The Voynich Manuscript and Occult Chemistry

This manuscript was found by New York bibilophile Wilfrid M. Voynich in 1912, in an Italian castle. It’s written entirely in a very unusual code and looks to be 13th century. It also contains a large number of drawings, of a strange nature – some astronomical, others botanical. The putative author is Roger Bacon, the great 13th century Franciscan monk, philosopher, magician, and alchemist, credited with having invented the magnifying glass amongst many other things.

The cipher is pretty much impenetrable but a successful attempt in my opinion was made on it by William Newbold, as the article I’ve linked to below describes. Newbold was both a cryptographer and a cabbalist. Of the astronomical drawings he found that one for instance was said by Bacon to be Andromeda, and clearly shows its spiral characeristics. Bacon says, if Newbold is to be believed:

>>”In a concave mirror I saw a star in the form of a snail….between the
navel of Pegasus, the girdle of Andromeda, and the head of Cassiopea”. << Sadly this deciphering was repudiated completely by cryptographers, and part of the objection was simply that no powerful telescopes were available to Bacon which would have enable him to observe Andromeda! (The manuscript also describes such phenomena as the comet of 1273.) But Bacon never claims to have used a 'telescope', only this 'concave mirror'. On the technology of such a mirror, the author of this article comments: >>The actual knowledge pertaining to the use of a device such as this is probably now lost<< ... but it is not in fact; this mirror is the same one used by magicians to this day and Bardon, for instance, gives a very good description of it. The botanical drawings, similarly, show microscopic details of the plant in question, indicating that scrying in the mirror enabled Bacon to see the very small and close as well as the very large and distant. These observations bear some resemblance to the 'occult chemistry' of Annie Besant and others in the Theosophical Society, who described molecular structures as they appeared to 'second sight' or astral vision. There appears to be a long history of this kind of thing in the west. All of this tends to show that spiritual development gives us new means of information which can be used to discover things not normally visible to us, and that this process is a natural outcome of human evolution. Voynich is still regarded officially as 'undeciphered', but I believe that it was indeed the record of some observations of Bacon's on phenomena he investigated with spiritual sight. There are many such treasures still hidden in libraries east and west. j Newbold’s decephiring of the Voynich Manuscript