The quixotic quest for an a priori language

In the winter of 1890, a Polish radical named Michał Habdank-Wojnicz escaped the permafrost of a Siberian prison and crossed Europe in secrecy. In Hamburg, he hid himself on a ship bound for England, a country that had previously taken in revolutionary exiles including Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin. Born into a noble family, Wojnicz was a turncoat to his class. As a young man, he became a member of proletariat, a revolutionary socialist party that sought to purge Poland of Tsarist tyranny. After failing to free two of his fellow comrades who had been sentenced to death, he was arrested and held for months in the Warsaw Citadel before being deported deep into the Russian interior. Five months after his escape, he settled in London, where he opened a bookshop dedicated to revolutionary literature. Over time, however, he became increasingly interested in rare, antiquarian manuscripts.

In 1912, Wojnicz travelled south of Rome to the Villa Mondragone in the hopes of procuring a suite of obscure texts. At the bottom of a chest in one of the villa’s rooms, he discovered a vellum quarto which he later described as ‘an ugly duckling’. As he flipped through it, he saw that it contained astrological and botanical diagrams drawn in soft watercolours, branching, hallucinatory images that climbed across its pages, crude but beautiful, like a child’s refrigerator paintings. There were also star charts, heavenly medallions and mobiles of concentric text, and there were images of naked women, pregnant maidens bathing in green liquid, reclining inside things resembling human organs, stomachs, urinary tracts, fallopian tubes. Most mysteriously of all, its pages were full of a strange script that corresponded to no known language. When Wojnicz returned to London, he immediately began writing to friends about the ‘sphynx’ he had found, a text that to this day has confounded every person who has tried to read it. Having no official title or author attached to it, the manuscript would in time come to be known by the anglicised version of its discoverer’s name – Voynich.

The manuscript’s alphabet contains 20 to 25 distinct characters. Words are no shorter than two letters and no longer than ten, although it is difficult to know for certain because there is no punctuation and no spacing, making it impossible to tell where one word or sentence ends and the other begins. Still, one might hope to discern syntactic or grammatical patterns based on the position of repeated words (e.g. one or two letter pronouns at the beginning of a clause). Yet the manuscript appears to have no discernible pattern and words that one might expect to recur in places – like those written beneath its many botanical drawings – are different every time.

Taped to the manuscript was a letter, written by Jan Marek Marci, rector of the Charles University in Prague, who claimed the manuscript had been purchased by Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats. Dated 1665, the letter is addressed to the German Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher, who devoted much of his intellectual life to cryptology and a comparative study of scriptural languages. His book Turris Babel (1679) is about the loss of Edenic language (spoken by Adam in the Garden) after the destruction of the Tower of Babylon. Marci attributed the manuscript’s authorship to Roger Bacon, one of the geniuses of the high Middle Ages. Bacon’s great work, the Opus Majus, is a study of natural philosophy, mathematics, theology, celestial mechanics, optics, ethics and antique languages. Bacon also imagined contraptions that wouldn’t exist for centuries (flying devices, elevators and diving bells) and he was also rumoured to have built a bronze automaton, a precursor to a modern robot. The sheer volume of Bacon’s intellectual interests, his acquaintance with languages and his forays into necromantic sciences – hence the need to write in cipher – confirmed for Voynich that he had indeed been the author of the manuscript. Thus, it became known for years as the ‘Bacon Cipher’.

Various people attempted to decode the manuscript, to no avail. One in particular was William Friedman, a US Army cryptologist who ran the Signal Intelligence Service, the code-breaking team established during the Second World War to crack Axis ciphers, which unlocked the Japanese encryption machine (codenamed ‘Purple’) by reverse-engineering its labyrinth of rotors and circuits. Long fascinated with Voynich’s manuscript, after the war, Friedman and his wife Elizabeth established a study group to decrypt the text. Applying the same alphabetic-shift employed by the Purple cipher, they converted the manuscript’s characters into letters of the Latin alphabet. These letters were then assigned a value that could be transcribed onto machine-readable punch cards, which were then fed into an IBM computer,­­­­ similar to the one that would later riddle out the calculations required to build the hydrogen bomb. Friedman and his team never published their results and in 1946 the project was disbanded. Years later, when pressed to disclose his findings, Friedman cheekily released them in the form of an anagrammatic statement, his own code that could be rearranged any number of ways: ‘I put no trust in anagrammatic acrostic cyphers, for they are of little real value – a waste – and may prove nothing. Finis.’

When Voynich died in 1930, ownership of the manuscript passed to his wife, Ethel. Like her husband, Ethel had been embedded in revolutionary politics. In her youth, she spent time in St Petersburg, where she became involved with the Narodniks, an organisation associated with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. In 1895, she returned to eastern Europe to set up a network to smuggle prohibited literature into Russia. Around this time, she began work on a novel, The Gadfly, about a love affair that takes place against the revolutionary upheavals of Italy in the 1840s, a novel that would later become required reading in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, making it one of the most-read novels of the 20th century. Ethel had little interest in her late-husband’s enigmatic manuscript, but it was she who allowed Friedman and his team to conduct their research – research that would have been impossible without a discovery made a century earlier by Ethel’s father, George Boole.

One afternoon in 1833, while walking across a field in Doncaster, Boole had an epiphany, an idea that came to him in a single timeless flash. The experience tugged at his brainstem for the next 20 years. In time, he came to realise that what had been revealed to him was a code, which he believed to be the key to a universal language, one that could reduce the infinite variety and complexity of human thought into a simple, notated system of mathematical logic. In 1854, he published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, which set out to ‘investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed’ and ‘to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus…’ Boole’s binary algebra, consisting of two variables, 0s and 1s (representing truth values – true and false), via which all propositions could be represented, would later become the foundation upon which computational systems would be built.

Boole was a profoundly religious man (seeing an expression of the Holy Trinity in the three dimensions of space) and his experience only deepened his messianic sense that his vision had been a donné, a gift delivered to him from God. For the rest of his life, he believed that he had glimpsed the source code of the intellect, the purest expression of the Divine Mind and the lattice of logic that upheld the entire structure of reality. Boole was not the first to be captured by the dream of a universal, a priori language. The idea first appears in a letter Descartes sent to the French mathematician Marin Mersenne, in which he mentions the possibility of an ‘Alphabet of Human Thought’, by which all concepts could be atomised into smaller concepts that could then be used in combination with one another. Descartes, too, had had an ‘experience’ not unlike Boole’s, on the outskirts of Prague one evening in 1619, during the battle of White Mountain, when he took refuge for the night in an overheated room and experienced a series of visions that revealed to him a whole new philosophy of mind.

Whereas Descartes joked that a universal language was never likely to exist, except perhaps ‘dans le pays des romans’ (‘in the land of novels’), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent much of his life trying to chase down such a language. In his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666), Leibniz began to elaborate the idea of a characteristica universalis, ‘a kind of alphabet’ that could express mathematical, metaphysical and ontological concepts at once and in a way that would be universally intelligible. He described it as ‘…a general algebra in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus… this would be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus far been proposed…’ At the time he was writing his Dissertatio, Leibniz was immersed in Polygraphia Nova (1663), a treatise on cryptology by none other than Athanasius Kircher, who proposed polygraphy as ‘all languages reduced to one’ and who, at that very moment, was likely in possession of the Bacon Cipher. If Marci’s letter is to be believed, Kircher was the last known owner of the manuscript before it vanished for centuries, until it was discovered again by Voynich.

A crucial text that shaped Leibniz’s sense of what a universal language might look like was the I Ching, an ancient Chinese manual for divination that found its way to Europe in the 17th century. The manual contains a set of 64 hexagrams, composed of broken and solid lines which can be used variously to express linguistic, mathematical and philosophical concepts. Leibniz rightly recognised this to be a system of binary notation, by which any number of complex ideas could be depicted using just two universally readable variables, anticipating Boole’s algebraic notation and modern computers by centuries. But the more Leibniz sought to fashion a singular, unified grammar of thought, the more elusive it became. Like Boole after him, Leibniz lamented the apparent disunity of philosophic and scientific knowledge – that they were not, as was the case with Bacon and Kircher, overlapping magisteria, a single intellectual system that expressed a Unity of Truth. Though it seemed forever out of reach, he continued to believe that such a calculus existed and that it alone was the true language of the cosmos, governing everything from heavenly mechanics all the way down to the smallest monadic infinity.

In the 1990s, samples of Voynich’s manuscript were radiocarbon-dated, revealing that it had been created sometime in the early 15th century, putting it too late for Bacon to be its author. It also dispelled any conspiracies that Voynich himself had forged the text. To date, no one has successfully decoded its language. Perhaps it cannot be deciphered because it is in fact not a cipher, but an invented script that doesn’t stand in for anything beyond itself, consisting entirely of empty signs, signifying nothing. But the level of detail and care taken in the crafting of the text, the aesthetic demands of its script and images, suggests that it is not merely a cipher, or an even an elaborate hoax, but something clearly meant to be instructional – that its author had some meaning they desperately wanted to impart.

Later in life, Friedman’s wife remarked that the manuscript’s resistance to decryption indicated that it was obviously not a cipher and likely an originally conceived language, dreamt up by its author, which meant that, without some kind of key, its meaning could never be known. In 1970, however, shortly after Friedman’s death, the official solution to his anagrammatic code was published in an article in The Philological Quarterly. It read: ‘The Voynich MSS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.’