The Voynich Ninja

(26-03-2018, 10:47 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(26-03-2018, 08:49 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Is anyone in this community actively engaged at the present time in trying to decode the VMS?

Yes. It's not as easy as it looks.

If I make any progress, I will post details here as a file attachment. Many thanks for all your help over the past month or two.

(26-03-2018, 07:59 AM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(26-03-2018, 03:14 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sadly, my most important theories never came up for discussion. These concern the VMS encryption. I theorize that

1. the red-star passages of the recipes section encrypt 161 verses of prophetic text. The underlying language is sixth-century Latin. One distinction with classical Latin would be an expanded vocabulary with more words borrowed from Greek.

Morten St George,
I have already shown to you that your count is incorrect.
There are 163 red stars, not 161, AND keep in mind that we are missing four pages (f109r&v, 110r&v) which puts the original total even higher, probably around 210 based on the average 7 per page.

During the course of my preparations for decoding work, I encountered another argument against your red star contentions. It comes from the last page of the VMS, page 116v, shown here:



Do you see the red ink on the right side of this image? It's smeared over and on top of marginalia. My logic runs as follows: smeared ink implies fresh ink, therefore it has to be more recent than the marginalia, that is, the red ink (ie. the red coloring and dots on top of the stars) could also be marginalia. And if the red dots are marginalia (not made by the original authors of the VMS), then they can most certainly be indicating the passages that were decoded, translated, and published, per my theory.

In support of your point of view, there are claims of proof (based on the ink) that the marginalia on the last page is not marginalia but was made by the original authors of the VMS. Personally, I find that hard to believe: after such enormous effort to make the VMS as flawless as possible, why ruin it all by scribbling in meaningless doodles? In any case I have my own "proof" (or let's say, strong evidence) that the page 116v marginalia was written closer to 1600 than 1420.

Unlike parchment, ink cannot be carbon-dated so, presumably, claims that the original author wrote the scribbles on page 116v come from the McCrone report. I have it here: on Table 1 we find for test 16 out of 20: "Folio 116v Black ink from text"; Sample Locations: Vertical: "6.9 cm from top"; Horizontal: "2.9 cm from left", and after that, uniquely for the 20 tests, we see a mysterious "no photograph recorded." 

I'm reading that the VMS measures 23.5 cm by 16.2 cm, which, by my calculations, would mean that the McCrone ink sample was taken from the middle of nowhere, well below the writing at the top of page 116v. Am I missing something?

(04-04-2018, 06:04 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Am I missing something?

Yes.
As I explained there are four folios missing from this quire, and we don't know when they were lost. So even if the red ink were added years after the text, you can't determine that the red ink was added to 161 stars: we don't know if there were more stars with red ink on those missing folios.
There is nothing that proves that the folios were lost before the red ink was applied, and additionally, as I mentioned in my post, even if we discount those folios, there are 163 stars with red ink, not 161 as you claim. This is not my view, but an objective count, cross-checked by other forum members. Sorry if 163 does not fit your theory, but that is just what the numbers are.

I don't know why you think the doodles are meaningless.

They are hard to interpret, but so is the rest of the manuscript.

(04-04-2018, 06:37 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-04-2018, 06:04 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Am I missing something?

Yes.
As I explained there are four folios missing from this quire, and we don't know when they were lost. So even if the red ink were added years after the text, you can't determine that the red ink was added to 161 stars: we don't know if there were more stars with red ink on those missing folios.
There is nothing that proves that the folios were lost before the red ink was applied, and additionally, as I mentioned in my post, even if we discount those folios, there are 163 stars with red ink, not 161 as you claim. This is not my view, but an objective count, cross-checked by other forum members. Sorry if 163 does not fit your theory, but that is just what the numbers are.

Back in the days when I had a computer that was able to distinguish colors, I counted that there were 161 VMS paragraphs where, immediately to the left, there was a star that had some red coloring. But if you say there are 163 such paragraphs, then so be it. Mathematics was never one of my strong points.

(04-04-2018, 07:26 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know why you think the doodles are meaningless.

They are hard to interpret, but so is the rest of the manuscript.

In the world of letters forged by the RC, someone called Kinner, presumably a friend of someone called Marci, wrote a letter in 1666 to someone called Kircher inquiring if he (Kircher) had made any progress in deciphering the VMS and, in the same letter, Kinner referred to a book called the "ficto Atlantidis".

In MSG Theory, the New Atlantis was a book written by Shakespeare (I'm quite serious about this but note that I am not a Stratfordian) in Latin and published by him under the title of Novus Atlas in 1633 and then under the title of Nova Atlantis in 1638. We know it was originally written in Latin because the Latin text includes a scattering of Spanish words. While a Latin to English translator would have no trouble translating the Spanish into correct English, an English to Latin translator would have no motive to put any of it in Spanish.

The Latin to English translation may or may not have been made by Sir Francis Bacon. Here is one of many intriguing sentences from that book:

"So as I take it to be denominate of the King of the Hebrews, which is famous with you, and no strangers to us; for we have some parts of his works which with you are lost; namely, that natural history which he wrote of all plants, from the cedar of Libanus to the moss that groweth out of the wall;"

In context, the King of the Hebrews would be Solomon but, as far as I am aware, he was not famous for his botanical writings. Out of context (a standard Shakespearean deception technique), the King of the Hebrews would be INRI who, as may be inferred from informant reports, was believed by the Cathars to have authored the cooking instructions for the VMS plants.

Anyway, we are looking for a botanical work that begins with the cedar of Libanus. Well, not exactly. It seems the original Latin gives us "cedro Libani" not "cedrus Libani." Cedro is one of those Spanish words inserted into the text. So, in effect, we are not looking for a Lebanese cedar but for a Spanish cedar (cedrela odorata, a tree with a tall, thick, branchless trunk) in a Baalbek setting. And, lo and behold, Shakespeare (in his very own Historie of Plantes, 1597) puts just such a drawing on his front page:



Notice the shape and distribution of the leaves and compare it with the shape and distribution of the leaves that show though the parchment on the FIRST page of the VMS. (Graphic previously uploaded).

I'm curious: Is it normal for color graphics to show through the parchment on all medieval manuscripts as vividly as they do for the VMS? Or does this suggest that the VMS parchment is exceptionally thin? Can parchment experts easily detect which side of each parchment page in the VMS was the inner skin and which side was the hairy side of the pelt? I imagine that this would be more noticeable on skin taken from older rather than younger animals.

We now need to find a botanical book that ends with "moss that groweth out of the wall." Shakespeare's botany book ends its depictions with the Barnakle Tree (graphic previously uploaded) where, I guess, we can imagine abundant sea moss on those natural sea walls. And then there's this at the end of our VMS:



Can anyone other than me envision moss growing out of that big crack in the wall?

But how can we be sure that the last page of the VMS is, in fact, a wall?



Let's immediately clarify that Shakespeare did not write this for it to be read by 21st-century experts in medieval handwriting. It's cryptic writing intended to provide helpful information for people who already have some idea about what is going on.

For me, the last word on the top line stands out as "mature", where here the plus sign is actually a "t". Mature, an adjective in English but an adverb in Latin, can be found in the first verse of the Incantation (deemed encrypted into page 106r, lines 13-14): Quos legent hosce versus mature censunto, Let those who read these verses consider them maturely.

Below, to the right of the "ō", we see a word that seems to have the dot of an "i" above it but that may be another deception. It is likely just a stray dot like the one we see directly below that word. Look now at the two letters to the right of the "t" in mature and compare with the two letters to the right of the "m" in the word below the dot: mur, = WALL. And that's our wall.

It seems INRI also wrote about walls:



In the VMS text above, note that "mur" is preceded with "ō" and that the line ends with a great big "O" that is preceded by the letters "ch".

Mur d'Orient cherra …

Per my translation, the entire recipe in English reads as:

The royal bird over the city of the Sun,
Seven months beforehand shall make nocturnal augury,
Wall of the Orient shall fall thunder, illuminated,
Seven days to the ports the inimicals to the hour.

Note that this recipe contains two quantities of seven (directly above and below the Wall) which add up to fourteen. In the VMS, directly above the mur (but which has dots above and below) we see "vix" which, when read as Hebrew from right to left, gives us "xiv", that is, fourteen.

In the last line of the French translation, the word "portes" is apparently a Frenchification of the Latin "portis" which, in the dative case (which is what we have here) could mean either ports or gates. Opting for gates was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes the cabalists ever made, inspiring them to develop elaborate encryption systems based on gates (combinations of Hebrew letters).

Shakespeare expresses general understanding of INRI's words; for example, in the second line of his Atlantidis, he openly refers to "Iaponiam" by name. But, regarding "portis", he erroneously sides with the cabalists as we can see in the line above mature:



Portas, gates. No, no, no. It's ports, not gates!

Here Shakespeare has to be referring to the encryption because in the Nova Atlantis he leaves no doubt that he knows it's ports: "urbis maritimae, ad Orientalem." Or, maybe, he wrote the VMS scribbles first and then later took advantage of his Atlantidis to correct that grievous error?

It's interesting that Shakespeare decided to use the gate of c + open-bottom 8 to represent the letter s and the gate of c + backward-slanted i to represent the letter e.

Convinced now that the writings on page 116v are just meaningless doodles?

(05-04-2018, 08:23 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm curious: Is it normal for color graphics to show through the parchment on all medieval manuscripts as vividly as they do for the VMS?

It's quite common. Some were so thin (especially some of the French bibles that were prepared with a special process that deliberately processed the parchment so it was thin), you could almost read the text from the other side.

Quote:For me, the last word on the top line stands out as "mature", where here the plus sign is actually a "t". Mature, an adjective in English but an adverb in Latin, can be found in the first verse of the Incantation (deemed encrypted into page 106r, lines 13-14): Quos legent hosce versus mature censunto, Let those who read these verses consider them maturely.

If you are used to reading 15th-century script, it quite clearly reads as ma+ria (Maria). Look at the other "i" shapes on the page. They all have a leading serif and the "i" was haphazardly dotted at this time (sometimes dotted, sometimes not). Look also at the other "r" shapes, they are the form which has the hook disconnected from the stem. This was quite common at the time.

JKP wrote:

"If you are used to reading 15th-century script, it quite clearly reads as ma+ria (Maria). Look at the other "i" shapes on the page. They all have a leading serif and the "i" was haphazardly dotted at this time (sometimes dotted, sometimes not). Look also at the other "r" shapes, they are the form which has the hook disconnected from the stem. This was quite common at the time."

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Isn't Maria a religious name in Italian? I sure hope you're not reverting back to authorship by the northern monks?

I think you handwriting experts are suffering from optical illusions. Let's try an experiment. Let's remove the word mature from all its surroundings and show it to people. I'm pretty sure many or most people would identify that central plus sign (+) as the letter t. Your judgment is being distorted by the surrounding plus signs and you don't realize it.

Similarly for the word mur. Let's extract it without the stray dot and show it to people. How many people do you think would say the word is nim when there is no optical illusion? BTW, what's nim supposed to mean? 

Also, please note that there is no Latin letter a here. That's another optical illusion. It's just a VMS glyph that happens to look similar to the letter a, comprised by the joining of a c with an i, where the i has a left hook on top and attaches to the top of the c. There is absolutely no evidence that this glyph was created to represent the letter a. In fact, I see that one handwriting expert transcribes the final a of your Maria as "ct". 

For my analysis, I interpreted this glyph as representing the diphthong æ which can be transcribed either as an a or an e. That's how I get mature. Similarly, portas can be rendered as portes, which exactly matches the published output in spelling.

Let's briefly have another look at Shakespeare's shield on page 17:



Recall that on page 116v Shakespeare induced us into a Hebrew reversal of vix to get xiv. Here, a Hebrew reversal of 17 gives us 71.

Let's now look at an excerpt from the printing of the backup manuscript:



Notice the numbering sequence: 80, 71, 82. The portes recipe is incorrectly numbered 71!

Now, inside the portes recipe, notice that the first Sept is erroneously and inexplicably spelled Segt, where the p has been ridiculously replaced with a g.



Now back to page 116v. Immediately to the right of mur: Is that, or is that not, the Latin letter g?

Quote:"Isn't Maria a religious name in Italian? I sure hope you're not reverting back to authorship by the northern monks?

I think you handwriting experts are suffering from optical illusions. Let's try an experiment. Let's remove the word mature from all its surroundings and show it to people. I'm pretty sure many or most people would identify that central plus sign (+) as the letter t. Your judgment is being distorted by the surrounding plus signs and you don't realize it."

There's no way a contemporary viewer can accurately read medieval text unless they've had practice reading (or at least studying) old manuscripts. My judgment is tempered by many years study and practice, so I'll trust my judgment over a bunch of random people who probably can't read even read 16th-century script, much less the more difficult 15th-century script.

That is not a "t". It's a cross that's been inserted. If the text on the last page is an incantation or prayer, the cross symbol means you genuflect at those points while reading it out loud.


I don't know how you can say my judgment is being distorted when I've paged through thousands of medieval texts and have read many medieval manuscripts that are in Middle English, French, German, Nordic, and Latin. I can even kind of get the gist of some of the Russian, Italian, and Spanish texts, not much, but enough to get a sense of what they are about. Unfortunately, I don't know any Czech or Turkish (except for a few words) and my Greek is limited to reading titles, mythical names and names of plants, but Greek is a different character set anyway and doesn't apply to the style of script on 116v.

Quote:Also, please note that there is no Latin letter a here. That's another optical illusion. It's just a VMS glyph that happens to look similar to the letter a, comprised by the joining of a c with an i, where the i has a left hook on top and attaches to the top of the c. There is absolutely no evidence that this glyph was created to represent the letter a. In fact, I see that one handwriting expert transcribes the final a of your Maria as "ct".

I have never said that the VMS glyph that resembles "a" is the letter "a". I don't even refer to them as letters, I always call them glyphs. The only time I say "a" is when I am referring to the EVA designation. In the EVA character set, this glpyh is mapped to the letter "a" on the keyboard.

It's just a shape, as far as I'm concerned.


There aren't very many handwriting experts here. Most Voynich researchers have not studied paleography. I have noticed, however, that some have good judgment and there are a few who are well-versed in the medieval Latin language, which means learning to read the old Latin character set.


I hope you are not assuming the text on the last page was written by the same scribes that wrote the Voynichese main text. I am skeptical. The text on the last page might have been written around the same time, but I don't see truly convincing evidence that it's one of the same scribes that wrote the Voynichese, in spite of the fact that there are a couple of Voynichese tokens on the page.