Today, I'm going to be discussing the Vonich Manuscript, which is certainly one of the most interesting and has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world.
I will describe the physical manuscript, place it in a historical context, and then discuss my own ideas about the people who may have been its authors.
First of all, the manuscript itself is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from 19 to 28 letters, none of which bearing any relationship to any English or European letter system.
The manuscript is small, 7 by 10 inches, but thick, nearly 170 pages, closely written in a free-running hand, copiously illustrated with bizarre line drawings that have been water-colored.
Drawings of plants, drawings of little naked ladies appearing to take showers in a strange system of plumbing, which has been variously identified as organs of the body or a primitive set of fountains, and astrological drawings, or what have been interpreted as astrological drawings.
But more about all this later, first of all, the known facts of the manuscript are few.
They are that it appears in 1586 that the court of Rudolf II of Bavaria was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period.
This is the same Frederick who collected dwarfs, who collected, had a regiment of giants in his army, he was surrounded by astrologers, he was fascinated by games and codes and music, he was typical of the occult-oriented Protestant intellectual of this period.
Anyway, to his court and among his court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for 300 gold ducats, which translated into modern monetary units is about $14,000, which is an astonishing amount of money to have been paid for a manuscript at that time.
And immediately signals that the emperor must have been highly impressed by this object, if he was willing to put out that kind of money for it.
Accompanying the manuscript is a letter which states that it is a manuscript of the Englishman, Roger Bacon, who flourished in the 13th century,
and who was a noted pre-Copernican astronomer.
Now, at that time in Prague, which was where the court of the emperor was being held,
the reputation of Roger Bacon was at a great height.
The court was a hotbed of alchemy, and among all these alchemists, the reputation of the English monk, Roger Bacon, was held very high.
This is because, two years previously, the sale of the Vonage Manuscript to the emperor being dated to 1586.
Two years previously, John Dee, the great English navigator, astrologer, magician, intelligence agent, occultist...
Wait a minute, I still am back on Frederick.
You mean, what was his relationship to all this?
Because you developed him a little bit more. You say he was typical.
Well, he epitomized the liberated northern European prince, who was a patron of alchemy, gave money to all these printing presses that were printing all this alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy, about which I will say more later, was fomenting at this very period, right under the surface.
And Frederick patronized astrologers, magicians, alchemists.
The reason John Dee had such a long stay at Frederick's court was because his companion, Edward Kelly, claimed to be able to perform the alchemical opus.
And the king, more or less, placed them under house arrest and asked them, you know, to do this for him as a favor, since he had patronized them very heavily.
And when they were unable to, Dee was able to talk his way out of it.
Kelly had been the one who had made the major claims, and he was kept there and actually died in an effort to escape.
He fell when the sheet of the shale roofing on a high parapet of his castle slid way underneath his feet one moonlit night when he was trying to sneak out of the castle.
But I anticipate my story because I think John Dee and Edward Kelly are probably, if they were not the, I certainly think they were the people who sold the emperor the Vonage Manuscript because of circumstantial evidence surrounding their interest in subjects similar to those being covered by the manuscript.
Frederick, Frederick, is the same one, is that the winter summer queen, king and queen, is that Frederick?
No, this, we're talking about a Rudolph the Second, he was succeeded by this guy, Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia, who was also in this mold as a patron of Protestant alchemical aspirations in Central Europe.
But, anyway, the Vonage Manuscript was accompanied by this letter stating that it was a Bacon Manuscript, and the best astrologers and cryptographers in this court looked at it and could make nothing out of it.
And it, and along with a great deal of other weird collections and material that Rudolph had gathered together from all over the world, was passed to various people at his death.
And this book, because it contained botanical illustrations, passed to his botanist, who was a man named Marcisi.
And he had it for 20 years, then it passed to an unnamed party, who had it for 20 years, and by this time we're up to the 1620s.
And then it passed to Athanasius Kirscher, who was one of the great polymaths of the mid-17th century.
He was a Catholic intellectual, an alchemist, a person who experimented with artificial languages.
And before he obtained the Vonage Manuscript, we know of letters of his to various people asking about it.
And, in fact, he was sent small portions of it, reproduced, that he struggled over.
But once he actually had the manuscript in his possession, his diaries are silent about it.
And he says nothing, even though five years after he acquired it, he published a book called A Universal Study of Artificial Languages that nowhere mentions the Vonage Manuscript.
Well, maybe he called it something else, but there's no reference of any sort to anything that he possessed that was like that.
That's right.
And he decided to become a Jesuit in about 1660 and had to give away all of his worldly goods, so he gave his library to this Jesuit seminary south of Rome.
And in among his books was the Vonage Manuscript, and it sat on a shelf in the seminary from 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960, 220, 320 years.
No, no.
Two hundred and eighty years till Alfred Vonage, a New York book dealer, bought the entire library on a trip to Europe in 1912.
And when he got it all back to New York and sorted through it, among all this easily catalogued late Renaissance Italian theological material was this peculiar book, more than peculiar, totally anomalous book.
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, the store of images in the European mind was very limited.
For instance, in speaking of the biological sections of the Vonage Manuscript, 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.
And none of the Vonage images can be directly traced to any of these previously printed or circulated manuscripts.
Likewise, the script itself, it has no antecedents, and it spawned no imitators.
Codes from the early 16th century onward were, in Europe, were all derived from a book called the Stenographica of Johannes Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim,
who was an alchemist of Sponheim, who was, wrote on the encipherment of secret messages.
And he had about three methods, and no military or alchemical or religious or political code was composed by any other means 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.
Trithemian Codes?
The Codes Derivative of Johannes Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim.
Is that a, I mean, is there something, do people research the Trithemian Codes?
Oh, the literature is voluminous on the Trithemian Codes.
Sure, there's a book by Walker called Spiritual and Demonic Magic, From Ficino to Campanella, that covers all of this very well.
Or Francis Yates' book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, although they, neither of them...
Can I talk about Rosicrucians yet?
Not quite yet.
Okay.
First of all, let's see, more about Dee and why I think that Dee is the obvious candidate for being the author or being the purveyor, if not the author, of the Vonage Manuscript.
Dee, first of all, Trithemius' book, The Stenographica, didn't circulate as a printed book until the 1580s.
But it circulated in manuscript form from about 1530 onward.
And when Dee visited the continent as a fairly young man, he records in his diary that he spent three days hand-copying the relevant chapters of a manuscript copy of the Stenographica that he was shown in Paris.
So from very early in his intellectual life, he was in possession of the Trithemian code-making machinery.
The next important event in his life, for my argument, and one of the most puzzling events in the whole history of science generally, is the afternoon in July of 1582 when at Mortlake in his study,
John Dee was distracted by a brilliant light outside his window and stepped outside to receive from a creature he described as the angel Gabriel a polished lens of Lancasterian coal,
which he described in his diary from thenceforward as the Shoe Stone, that's S-H-E-W, the Shoe Stone.
And he was able, by meditating on this stone, to induce visions and dialogues with spirits.
However, this ability seemed to fade in the months after he received the stone.
Until, until a strange personage came into his life in the spring of 1584, and this was Edward Kelly.
Now, Kelly was a much younger man than Dee, and Dee was married to a much younger woman, and Dee.
And Kelly was of the rascal class.
And he, in fact, in one account is described as being earless, having had his ears removed for some petty crime in the provinces.
Anyway, he arrived at Dee's place in Mortlake, pop-eyed and breathless, with a wild story about how he had fallen asleep in a ransacked tomb in a monastery in Wales.
And when he had awakened, beneath him in the tomb had been a vial of red powder, which was the transformative elixir,
and a book in an undecipherable language, which he called the diary, sorry, the Gospel of St. Dunstable,
and said that he had been told around in the village that it was enciphered Welch.
Now, we actually hear no more in anybody's diaries or letters of the Gospel of St. Dunstable.
However, Arthur Dee, the son of John Dee, writing some 30 years later and reminiscing about his father,
said that from the time he met Kelly, he spent a great deal of time trying to unravel a book called,
covered all over with hieroglyphics, and perhaps this is the diary or the Gospel of St. Dunstable,
and perhaps it is, in fact, the Vonich Manuscript, and that these two things are the same thing.
In any case, Kelly's entree to Dee was the undecipherable manuscript and the alchemical potion,
and he quickly, from his conversations with Dee, determined the story about the show stone,
and they set up a seance situation, and Kelly proved himself to be a very adept scryer of the stone.
And from the very first instance, he could describe vast theatrical undertakings and speak all the parts of the characters.
Oh, the show stone is in the British Museum.
You can see it.
There it sits.
They still have it.
Anyway, so then begins a period in Dee's diaries, which were published in 1658 by Marie Cassebone
as a true and faithful relation, a series of diary entries that span the next ten years,
dozens, hundreds of spirit conversations, and the delivering unto Dee and Kelly of an angelologic language
called Enochian, which was composed of non-English letters,
but which computer analysis has recently shown, has a curious grammatical relationship to English.
But over 4,000 words are known in Enochian,
and they were transmitted by the ghostly apparitions, which Kelly channeled to Dee.
And Dee and some of the messages were theological in nature.
Many were political and came to them as they traveled about Europe,
including visiting the court of Rudolf II of Bavaria,
our man who was sold the Vonich manuscript.
And they were the people who were responsible for telling everyone
what a great alchemist Roger Bacon, the English monk, had been.
They laid the public relations groundwork for turning this manuscript at a high premium, I maintain.
In any case, the several groups that have studied the Vonich manuscript
have not looked at the amounts of encrypted material in John Dee's diaries,
of which there's over 92 pages of strings of numbers and letters,
which, if it were found to be encoded in the same way that the Vonich material is encoded,
that would definitely solve the problem of the authorship of the manuscript.
The manuscript, which would have had to have been written in the 13th century,
if it were by Roger Bacon,
definitely shows all the physical signs of being a 16th century manuscript.
I estimate it was done sometime around 1540.
And Dee, this means Kelly perhaps obtained it somewhere.
Otherwise, it would have had to have been done later, as late as the early 1580s.
If Dee actually wrote it, then it should be possible to determine this,
because such large amounts of his encrypted, though still undeciphered, material is on record.
And perhaps now would be the moment to talk about the Rosicrucians
and show how they work into all this.
Dee died an old and broken-hearted man in the run to the reign of James I in 1608,
many years after the events of the sale of the Vonich manuscript occurred.
Why was he broken-hearted?
Well, he had been the court astronomer of Elizabeth,
and the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and the most educated man in England.
When James came to power, James had a total horror
of the whole magical side of the Elizabethan court,
and he just dismissed this guy as a crank.
He didn't want astrologers around him.
He thought it was all creepy.
He was a rationalist.
His anti-Catholicism extended to a mistrust of the entire occult tradition generally.
However, early in his flowering period,
Dee had written a strange book called the Hieroglyphic Mona,
the Monus Hieroglyphicum,
which was 36 quasi-geometrical theorems,
which actually hinted at some kind of mystical doctrine.
And it was just, it's this utterly obscure book.
In the early 1580s, it circulated in manuscripts.
And who we are, you may not know,
but if you're hip enough,
you'll be contacted and asked to join.
And people like Robert Flood,
who was essentially the heir of the Dee tradition
in English occultism and science,
basically put out advertisements saying,
if I ain't good enough, nobody's good enough.
Why haven't you people contacted me?
And the fact of the matter is that
the Rosicrucians, meaning the authors of the Fama and the Confessio,
never contacted anybody.
And their claim was basically fraudulent.
It was that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz,
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
two centuries previously,
that the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz,
a great knight who had gone on the last crusade,
had been discovered,
and that inside there were all these alchemical books
and with a quasi-political overtone
definitely favoring the bohemian court
of Frederick the Elector Palatine,
and that all this should be disseminated as gospel.
It was a kind of alchemical Protestant revival.
But curiously, these texts,
the Fama and the Confessio,
had many doctrinal similarities
to Dee's hieroglyphic monad,
so that it appears
that Dee either was used as the model
for the Rosicrucian conspiracy
by its authors,
persons unnamed,
but I suspect the Czech alchemist
Johan Valentin Andrei
as probably being the person behind this,
because Andrei and Michael Meyer
were people who
definitely were old enough
to have been involved
in Dee's earlier visits
and have then just been
at their intellectual,
at the peak of their intellectual powers,
when the foment that you mentioned
of the Winter Kingdom
and the bringing of Frederick Elector
and his wife
to Prague
as the king and queen
this episode
occurred.
And in fact,
I'll now relate
the Vonich manuscript
back to all of that.
Previously,
I mentioned that
when Rudolf's king,
his court,
fell into disarray,
the Vonich manuscript
passed to his botanist.
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.
Meanwhile,
to the West
in Bohemia,
the Frederick Elector,
who is everything
a Protestant alchemical prince
could hope to be,
young,
brilliant,
scheming,
totally in charge
of his lords,
he weds Elizabeth,
the daughter of James I
of England,
and he takes
the king's decision
to give him
his daughter's hand
in marriage
as a
tacit approval
for his plan
to establish
an alchemical kingdom,
a Protestant alchemical kingdom
in Central Europe.
Actually,
James,
being the conservative
that he was,
had a far more
Machiavellian purpose
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
and was trying
to steer
a neutral course
when he realized
that Frederick
and Elizabeth
had gone off
to Bohemia,
to their court,
to be with Michael Meyer
and Gerhard Dorn
and Johann André
and all these guys
and to patronize
these alchemical presses
and astrology
and all this stuff.
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.
When Rudolf
finally did die,
the princes
of the Northern League
gathered
and chose
his successor
by secret ballot,
Frederick won.
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.
The Mayflower
was landing
in America
in the same year,
but it had nothing
to do with
any of this.
Then the Habsburgs
by that time
had mounted
an army
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' War...
Well, it was
the opening shot
of the Thirty Years' War.
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.
Michael Myers,
one of the last
great synthesizers
of the medieval
alchemical vision,
died in the siege
of the city.
Frederick was killed
and Elizabeth fled.
She lived in
The Hague
for many years.
And so, see,
in that confusion,
the botanist
of Rudolf
held in his house
somewhere in the
suburbs of Prague
the Vonich
manuscript
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
in this period
when Dee
and Kelly
were regaling
Rudolf
with tales
of the alchemical
prowess
of Roger Bacon
that they
ponied up
this manuscript.
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
and this would
explain to some
degree why it
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?
It is true
that Dee
was under
the patronage
of the Earl
of Northumberland
who,
when Henry VIII
broke with Rome
and all of the
English monasteries
were sacked
by the lords
who stuck
with the king
and the Earl
of Northumberland
sacked monasteries
that had large
repositories
of Bacon
material
and Dee's
library at
Mortlake
was known
to have
Baconian
manuscripts
of which
only 41
have survived
into modern
times.
There are 41
Baconian
manuscripts.
Where are
they?
Oh,
they're at the
Bodleian
Museum,
library at
Oxford
and the
British Museum.
They have
all this
Dee
material.
Have you
seen it?
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.
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.
Now,
it is true
that another
angle on
Dee's personality
and some
biographers
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.
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
and because
he could
cast the
finest
horoscope
in Europe
he had
an entree
into all
these
people's
scenes
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
the finest
flower of
the medieval
mind.
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.
What do you
think about
the Bacon
Shakespeare
controversy?
Does that
fit into
that at
all?
Well
it just
shows
how tenuous
our grip
is on
what was
going on
in this
time.
I mean
besides
whether
Bacon
wrote
Shakespeare
then you
have
the
problem
of
things
like
the
Vonage
manuscript
Bacon
visited
Dean.
We're now
talking
about
Francis Bacon
who was
who claimed
actually
Roger Bacon
as
one of his
as one
of his
yes
oh
yes
Queen
Elizabeth
and
Philip
Sidney
and
Francis
Bacon
visited
John
Dee
at
Mortlake
one
afternoon
to see
his
library
because
he
had
more
books
than
anyone
in
England
one
of
the
most
interesting
things
about
the
Vonage
manuscript
is
the
people
whose
careers
have
found
floundered, foundered on
decipherments where people have come forward with very bold claims.
This guy, William Romaine Newbury, Newbold,
in the 1920s, who was a classic scholar, a medievalist, and by all accounts a very brilliant man,
he announced that he had a complete decipherment of the Vonage Manuscript and
said that what it involved was
shorthand strokes,
tiny
strokes that were
components of each letter in the Vonage Manuscript, and that by staring through a magnifying loop
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, and he produced
astonishing
decipherments
in which
he definitely thought that it was a Roger Bacon
manuscript. He decoded passages that dealt with student uprisings at Oxford at Christmastime
1292, when the riot between the Blackfriars and the something or other, 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. 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.
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.
The next person to advance a decipherment of the Vonage Manuscript was Robert S. Brumbaugh, also of Yale University.
And his decipherment is in some ways almost as puzzling as the encryption.
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, Italian, plus Sicilian, plus salt,
et cetera, et cetera.
Robert S. Brumbaugh of Yale. However, when his method was examined by other people attempting to
reproduce the same plain text, they got nowhere, and it can't be taken seriously.
How embarrassing.
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. 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, and my friend Ralph Abraham, who's a mathematician at Santa Cruz, had photo stats of
certain folios of the Vonage Manuscript, 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, here is a photo stat of folio 9b, please circle the word you translated,
and this kind of thing. 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. So that was a Thursday. Ralph
made and 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. 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. The 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 a such a large
amount of code from such an early period and have it resist decipherment. I mean it is just unheard of
that a 16th century manuscript could not be deciphered by modern methods. 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 D'Imperio, and Mary D'Imperio must be a Renaissance
PhD student somewhere who was hired by the government to basically collate everything known about the Vonage Manuscript,
and some interesting things are known. Eventually I think perhaps it will yield, although I'm not sure. For instance,
computer analysis of the handwriting in it shows that two hands are involved. 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? Can we then, by comparing it to the
handwriting of Dee and or Kelly, get a further feeling for their relationship to it?
How do you get a hold of one of these? 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.
And does it cost? 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. 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, since someone went to such great effort to hide what it says, is just the idea of an
unreadable book is a kind of Borgesian concept that is attractive. There must be somewhere an unreadable
book, and perhaps this is it. 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, and that 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. Perhaps it is possible to find that out, and we're just premature in our wish for a
resolution of it. 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. Right. And an unreadable book in a non-English script with no
dictionary attached is very puzzling because we are like linguistic oysters. We secrete around it. We
insist it into our metaphysic, 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, or that its real message is
its unsayability. It simply is, it points to the otherness of the nature of information. It's what's
called then a limit text, as Finnegan's Wake is a limit text, or, or...
What does that term come from? 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. No one can
read it. It is truly an occult book. 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 Al-Hazrad. And in fact, Colin Wilson,
in his book, The Philosopher's Stone, connects the Vonage manuscript to the Necronomicon. The
shoe stone, maybe, too? Perhaps the shoe stone. Well, the Philosopher's Stone was the shoe stone for D,
for sure. It's very interesting, this business of, uh, of, uh, the angelic language, Enochian,
because, as I say, 4,000 words were delivered through the show stone to D. 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. And he was demonstrating
this ability for a group of his superiors in a room in the Pentagon. And he asked for a demonstration.
He was communicating with them through automatic writing. And they said, go to the window and look
out. And they all went to the window and looked out. And there was a brilliant golden disk of light
cruising past the Pentagon. And, uh, they went berserk, uh, called the nearby Air Force Base to see what was
on the scopes. The radar had just gone out in this sector, et cetera, et cetera. But what was,
uh, was, uh, uh, the message that this guy was getting on this Ouija board were signed, AFFA,
AFA, which any scholar of Enochian can tell you is the Enochian word for nothingness, friends.
friends so it's very interesting Blake spoke with angels who he was the flower
of English poetry at a certain point in time Dee spoke with angels he was the
flower in English science and and mechanics at a certain period and
perhaps the Fonich 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 it is just utterly beyond the pale as they say
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 would say
and but there would also be a way to locate its its origin that's right I mean
there's all sorts of approaches in this in the summation in this book by Dean
Perio 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 this would settle once and for all at least the century of its
origin and you know a number of things could be done the libraries of the world
should be searched for other examples of Vonage script I mean after all are we
really sure that there's no other extant example of this strange writing
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 the graphics of it as well just the patterns that it forms the
different if they did a fully computer graphics on it I bet that that would
give it three-dimensional 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 they just seem to have stars and circles in
them but otherwise they're not particularly relatable to the sky the so-called
pharmaceutical section which is all these little canisters and things and these
strange little naked women bathing and these in all this plumbing which is
called the pharmaceutical or the anatomical section you know could be
anything could be an obscure form of central German hydrotherapy or you know
actually the doodlings of a deranged imagination when you only have one of
something it gets quite gets quite dicey placing it in the correct context and
cultural history especially since there was a lot of secrecy in this period a lot of
people running around faking manuscripts and other people's names using secret
cover languages communicating and secret codes plotting secret societies I mean this
was really the break of the medieval mind just like today all sorts of medieval
mentalities 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 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 so what do you want to do that about the
Vonich manuscript yeah oh I would like to think about it it as an object of
thought 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 since the
Vonich manuscript is at the Benecke 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 the book
which Robert Brumbaugh edited called the most mysterious manuscript which is now out of date
and that his conclusions that cannot be taken seriously nevertheless it reproduces a number of
the folios from the manuscript 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 manuscripts compare other writings in there it
doesn't but the Imperio's book does she has many magical alphabets many different forms of
shorthand and specialized note-keeping scripts that were current in Europe throughout the Middle Ages
and none of them look particularly like Vonich script Ralph Abraham made the suggestion that Vonich script
had some relation to early Brahmannic number systems 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
one thing that might be said about it is perhaps modern people simply overrate the sophistication of our code-breaking machinery perhaps there are simple ways of encoding material that simply have not occurred to the CIA and so when the Vonich text is finally broken it will be trivial the way in which it was encrypted trivial but unexpected in some way for instance Ralph made the
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 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 it's an ever-changing variable 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
it would mean that it didn't want to be deciphered it would mean that the author decided to do it that way and because no one could have at that time deciphered it either
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 and then out of that you could extract a portion of Vonich text which would quickly yield to modern methods of decipherment because it is the only part of the message which is really sense this is a standard method of hiding a message is to
embed it in great amounts of garbled material hours of garbled material yes it would have appealed to the alchemical imagination of D or Kelly or any of their educated occult contemporaries to use this kind of method so it's very it's very interesting what would you say the difference between alchemist and shaman is well they have different spheres into which they produce
different spheres into which they project themselves they have different models of the universe the medieval alchemist had a a discontinuous and fleeting but nevertheless somehow ontologically founded conception of an inside and an outside he knew that there his ontology was naive but he accepted the existence of an exterior world on some terms then it was to be manipulated through the alchemical process
shaman actually translate into another dimension they are true trance ecstatics and in that sense it probably probably represents a higher resolution of that intent but merceli odd has traced back alchemists into smithing into early metallurgy and the and metal working which was always thought to be a magical task and it runs
together then with alchemy alchemy alchemy alchemy and shamanism are united in the figure of the primitive blacksmith because he is both proto chemist and shaman 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 it was like magic to turn metal red hot and to change it into weapons and
figures and that sort of figures and that sort of thing so the bonage manuscript would be really by an alchemist 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 it could be anybody that would do that sort of a thing at that time would be labeled yes it comes out of an alchemical mentality
you