The Voynich Manuscript is an obscure anomaly in the history of human literature. Tentatively dated to the early 14th century, it is an illuminated codex written in an unknown and thus far indecipherable script. Despite seven centuries of obsessive effort on the part of linguists, cryptographers and expert medievalists, the manuscript remains a complete enigma. Theories ranging from micro-writing to substitution ciphers to artificial alphabets concealing a known scholarly language such as Greek and Latin have been posited and discarded. But not a single word or letter of the five hundred page document has revealed itself. With only the strange and often crude illustrations to go by, most researchers believe the book to be a codex of botany or medieval herbalism. This conclusion is suggested by the copious depictions of plants and flowers. Some of them containing real or mythical medicinal properties. Why a seemingly innocuous guide to seven hundred year old fauna should be hidden behind a unique and incomprehensible series of signs remains a complete mystery.
To cross from one enigma to another is not a difficult feat, but it was more complicated than the simple fascination with mystery so common to the human mind. I saw in Josef6 a creature of an identical nature to the one I was seeking. For months I had pictured the writer in my mind. The unknown writer of the Voynich Manuscript. This strange, virtual figure, crouched over his parchment, quill in hand, his face and body a mere collection of shadows. Slowly forming the signs that he alone, of all the men who have ever walked the earth, would ever understand. A haunting vision. Not because of its mystery, but because of its one aspect which was devoid of mystery: he did exist. Someone had known. Some hand had formed those inscrutable letters. One man, this unknown author, had known the secret, and he had chosen to torture seven centuries of other men by revealing it only in the act of concealing it forever. I had long since dismissed the theory that the script was nothing but a meaningless babble. I knew that its regularity, its recurring symbols, its careful rendering upon the page, could only be the product of meaning. A meaning that fascinated us because to us it meant nothing.
Yes. I admired him. I admired his courage and his probable madness. The barely comprehensible urges that must have driven his extraordinary act. And as the events of the present began to unfold, this object of my fascinated admiration began to be replaced by the equally unknowable image of Josef6. A cipher replaced a cipher. Their only differentiation was time. A differentiation that was also a perfect irony.
They were not, of course, identical. Josef6 was hidden in plain sight. He admitted everything. The only question was whether he existed at all. he was equal and opposite to my unknown author, of whom nothing could be certain except his existence. Nonetheless, it was the same intrigue. Someone was there, hunched over his keyboard, concealed behind digitized letters. Was I dreaming him too? It was impossible. Because the words were there. And here, the words, the script, the signs, were instantly comprehensible. The only unknown was the author. The author I could not stop dreaming.
I began to frequent the TimeLords message board, hoping for more glimpses, more reactions, more believers and disbelievers. The process of seven hundred years, the very object of my study, was recurring before my eyes at the requisite hyper-speed of the digital, global, virtual age. There were skeptics, cynics, heretics, flagellants, chiliasts and true believers. I was watching a mystery in action. I was privileged to witness and to wait patiently for the inevitable moment when the mysterious reaches terminal velocity and violates the very fabric of the world.
I did not expect that the phenomenon would reach beyond the realm of the virtual. When it did, I realized, to my surprise, that it was not only my dream, but the dream of millions of others. A shared dream. A collective unconscious conscious only of Josef6.
This was a true phenomenon of the mass age. The immediate and total fragmentation of information into complete and yet dissonant parts. Josef6 was a grenade waiting to explode in the midst of an invisible crowd. Shards of him embedded in the translucent surface. They were left shining for the seekers to discover, to receive, to contemplate, to grasp and refashion at their will. The exegesis of Josef6 became it own event, separate and independent of its unknown creator.
The first sign that the thing had become an entity of its own was the t-shirts. I have a permanently non-submersible memory of walking down a busy city street and seeing a young girl wearing a white shirt on which were emblazoned the letters: WWJ6D? On the back was scrawled the cumbersome phrase, spelled out in letters large enough for a child to read: What Would Josef6 Do?
What? Why? Who? How? All such questions pertaining to the phenomenon were impossible for me to answer. I knew only that it had occurred and was occurring. Somehow, Josef6 had passed from the beleaguered status of cipher-prophet and become some manner of deus abscondus -- an absent god. A narrator who hides his face. The proof was in the phrase itself, WWJ6D, lifted directly from the lexicon of evangelist exultation: WWJD, What Would Jesus Do? The temptation of the identical initials was nothing compared to the temptation of identical phenomena. Only a single letter required enumeration. Small variations are cheap and easy to produce, but the threshold must be reached before they are even conceived. The thing had somehow become a statement of faith.
There is an essential distinction in that small enumeration. It was clear at first sight. The division was that between the obscure and inscrutable, between prophecy and transubstantiation. The infusion, and then the annihilation, of the flesh by the divine.
Because Josef6 required no resurrection. He was already something like a spirit. He had no face. No body. No voice. He had only words. He was only words. There is no great distance between words and The Word. There were so many who were exhausted by words. They dreamed instead of The Word, and with it an end to words. They had nothing to lose. They decided to take a chance.
The essential attribute of any god is strategic silence. The divine must hide its face to avoid become part of this firmament. The faceless author of the Voynich Manuscript was immune to mockery. We could curse his name, but our hate only magnified his power. Our frustrated loathing was the source of his immortality. He was safe forever. Gods are nothing more than unnamed authors. Like a god, we could know only what he was not. He was not illiterate. He was -- in all likelihood -- not an aborigine huntsman. He was not a crysthanthemum. From the side of not, from the wasteland of negation, the possibilities were endless. Infinite. It was into this infinite that the vermin swarmed.
He must have known. Because Josef6 did not speak again for over a month. During this time, traffic on the TimeLord’s discussion board quadrupled. A new web server was installed to avoid a full scale systems crash. As should have been expected, people began to take sides.
Those who believed Josef6 a fraud were a distinct minority from the beginning. The epic schisms took place between the believers. The most passionate of these was between those who believed Josef6 to be hiding the nature of his true mission and those who believed him at face value. The primary spokesman for the former, ewallis_heins explained:
Clearly, Josef is not just some poor grunt sent back through time to find an obscure microchip. That may be his cover story, but think about it: why would a society that has mastered time travel be incapable of just debugging its own computers? That’s certainly a smaller task than mastering the quantum output of micro-singularities. C’mon people, think!!! Why give us so many details about the future in the first place?? Why tell us about the disasters of the future when he could be explaining the nuts and bolt of time travel??? He’s trying to warn us!!!! And why here? Why now? Personally, I don’t buy all that bullshit about his family and wanting to spend time with granddad. This is his mission priority!!! He’s here to follow orders! And those orders are to make an attempt -- only an attempt -- to prevent us from making the mistakes in this timeline that caused all the bad shit in his timeline. Isn’t that the first thing you would do in a post-apocalyptic society if you discovered time travel? Try and prevent all the bad shit from happening?! For all we know, theres thousands of these guys crawling around the multiverse or the time spectrum or whatever the hell it is!There was an almost immediate response from prettycrazygirl.
OK, ewallis, calm down… I know you’re excited, but take a valium and try to relax. Nothing you say makes any sense. First of all, it would violate everything Josef has told us about his mission parameters, which he seems to believe in very strongly. Not to mention that the chances of actually affecting our timeline, according to Josef’s own description of how time travel actually works, would be very small. And why is it so difficult to believe that a small computer glitch could cause huge problems? Chaos theory! Ever heard of it? You know, the butterfly effect! Y2K! And what is so weird about wanting to be with your grandfather? Just because you have a lousy relationship with your family doesn’t mean everybody does!!The speed with which the virtual became the personal was typical of the medium. As was the inherent presence of severe grammatical error. Response, of course, was quick in coming.
Well, obviously your more crazy than pretty, if you aren’t some fifty year old transvestite getting his jollies.Which elicited an equally swift reaction.
Nice, ewallis, really nice. Maybe you should answer some of my questions instead of describing your fantasies to us.The voice of reason was sounded by eekthecat.
Play nice, kids! There’s no need for personal insults. Lets remember that we don’t have enough information yet to reach any conclusions about Josef or his mission. Lets try and hold off the craziness until we know some things for sure. Personally, I think youre both right. Josef may have been sent back on a relatively routine mission, but he obviously has some emotional need to contact us. I don’t buy the whole “curiosity” excuse either. Maybe on some level, subconscious perhaps, he is trying to warn us about the troubles of his time period so we can prevent them from happening. That’s what I’d do if I was in his place. And he’s trying to do it in a way that doesn’t violate his mission parameters or his military obligations. Let’s try and keep some perspective on this until all the facts are in.The only truly dissenting voice belonged to drmuskrat_md.
I think its amazing that I’m the only one here with the guts to say that this guy is obviously some wingnut whos taking you all for a ride.This post met with remarkably little notice, except a short missive from jennieruptha
Lets do our best to ignore the trolls, shall we? Kiss kiss.Jennie’s advice was taken to heart, and the debate continued on mostly civil terms until 10 January, when the images began to appear.
