The Voynich Ninja

Well, you didn't specify 116v, you said, "... something Germanic behind the VMS."

When you say "behind the VMS" to me that means the main text.

I pretty much think of 116v as marginalia. There's no guarantee whatsoever that it was written at the same time as the main text. It could have been added 1 or 2 decades later, possibly even in another country. There might not be any connection whatsoever with 116v and the rest of the manuscript. Even the style of writing of the two Voynich words is not the same as the main text handwriting.

It was extremely common in the Middle Ages for people to add notes to the beginning and end pages regardless of the content of the rest of the manuscript.


I do not think there is something "Germanic" behind 116v. I KNOW that there are German words, just as there are Latin words and Romance-language words.

The German words are very recognizable, but ungrammatical, as though they were written by someone not very familiar with German.
The Latin words are somewhat recognizable but with plus signs in between, one doesn't necessarily expect grammar (it could be an incantation, for example).
The Romance words are mixed with something similar to Romance language but not immediately recognizable and not standard, but the syllables follow the patterns of Romance words.

So, German followed by Romance-like words, followed by Latin and Romance (e.g., portas), then Latin followed by two tokens of Voynichese followed by German. None of it grammatical.

(15-09-2019, 02:46 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I pretty much think of 116v as marginalia. There's no guarantee whatsoever that it was written at the same time as the main text. It could have been added 1 or 2 decades later, possibly even in another country. 

With our total inability to carbon-date the marginalia, it is easy to see how someone might think that its German words could have been written around the same time as the main body of the VMS or shortly thereafter, or that the VMS could have been written by Germans (who probably wrote mostly in Latin during that epoch) or that the VMS could have been compiled "north of the Alps".  This would be especially true, as is here the case, where the handwriting style of the marginalia has been determined to be consistent with typical handwriting styles of the 15th century.

In my own investigation of the marginalia, I discovered that it unmistakably reveals knowledge of prophetic writings published in 1590 and of a herbal encyclopedia published in 1597. This overrides all other considerations: the marginalia had to have been written toward the end of the 16th century or sometime thereafter.

Similar logic applies to a refutation of a prophet named Michel Nostradamus (1503 - 1566): some of the prophecies attributed to him reflect detailed knowledge of French historical events of the 1580s, hence they could not have been written any earlier than that.

Meanwhile, the marginalia's surreptitious pointers to the aforementioned prophetic and herbal books bring into play other books (written in the Latin, German, English and Italian languages) that likewise surreptitiously link to one or the other or both of those books.  As it turns out, the history of the VMS and the identity of the marginalia's author are no longer as much of a mystery as they once were.

What's a surreptitious link?



This is a only a quatrain, not a VMS prophecy. So, where do we find something beginning with "Boni"?



Confirmed by a corroboration (not to mention the depicted astrolabe!), we've been drawn to an Italian book that initiates the story of An English Fairy Tale that I posted the other day.

The style of the handwriting on 116v is early or mid-15th century. Even though a palaeographer can see this at a glance, I have collected many hundreds of samples to demonstrate this because non-palaeographers simply won't believe it if they don't see evidence.

So, it's possible it was written at the same time as the VMS, but it's also possible it was written a decade or two later. It is HIGHLY unlikely that it was written any time after the mid-16th century and only a small percentage of people still wrote this way in the early 16th century (they were transitioning to humanist styles).

"Bonis in bonum"? What's that mean, something like "right are the morally good"?

(16-09-2019, 02:25 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The style of the handwriting on 116v is early or mid-15th century. Even though a palaeographer can see this at a glance, I have collected many hundreds of samples to demonstrate this because non-palaeographers simply won't believe it if they don't see evidence.

So, it's possible it was written at the same time as the VMS, but it's also possible it was written a decade or two later. It is HIGHLY unlikely that it was written any time after the mid-16th century and only a small percentage of people still wrote this way in the early 16th century (they were transitioning to humanist styles).

JP, I look at it this way:

a. A great linguistic scholar of the 16th century, in personal possession of many 15th century manuscripts, should be able to imitate the handwriting style of the 15th century if he so wished.

b. Someone from the 15th century should not be able to express knowledge of 16th century publications under any circumstances.

I've posted about such knowledge in this forum so my arguments are available for any and all to challenge.

The marginalia provides us with tons of information useful for decoding the VMS and your conclusion that it was written by someone weak in grammar isn't at all helpful. That applies equally well to those of you who think it's all about "goat's liver" and to those of you who write it off as "doodle".

(16-09-2019, 05:46 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."Bonis in bonum"? What's that mean, something like "right are the morally good"?

The "Bonis" looks like the ablative case to me so I would translate it as "Unto good for the sake of good". But I, of course, am not a professional translator so please take that as just a guess.

If you're really interested in what it means, I can tell you where you might find the correct answer. Get a modern-day book entitled "Bonis in Bonum", which actually has direct bearing on the case at hand (late 16th / early 17th centuries) and hopefully will explain the meaning of its humanistic title. It's written in Dutch but that's fine because the book I alluded to, though written in Italian, was actually printed in the Netherlands but falsely attributed to a printer in Venice.

That reminds me of Giordano Bruno whose books, a couple of decades earlier, were published in London but falsely attributed to printers from all over Italy. Indeed, they were master forgers. Numerous booklets called almanachs and quartos were forged by them, backdated, and falsely attributed to real printers who were genuinely active on the backdated date. They modeled their forgeries on real publications (which provided fonts, vignettes / logo, shop address, et cetera) of said printers and often not even experts could detect that those publications were fake.

(16-09-2019, 10:55 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....


The marginalia provides us with tons of information useful for decoding the VMS and your conclusion that it was written by someone weak in grammar isn't at all helpful. That applies equally well to those of you who think it's all about "goat's liver" and to those of you who write it off as "doodle".

I didn't say the person was weak in grammar. I said it was ungrammatical, all of it. Maybe that is deliberate.

I did say it was written like someone who isn't a native German speaker (it is ungrammatical) but that still doesn't eliminate the possibility of deliberate obfuscation.



As for the goat's liver (pox leber, which would be pronounced poch/boch leber in some German dialects), it's not my idea, but it is a legitimate possible reading. They DID pronounce and write it that way in some regions, as in Alsace/Bavaria/Tyrol. The "x" is interpreted as in Greek (in fact, it was quite common to see this substituted for "ch" or "k" in early medieval manuscripts). and the p/b were interchangeable in some areas (not just Germany).

pox leber is bock's leber, die Leber eines Bockes, the liver of a billygoat or a roebuck, the '...cks' is pronouncd the same way as '...x', it is the same genitive 's' as in English, it it the same sound as in ENG box, a small case or pox, the sickness.

For English speakers it should be intuitive to think of "buck's liver" as the etymological cognate.

(17-09-2019, 05:02 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.pox leber is bock's leber, die Leber eines Bockes, the liver of a billygoat or a roebuck, the '...cks' is pronouncd the same way as '...x', it is the same genitive 's' as in English, it it the same sound as in ENG box, a small case or pox, the sickness.

Hi Winkler. I'm afraid you have me confused. Are you claiming that it's a "sickness" of the liver or that the goats themselves are sick? I think you should take up this matter with JP who, I presume, thinks the goat's liver is something that you eat.

Yesterday, I saw on YouTube the latest and greatest of the VMS movies, entitled The Voynich Manuscript: A History, which I believe was released just this month:

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Beware that the movie tends to agree with JP: it's goat's liver and not goat's sickness; however, rather than edible liver, the world's scientific community now thinks that the goat's liver was used to make patches for wounds. So the VMS is no longer to be considered a herbal book, nor a book about astrology and cosmology, but merely a book about medieval medicine.

The film displayed the animal depicted on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and although they did not directly say so, it was presumable that there is universal scientific agreement on it being a goat. For my part, beyond the fact that it has four legs, I see little resemblance with goats. For one thing, the ears look wrong:



That's the VMS image on the left, followed by wiki deer ears and wiki goat ears. The deer ears seem to give the better match. Moreover, the black lower legs look a lot like the black lower legs of marsh deer. Marsh deer are relevant here because the animal is depicted directly above a naked marsh girl from the swamp section of the VMS.

Even the "pox leber" itself is questionable.



When I want to correct something I've written, I sometimes just X it out. Notice that the ink of the X looks darker than the rest of the ink and hence the X could very well be overwriting another letter, making it a cross-out X rather than a real X.

On "leber", I see the belated dot of an "i" above the "r". To which of the two vowels does it apply? Only the top of the first "e" points to it on extension so that has to be our "i". This gives us "liber" instead of "leber". And it just so happens that "liber" was a fundamental word of Latin and all Romance languages. As a noun, it meant "book", and as an adjective it meant "free".

Granted that the bulk of the VMS depicts plants, "liber" might make more sense than "leber" because plants do not have livers. I'll repeat that: plants do not have livers.

Beyond the pictures of Wilfred Voynich's wife and his female assistant (I was wondering what they looked like), the movie mostly covered the same old stuff that everyone knows with the notable exception of the following citation of Wilfred's words:

"When the time comes, I will prove to the world that the Black Magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of Twentieth century sciences."

With you guys endlessly disparaging the VMS on goat's liver and the like, it was certainly refreshing to see someone take a positive view!

I sure wish I could have seen that citation a few years ago: though I've known that the VMS prophecies were a subset of Merlin's prophecies for some time, only in the current year (2019) have I come to realize that the link between Merlin the magician and the VMS extends to encryption. The Sigillum Dei that I have been talking about lately stands, of course, at the very heart of medieval Black Magic.

The "discoveries far in advance of Twentieth century sciences" sounds like a ploy to increase the monetary value of his manuscript but I don't think so. I think Voynich knew more about the VMS than he's letting on (there's nothing visible in the VMS that could lead one to such an outrageous conclusion), and he surely didn't acquire that knowledge from the Jesuits in Italy.

His contact might have come via his wife. She was the daughter of George Boole, the father of Boolean algebra, that is, he was someone who could have been a latter-day member of the same secret society that decoded the VMS in the late 16th century. Regardless, the VMS was likely passed on to Voynich in London on the condition that he bring it to the world's attention.

Interestingly, the aforementioned film notes that an effort was made to sell the VMS to a public institution at high price prior to giving it away to Yale. I think that was always the plan for Voynich and his wife: if they couldn't sell it to a public institution (not including private investors) that would continue to promote the VMS after their death, then they would arrange for it to be gifted to one such institution. It would have been their commitment upon acquisition of the manuscript, and I hold Voynich and his wife in high esteem.