Lessons From the Past
When Columbus first sighted land in 1492 he carried with him portions of the writings of a Franciscan Friar who was a cryptologist, alchemist, and magician. Yet it was these fragments of the Opus Major of Francis Bacon, a man that had died two hundred years earlier that inspired Columbus to make his journey to the west to get to India. But if Columbus had known about Eratosthenes of Cyrene—the third chief librarian of the Alexandria Library in Egypt—and his calculation of the diameter of the earth two-thousand-two-hundred years earlier, Columbus would have know that he couldn’t possibly have reached India yet and must have discovered a new land.
Unlike today when we believe all things we don’t know must be uncovered through research and analysis, people of the not-too-distant past believed that all great knowledge and wisdom had already been known in the mists of ancient time, and that if they could just find it in lost stories, manuscripts, and books, they could contribute to great discoveries that would revolutionize the present. How strange to look backward to find the future. Yet this was an implicit understanding for thousands of years. What has changed?
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England from the 1780s to the 1830s the popular attitude toward the acquisition of new science and knowledge in general has changed from dogmatic uncertainty to confident assertion. Surely, in the past two-hundred years we’ve turned the corner to the future and there’s no looking back. All knowledge and new science is before us. Behind us is only superstition and ignorance.
In summary, for thousands of years humanity has been on the wrong track, but today we are going in the right direction. This type of thinking is not uncommon at any given point in history; in fact, it is characteristic of the view of all points in history. What period was it that the consensus of historians believed that their philosophy and beliefs were going in the wrong direction?
Taking historical perspective out of the context of its age and judging it outside its own frame of reference is fraught with the risk of error. Yet it is so easy to do when we want to convince ourselves that our way is the best course of action.
As we pursue our studies of who wrote the Voynich Manuscript, we will try to keep a perspective of the context of the time period we are studying.