traveled about Europe, including visiting the court
[00:16:41 - 00:16:46]	 of Rudolf II of Bavaria, our man who was sold the Vonage manuscript,
[00:16:46 - 00:16:53]	 and they were the people who were responsible for telling everyone what a great alchemist Roger Bacon,
[00:16:53 - 00:16:59]	 the English monk, had been. They laid the public relations groundwork for turning this manuscript
[00:16:59 - 00:17:08]	 at a high premium, I maintain. In any case, the several groups that have studied the Vonage manuscript
[00:17:08 - 00:17:15]	 have not looked at the amounts of encrypted material in John D.'s diaries, of which there's over 92 pages,
[00:17:15 - 00:17:25]	 of strings of numbers and letters, which if it were found to be encoded in the same way that the Vonage material
[00:17:25 - 00:17:32]	 is encoded, that would definitely solve the problem of the authorship of the manuscript.
[00:17:32 - 00:17:39]	 The manuscript, which would have had to have been written in the 13th century, if it were by Roger Bacon,
[00:17:39 - 00:17:48]	 definitely shows all the physical signs of being a 16th century manuscript. I estimate it was done sometime around 1540,
[00:17:48 - 00:17:57]	 and D., this means Kelly, perhaps obtained it somewhere. Otherwise it would have had to have been done later,
[00:17:57 - 00:18:06]	 as late as the early 1580s. If D. actually wrote it, then it should be possible to determine this,
[00:18:06 - 00:18:14]	 because such large amounts of his encrypted, though still undeciphered, material is on record.
[00:18:14 - 00:18:23]	 And perhaps now would be the moment to talk about the Rosicrucians and show how they work into all this.
[00:18:23 - 00:18:32]	 D. died an old and broken-hearted man in the run to the reign of James I in 1608, many years after the events
[00:18:32 - 00:18:39]	 of the sale of the Vonage manuscript occurred. Why was he broken-hearted? Well, he had been the court astronomer
[00:18:39 - 00:18:47]	 of Elizabeth and the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and the most educated man in England. When James came to power,
[00:18:47 - 00:18:55]	 James had a total horror of the whole magical side of the Elizabethan court, and he just dismissed this guy
[00:18:55 - 00:19:02]	 as a crank. He didn't want astrologers around him. He thought it was all creepy. He was a rationalist.
[00:19:02 - 00:19:11]	 His anti-Catholicism extended to a mistrust of the entire occult tradition generally. However,
[00:19:11 - 00:19:20]	 early in his flowering period, D. had written a strange book called the Hieroglyphic Mona, the Monus Hieroglyphicum,
[00:19:20 - 00:19:28]	 which was 36 quasi-geometrical theorems which actually hinted at some kind of mystical doctrine.
[00:19:28 - 00:19:36]	 And it was just, it's this utterly obscure book. In the early 1580s, it circulated in manuscripts.
[00:19:36 - 00:19:48]	 And who we are, you may not know, but if you're hip enough, you'll be contacted and asked to join.
[00:19:48 - 00:19:56]	 And people like Robert Flood, who was essentially the heir of the D. tradition in English occultism and science,
[00:19:56 - 00:20:04]	 basically put out advertisements saying, "If I ain't good enough, nobody's good enough. Why haven't you people contacted me?"
[00:20:04 - 00:20:10]	 And the fact of the matter is that the Rosicrucians, meaning the authors of the Fama and the Confessio,
[00:20:10 - 00:20:22]	 never contacted anybody. And their claim was basically fraudulent. It was that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz,
[00:20:22 - 00:20:30]	 who had lived in the 14th century, again, it's like this harking back to Roger Bacon, but instead harking back to a mythical personage
[00:20:30 - 00:20:37]	 two centuries previously, that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz, a great knight who had gone on the last crusade,
[00:20:37 - 00:20:44]	 had been discovered and that inside there were all these alchemical books and with a quasi-political overtone,
[00:20:44 - 00:20:54]	 definitely favoring the Bohemian court of Frederick the Elector Palatine, and that all this should be disseminated as gospel.
[00:20:54 - 00:21:00]	 It was a kind of alchemical Protestant revival. But curiously, these texts, the Fama and the Confessio,
[00:21:00 - 00:21:11]	 had many doctrinal similarities to Dee's hieroglyphic monad, so that it appears that Dee either was used as the model
[00:21:11 - 00:21:22]	 for the Rosicrucian conspiracy by its authors, persons unnamed, but I suspect the Czech alchemist Johan Valentín Andrií
[00:21:22 - 00:21:33]	 as probably being the person behind this, because Andrií and Michael Maier were people who definitely were old enough
[00:21:33 - 00:21:42]	 to have been involved in Dee's earlier visits and have then just been at their intellectual, at the peak of their intellectual powers
[00:21:42 - 00:21:51]	 when the foment that you mentioned of the Winter Kingdom and the bringing of Frederick Elector and his wife to Prague
[00:21:51 - 00:22:00]	 as the king and queen this episode occurred. And in fact, I'll now relate the Vonage Manuscript back to all of that.
[00:22:00 - 00:22:08]	 Previously I mentioned that when Rudolf's court fell into disarray, the Vonage Manuscript passed to his botanist.
[00:22:08 - 00:22:18]	 Well, what was happening was that the old emperor was dying at a great age and mad as a damn hatter, no question about it.
[00:22:18 - 00:22:29]	 Meanwhile, to the west, in Bohemia, the Frederick Elector, who is everything a Protestant alchemical prince could hope to be
[00:22:29 - 00:22:39]	 young, brilliant, scheming, totally in charge of his lords, he weds Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England
[00:22:39 - 00:22:52]	 and he takes the king's decision to give him his daughter's hand in marriage as tacit approval for his plan to establish an alchemical kingdom
[00:22:52 - 00:23:05]	 a Protestant alchemical kingdom in central Europe. Actually, James, being the conservative that he was, had a far more Machiavellian purpose
[00:23:05 - 00:23:16]	 in wedding his daughter to Frederick the Elector because he also had it in his mind to wed one of his sons to a Spanish Catholic Habsburg princess
[00:23:16 - 00:23:29]	 and was trying to steer a neutral course when he realized that Frederick and Elizabeth had gone off to Bohemia, to their court
[00:23:29 - 00:23:41]	 to be with Michael Myer and Gerhard Dorn and Johann Andre and all these guys and to patronize these alchemical presses and astrology and all this stuff.
[00:23:41 - 00:23:51]	 He was much alarmed, but by that time it was too late to call it back and he realized that Frederick the Elector was a wild card.
[00:23:51 - 00:24:05]	 When Rudolph finally did die, the princes of the Northern League gathered and chose his successor by secret ballot. Frederick won
[00:24:05 - 00:24:20]	 and so in the winter, in the late fall of 1619, he and Elizabeth transferred their court to Prague and ruled for one winter until May of 1620
[00:24:20 - 00:24:34]	 The Mayflower was landing in America the same year, but it had nothing to do with any of this. Then the Habsburgs by that time had mounted an army
[00:24:34 - 00:24:47]	 and were able to crush this thing. In a sense, it can be seen as the opening shot of the Thirty Years War, although the Thirty Years... well, it was the opening shot of the Thirty Years War.
[00:24:47 - 00:25:01]	 One of the young French soldiers in this Habsburg army laying siege to the city was the 19 year old René Descartes, who would grow up to be the great proponent of modern French materialism.
[00:25:01 - 00:25:15]	 Michael Myer, one of the last great synthesizers of the medieval alchemical vision, died in the siege of the city. Frederick was killed and Elizabeth fled.
[00:25:15 - 00:25:28]	 She lived in the Hague for many years. And so see, in that confusion, the botanist of Rudolph held in his house somewhere in the suburbs of Prague the Vonage manuscript
[00:25:28 - 00:25:42]	 and the Thirty Years War comes, modern times overtake Europe and this thing drifts further and further from its roots. But my reconstruction of what must have happened is that
[00:25:42 - 00:25:59]	 in this period when Dee and Kelly were regaling Rudolph with tales of the alchemical prowess of Roger Bacon, that they ponied up this manuscript.
[00:25:59 - 00:26:19]	 Either they wrote it at that time or they had it with them. If they had it with them, it's a far more interesting story because then perhaps they are not its authors. If they are its authors, then it merely reveals the grammatical deep structure of the deranged mind of an Elizabethan magician.
[00:26:19 - 00:26:32]	 And this would explain to some degree why it was outside the can of the CIA. But if they didn't write it, if they only had it in their possession, then the mystery continues because where did they get it and what was it?
[00:26:32 - 00:26:50]	 It is true that Dee was under the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland who, when Henry VIII broke with Rome, all of the English monasteries were sacked by the lords who stuck with the king.
[00:26:50 - 00:27:08]	 And the Earl of Northumberland sacked monasteries that had large repositories of bacon material and Dee's library at Mortlake was known to have 53 Baconian manuscripts of which only 41 have survived into modern times.
[00:27:08 - 00:27:10]	 There are 41?
[00:27:10 - 00:27:12]	 Baconian manuscripts.
[00:27:12 - 00:27:13]	 Where are they?
[00:27:13 - 00:27:21]	 Oh, they're at the Bodleian Museum Library at Oxford in the British Museum. They have all this Dee material.
[00:27:21 - 00:27:22]	 Have you seen it?
[00:27:22 - 00:27:36]	 No, no. Oh, well, it would be fun to see it. The most interesting thing is this huge book called A True and Faithful Relation, which is the day-by-day seances with these spirits as Dee and Kelly move all over Europe.
[00:27:36 - 00:27:56]	 It's in that that it's recorded. Oh, and this is a piece of circumstantial evidence I almost left out, that in the very month that the emperor paid the 300 gold ducats for the manuscript, Dee records in his diary that they received 320 gold ducats from a mysterious source.
[00:27:56 - 00:28:14]	 Now, it is true that another angle on Dee's personality and some biographies have taken the position that he didn't believe in magic at all, that he only posed as a screwball and that actually he was an intelligence agent for the British crown.
[00:28:14 - 00:28:29]	 He was visiting all these courts as an astrologer and a necromancer and an alchemist and actually encrypting very succinct military and strategic and diplomatic information into these letters, which he was sending home.
[00:28:29 - 00:28:36]	 And because he could cast the finest horoscope in Europe, he had an entrée into all these people's scenes.
[00:28:36 - 00:28:48]	 And the truth lies somewhere in between. He was doing all of this. He was an agent for the British crown, but he was also, you know, the finest flower of the medieval mind.
[00:28:48 - 00:29:02]	 He was used by Shakespeare as the model for Prospero and the Tempest and is the model for Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's version of that classic spellbinder.
[00:29:02 - 00:29:09]	 What do you think about the Bacon Shakespeare controversy? Does that fit into that at all?
[00:29:09 - 00:29:15]	 Well, it just shows, you know, how tenuous our grip is on what was going on in this time.
[00:29:15 - 00:29:24]	 I mean, besides whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare, then you have the problem of things like the Vonage manuscript.
[00:29:24 - 00:29:35]	 Bacon visited D. We're now talking about Francis Bacon, who was who claimed actually Roger Bacon as one of his.
[00:29:35 - 00:29:51]	 Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Queen Elizabeth and Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon visited John D at Mortlake one afternoon to see his library because he had more books than anyone in England.
[00:29:51 - 00:30:01]	 One of the most interesting things about the Vonage manuscript is the people whose careers have found floundered,
[00:30:01 - 00:30:10]	 foundered on decipherments where people have come forward with very bold claims.
[00:30:10 - 00:30:23]	 This guy, William Romaine Newbury Newbold in the 1920s, who was a classic scholar, a medievalist and by all accounts, a very brilliant man.
[00:30:23 - 00:30:36]	 He announced that he had a complete decipherment of the Vonage manuscript and said that what it involved was shorthand strokes,
[00:30:36 - 00:30:46]	 tiny strokes that were components of each letter in the Vonage script and that by staring through a magnifying loop,
[00:30:46 - 00:30:58]	 you could magnify these characters and see that encoded into each one were the distorted remains of a Roman shorthand system that had been lost for 600 years.
[00:30:58 - 00:31:10]	 And he produced astonishing decipherments in which he definitely thought that it was a Roger Bacon manuscript.
[00:31:10 - 00:31:23]	 He decoded passages that dealt with student uprisings at Oxford at Christmastime 1292 when the riot between the Blackfriars and the something or other.
[00:31:23 - 00:31:36]	 Just, you know, long, long decipherments. The problem with all of this was that no one else could extract the same sense using Professor Newbold's method.
[00:31:36 - 00:31:49]	 His method involved so many choices from pools of letters at every given point along the line that you could demonstrate that hundreds of messages could be extracted.
[00:31:49 - 00:32:05]	 And Professor Newbold died a broken man. He was disgraced, his career shattered. He had gone too far. The Vonage manuscript had claimed its first victim.
[00:32:05 - 00:32:14]	 The next person to advance a decipherment of the Vonage manuscript was Robert S. Brumbo, also of Yale University.
[00:32:14 - 00:32:20]	 And his decipherment is in some ways almost as puzzling as the encryption.
[00:32:20 - 00:32:43]	 He would have us believe that the Vonage manuscript says things like liquid Syrian matter, liquid matter plus Syrian Sicilian plus Syrian salt, European Swedish Sicilian plus Syrian plus Russian Asian Sicilian salt, liquid liquid, Asian Italian Syrian salt, liquid Sicilian.
[00:32:43 - 00:32:52]	 Liquid Sicilian Italian plus Sicilian plus salt, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:32:52 - 00:33:04]	 Who is that again? Robert S. Brumbo of Yale. However, when his method was examined by other people attempting to reproduce the same plaintext, they got nowhere.
[00:33:04 - 00:33:09]	 And he it can't be taken seriously.
[00:33:09 - 00:33:28]	 Another effort at decipherment, which is minor, perhaps in comparison to the other two, but which provides an interesting anecdote, was a man named Strong who was at San Diego, had claimed decipherment of certain of the labels of the illustrations of the Vonage manuscript.
[00:33:28 - 00:33:39]	 And when Paul Lee formed a working group to look into the Vonage manuscript, Dr. Strong was one of the people they wanted to interview.
[00:33:39 - 00:33:49]	 And my friend Ralph Abraham, who's a mathematician at Santa Cruz, had photo stats of certain folios of the Vonage manuscript.
[00:33:49 - 00:34:03]	 And he sent very detailed letters to Dr. Strong with these folios as enclosures and questions like, it is alleged that on folio 9B you translated a certain word as uterus.
[00:34:03 - 00:34:10]	 Here is a photo stat of folio 9B. Please circle the word you translated and this kind of thing.
[00:34:10 - 00:34:29]	 And Dr. Strong's secretary wrote Ralph back and said that he was very old, he was in his 90s, and he didn't feel he could compose a letter to address all these questions, but that if Ralph would come to San Diego, he would satisfy him completely.
[00:34:29 - 00:34:48]	 So that was a Thursday. Ralph made, got a reservation to fly down on the following Monday, and Sunday night the secretary called and said that Dr. Strong had died of a heart attack that evening.
[00:34:48 - 00:35:05]	 So the Vonage manuscript has bedeviled people's careers and people who have claimed to understand it have died with the secret untransmitted to the rest of us.
[00:35:05 - 00:35:26]	 The intelligence community inside the United States government has spent a fair bit of time looking into it simply because it is so unusual to come upon such a large amount of code from such an early period and have it resist decipherment.
[00:35:26 - 00:35:35]	 I mean it is just unheard of that a 16th century manuscript could not be deciphered by modern methods.
[00:35:35 - 00:35:51]	 The most interesting thing in fact published on the Vonage manuscript is a United States government technical information office publication called the Vonage manuscript, an elegant enigma by Mary de Imperial.
[00:35:51 - 00:36:05]	 And Mary de Imperial must be a Renaissance PhD student somewhere who was hired by the government to basically collate everything known about the Vonage manuscript.
[00:36:05 - 00:36:14]	 And some interesting things are known. Eventually I think perhaps it will yield, although I'm not sure.
[00:36:14 - 00:36:22]	 For instance, computer analysis of the handwriting in it shows that two hands are involved.
[00:36:22 - 00:36:30]	 It was written by two people. Does this mean it was written by Dee and Kelly? Is this the hands that we should look for?
[00:36:30 - 00:36:41]	 Can we then by comparing it to the handwriting of Dee and/or Kelly get a further feeling for their relationship to it?
[00:36:41 - 00:36:44]	 How do you get a hold of one of these?
[00:36:44 - 00:36:55]	 You have to write to the Office of Technical Information Services in Springfield, Virginia and ask for this particular document whose number I'll have to hunt down.
[00:36:55 - 00:36:57]	 And does it cost?
[00:36:57 - 00:37:13]	 Oh yes, it costs like five or six dollars. But it's a wealth of information on the whole context in which, I mean, it discusses all kinds of magical alphabets and early systems for encoding and hiding information.
[00:37:13 - 00:37:27]	 I think that what fascinated me about the Vonage manuscript is above and beyond the historical puzzle, above and beyond how interesting it would be to know what it actually says, and someone went to such great effort to hide what it says,
[00:37:27 - 00:37:38]	 is just the idea of an unreadable book is a kind of Borgesian concept that is attractive.
[00:37:38 - 00:37:44]	 There must be somewhere an unreadable book, and perhaps this is it.
[00:37:44 - 00:37:56]	 And it's almost, I mean, if my analysis of it as being the product of Dee and Kelly has seemed too facile or facile, let me assure you that it is.
[00:37:56 - 00:38:09]	 And that there, not all the facts are covered by that theory. So much of Dee's writing is known that I think if he had been the author, it would be possible to find that out.
[00:38:09 - 00:38:15]	 Perhaps it is possible to find that out, and we're just premature in our wish for a resolution of it.
[00:38:15 - 00:38:35]	 But the unreadable book, the idea that the world is information, and the way by which we have cognizance of the world is by ordering all the information we come upon through relation to information that we already have accumulated.
[00:38:35 - 00:38:46]	 Right. And an unreadable book in a non-English script with no dictionary attached is very puzzling because we are like linguistic oysters.
[00:38:46 - 00:39:01]	 We secrete around it. We insist it into our metaphysics, but we don't know what it says, which always carries with it the possibility that it says something which would unhinge our conceptions of things,
[00:39:01 - 00:39:12]	 or that its real message is its unsayability. It simply is, it points to the otherness of the nature of information.
[00:39:12 - 00:39:20]	 It's what's called then a limit text, as Finnegan's Wake is a limit text, or...
[00:39:20 - 00:39:22]	 What does that term come from?
[00:39:22 - 00:39:34]	 It's a term of French structuralist criticism, searching the search for limit text. Well, certainly, the Vonage Manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism.
[00:39:34 - 00:39:38]	 No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
[00:39:38 - 00:39:43]	 [laughter]
[00:39:43 - 00:39:44]	 Definitely a literal...
[00:39:44 - 00:39:56]	 It is like a literalizing of the mythical book in H.P. Lovecraft's work, which is the Necronomicon, the writings of the mad era of Alhazrad.
[00:39:56 - 00:40:03]	 And in fact, Colin Wilson, in his book, The Philosopher's Stone, connects the Vonage Manuscript to the Necronomicon.
[00:40:03 - 00:40:05]	 The Shoe Stone, maybe, too?
[00:40:05 - 00:40:10]	 Perhaps the Shoe Stone. Well, the Philosopher's Stone was the Shoe Stone for D, for sure.
[00:40:10 - 00:40:11]	 Right, yeah.
[00:40:11 - 00:40:23]	 It's very interesting, this business of the angelic language in Nocian, because, as I say, 4,000 words were delivered through the Shoe Stone to D.
[00:40:23 - 00:40:37]	 In the 1950s, there was a famous UFO case where a woman who claimed she was in contact with UFOs taught a colonel in the CIA how to be in contact with the same group of saucers.
[00:40:37 - 00:40:46]	 And he was demonstrating this ability for a group of his superiors in a room in the Pentagon, and he asked for a demonstration.
[00:40:46 - 00:40:52]	 He was communicating with them through automatic writing, and they said, "Go to the window and look out."
[00:40:52 - 00:40:58]	 And they all went to the window and looked out, and there was a brilliant golden disk of light cruising past the Pentagon.
[00:40:58 - 00:41:07]	 And they went berserk, called the nearby Air Force Base to see what was on the scopes, the radar had just gone out in the sector, etc., etc.
[00:41:07 - 00:41:24]	 But what was, to tie it in with my point, these messages that this guy was getting on the Swiggy board were signed AFFA, which any scholar of Enochian can tell you is the Enochian word for nothingness, friends.
[00:41:24 - 00:41:28]	 [laughter]
[00:41:28 - 00:41:39]	 So, it's very interesting. Blake spoke with angels. He was the flower of English poetry at a certain point in time.
[00:41:39 - 00:41:47]	 D spoke with angels. He was the flower of English science and mechanics at a certain period.
[00:41:47 - 00:42:06]	 And perhaps the Vonage Manuscript is actually a manuscript that is not encrypted at all, but is simply a book in a non-human language, and therefore there is no Rosetta Stone to it.
[00:42:06 - 00:42:12]	 It is just utterly beyond the pale, as they say in Ireland.
[00:42:12 - 00:42:20]	 Well, I think they should analyze the ink. That's one way. I really think that's a very important thing to do, even if it was written in the 1500s and that was to say.
[00:42:20 - 00:42:24]	 But there would also be a way to locate its origin.
[00:42:24 - 00:42:25]	 That's right.
[00:42:25 - 00:42:27]	 I mean, there's all sorts of approaches.
[00:42:27 - 00:42:41]	 In the summation in this book by Dame Pirio, where she suggests things that can be done, the first thing she suggests, as being totally obvious, is the physical book should be analyzed because this has never been done.
[00:42:41 - 00:42:46]	 This would settle once and for all at least the century of its origin.
[00:42:46 - 00:42:53]	 And, you know, a number of things could be done. The libraries of the world should be searched for other examples of Vonage script.
[00:42:53 - 00:43:01]	 I mean, after all, are we really sure that there's no other extant example of this strange writing?
[00:43:01 - 00:43:17]	 Well, computer analysis, this has been part of the approach of the Santa Cruz group is, first of all, settling on a standard alphabet for Vonage and then cataloging every character and the number of times that occurs and in what combinations with other characters.
[00:43:17 - 00:43:27]	 And the graphics of it as well. Just the patterns that it forms are different. If they did a fully computer graphics on it, I bet that that would give a three dimensional.
[00:43:27 - 00:43:38]	 Yes. Well, none of the illustrations have ever been satisfactorily interpreted. Like what are called the astrological illustrations are only nominally that they could be anything.
[00:43:38 - 00:43:45]	 They just seem to have stars and circles in them. But otherwise, they're not particularly relatable to the sky.
[00:43:45 - 00:44:00]	 The so-called pharmaceutical section, which is all these little canisters and things and these strange little naked women bathing in these in all this plumbing, which is called the pharmaceutical or the anatomical section.
[00:44:00 - 00:44:12]	 You know, could be anything. Could be an obscure form of central German hydrotherapy or, you know, actually the doodlings of a deranged imagination.
[00:44:12 - 00:44:26]	 When you only have one of something, it gets quite dicey placing it in the correct context and cultural history, especially since there was a lot of secrecy in this period.
[00:44:26 - 00:44:38]	 A lot of people running around faking manuscripts and other people's names, using secret cover languages, communicating in secret codes, plotting secret societies.
[00:44:38 - 00:44:48]	 I mean, this was really the breakup of the medieval mind, just like today. All sorts of medieval mentalities.
[00:44:48 - 00:45:05]	 Yes. Well, this hope to establish an alchemical political union in Central Europe was in the context of what followed the 30 years and modern times can just be seen as one of those places where the river of history chose not to run.
[00:45:05 - 00:45:22]	 It was a path not taken. But had things turned out differently, had the King of England been behind it wholeheartedly, had certain things been different, it might have all unraveled somewhat differently.
[00:45:22 - 00:45:31]	 So what do you want to do about it? About the Vonage manuscript? Yeah. Oh, I would like to think about it as an object of thought.
[00:45:31 - 00:45:56]	 I think it's very interesting. It's like thinking about your DNA. One thing I have thought to do about it is there are now what's called psychic archaeologists, which when all else fails, you bring in these people and by various means, esoteric and exoteric, they attempt to divine what story resides in an object.
[00:45:56 - 00:46:10]	 Since the Vonage manuscript is at the Bennecke Rare Book Room at Yale, I'm sure any serious scholar would be allowed to look at it and spend time with it. I've never seen it. I would like to see it.
[00:46:10 - 00:46:26]	 The book which Robert Brumbaugh edited called The Most Mysterious Manuscript, which is now out of date and that his conclusions cannot be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it reproduces a number of the folios from the manuscript.
[00:46:26 - 00:46:41]	 And when you see them, just the pure weirdness of it all is conveyed quite readily. I mean, it is unearthly. It does not fit in the context of late medieval alchemical manuscripts or late medieval any other kind of manuscript.
[00:46:41 - 00:46:47]	 Does it compare other writings in there? It doesn't, but the Imperio's book does.
[00:46:47 - 00:46:58]	 She has many magical alphabets, many different forms of shorthand and specialized note keeping scripts that were current in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
[00:46:58 - 00:47:10]	 And none of them look particularly like Vonage script. Ralph Abraham made the suggestion that Vonage script had some relation to early Brahmanic number systems.
[00:47:10 - 00:47:21]	 He thought perhaps it was a string of numbers that would then have to be decoded from that and then further unencrypted to get sense out of.
[00:47:21 - 00:47:30]	 One thing that might be said about it is perhaps modern people simply overrate the sophistication of our code breaking machinery.
[00:47:30 - 00:47:45]	 Perhaps there are simple ways of encoding material that simply have not occurred to the CIA. And so when the Vonage text is finally broken, it will be trivial the way in which it was encrypted.
[00:47:45 - 00:47:49]	 Trivial, but unexpected in some way.
[00:47:49 - 00:48:04]	 For instance, Ralph made the suggestion to me that grids where you have a grid which has holes in it when laid over a page shows you the parts of the text which are to be dealt with and all the rest of it is noise.
[00:48:04 - 00:48:21]	 If the grid changes from page to page and is completely irrational in the way it changes, then no computer program imaginable could separate the plain text from the noise because it isn't a recursive formula.
[00:48:21 - 00:48:34]	 It's an ever changing variable that could be just whim, the whim of how you made the grids. And this would preclude, I think, any machine oriented effort to decipher it.
[00:48:34 - 00:48:43]	 It would mean that it didn't want to be deciphered. It would mean that the author decided to do it that way. Because no one could have at that time deciphered it either.
[00:48:43 - 00:48:56]	 That's right. Oh, this grid method is known long enough that this may be the key. So that may mean that somewhere there either exist these grids or there exists the instructions for building them.
[00:48:56 - 00:49:08]	 And then out of that, you could extract a portion of Vonage text which would quickly yield to modern methods of decipherment because it is the only part of the message which is really sense.
[00:49:08 - 00:49:17]	 This is a standard method of hiding a message is to embed it in great amounts of garbled material, hours of garbled material.
[00:49:17 - 00:49:20]	 That's what alchemy is. That's what really alchemy is.
[00:49:20 - 00:49:34]	 Yes, and it would have appealed to the alchemical imagination of Dee or Kelly or any of their educated occult contemporaries to use this kind of method. So it's very interesting.
[00:49:34 - 00:49:40]	 What would you say the difference between an alchemist and a shaman is?
[00:49:40 - 00:49:46]	 Well, they have different spheres into which they project themselves. They have different models of the universe.
[00:49:46 - 00:50:08]	 The medieval alchemist had a discontinuous and fleeting, but nevertheless somehow ontologically founded conception of an inside and an outside. He knew that his ontology was naive, but he accepted the existence of an exterior world on some terms.
[00:50:08 - 00:50:11]	 Then it was to be manipulated through the alchemical process.
[00:50:11 - 00:50:28]	 Shaman actually translate into another dimension. They are true trans ecstatic and in that sense, it probably represents a higher resolution of that intent.
[00:50:28 - 00:50:42]	 But my silly odd has traced back alchemists into smithing, into early metallurgy and the metalworking, which was always thought to be a magical task. And it runs together then with alchemy.
[00:50:42 - 00:50:53]	 Alchemy and shamanism are united in the figure of the primitive blacksmith because he is both proto chemists and and shaman.
[00:50:53 - 00:51:04]	 So at that point in time, it's fused. And that's why there is so much stress on metal in primitive shamanism and hanging metal off of your body on smelting metal.
[00:51:04 - 00:51:13]	 It was like magic to turn metal red hot and to change it into weapons and figures and that sort of thing.
[00:51:13 - 00:51:20]	 So the Bonnage manuscript would be really by an alchemist.
[00:51:20 - 00:51:27]	 Well, we don't know what it says. We only know the traditions in which we find it embedded. We assume it's by an alchemist.
[00:51:27 - 00:51:28]	 It could be.
[00:51:28 - 00:51:32]	 But anybody that would do that sort of a thing at that time would be labeled alchemist.
[00:51:32 - 00:51:42]	 Yes, it comes out of an alchemical mentality. It's very mysterious. It's quite an enigma.