Review: Voynich Manuscript
"A Lush Garden With Intriguing Weeds"
As many have painstakingly documented, most (MacKeefe, 2005, asserts "> 95%") of Voynich's astute observations have found their way into the canon of modern pharmaceuticals so I won't be focussing on those. Instead, I've become fascinated by the deviations - some minor, some so grand that they must be jokes, levity in what is after all a rather dry compilation. It's difficult to imagine that a scholar with his devotion and meticulousness could have made such grandly misplaced observations.
It is clear that as a chiild, Voynich derived his fascination with botany and pharmaceuticals from almost daily visits to the distillery of a monastery near his home, which a century later would produce the prototype for what we now know as Jäegermeister.
We have documentation of all the goings-on there via a team of diligent scribes who recorded everything: recipes and procedures, the weather -- and the sudden regular appearance of a genius child with not only an uncanny memory for plants and their properties, but also a steady hand at illustration and writing. Writing experts themselves, the scribes made frequent references to Voynich's tidy but dense shorthand which many could read only with difficulty.
It is obvious that the monks assumed that Voynich would join them, but after several years as a star Novice, his relationship with the organization was dampened by an unfortunate incident with the cantor and a particularly fine specimen of Vorberium asinus "Donkey Root." Many have considered the unusually detailed story and accompanying illustrations about _asinus_ on Folios 152-154 as just another description of a hallucinatory botanical, but this author is sure that it is a cautionary tale which directly refers to the cantor's untimely (but happy, by both accounts) ending. Why would Voynich devote three pages to the description of a plant which has, as he repeatedly specifies, an unusably peculiar combination of physical and psychopharmacological effects?
Reading Voynich's entire oeuvre carefully, there are perhaps two dozen other puzzling anomalies. I'll give just a few examples.
On Folio 74 he gives a concoction of Thalamoidies leaves and goat's milk as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. But the illustration of Thalamoides is the four-leafed variety which did not grow anywhere near his home prefecture. He doesn't specify that the wet climate loving variety is the only effective one, as he does with the _Tripsecales_ gout cure on Folio 55 or the quite complicated rectification materials and methods listed on 188.
As a side note, other contemporary published botanicals repetitiously (or larcenously) list the properties of teas and tinctures of each plant, and this is almost completely absent in Voynich. We can guess that he had studied these and wanted all of his work to be original or perhaps an accompanying text.
An exception is Folio 124 he asserts that all tubers with heart shaped leaves are poisonous. But only 9 folios later he says that Aspergillium root can be boiled to make a delicious tea! Mistake? Exception? Or grim recipe?