I started the Halloween season off by discussing the dubious claim of TikTok witches that they’d solved the Voynich Manuscript.
So it feels apropos to close out the Halloween season with a post about two women who actually unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding an encrypted manuscript involving witches!
This video by Kat Saturn details the fascinating journey she and Rian Hagebeuk embarked upon to unravel the secrets of a book entitled “The Subtelty of Witches,” supposedly published in 1657.
It was one of the longest encrypted works of the period, and yet, it sat in the British Library for decades without anyone digging into the cipher or the manuscript’s contents.
In 2018, Kat stumbled across “The Subtelty of Witches” in a list of encrypted manuscripts, and started investigating.
Along the way, she teamed up with Rian, whose facility with Latin helped immensely in unraveling the manuscript’s true contents. They reached out to professionals and fellow amateurs alike, delving deep down the rabbit hole of this manuscript.
Along the way, she and Rian determined:
- the year was incorrect (the text is actually OLDER)
- the contents of the manuscript had nothing to do with witches (it’s a list of verbs in Latin and Dutch from a Calepino dictionary)
- the cipher was consistently applied throughout (meaning it’s unlikely this was a practice exercise for improving the author’s facility with the cipher)
- the real mystery of this text wasn’t in the cipher…
It was in the book’s creation and reason for existing at all.
The cipher was easily cracked — a one-to-one substitution cipher wouldn’t deter even a casual puzzler — but so many questions still remain.
Who was the author? Why was the manuscript titled this? Why were a dictionary’s partial contents encoded? What is the meaning behind the cover stamp?
Like some of the more puzzly mysteries we’ve pursued in the blog over the years, there’s always more to uncover once the puzzly part is resolved.
I purposely haven’t gone into too much actual detail — hopefully I’ve included just enough to give you a sense of the story here and pique your interest — because I think you should take the time to watch Kat’s entire video. It’s always best to hear from the creators themselves!
This story is the perfect counterpoint to the Voynich discussion a few weeks ago.
I made a point in that post of highlighting that I wasn’t throwing shade at nonprofessionals in scholarly fields. I simply wanted something more reliable than “this looks like this, so they must be related” and wild conjecture.
And Kat and Rian’s work is exactly what I was talking about.
Kat and Rian aren’t professionals, they’re enthusiastic amateurs, but they are scholars nonetheless. They’ve done fantastic, reproducible work, drawing reasonable and insightful conclusions from verifiable data.
They’ve thoroughly and meticulously documented their steps, they’re continuing to pursue leads, and they have genuinely, impactfully contributed to both awareness of the manuscript and the facts surrounding it.
Heck, they published a peer-reviewed paper on the manuscript, and you should absolutely check it out.
TikTok witches and Voynich Manuscript enthusiasts, please take note: this is the way.
Do you have any theories about “The Subtelty of Witches,” fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
