EPISODE 157 | Bohemian Books: Gigas, Voynich & Soyga
Some very old books have an air of mystery and intrigue about them. Partly, that’s because they are literally hundreds of years old, and partly because of the weird things they contain.
Today, we’ll take a look at three, all of which have a connection to the Czech Republic and Prague: the biggest book in the world, the Codex Gigas (also known as the Devil’s Bible and which features heavily [no pun intended] in Dan Brown’s latest schlock fest), the utterly baffling Voyn...
EPISODE 157 | Bohemian Books: Gigas, Voynich & Soyga
Some very old books have an air of mystery and intrigue about them. Partly, that’s because they are literally hundreds of years old, and partly because of the weird things they contain.
Today, we’ll take a look at three, all of which have a connection to the Czech Republic and Prague: the biggest book in the world, the Codex Gigas (also known as the Devil’s Bible and which features heavily [no pun intended] in Dan Brown’s latest schlock fest), the utterly baffling Voynich Manuscript, which is not written in any recognizable language; and the mysterious Book of Soyga, which disappeared for nearly 400 years, and some say that if you can decipher the final puzzles in the book, you will die.
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SECTIONS
- 02:11 - The Codex Gigas - That's a big book, contents, legend of origin, Sweden gets it, defenestrations, the Sedlec Bone Church, The Secret of Secrets
- 11:00 - The Voynich Manuscript - WTF is this thing?, ownership relay, who maybe wrote it, what maybe it says, aspects of Voynichese, obscure languages, steganography, glossolalia, outsider art, a hoax, radiocarbon dating, those who have claimed decipherment, ciphers, people see what they want to, goropism, the Sun Language Theory, recent videos about Alphafold and protein folding, maybe a work of proto-fiction
- 43:32 - The Book of Soyga - John Dee, Edward Kelley, cryptic puzzles, 400 years lost, found in 1994
More Info
- The Codex Gigas – Devil's Bible on the National Library of Sweden website
- The Devil’s Bible: My Deep Dive into the Weirdest Book I’ve Ever Seen
- Devil's Bible: Codex Gigas in Klementinum on Prague.net from 2007 loan
- Inside the ‘Devil’s Bible,’ the Largest Medieval Manuscript Ever Made on ArtNet
- EPISODE 109 | What's in a Name? The Shakespeare Authorship Debate with Scott Jackson
- EPISODE 135 | On Shakey Ground: More Shakespeare Authorship with Scott Jackson
- What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Communicating with Jennifer King on the Digital Signage Done Right podcast
- Yale Library webpage on the Voynich Manuscript, with images
- The riddle of the Voynich Manuscript on the BBC
- Unsolved Mystery: The Voynich Manuscript
- An entire website about the Voynich Manuscript
- The Voynich Manuscript revealed: five things you probably didn't know about the Medieval masterpiece on The Art Newspaper
- THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT - "The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World" - NSA report (PDF)
- Another NSA report on titled The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma written in 1978 (PDF)
- A PDF of the actual Voynich Manuscript
- Headcanon: The Voynich Manuscript actually doesn’t contain any cohesive text and is just a prank done by someone in the past on r/medieval
- A Scholar Has Cracked the Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, the Encrypted Medieval Artwork That Defeated Codebreakers for Years on ArtNet
- Article on the Voynich manuscript on Brazilian website Revista Pesquisa Fapesp
- The Voynich Wiki
- How an Emperor Trapped a Con Man - blog on Edward kelley
- Magic and Mystery: Decoding the Secrets of the Book of Soyga on Discovery
- The Book of Soyga translated by Jane Kupin (PDF)
- Decoding the Book of Soyga: A Living Project of Esoteric Discovery
- The Book of Soyga | Literary History on House of Cadmus
- Soyga: the book that kills on Blog of Wonders
- Holy Conversations: The Impact of the Mysterious Book of Soyga on Ancient Origins
- Book of Soyga on the Voynich Wiki
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