The Voynich Ninja

I feel like Galileo trying to explain to the Inquisition that he saw four moons around the planet Jupiter and that they really exist.

(10-04-2018, 02:17 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I feel like Galileo trying to explain to the Inquisition that he saw four moons around the planet Jupiter and that they really exist.

You're more like Galileo's uncle who claims the earth is flat and keeps demanding more evidence that it isn't.

This question is specifically for Morten St George (please don't jump in and answer it for him).
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MSG, this text snippet is from a late 14th, early 15th-century manuscript with the same subject matter as the VMS and is placed next to a drawing. There is a large drawing on each page and labels similar to this by each one. It is the same script style as folio 116v. The original labels are added in red and these are underneath, and were probably added in the early to mid-15th century.

Without cheating and asking someone to help you, tell me what this says. It's not difficult if you are familiar with 15th-century script:

[attachment=2069]

(13-04-2018, 05:25 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This question is specifically for Morten St George (please don't jump in and answer it for him).
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MSG, this text snippet is from a late 14th, early 15th-century manuscript with the same subject matter as the VMS and is placed next to a drawing. There is a large drawing on each page and labels similar to this by each one. It is the same script style as folio 116v. The original labels are added in red and these are underneath, and were probably added in the early to mid-15th century.

Without cheating and asking someone to help you, tell me what this says. It's not difficult if you are familiar with 15th-century script:

Sorry, I only have ten minutes of Internet time left. Will be back online later in the week. In my country, a regular Internet connection is only for rich people.

I think the u of ubren changes places with the v of mvr to give us vbren and mur.

It looks like the text pages are not in front to back order. page 103r jumps to page 104r. look at the stars. full coloring as opposed to red dots. the match from page 116v to page 104r is in the last of the full coloring just before it changes over to dots. This would be the portes line, the last line of the stanza. Note 7 full reds on page 103r and 5 full reds on page 104r, making 3 complete stanzas of 4 lines each.

(13-04-2018, 05:25 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This question is specifically for Morten St George (please don't jump in and answer it for him).
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MSG, this text snippet is from a late 14th, early 15th-century manuscript with the same subject matter as the VMS and is placed next to a drawing. There is a large drawing on each page and labels similar to this by each one. It is the same script style as folio 116v. The original labels are added in red and these are underneath, and were probably added in the early to mid-15th century.

Without cheating and asking someone to help you, tell me what this says. It's not difficult if you are familiar with 15th-century script:

Is that unnamed 14th / 15th century manuscript something that the authors of a herbal encyclopedia in the 16th century could have seen or been familiar with?

The author of the marginalia reveals the same fanaticism and approach to the recipes that I found elsewhere. Thus, I'm confident I know who wrote the VMS marginalia but I think it best to avoid that topic as it would only sidetrack us from our VMS investigations. But I will say that he lived from 1553 to 1625 which would pretty much rule out any possibility of authorship of the marginalia in the 15th century.

There is nothing wrong with your discovery of German influence in the marginalia. The author of the marginalia wrote two classics in that language: Faustbuch (1587) and Fama Fraternitatis (1614), so it cannot be surprising that he would resort to that language for purposes of deception and disguise. For example, the German "mich" can also allude to Michel Nostradamus, under whose name the VMS recipes were published.

What I would like you to do is imagine, just for moment, that I am correct in claiming that the dot above mur is just one of the stray dots on that page. Without seeing a dot there, would you really read that word as nim?

As previously cited from a translation, the author of the marginalia, in his Latin writings, refers to a botanical book that ends with a wall. On the last page of the VMS your nim is the only realistic possibility for that wall. From this point of view, the word has to be mur. Moreover, the "portas" in the second line of page 116v and "vix" in the third line of page 116v have connections with the same passage where we find the "Mur". Moreover, the Latin book that tells us about the wall begins with a reference to the location of that mur.

(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.

This was the third time you challenged the count of red stars so I think it time we sort it out.

It looks like the original authors of the manuscript (circa 1420) put a small black dot into the middle of most of the stars. In order to avoid confusion with the newly-added red stars (which mark the published paragraphs), the author of the marginalia (circa 1590) applied white-out to the small black dots of the original authors but a few of them can still be seen.

Some of the red ink is so dark that it can also look black. The only way to safely distinguish the dark red ink and the original black ink is to enlarge the dots enough to see whether or not it has pixels with a tinge of red ink.

As I have stated previously, I am not counting the red-dot star on the top of page 105r because, unlike all the other stars, it has no text to the right of it. This is not to say that this red dot is not important. It lies above a rare glyph seen nowhere else in the recipes. In fact elsewhere we only find this glyph on one of the concentric circles on page 57v, where it is the 14th of a series of 17 letters repeated four times around a circle, so I take this as possible indication to use that particular circle in the decoding process. As previously stated, the circles oscillate back and forth, presumably to rearrange the order of the gates. I do not yet know the precise mechanism but I am working on it.

I am also not counting a miniature star (which appears to have a slight tinge of red ink in it) attached to the second red star on page 106r. This mini star does not independently mark any text.

Since all the red ink in the recipes section is marginalia, it is wholly irrelevant whether or not any pages are missing from that section.

I count red-tinge stars (excluding the two mentioned above) as follows:

page 103r = 7 red stars; page 103v = 7 red stars; page 104r = 7 red stars; page 104v = 7 red stars; page 105r = 5 red stars; page 105v = 5 red stars; page 106r = 8 red stars; page 106v = 7 red stars; 107r = 8 red stars; page 107v = 8 red stars; page 108r = 5 red stars; page 108v = 8 red stars; page 111r = 8 red stars; page 111v = 10 red stars; page 112r = 6 red stars; page 112v = 7 red stars; page 113r = 8 red stars; page 113v = 8 red stars; page 114r = 7 red stars; page 114v = 6 red stars; page 115r = 7 red stars; page 115v = 7 red stars; page 116r = 5 red stars

By my count, this adds up to 161 stars (paragraphs) marked with red ink. If you wish to dispute the count for any particular page or pages, please let me know which page or pages so that I can have another look at it and we can then discuss the issue.

I started looking for the original source of 161 prophetic verses around 35 years ago but encountered the VMS only around five or six years ago. At the time I was investigating John Dee as a potential consultant for certain astrological almanacs when I saw an article connecting him with the VMS, so I decided to check it out. Today, evidence that the VMS could be the source I was looking for goes far beyond a count of red stars.

(16-04-2018, 07:40 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.page 111r = 8 red stars

Not 9 ?
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By the way, why do you insist on 161, exactly? It's not as if there were only 39 quatrains in the Centuries of Nostradamus that could be linked somehow to some lines in Shakespeare's and Marlowe's  works... some common vocabulary, yes, but what else should be expected from such a large corpus? So where did the idea of 161 prophetic verses come from, 35 years ago, somewhere else?

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"Les corrélations sont apparemment sans fin." (The correlations are apparently endless.)

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39 prophecies of the Kabbalah identified in Nostradamus

(17-04-2018, 10:42 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-04-2018, 07:40 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.page 111r = 8 red stars

Not 9 ?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

By the way, why do you insist on 161, exactly? It's not as if there were only 39 quatrains in the Centuries of Nostradamus that could be linked somehow to some lines in Shakespeare's and Marlowe's  works... some common vocabulary, yes, but what else should be expected from such a large corpus? So where did the idea of 161 prophetic verses come from, 35 years ago, somewhere else?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
"Les corrélations sont apparemment sans fin." (The correlations are apparently endless.)

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
39 prophecies of the Kabbalah identified in Nostradamus

Thanks. As I was saying, mathematics was never one of my strong points.

I can't find my notes from a few years ago, but I now think I excluded the second shaded star on page 104r, viewing it as a blackened-out (deleted) red star. In that section of the recipes they were oscillating between red star paragraphs (the original Latin) and white star commentaries (possibly in a vernacular language) so seeing two consecutive red stars certainly suggests an error.

Please have a close look at the second shaded star (the third star from the top) on page 104r and carefully compare it with the other shaded stars on that page. Do you agree that it could be a blackened-out red star?

So we are potentially back to a total of 161. Regardless, your outstanding ability to count stars is forcing me to dramatically alter my theories. I now have to increase the number of recipe pages from 23 to 26. The first six pages of the recipes (this is subject to change) would be as follows:

1. page 57v. No stars. Just decoding keys.

2. page 58v. One white star. Probably an introduction to the text of recipes.

3. page 108r. Five full-color red stars with commentaries.

4. page 58r. Three white star commentaries on last red star of page 108r.

5. page 103r. Seven full-color red stars with commentaries.

6. page 104r. Four full-color red stars (excluding the blackened star) with commentaries, followed by changeover from full color to red dots for two stars.

OBSERVATIONS / COMMENTS

a. There are no full-color red stars other than the ones on the three indicated pages. The full-color stars add up to 16, that is, four complete recipes of four lines each.

b. The white stars on the top of pages 58r and 58v have their inner black dots whitened-out just like the white stars on pages 103r to 116r, reinforcing the conclusion that those pages belong in the recipe section.

c. There are no pages missing from the recipes section. The gap in the numbering is only an indication that two folios (subsequently numbered 57 and 58) were moved to elsewhere in the manuscript.

OTHER MATTERS

1. There are 39 recipes of 4 lines each, making a total of 156. In addition, there is one Incantation of 4 lines plus 1 title line, adding up to 5 and making a grand total of 161. The Incantation is not strictly a recipe but appears to be an original-author prelude to his recipes. Unlike the recipes, which were translated from Latin to French, the Incantation was left in the original Latin and hence could prove to be invaluable for decoding the VMS.

2. I haven't updated my French website in quite a while but the account of published output and textual variants should remain valid as well as a lot of the bibliographical and Cabala-related information. The latest on Marlowe and Shakespeare can be found on my English-language website.

In brief, I am claiming that the author of the VMS marginalia was the architect (creator of plots and characters but not the writer) of the Marlovian and Shakespearean plays. In addition, he wrote Faustbuch, Fama Fraternitatis and Novus Atlas. All of these works excluding Faustbuch, but including Marlowe's Faustus and all thirty-six plays in Shakespeare's First Folio, directly refer to one or more of the VMS recipes.

Consequently, a successful fresh decoding of the VMS could have unexpected impact on another sphere: It would quickly resolve a century-long debate regarding Shakespeare authorship.

(07-04-2018, 10:46 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I suggest you read the threads on this. This specific phrase is closer to German (or old Yiddish) than any other language.

so is German (it's similar to "so" in English)
nim is German (this was a common way to spell it in certain areas in the Middle Ages, now it is spelled nimm and means to take)
gaf means gave in lowland Medieval German, gas can have a number of interpretations, one being "goose"
mich is "me/to me" in German. Some have also suggested it might be short for "milch" for "milk" in German and that is reasonable as consonants were sometimes dropped from words if the word was pronounced that way.

In other words, depending on how gas/gaf is interpreted (as "f" or as "s") it might mean he gave it to me to take (in corrupted grammar typical of a foreign speaker), or so take goose milk (which might be a remedy connected with an incantation).

From the point of view of a paleographer, your comments here are no doubt just fine. But as a cryptographer suspecting evasive writing on page 116v, I would be looking for meanings of greater significance or at least a helpful hint or two for the decoding. Can any benefit be derived from insinuating that this marginalia could have been the work of a child who wanted a glass of goose milk?



On the assumption that "mich" is a cryptic truncation of the word "michel", I have to conclude that your gaf or gas is in reality gal this being a cryptic truncation of the word "gallo". Note that it truncates at the middle of the l which lacks the final downward stroke, similarly to how the r of mur was truncated, lacking the final upward stroke.

As previously indicated, the author of the VMS marginalia also wrote parts of a botanical encyclopedia including the following words:

"Nostradami Salonensis Gallo-prouincie"

To reinforce "gal" as a truncation of "gallo", the author repeats the unusual "u" of ubren (page 116v) on the top of page 17r, just to the right of where he gives special emphasis to the concept of a double l :



Note that the top of the first l in a double l situation is more horizontal than the second l similar to what we see for the l in gal.

Meanwhile, the big O that follows "mich" can stand for both Orientalem (location of the wall) and Oracula (Michel's theme).

Thus, the "gallo" serves a double function: it identifies "mur" as a French word and it identifies "mich" as a Frenchman.

In summation, the final words of the VMS quite appropriately point us to the publication of the recipes.

You remind me of Darla on YouTube