The Voynich Ninja

Morten, if the red pigment on the bull is marginalia (which is very speculative and which would cost a lot of money to test) and it was added, let's say 15 years later, the test results would not make much distinction between them.

We know the pigments that have been tested so far are consistent with the radio-carbon dating, the zodiac styles, the clothing styles, and the script styles. In other words, more pigment testing is not likely to yield significant returns.

If you are prepared to pay for the tests, they might consider it IF it were something that had a higher probability of yielding useful information.

(03-09-2019, 02:32 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Morten, if the red pigment on the bull is marginalia (which is very speculative and which would cost a lot of money to test) and it was added, let's say 15 years later, the test results would not make much distinction between them.

We know the pigments that have been tested so far are consistent with the radio-carbon dating, the zodiac styles, the clothing styles, and the script styles. In other words, more pigment testing is not likely to yield significant returns.

If you are prepared to pay for the tests, they might consider it IF it were something that had a higher probability of yielding useful information.

JP, At this point the only thing that would yield truly useful information is a decoding of the manuscript and I can assure you that I am working on it.

(19-03-2019, 05:00 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is pretty rigorous. That's what I've been trying to tell you. Yes, there may be slightly different systems of encoding but having studied them and having created four transcripts (which means I've looked at EVERY GLYPH in the VMS from beginning to end), I think of them as system "adjustments" rather than as different systems or languages. The differences are not major.

I guess we can consider ourselves quite fortunate to have an expert in Voynichese script available for consultation in this forum.

As you know, MSGT maintains that Voynichese is not a language and that VMS tokens are not words. Quire 20 (at the moment I have little interest in the rest of the manuscript) contains pure code created by the wheels of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which in turn were inspired by Merkavah mysticism, by the oscillating circles of the Sefer Yetzirah, and by a "revolved" prophecy believed encoded in quire 20.

Only the outermost wheel is missing and has to be brought in from the outside. That wheel contains the first letter of 72 divine names (Latin alphabet) and it is where we find the Latin letters for either encrypt input or decrypt output. I refer to this wheel as the Sigillum Dei. Another wheel on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks like a intermediary mechanism needed for transitioning from glyphs to letters. It's the wheel containing 17 glyphs repeated four times around the circle. I refer to it as the "alphabet" wheel.

I've made a table containing the contents of the Sigillum Dei wheel with the glyphs of the alphabet wheel placed underneath.





For the Sigillum Dei, I'm going with the one from the Summa Sacrae Magicae (SSM). The London manuscripts of the Liber iuratus have mostly the same letters but in a different order at places. There are two reasons for believing the Sigillum Dei of the SSM is the right one to use:

1. John Dee's handwritten notes are all over it. Thus, we can see online the actual physical book they used to decode the VMS, and

2. Unlike the SSM, the London manuscripts do not provide the complete names, only the first letter of the divine names. However, the author of the marginalia expresses familiarity with the actual names. There's "alla" on f17r, followed by an "r" for "rabur", followed by a partial Pax symbol for Christus. On f116v, we find that the "ydard" of "yardycon" was replaced with the "mich" of "michel" to give us "michicon". The y's and i's were interchangeable.

On the alphabet wheel, the four sequences of 17 glyphs run together followed by a space with a double bar in the middle. To represent that, I have placed two blank spaces at the beginning and two at the end, bringing the number of characters on the alphabet wheel up to 72, which would equal the number of Latin letters on the Sigillum Dei.

Many of the glyphs of the alphabet wheel (e.g., those under Box Numbers 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19) are rarely or never employed in quire 20 script. This likely means that the alphabet wheel has to oscillate to make all the Latin letters available as a target. For example, maybe we oscillate the alphabet wheel one space to the left, then two spaces to the right, then three spaces to the left, and, finally, four spaces to the right. Thus, we'll have a maximum of five levels (the starting position plus four oscillations) to encrypt (or decrypt) all the Latin letters of a quire 20 paragraph.

As you can see, under this scenario, VMS encryption becomes quite easy to put into effect. For the starting position and each of the four oscillations, all you have to do is make sure you put into your line of script at the right places, the same glyph that is on the alphabet wheel lying directly under the Latin letters that you want to target while at the same time making sure you do not inadvertantly allow a match of glyphs under unneeded Latin letters. In brief, VMS encryption is position based.

Of course, everything I have just said is subject to revision when I formally begin decoding work in October, and I'm sure I am going to have a lot of questions for you. For now, to get us started, I'll seek your opinion on just one thing.

The glyphs under Boxes 6, 14, 23, 31, 40, 48, 57 and 65 look the same; thus, unexpectedly for an alphabet wheel, the same letter appears twice in each of the four sequences of 17 glyphs.

Look at the following:





The last glyph on the first line is the glyph in the Boxes, and none of the glyphs in the second line are found on the alphabet wheel. But frankly why would anyone want to use those fillers for positioning the last glyph if that last glyph is not found on the alphabet wheel?

The first glyph resembles a backstroke joined to the right side of circle from the top of the backstroke, and the second glyph resembles a backstroke joined to the right side of a circle from the bottom of the backstroke.

Do you think both glyphs could be functionally equivalent and both usable for matching the repeated glyph of the alphabet wheel?

Do you think the first glyph could indicate that the Latin letter above it should be a capital letter and the second glyph that the Latin letter above it is a small letter?

Any other ideas?

The distinction between capital and lowercase wasn't super important in the Middle Ages. Many scribes barely bothered with capitals (or only used them at the beginnings of paragraphs), and many scribes omitted punctuation, as well.

In regular script (script written by the average person, not by professional scribes), there were still people who didn't use capitals or punctuation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (this is something I was surprised to see while reading old letters when I was helping someone with genealogical research).

The better-quality manuscripts often had capitals, often beautifully embellished or rubricated capitals, but books written by students or professionals for their own use didn't always have them.

I'm very sure that folio 57v shows us a calendar. I can't say for sure, where it comes from, but I think I've deciphered some words in it and I'm quite sure, that it begins with Beltane and gives us a cycle of 3 or 6 years.

For me it's seems to have a Celtic origin. But it could come from witch circles, too.

In the last days, I changed my transcryption alphabet a bit, so I have to check the words, I've found in these folio, again.

(05-09-2019, 07:07 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The distinction between capital and lowercase wasn't super important in the Middle Ages. Many scribes barely bothered with capitals (or only used them at the beginnings of paragraphs), and many scribes omitted punctuation, as well.

In regular script (script written by the average person, not by professional scribes), there were still people who didn't use capitals or punctuation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (this is something I was surprised to see while reading old letters when I was helping someone with genealogical research).

The better-quality manuscripts often had capitals, often beautifully embellished or rubricated capitals, but books written by students or professionals for their own use didn't always have them.

Thanks JP. I was able to see that neither Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century nor Berengario Ganell in the 14th century made much use of capital letters. However, the only thing that is really important is what the prophecies say. Those prophecies self-proclaim themselves to have been written in the sixth century, which brings us a lot closer to classical times when both small letters and capital letters were in common use.

In sharp contrast to the thirty-nine prophecies which were translated into French, it looks like the decoders decided to leave the Incantation in its original state. In the Anver publication of 1590, only a blank space was left for it, so perhaps they were still debating whether to translate it or leave it in Latin. In the expanded Caors publication, also dated 1590, we find it unnumbered following stanza VI-99:



As you can see, it employs capital letters both at line starts and internally for certain words; it seems safe to assume the same for the translated prophecies as well.

Of course, having the original text of a passage that underlies VMS encryption can be enormously helpful, much more helpful than a translation, provided we can locate that passage within quire 20 (and I have an idea about that). It may allow us to figure out the precise mechanism of VMS encryption (and decryption thereof) merely by trial and error. Naturally, I'm going to have a lot more to say about the Incantation later on. To a certain extent, I'm counting on it for quick success in my decoding efforts.

(05-09-2019, 08:04 AM)Gavin Güldenpfennig Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm very sure that folio 57v shows us a calendar. I can't say for sure, where it comes from, but I think I've deciphered some words in it and I'm quite sure, that it begins with Beltane and gives us a cycle of 3 or 6 years.

For me it's seems to have a Celtic origin. But it could come from witch circles, too.

In the last days, I changed my transcryption alphabet a bit, so I have to check the words, I've found in these folio, again.

Thanks Gavin for your input.

I'm fairly ambitious in my own objectives. I'm looking for the wheels to spell out all of quire 20 in Latin letters representing words in multiple languages and even proper nouns. I'll illustrate with a real segment of the Sigillum Dei, top line, with potential results for starting position and four oscillations of the alphabet wheel. Places where glyphs from a line of VMS script match glyphs on the alphabet wheel are marked with an asterisk.



The y's and i's were interchangeable and the "v" could also stand for a "u".

Allowing also for shifts with the VMS script, whereby the front of the script gets pushed around the circle to the other end of the alphabet wheel, it may be possible for this system to represent almost anything. The shifts I refer to would be based on two tower glyphs (Boxes 11 and 45 [also 62] in an earlier post of mine) usually seen, in quire 20, only in the first line of a paragraph and often as the first glyph of a paragraph. 

There are still a few more nuances that need to be worked out but, overall, it looks quite doable.

(18-08-2019, 11:29 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The words on the bottom-right are German, and "mich" is an extremely common word for "me". The reason we have a hard time interpreting it is because the grammar is strange. A native German speaker might use those words, but would put them in a different order.

German grammar is hard for some people, if they come from languages where the verb is at the beginning. In German, it is often at the end (not 100% of the time, but frequently).

In English, we say, "I can understand that." In German, they say, "I can that understand." Quite a few of my classmates never could wrap their brains around this fairly simple concept and they gave up and dropped out or switched to Spanish or French.

Some of the Holy Roman emperors chose German as the official language (rather than Latin) which means that people traveling to the capital to seek patronage or to conduct business were forced to use a language many of them didn't know. I sometimes wonder if this is what happened with the VMS. It's a mixture of Latin (which most scholars learned) and Romance and German (which many scholars did not know, since they learned Latin as the lingua franca and thus were more likely to choose a Romance language if they learned another one, because they are similar to Latin).

JP, Your remarks here leave little doubt that you suspect something Germanic behind the VMS.

I've heard that contemporary investigators of governmental corruption have a motto: "Follow the money." And I have a motto for finding VMS precedents: "Follow the prophecies." The prophecies take us to England, to southern France and to Spain. They do not take us to Germany.

Evidently, you find it hard to believe that any medieval Englishman would or could become fluent in an uncouth language like German. But I for one can imagine circumstances where just such a thing would be theoretically possible.

=====================================

An English Fairy Tale

Once upon a time in the kingdom of England great turmoil was instigated by two competing religions, a good religion and an evil religion. By a stroke of misfortune for a teenage girl from the good religion, she was unwillingly forced upon the throne of England only months after secretly giving birth to a baby boy. But her reign came to an abrupt end only days later, when the more powerful forces of the evil religion removed her from the throne and replaced her with a wicked queen. The good queen and her young husband were both beheaded. Indeed, the wicked queen turned England into a sea of blood. Many of the supporters of the good queen and her religion were beheaded, and others were gathered up en masse and burned alive. In a desperate attempt to save the life of the infant child of the good queen (if ever his existence became known), he was entrusted to foreigner, a mere commoner, who along with a wet nurse made a daring escape across the Channel and took the infant to Switzerland where his mother had a correspondence friend of note. With money sent by a wealthy nobleman (a secret supporter of the good religion), the good queen's son was sent off at a very young age to be educated at one of the finest schools of Germany, where he remained for many years. As a highly-educated young adult and back in England (fortunately for England the wicked queen did not reign for very long), the good queen's son agreed to comply with his mother's dying wish, that he be kept out of politics, thus he abandoned his rights to the throne of England. Instead, he opted for a literary career, using his pen to avenge the unjust murder of his parents and to defend his country against the ever-threatening forces of the evil religion. 

The End.

=====================================

As postulated earlier, quire 20 encodes multiple languages (but it's doubtful that there's any more than a few lines in German) which, excluding the references to stars and planets, correspond to the language spoken at the place where prophesied events occur. Sometimes elements of the underlying language remain in the French translation, e.g., Greek: Le Pánta chiona philòn mis fort arriere; Italian: Chasser la Croix par fer raffé ne riffe; Spanish: Bien eslongnes el tago fara muestra.

Of course, for decoding purposes, it's the "good Latine of the Schoole" that most interests us:



Initially for a Master's Thesis on Nostradamus, Edgar Leoni wrote the following about this poem often referred to as the "Incantation":

"Jean Leroux in his Clef (1712) ... was convinced that Nostradamus had read a book called Progymnasmata in artem oratorium by Franciscus Sylvius, professor at the University of Paris. This book, printed in 1528, set forth in the greatest detail how to produce the most elegant Latin. Leroux cites chapter and verse of Sylvius' book for ten instances in which his precepts have been followed in this one quatrain alone."

A Latin grammar printed in 1528 would likely have been in possession of our decoders, so it is easy to see where "of the Schoole" comes from.

The two versions of the Incantation that I posted display some textual variants. For example, the "ineptos" in the title line is here written as "ineptus" but it gets even worse than that. In his Germanic writings, the English author of the marginalia drops a hint that the word "cantio" (meaning incantation, spell, song) should really be "cavtio", alternative spelling of "cautio" (meaning wariness, precaution or caution). Here's the relevant passage:



After "Legis", we see a word with two u's and no n's. And above the "Iugum" we see a word with two u's and a capital "V". Note that the Sigillum Dei has no u's so it must use a "v" for a "u".

In the German line, we note that the word "lauter" has an "aut" in it, just like the "aut" of "cautio". And below "lauter" we find another of the below-the-line tricks we saw earlier. The "l" of "lauter" lies just above the left edge of the "C" so "lauter" can become "cauter". And below the "e" of "cauter" we find an "i", now giving us "cautir". That's close enough: Legis cantio should be Legis cavtio.

(I have suspicions that "ineptos" was deliberately changed to "ineptus" in the cited words of caution in order to mock the inept printer who mistook "cautio" for "cantio"!)

Per my best guess (based on the assumption that an attached mini star could denote a title), the line "Legis cavtio contra ineptos criticos" was encrypted into two short paragraphs on f106r. This here is my transcription of the first of the two paragraphs:



It has become evident that VMS encryption is based on the positioning of glyphs (drawn from the 17-glyph alphabet) under the Latin letters of the Sigillum Dei that they wish to target. Thus, it is essential that the script be correctly parsed and that would be the case even if it becomes necessary to maneuver geometrically as then the starting point would be wrong. Note that the cited German passage immediately proceeds to refer to the seven sides of two heptagons ("die siebende Seyten/und die zween siebende Triangel").



As you can see, there is an interior heptagon and also seven pointers to Latin letters effectively forming a second heptagon. Note that there are only y's and no i's on the sigil which could explain why our author spelled Seiten as Seyten. Granted that the very next sentence of the German text directly alludes to the names of Gott ("gelobet sei sein Name"), there can be little doubt that the Sigillum Dei was used to extract the "Legis cavtio..." from the VMS.

On VMS script, I am, for the moment, assuming that all glyphs that touch each other occupy a single spot on the wheel and that separate glyphs occupy separate spots even if they are frequently grouped together. Also, for the moment, I'm assuming that blank spaces between tokens are characters occupying one spot. In movement (forward or backwards) around the circle of the Sigillum Dei, each spot would correspond to one Latin letter. An error in parsing the script will unfortunately lead to erroneous output.

Well, JP, this brings us to the point of this whole post. I'm looking for alternative ideas on how to best parse VMS script. Do you have anything to suggest?

Quote:Morten: "JP, Your remarks here leave little doubt that you suspect something Germanic behind the VMS."

Why do you assume that?????

I'm blown away that you would say that.

I've never ever once said or even implied that the VMS main text might be germanic. I have no idea what language it is, assuming there is a medieval natural language behind it. Maybe it is a germanic language but I've seen no evidence for that yet. It could be anything.


Whoever wrote the text on 116v might have added the text 20 years after the VMS was created and not known anything about the actual VMS glyphs. I'm HOPING they were contemporary with the creation of the VMS because it simplifies the research process (a bit) and there are two VMS tokens on the folio that suggest MAYBE they understood Voynichese, but just because there are half a dozen German words on the last folio doesn't mean there's a germanic language encoded into the VMS.

In fact, I very much doubt that the person who wrote the German words on 116v was a German speaker. It's written as though by someone who DOESN'T know German very well (the grammar is off).

(14-09-2019, 10:06 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Morten: "JP, Your remarks here leave little doubt that you suspect something Germanic behind the VMS."

Why do you assume that?????

I'm blown away that you would say that.

I've never ever once said or even implied that the VMS main text might be germanic. I have no idea what language it is, assuming there is a medieval natural language behind it. Maybe it is a germanic language but I've seen no evidence for that yet. It could be anything.

JP, You are jumping to the wrong conclusions. I do not think you believe the German language underlies VMS encryption and I have never thought such a thing. By "something Germanic" I was only referring to the comments that I cited.

I guess it was foolish of me to seek help on the parsing. No need to worry. I'll be able to figure it out. The possibilities are no longer limitless. And even if the encryption employs gates, I may still be able to break the code before the end of the year.