Creative Paranoia

[Eulenspiegel7646 at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/26/2004 9:23:12 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
ghetta_outta at hotmail.com writes:
'It was bought by Emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia for 600 ducats, an absolute 
fortune for that period,' said Rugg, whose paper on the manuscript is 
published in the journal Cryptologia. 'People clearly thought it contained 
arcane secrets and great knowledge and were prepared to pay to learn them.'
I took part in a seminar sponsored by the University of California on the 
Voynich Manuscript.  The instructor (an astronomy professor in his day job) had a 
microfilm copy of the complete manuscript, and we got to view much of it.  
It's not a huge work, but the aesthetics are charming.  The characters of the 
text are very repetitive, leading myself and several others to conclude that it 
was probably a hoax--quite a successful one at 600 ducats!
If it were not for the fact that it actually exists, one would suspect a plot 
device from a novel by Pynchon, if not Borges or Eco.

E
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