“If you haven’t read Book Six yet you will definitely want to come back to this page later as there are spoilers here about the breaking of the code that runs throughout the whole series! Don’t go peeking if you don’t want to know! You have been warned!”

You know by now that the main code of Secret Breakers is MS 408. If you haven’t had a good look at that yet then head over to the main Secrets to Break page here. When planning my series, it was this central code that connected to all the others. Breaking the Dorabella Cipher and the Beale Papers codes and all the other un-cracked codes that I used were just steps leading towards the solution of one large overriding question. What does Voynich’s Manuscript say?

I wanted to be sure that all my code cracking was testable and repeatable. I wanted to be sure that no-one went away and tried to used my solutions and found they failed. You can work through all the solutions of the codes in the series and so I believe that the only true way to make sense of MS 408 involved it being written in a language that each reader would understand if they tried hard enough to remember.

You might think that is a cheat! There is no alphabet system for Voynich’s book that you can use to translate page after page yet. But Hunter explains this!

This solution means that reading Voynich’s Manuscript draws on all the skills used in earlier codes in the series: a link with the music of Book Two; a story of a magical island from Book Three; the architecture of the world in Book Four and the search for treasure buried deep in Book Five! It is only after completing the deciphering of all these codes that Team Veritas can finally make sense of the original language of MS 408. Without these steps in the journey they would never have broken the code!

That might all sound a bit deep. But hopefully it makes clear the idea that the potential to solve the code is inside everyone…and that they have to tap into earlier forgotten memories to make the answers clear!

I thought a lot about the development of language when writing the series of Secret Breakers and I became fascinated by the idea of the story of the Tower of Babel. If all the people of the earth spoke the same language they would have immense power and of course deeper understanding of each other. This concept fascinated me. My research about the Tower of Babel led me to discover that according to many versions of the story, the Tower was built on Nimrod’s land…and Nimrod was a mighty Hunter! Can you see the link there to one of the main characters in the story of Secret Breakers and also to one of the main codes they solve? ie: Hunter and Elgar’s Enigma Variations in Book Two!

The interesting thing about the story of the Tower of Babel, is the idea that a story about the confusion of languages exists in lots of cultures - Irish, Ancient Greek, Australian etc. They all have their own versions of a story where the ability to understand each other is suddenly shaken up and the power of one universally understood language is lost forever! I love the idea that different peoples have their own languages. Diversity and difference is important but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all understand each other? I think in order to do that we have to go beyond language and understand all the links and connections that make us human…and that is what my decoding of MS 408 is all about!

A forgotten Language

When I was at university, I remember learning about how all babies are born with certain innate skills. They can all make stepping motions. They can all swim under water. They each have a startle reflex. In the time after birth, these skills begin to weaken and disappear and then have to be learnt again. Wouldn’t it be amazing if each baby was also born with an innate understanding of language and that this was lost too? Maybe being able to read MS 408 involves just trying to remember! And that is why it was important that this final book in the series was called Circle of Fire and why I included quotes about returning to the very beginning. The potential of a child to do incredible things is so important and I suppose the deciphering of MS 408 also includes that idea. In my series, children have the power to do what adults can’t!

Of course there are other stories written about an incredible universal language that we all could have had access to. It is sometimes called the Language of Babel, but sometimes it is called the Language of the Birds! Many societies have stories written about this perfect language that is able to carry great wisdom.

Other attempts to crack the code!

A question I get asked regularly is ‘has anyone really managed to read MS 408?’ Interestingly, there is of course the chance that the Second Study Group who moved into Bletchley Park after the Second World War and was headed by William Friedman may very well have broken the code! The history books tell us that they didn’t….but thinking about it, it’s most likely that if they did break the code and what they discovered was very important, they might not have made that knowledge public! Code-breakers are, after all, people of secrets! Perhaps William Friedman and his team worked out what MS 408 said all along and just didn’t tell anybody!

At any one time, there are people across the world working on the code of this manuscript. A quick internet search will lead you to all sorts of sites which claim that that researchers have made sense of the code. When writing the series, I was always scared that a researcher would reveal that the book was a hoax, or that it wasn’t as old as we thought. Excitingly, in the Spring of 2014 a university Professor Dr Stephen Bax, did make his findings on Voynich’s Manuscript public. He revealed that he was sure the manuscript wasn’t a fake and that the star pages in the manuscript were really important! He also talked a lot about the ideas of myths and legends that might have been included in the writing of the ancient text. I was very relieved to think that my ideas about the manuscript could be on the right lines!