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- [00:01]
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- [02:48]
Gary J. Shaw
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. What do exploding bats and amphibious galleons have in common. They're both fascinating features of some of the world's most mysterious manuscripts, as revealed by journalist and author Gary J. Shaw in his book Cryptic. From the hoaxes of Renaissance Spain to John Dee's Angelic Communications, Shaw unravels the allure of text shrouded in secrecy, explores how codes and ciphers reflected power and performance, and investigates the stories of those who created, concealed or forged these intriguing works. He was speaking to Emily.
- [03:25]
Emily Griffet
We are talking all about your book Cryptic, which is all about some of the world's most mysterious manuscripts. So, to start off, can I just ask you, why are we so fascinated by mysteries from history?
- [03:38]
Gary J. Shaw
Well, I mean, I think like all humans, we kind of just can't cope with the idea of losing something, right? The idea that, you know, that something is misplaced even in our own living room, like the remote control for a TV or something, something simple like that just drives people crazy. And so I think history has the same sort of impact on the mind, that there's something that's out there that we really should know, but we don't know anymore. And frankly, we want to know what that is. We want to answer this question and solve this problem. And anything mysterious just grips you as well. You know, they're kind of more unusual or anything strange or unique. It also has that added allure of just trying to say, you know, it grabs you and makes you want to look at it deeper.
- [04:16]
Emily Griffet
And things like manuscripts in particular, they seem to infiltrate our popular culture, that kind of sense of investigating the secrets of a historical manuscript. Why do you think that is?
- [04:27]
Gary J. Shaw
Well, yes, there's something particular about manuscripts. I guess it's maybe the handwritten nature of it, the fact that, you know, you can see a connection there with the person. And there's this element in the media in general, in books, movies, TV shows of this, the idea of the mysterious manuscript and the power it holds. If you see a manuscript like this in a TV show, you know, it's going to be dangerous. It's going to be full of evil magic. And, you know, you see this in all sorts from hundreds of years, even thousands of years back. There's an ancient Egyptian example of the scroll of Thoth in a story that was written around 2000 years that basically describes the dangers of finding this scroll in a tomb and then the horrible things that happened to the individual who took it from the tomb. And we see this, you know, all the way down to TV shows today.
- [05:10]
Emily Griffet
But of course, these things are more than just historical novelties. What do you think we can learn by examining the people behind them as well?
- [05:18]
Gary J. Shaw
Yeah, I'm not a cryptographer, but a lot of the manuscripts I look at involve ciphers and codes. There's elements of artificial languages and made up scripts. But me personally, I'm interested in the history, the context, the individuals involved, and the stories that we can reconstruct surrounding these manuscripts, the circumstances around them. And when you look at it from that perspective, although obviously there's an element of secrecy here, it's not often the main reason that people are creating these mysterious manuscripts. So, I mean, to give you a quick example, I suppose in alchemy, alchemists famous for their hidden knowledge, the secrecy of their craft, it was a divine work, after all, a divine art. And they filled the books with mysterious symbols. Sometimes they spread out the information that might give you the real clues to what they're talking about across many different pages. But all of this had an extra element of bringing attention to itself, which is kind of the opposite of secrecy because, you know, you think secrecy, I'm trying to hide something. We don't want people to understand this. But these are cases where people have published books in this case, and actually it brings attention to the author's knowledge because it shows you're a member of this community. If you're using the symbols correctly, other alchemists will see this and go, oh, right, okay, he knows what he's talking about here. And so you can see it as a sort of performance of secrecy. It's using the idea of a mysterious manuscript, all the secrets and ciphers around all of that, to actually bring attention to itself.
- [06:47]
Emily Griffet
There is an alchemist that we are going to come on to talk about, one that you've mentioned in your book. So I think maybe, though, we should start where your book begins. And I'm sure as we pass through time, we're going to find out more about the reasons behind why people concealed their knowledge and what they wish to hide. So let's start with Hildegard of Bingham, where your book starts off. What was the purpose of hiding knowledge for this medieval nun?
- [07:13]
Gary J. Shaw
Hildegard's probably one of the more famous people I discuss in the book. She's very famous today for her music, for her visionary writings. But, yeah, much less well known is the fact that she created what she called her unknown language and unknown letters. And, yeah, why she did this is still a mystery. She made these in around about the 1150s. The language itself only survives to us in a couple of manuscripts. Now, there's about 10, 11 nouns of this invented language that she just made up, it seems, or to her came from God, came from the divine. And this Alphabet as well that she also created and how she used them is the big debate here. Was this use used as a sort of secret way of communication between her and the nuns in her convent, because she was running a convent at this time? Are there are other purposes here? And the problem is that there are very, very limited examples of her using it in daily life. So we can't really reconstruct the context around what she was doing with it. For example, the invented language that she created, this is only known to have been used, or in the surviving evidences, used in a song that she wrote, which was written for the consecration of a church. So, you know, it doesn't give us much to go on other than it seems that this church, you know, if this song was performed at the consecration of a church, this was outside of her convent and so among people outside her community of nuns. So it kind of adds to this idea that it wasn't just a secret for people in the know, people within the community, as to why she was doing it. That's the big question there. And there's a lot of different explanations. Right. Some people have said it could be talking in tongues, although there's no evidence in any of the recorded data about her life that she ever did this. Some people said it, that it's maybe the language of Adam, so the first language at the beginning of time, the language of creation that had come to her through divine visions. Another one that I think is quite intriguing is that it was a sort of ornamentation that you find people at the time, people composing songs and poetry as well, using Greek as a symbol of the knowledge and high learning, and adding it into the Latin songs and writings as a sort of ornamentation. And Hildegard didn't know Greek, we know that. But she might have then peppered these words in her songs in the similar way that people were doing that with Greek, to highlight her special connection with the divine, to give these songs maybe an extra sort of power, a sort of stamp of her knowledge and authority, perhaps. It's very strange.
- [09:42]
Emily Griffet
That seems so bizarre and it'd be so intriguing to find out more about why. Obviously, conundrum that might be slightly lost to us now. Another German religious figure we should talk about is Johannes Trithemius. He has a slightly different reputation in his contemporary era. How and why did he hide his knowledge in plain sight?
- [10:03]
Gary J. Shaw
So Trithemiusi is a fascinating character. Again, just because he seems to love himself a fair amount, I'd say, from his writings and his letters, he seemed to want to bring attention to his knowledge and how amazing he was. He was famous for working his monks to the bone. He was in charge of a monastery and, you know, basically he believed that lazy monks shouldn't eat. And so you can picture these monks working for him, just endlessly copying books because he was obsessed with creating a fabulous, amazing library. He was also interested in experimenting, too, with ideas. And one of these things he did was try to create secret writing systems, ways of communicating information to people hundreds of miles away in a way that wouldn't be detected. And so he started working on multiple volumes of a book he calls Steganographia, which is connected with kind of concealed writing. It sounds quite simple today, but was very important for its time. You know, he simply hid the letters of words within longer sentences. A very simple example might be that, you know, you were only supposed to read the first letter of each word. And so he did this normally through hiding it in what looked like magical spells. And this is what really brought him into, well, trouble with everybody at the time, because it was quite clear what he was doing. He wasn't really hiding the idea that he was pretending to be creating magic spells here, that these were just used for hiding his messages. But people thought he was dabbling in dark magic, necromancy and all of this. And to be fair, he was on the side. Not in this case, but, you know, in the rest of his life he was. But people started becoming afraid of this work. They would look at his writings, these weird words in which he was hiding his messages, and think this was demon magic. And so he got a reputation as a conjurer of demons, which is a reputation he still has today.
- [11:43]
Emily Griffet
This is so different from somebody like John Dee, who's somebody else you cover. He's an English polymath. He's not communicating, or not believed to be communicating with demons. He instead is looking at angels. Why and how did he hope to do this?
- [11:57]
Gary J. Shaw
So, yeah, Dee is one of these kind of celebrities of the Elizabethan age. You know, he is a polymath, he's an expert in mathematics. He was involved in discussions connected with navigation and discovering the Northwest Passage through North America. He was the Queen's astrologer. But, yeah, he had this interest in contacting angels. And this is because he felt that he'd reached the limits, really, of what he could achieve through the means at his disposal. He wanted to understand everything. He was one of these guys, and he was like, well, if I can't go further with the information I have at my disposal, the only good thing I can do is contact the divine. And so this meant contacting angels for him. Now, he couldn't do this himself, or, you know, he didn't have this ability that Elder Zebel did. And so he did this by hiring scryers, these individuals that had this ability to contact the supernatural. And so he'd have to go through various rituals. There was particular clothing and the room, the right table to be used, the right seal, the right seeing stone that he would use. And so Dee would sit there on one side of the table, and he would have the scryer with him. And the scryer was the one who could see the angels, the one who would be speaking with the angels, hearing the communication. And then he would relate all of this to Dee, who would be sitting there scribbling it all down as fast as he possibly could in these set of diaries, which we call angel diaries now. And so he was doing this in a way to try to contact the most important angels, to get information from them, because many people at this time believed the apocalypse was coming, that it was the end of times. And so Dee was hoping to guide England through this process. He was doing this because he wanted to help everybody, really. And from his perspective, through the scrya, the angels were giving him books of knowledge, secrets that might help him unlock the secrets of the cosmos. And this was coming to him in unusual ways. And this is where the more mysterious, if that wasn't mysterious enough, the more mysterious angle comes in, in that he starts receiving, through the scryer, the language of the angels. It was the language that was used to name all things at the beginning of time. So when the angels started giving him this, this was great. This was exactly what he wanted. And at the same time, they started giving him their Alphabet as well, the celestial Alphabet, which he had to learn, again, just very carefully rewriting the symbols and trying to match up the sounds with English sounds as well. And of course, all of this is coming through the scryer. There's different ways of interpreting what was happening here. Was it simply a con, or did Edward Kelly, who was the main scryer he was working with, actually believe himself? Was he in a sort of trance? Was he putting himself in this situation and speaking in this way more realistically? It was probably a con because, as I say, Dee wanted this information, and Kelly was basically feeding him exactly what he wanted to hear.
- [14:36]
Emily Griffet
I'm curious, what did the celestial language actually look like?
- [14:40]
Gary J. Shaw
I mean, the symbols themselves seem to get inspiration from existing alphabets, but in terms of the words themselves, the way they sound, it's an interesting thing because there's two separate phases here. And so the first phase of angelic language that Dee gets from Kelly sounds a lot like words just spoken off the top of the head. Whereas the later versions D is receiving, the angels had dictated these huge grids full of letters to D. And now at the later stages, the angels are supposed to be pointing at particular squares in this grid or in these different grids, and these would each have letters in them. So it would create these words again as if they are, you know, picked at random from a grid. And so some of these are quite hard to pronounce because they just look like a bunch of letters thrown together. And so this confused D quite a lot because he was a careful scholar, he was well educated, he was again interested in helping people. And to do this he had to understand this perfectly. So every time these things didn't really make a lot of sense to him, he would ask more questions and maybe sometimes like say, really? What do you mean questioning the angels? Kind of saying, can you tell me this again? Are you sure about this? Because yeah, he was trying to understand the grammar, which didn't always make a lot of sense. So, yeah, there's different phases here. And again, I think it adds up to this idea that Kelly was using different methods to constantly invent words.
- [16:02]
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- [17:14]
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- [18:13]
Emily Griffet
John Dee wasn't the only one of your people behind these manuscripts in your book that was focused on widening communication for the greater good of society. Mathematician Thomas Harriot. His work was almost intended for this greater good too. Why could his works be considered mysterious then? Could you tell us about his works?
- [18:34]
Gary J. Shaw
So Thomas Harriot is one of the examples here where I wanted to highlight that, you know, sometimes something might look mysterious and be classed as a mysterious script, but in the end it's actually more of a functional thing. It wasn't produced to be mysterious, but at various points it's been interpreted that way. And so Thomas Harriot is another fascinating person because he isn't that well known even today still. I mean, he did a lot, but he never really published much, which I think has impacted how well he's known. Now today he is best known, I suppose, for his mathematical work and as an astronomer. But in his early life, at the beginning of his career, he was involved in, well, teaching sailors working for Walter Raleigh how to sail their ships to the New World. And so it was his navigational knowledge through his mathematics that was being exploited at the beginning by Raleigh and his mission to the New World. But part of this then became that Raleigh wanted to send Harriet to these colonies he was going to set up at Roanoke. And basically Harriet was there to try to understand the language of the Algonquin, to kind of write this down, to communicate with them and learn as much as he could about this territory that Raleigh was trying to settle in. So Harriot, being a mathematician, he had a very particular way about going about this. And he realised, of course, that, you know, the Alphabet doesn't really quite often reflect the sound of English words. You know, there are different pronunciations of the letter A depending on the word it might appear in, for example. And so if he's trying to be accurate about how he recorded the sounds of the people he was going to meet in the New World, he needed a new system to do this. And so he started trying to create what he called a universal Alphabet, a way that would allow him to accurately represent the sounds of the Algonquin and other peoples he might meet so that we could properly learn the ways of communicating. Now, he did this, he wrote this out, but knowledge of him doing this was lost later on. It wasn't a really big famous thing that he did. And so when people started coming across this, first of all in the late 19th century and in the 20th century, people were trying to figure out what this was. Initially, it wasn't connected with Harriet, and people were just looking at these weird symbols. And then, I think in the 1960s, an Oxford scholar started looking at examples in, I think it was the British Library initially, and finding all these kind of squiggles across Harriet's notes and saying, well, what is this? She called it Harriet's secret script. And so this kind of begins this kind of attempt to try to understand what was going on here. And so over the course of decades, people started finding more examples of these squiggles across his notes or in people who worked with him, their notes as well. And initially it was thought perhaps this was a way of him writing down alchemical recipes or experiments like this in a way that others couldn't read. And so it had this kind of, I guess, mystique around it because of this. But in the end, as. As evidence was accumulated, it basically became clear that this wasn't anything to do with a sort of mystical thing. It wasn't him using codes and ciphers to kind of purposely hide their secrets in this way. He was just playing with this script that he'd invented decades earlier during these missions to North America.
- [21:35]
Emily Griffet
So that's an example there where we've got a genuine effort to help and try and broaden communication that's been considered mysterious since. But then we've got another example where you've got something that's more of a hoax, still intended to help people, but it is mysterious in its nature from the start. Could you tell us about the Terpiana Tower parchment?
- [21:57]
Gary J. Shaw
So I wanted to look at examples of mysterious manuscripts that have been used as hoaxes, because this is also a big element of this Genre, let's say, of writing. People in the past were just as interested as we are today in mysterious manuscripts, and you can use them in different ways. Some people use them to get rich exploiting this interest to make fake manuscripts or to try and sell to rich collectors in particular. But in other cases, people were using this interest to kind of help people as well. And so the Turpiana Tower parchment is an interesting example because it's from Granada. Basically, what was going on in Granada is that you had the Spanish takeover again from Muslim rule in 1492 in Granada. And this started a series of decades of horrible mistreatment of the Arab population, the Muslim population. Eventually, their language was banned, their clothing was banned, their customs were banned as well. And if you didn't convert to Christianity, there was the chance of exile or even execution. And so, basically, at some point, they were expanding the cathedral there in Granada, and this was on the spot where the Grand Mosque had been. And they were demolishing the minaret. And as they were pulling the minaret apart, they found a lead box in the rubble. And, okay, this was surprising. People were like, okay, what's this all about? So they opened it, and inside there was various strange, interesting artifacts and including a parchment. And so the church was like, okay, what is this? The churchmen took it back, decided to look at this, gathered around, and they found what looked like an old, ancient parchment with writing in Arabic and Latin and two huge grids of brown and red writing. Each grid had one letter alternating in colour. And so this was very strange. Now, they couldn't really read that because that was still encoded. They couldn't really read the Arabic very well, but they could look at the Latin. And the Latin there was kind of suggesting to them that these were all relics in this box from the first century, connected with St. John. And the text itself was an apocalyptic prophecy of St. John as well. And so, wow, they were thinking, this is amazing. Great, we need to understand more about this. This is a great find. So basically, to understand the Arabic, they gave it to two individuals who were members of the Morisco community. Moriscos were Muslims who had converted to Christianity during this tumultuous time. And so they used their expertise to try to understand the Arabic, which revealed this apocalyptic text. And also they managed to use the clues in the text to decode the grid as well, so that basically you were supposed to read every red letter and then every brown letter. So it was a simple sequence thing, really. And so this helped create this picture of what actually revealed that in fact, the first Christians in Spain were speakers of Arabic. And so this was interesting to the people at the time. It was like, wow, okay, right. We didn't realize that Arabic speakers were in Spain in the first century. Okay. And then the text was also going on to say that these relics were hidden from the Moors, so the Muslims that had taken over in Spain. But then people started looking at this in more detail. Specialists got involved. Obviously this was a major discovery. And they started looking at it and thinking, this doesn't really add up. You know, when you look at the text dotted in there, there's kind of modern Spanish, 16th century Spanish in there. It seems to have been written with a quill, which we don't think they had in the first century. Again, they're talking about people speaking in Arabic in Spain at this point, but we don't think there was any Arabic speakers at that time there. They talk about the Moors, but as far as where we are, this is pre Islam. So none of this makes sense. And so it was immediately regarded as a hoax. And this got even bigger a few years later on when people were digging around on nearby Valparaiso Hill in Granada and they started finding these lead books, so pieces of lead inscribed with writing that then added to this story, added more about the history of Arabic speakers in Spain, the first century, the saints, etc, their presence, early Christianity in Spain. And again, the people in Granada were very excited about this. But the Vatican ultimately decided that this too was a hoax, folks. And so basically he was kind of left alone from that point. But what was the point of all of this? Again, the idea seems to have been that, well, as I say, the Arabic community, the Muslim community in Spain at this point have been maltreated, mistreated, they were trying to keep their position in society. And so it seems to have been an attempt by the Moriscos to show the importance of the Arabic speaking communities, their early presence in Spain, to prove this to the Christians who were now in charge and that they should belong there because they were constantly under this threat of expulsion. And so I think they were hoping that this would change the minds of the Christian clergy, perhaps be more receptive to the Arabic speakers and their customs and their language, etc. And you know, not exile them. In the end, unfortunately, this all failed because in the end there was the mass expulsion. But it's a hoax. In the end, it seems to have been a hoax. It tries to look like it's first century, but it's trying too hard in a way. You know, it Becomes so archaic in its writing in places that it's almost impossible to read. And this is where people's suspicions also arise that probably one of the people who was involved in translating it is thought to have been involved in the hoax itself, because they think that only someone who was involved in the hoax could have actually decoded and translated this, because it makes so little sense.
- [27:19]
Emily Griffet
I mean, that's wonderfully niche knowledge. What a funny story. To be both involved and the decipherer at the same time. Way to worm yourself in from this hoax, which obviously has more serious implications. We should turn to Giovanni Fontana. What can we say about him? He's an inventor, he's a bit of a prankster. He's fascinated by ciphers. His manuscript's got almost these lightly humorous, I don't know if humorous is the right word to say elements. How do all these combine in his mysterious manuscript?
- [27:52]
Gary J. Shaw
So, yeah, Giovanni Fontana, I think, is my favorite person in the book. He's very little known. I don't think he's. He's got the attention he deserved. Hopefully that will change. So, yeah, born around 1395 in Venice and then went to Padova, not too far away, 35km or so. Went to university and studied there. Now what we see from him from the bits of information we have, is yes, he's a bit of a prankster, Likes to have fun with his creations. Certainly an inventive personality, interested in engineering. He was learning and training to be a doctor, so his main income came from being a physician. But at the side, like many people of the time, he was interested in basically everything. You can imagine him in Padova playing around with these experiments all throughout the city. Probably getting a lot of attention because he liked to use gunpowder and things like this, explosive rockets and things, for example, to measure distance. And he didn't do this in a simple way. He liked to dress up his creations in creative manners. So for example, he likes to measure the speed at which lead passes through water. And he could have done this just with a piece of lead, but he actually dressed it up to look like a fish, just because he thought that would be fun. The same thing with traveling through the air. He dresses up a little rocket to look like a bird. And he also, for land, he dresses up what looks like a little. Well, it's a rabbit, basically, on what looks like a sort of late medieval skateboard with a rocket where he launches it down the street. So this kind of gives you an insight into him there. And yeah, the prankster side of him as well, there's the. The fun story that he was being visited by a monk at one point, and so he wanted to play a game trick, this monk, scare him, so he got some furry leather and some bat wings and some bits of glass to put into as the eyes, and he put this all together to create what looked like a little demon, stuffed it with gunpowder, and then when the monk entered the room, he lit it, threw this into a barrel full of water, so that when the monk came in, he saw this kind of explosive, writhing beast in the water, in the barrel with the wings flapping everywhere. And the monk freaked out, panicked, and was like, oh, my God, there's a demon in front of me. What's happening? And of course, Fontana is standing there laughing his head off. Now, for Fontanari, this was fun for him because he believed this is great, the most educated, highly educated people can be tricked through engineering. He wanted to use his knowledge, his genius, to recreate supernatural things to show that it could be done by people. So this is part of his personality. He was still a believer, he was still a Christian, but he still also liked to play around with all of this. So that gives you a bit of an insight into what his character is like. In the 1420s, he started writing a book, a manuscript, called the Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, the Book of the Instruments of War. Although this is a modern title for it, the original title is missing, and inside it's full of these inventions, mostly connected with war first, so there's like an amphibious galleon, there's a fortress cinder, which is multiple levels, and the weapons that are pointing out the windows are set to automatically reload, which is quite clever. He has a massive cannon, which was meant to fire into water so that it would destabilize ships that might be coming to attack a castle. But then he has other inventions, like fountains and labyrinths and lock picks, a system for walking on a tightrope to help you balance, Although he makes a note saying that, you know, he hasn't tried this one out yet. He has a chair on wheels, which is meant to go faster than horses, especially downhill, which I guess you could imagine him again in Padava, rocketing down a hill in this kind of creation of his own. But what adds to the mystery here is that he has written most of the text, some of it in Latin, but most of the text in a cipher that he created himself. And this cipher is quite ingenious, it's simple in its execution, it's based around circles, and of those circles you draw a line or a squiggly line and this represents the sounds. It's effectively a substitution cipher where one symbol represents a letter. So it's very simple, easy to break, but it shows creativity. And, you know, it's one of these areas where you got to look a bit deeper because the first thing you could say is, well, he's doing this for secrecy. He's trying to hide his creations or the mechanisms of them, because he was probably producing this book to get a patron, someone to support him and hire him, give him some money. But it's so easy to crack and easy to break. And knowing his personality, it's probably more to it, right? He's dressing up his words the same way he dresses up his creations to make it look more appealing. It's a bit of a game that you can play with the reader. It shows his ingenuity as well. And we also have to remember that this is a time when it's the early 15th century in Northern Italy, that ciphers were becoming quite popular, particularly in diplomacy and intelligence gathering among the elite. And so it shows off his knowledge. He's created his own cipher at this point when it's becoming kind of in vogue. You can see how a potential painter would be looking at this, going, wow, you know, not just has he got all these creations, he can even dress up his writing to look impressive as well. So this is pretty cool. On top of all that too, just to quickly mention, he liked to scare people as well, generally with his other inventions. You know, his book is filled with like rocket propelled fire breathing witches or you know, skeletons that rise from the dead and a magic lantern that was meant to project a witch, I think, onto a wall to scare people as well. So all of this is kind of showmanship, you know. So I think you can see his cipher in this same category, kind of showing his ingenuity, but being a game, playing a bit of fun with the reader, but having the also the benefit of adding secrecy as well.
- [33:01]
Emily Griffet
I can only imagine what it must have been like to live in Padva at this time. He's either this enigmatic genius who's your best friend, or he's your worst nightmare as he shoots down the streets. While we're talking about this engineering, we should talk about a scientist that you cover. Johannes Hecius. And he enciphered his travel writings. How did his motivations for this differ?
- [33:23]
Gary J. Shaw
So Hecius is another one of these, I guess, not as well known as he should be. Characters from history as well. He trained as A doctor, he's from the Netherlands, but he spent most of his life in Italy. So Hecius had a very strong temper. You could say he was kind of all over the place with his kind of mood. And he gets into trouble at various points in his life. So he's quite a fiery person. And this is kind of how his career begins, in fact. So he's working as a doctor in this small town in Italy and he gets into a fight with the local apothecary. The local apothecary is basically trying to, I guess, rip people off slightly by not using the ingredients he's been told to use for concoctions to help cure people. He wants to use expensive herbs and so forth. And Hecius wasn't interested in this. Hecius was interested in using the most simple materials, simple herbs to help people. And so there was already a fight going on here. And at one point this apothecary comes across Hecius and basically starts throwing rocks at him. It leads to a massive fight between the two of them and ultimately the apothecary is killed. Hecias seems to have accidentally killed him. There was no sign that he tried to murder him. It's more that this fight got so tough that eventually, yeah, it just led to this. And 15 days later, the apothecary died. Hecius is in prison in Rome at this point as a result. But he gets saved by this young noble, a guy called Federico Ceci. And Ceci was a rich guy, the son of a noble, and he seems to have been a bit of a fan of Hecius. Hecius had got a bit of a name for himself because of his talents as a doctor, and also some of the writings he'd been been doing as well, his manuscripts. And so basically Ceci saves him, uses his connection, gets Hecius out of prison and brings him into his household. He becomes a sort of living scholar. And then this begins this important phase here where we get the foundation of the Linsean Academy, the Academy of the Lynxes. And this is a sort of scientific society that's set up by the noble Ceci and his friends, including Hecius, to investigate nature, to investigate the cosmos, to understand everything they possibly could. And they each get specialisms, things they're supposed to research and communicate with the others. But it's also got elements of a bit of a secret society going on too, because they get secret names. Hecius is known as Illuminatus, for example. They get special rings, they have to take oaths of chastity when they join the society. And so there are all these kind of rules surrounding it, but on top of all of that, they communicate in a cipher that they've created of themselves. And so they're sending these letters between each other in cipher. And this kind of starts raising concerns from Ceci's family, the Duke of Aquasparta, who's like, who are these guys that his son is hanging out with? What are they up to? Why are they using ciphers to communicate? Why are they having these meetings in secret? What's going on? And so he decides that he has to try to basically get rid of Hecius. And this happens at the very, very beginning of the 17th century. Hecius is meant to be heading home, leaving Italy to pick up his inheritance because his father has died. And this is the opportunity they use to basically make sure that he never comes back. So Ceci's father starts badmouthing Hecius across Italy, particularly to the Church authorities, and basically gets him accused of all sorts of things, heretical behaviours. So he can't come back, basically, is the point. So this starts this period of travel for Hecius. He uses it to the best of his advantage because he can't go back to his home in Italy, where his heart wants to be. So he just travels around northern Europe from place to place, making notes, writing down his observations. And like, from a simple worm or a bird or a beetle to a bit where he starts observing the skies and the stars and starts writing about the supernova that was going on at the time when he was in Prague. And so he starts filling these notebooks with drawings and writings. And in particular, there's a few that he starts writing in cypher as well, because he wants to send these back to Italy, to Caesi in Rome. So he starts writing out these full notebooks in cypher, some in the cipher they created, others where he just uses Arabic, but he's writing Latin, but using Arabic script or Syriac script as well. So he's using these different methods to hide what his observations are. And a few of these notebooks existed that were sent back and kept by SESE in his library in Rome. And, you know, one of them is connected with alchemy and alchemical instruments and things like this. The other one is mainly just descriptions of cures. It seems to have medical notes from things he'd been learning or reading as he traveled. So it's just a whole notebook full of these notes on cures and ailments. And who told him this and who said that this worked and what you could do in this case or in this case. So it's interesting, because why he wanted to keep it enciphered, I mean, the one hand does seem to be that he just didn't want people who might intercept his notebooks learning his secrets. On the other hand, it shows membership of a community that, you know, it emphasizes these bonds between this group because only they could read it.
- [38:06]
Emily Griffet
Now, right at the top of our conversation, you mentioned alchemists. Following on from talking about hecias, did the alchemist you mention in your book, Michael Meyer, did he have similar reasons for hiding his knowledge?
- [38:19]
Gary J. Shaw
Michael Meyer, I characterised him, I guess, as unlucky because he travelled all over the place looking for patrons, looking for income, and this never really came. So he spent his entire life attempting this, never quite managing it. But along the way he tried his best to get noticed. And one way he did this was to write books. And so his particular interest was the way that he believed alchemical knowledge was hidden in ancient myths. And so he starts trying to deconstruct ancient Greek myths, ancient Egyptian myths, trying to figure out how can they be interpreted through an alchemical lens. And so he starts writing these manuscripts, but also books on these topics, and they're filled with this interesting imagery, scenes that can be interpreted through an alchemical lens. He would sometimes write in a cipher as well. And so he was very much a big part of this explosion of alchemy at this time and trying to fit into this community. So he was very obsessed with it and he very much wanted to show others that he knew what he was talking about by using the kind of same symbols and knowledge and allegories etc that were common among alchemists at this time. But sadly, he never really made it. You know, he never really got the patronage he desperately wanted until he died. Shortly after his death, a lecturer came to his house, basically inviting him. I think it was the King of Sweden inviting him to work for him as his alchemist, which would have involved a great annual salary, free food, free accommodation. Unfortunately, he was dead by this point. But he would have been overjoyed, I'm sure, to have received that letter.
- [39:46]
Emily Griffet
That's so unlucky. What a shame for him. We've spoken about quite a few different manuscripts, but we need to come on to what is arguably the world's most mysterious manuscript, the one that our listeners may recognise the name of, and that's the Voynich Manuscript. Just so we can picture it, what would our listeners find if they were to leaf through its pages?
- [40:08]
Gary J. Shaw
The Voynich Manuscript is famously called the world's most mysterious manuscript. It's quite small. It's about the size of a paperback, really, 240 vellum pages. And if you picked it up and started flicking through it, it basically, the first biggest section is dedicated to plants, so it's called the herbal section. You'll see all these interesting plants, quite unusual ones, often with their roots included as well. There seems to be an unusual emphasis on the roots, which may be a clue to what is going on here. Then there's a sections about cosmology, astronomy, astrology, astrological, zodiacal signs are in there. There is a section dedicated to bathing, where you see basically naked women in green and blue water, sometimes with unusual creatures around them. There's a section that looks like it's, you know, showing the concoctions for recipes. So you see again, small plants and, like, pots which, you know, perhaps you could imagine putting them in to create these recipes. And then a section which is just simply lines of text introduced by stars, which again, is interpreted as recipes as well. But when you looked a bit closer, okay, you might be like, okay, this is all a bit weird. What's all these illustrations about? If you look closer, then you find that's actually an unreadable script, a completely unique written script that nobody can read and is still unreadable today. It's a bit familiar in places. There are elements of it that you could recognize, like the symbols that look like nines, for example, or symbol that looks like a P connected up by the top of the loop, or an X with a loop on top of it. So it looks familiar enough. But it is a unique script and people have been trying to figure out what this is all about. What could it be? Why does this exist?
- [41:43]
Emily Griffet
I'm not sure we're going to have time to completely unravel the entire mystery today, given how it's puzzled so many for so long. But what would you say is the purpose of this manuscript, in your mind, at least?
- [41:55]
Gary J. Shaw
Sure, sure. I mean, so basically it could be a cipher or code, or it could be an artificial language and script, or it could be a hoax. These are the main categories it could possibly be. Now, if someone forced me to make a choice around that, again, acknowledging the lack of knowledge about it, the kind of holes in our evidence, the problems with understanding it. From the research I did for this book about mysterious manuscripts, I personally feel it would have to fall into the hoax category. And for me, there are certain clues to that. For example, we now know through radiocarbon dating that it was created during the early 15th century, which places it at an interesting point for it to be made. There are clues in the illustrations, the style of them, but particularly little hints like the Merlins and the fortifications of a little castle that suggest northern Italy as the location it was created. So if you put northern Italy together with the early 15th century date, you start having problems in that northern Italy at this point. We talked about Fontana earlier, he was creating ciphers. But ciphers at this time were quite simple, you know, they weren't that hard to break. And yet the Voynich one, if it is a cipher, even great cryptological minds have not broken it yet, even with the great computing power of today as well. So that's a bit of a warning sign. The craze for artificial languages and the creation of that was only really in the 17th century, when scholars started realising that Latin wasn't working for them anymore. To communicate their discoveries, they had to find new methods. Hildegard created one much earlier, but she was a bit unusual for this. And so it doesn't really fit the kind of artificial language craze either. We can say that during the time in the early 15th century in Northern Italy, there was a bit of an interest in the time, particularly among the universities in Bologna and Padova, for medicinal bathing, therapeutic bathing. So the fact there's a bathing section in there fits neatly with that. It's kind of trendy thing for the time that the elite were interested in. But also this kind of botanical section as well was also quite trendy at this era as well. Particularly it looks very similar to what we call alchemical herbal manuscript that were also produced at this time in northern Italy. So you kind of put these things together and then you add in that this was also a time of a great explosion of interesting book collecting, particularly among the elite who were trying to create these fabulous libraries. Often they didn't even bother reading these books. It didn't matter what was in the books or the contents, as long as they were unique or they looked interesting. And so the uniqueness, the specialness added status to your library. So there's a few little clues there. I think all that adds up. And I've also, in my chapter about hoaxes, you see throughout history that people were just as interested in ripping people off in the past as they are today. And so you can see how some enterprising scribes, because a great study from 2020 by Lisa Fagan Davis showed that there was five scribes who worked on the manuscript. If you can Imagine that perhaps they worked together to produce this, maybe using inspiration from materials in a bookstore or maybe a bookseller's in northern Italy. The great cost of producing a manuscript, up to 75% is normally hiring the scribes. And so they would keep costs down. They worked on it together to produce it, probably invented this script. So I can imagine a situation where this was produced to intrigue someone, maybe a rich physician, who might expect, like, because it looks like it could be a medical compendium, you know, connected with herbal recipes, particularly with bathing, therapeutic bathing that would help people and, as I say, was trendy at the time, but they wouldn't be able to read it. But again, this is where it's important that the script looks like potentially it could be cracked. It takes certainly inspiration from North Italian ciphers at this time. There are symbols that you see that look familiar. So I can imagine, you can imagine someone picking up, going, okay, ciphers, that's interesting. Bit trendy bathing. Okay, that's also interesting, too. Herbal sectional. What can I learn from this? Oh, but I can't read it, but it looks familiar enough. I bet if I spend enough time on this, I'll be able to crack it and then it's in your library because you've bought it by that point. So to me, that's a sensible explanation for it. But I want to emphasize that I love the Voynich Mystery. I would love it to be, you know, some ingenious cipher from the past that kind of breaks all of our knowledge and rules of that time, or, you know, again, an ingenious early created language and script that, again, is before this craze. But unfortunately, I think the evidence points towards this hoax idea, and I hope I'm wrong. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that.
- [46:12]
Emily Griffet
As a final question for you, if you had to pick your favourite mysterious manuscript, either from the ones that you've mentioned, your book, the ones you've mentioned today, or some that had to be left on the cutting room floor, what would it be?
- [46:26]
Gary J. Shaw
Hmm, interesting question. I mean, obviously I really love the Voynich Mystery, the Voynich Manuscript. I really enjoy Giovanni Fontana and trying to bring more attention to his work. In particular, as far as Wayburn, that's not a featured manuscript that I wish I could have looked at in more detail. There is a manuscript called the Libro del Tesoro, produced, it seems, in Spain, 15th century, an alchemical manuscript, again, full of ciphers. And basically, this is a fun hoax one because, you know, it's. It's A good example of someone who is trying to rip someone off. So, but it's 15th century at this time. The Archbishop of Toledo was particularly interested in alchemy. And this book is from that period and that time, that place, and it looks like it was produced specifically to try and get his attention. So it's made to look like a manuscript from much earlier time, probably from the 13th century. Everything about it screams 13th century, the way it's been designed, the way it's written, the content the people mentioned. But at the same time, to academics looking at it, it actually screams 15th century, that it was made then. And there's fun little hints in there that you know, for example, the writing style. So the writing style that's meant to be 13th century. Describing the original content of the book. You look at the handwriting and then there's meant to be some text from later on by a famous necromancer who was trying to break the cipher, which is intriguing in itself. And you look at it and you go, okay, that's interesting. But then you also realise it's the same handwriting that was meant to be centuries earlier. So you can see how someone has just written the whole thing. You can also see also that in the ciphers that's being used. Used, they use. Well, often ciphers include what they call nulls, which are symbols that have no meaning, just to kind of throw off people trying to decipher it. And the writer has clearly got bored of using these because as the book progresses, fewer and fewer and fewer nulls are being used as they're clearly just trying to get the content produced. But yeah, he seems to have been produced to kind of probably trick this alchemy interested Archbishop of Toledo.
- [48:25]
That was journalist and author Gary James Shaw speaking to Emily Griffet. His book Cryptic is out now.
- [48:46]
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Gary J. Shaw
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Gary J. Shaw
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Emily Griffet
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