The Voynich Ninja

Let us suppose an intelligent and inquisitive person who has never seen the Voynich ms. is shown it and allowed to peruse it for five and only five minutes.

What are the peculiar and unusual features to be noticed on such first impressions?

I think there are three:

1. The nymph section.
2. The fold out map.
3. The script.

On first impressions we have a medieval herbal with an astrological section and, it seems, recipes for herbal preparations. Nothing unusual in any of that (until we look closer.)

But turning to the nymph (baneological) section is a WTF moment. It is when we reach page 75r that we realize this is not just an ordinary (if somewhat rustic) herbal.

I think the foldout map is a big surprise as well. First impressions must tell us that it is important to the whole work. It is unusual in itself and obviously a stand-out feature.

It is the script, though, that is most peculiar. On first impressions, given five minutes, we would think, quite reasonably, that it is written in some European language. There seem to be words and paragraphs and running text. But the script is entirely unfamiliar.

After looking at it for five minutes there is only one question to be asked: Why is it not written in Roman script?

There are, indeed, so many peculiar features of the Vms, upon closer inspection, and its peculiarities are so overwhelming, that it is useful, I think, to look at it with fresh eyes now and then, as if for the first time.

For me, these are the matters that are really begging for answers. I can explain an astrological herbal no matter how odd, but the nymphs, the map and the script place this work beyond the pale. That is what I see when I ask: what is wrong with this picture?

The script is the real mystery. Even if, on first impressions, I suspected the work is a cipher, or gibberish, I am left wondering why someone has invented a script for the purpose? Wasn’t scrambling the text concealment enough? Why has someone gone to the trouble of designing and deploying a new script?

I suspect this mystery is connected to the other peculiarities, the nymphs and the map, and that a single explanation will explain all three.

I am wondering what others might cite as the conspicuously peculiar and unusual features of the work, the core conundrums?

I don't quite understand why you first point out all the weird stuff about the VM, and then single out the writing. 


I still remember the first time I read about the VM. I was waiting at the doctor's and there was an issue of EOS magazine. I'm always happy to find those, usually they only have things I'm not interested in: gossip, fashion and cars. Anyway, there was an article about mysterious books. One of them was the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which I often mention as an example of what a "modern" hoax looks like. Another was the VM. 

When I read about the VM some more at home, what struck me was exactly the opposite of just one thing: it was everything. The nymphs are weird, the diagrams are weird, the script is weird, the fact that there are foldouts is weird. These are all things one would notice in a few minutes, without bringing in deeper study of plant images. And if in those first minutes one would look at the last page, it would become clear that even the marginalia are weird. 

That is the conundrum, in my opinion: why is almost everything unusual?

I had a similar experience as Koen. When I first looked at the Voynich manuscript, everything was strange to me. At that time, I knew very little about medieval  manuscripts in general and medieval herbals in particular. All the plant illustrations seemed weird and the animal or human elements in pages like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seemed just crazy. So I guess that much depends on how knowledgeable the viewer is. The script probably looked strange to me, but to a palaeographer like Helmut it looks like abbreviated Latin; to someone who knows about medieval cyphers it probably looks less peculiar than Giovanni Fontana's cypher alphabet.

There are elements that still are highly original after years of looking at manuscripts: Q13 and the Rosettes certainly are two of them. I find the neat layout and the jars in the Pharma / Small-Plants section also quite unique. The whole tethered-stars theme is also worth mentioning: there are isolated parallels, but the Voynich takes things to a different level.

Many features of the text are unique, but these are things that you can only see with an accurate quantitative analysis, yet they could be the true core conundrum.

(14-07-2022, 02:17 AM)Hermes777 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On first impressions we have a medieval herbal with an astrological section and, it seems, recipes for herbal preparations. Nothing unusual in any of that (until we look closer.)

One can describe the VMS at a first view actually with this simple content specification. That is why it is all the more astonishing that someone has developed an encoding or a writing system for such a relatively banal content. Unless the text has little or no relation to the illustrations and contains an explosive content that should not be readable by everyone. On the other hand, the text may be just an intellectual gimmick and the VMS is indeed what it seems to be, namely a late medieval composite manuscript with the named sections (despite all the idiosyncrasies of the illustrations ).

Agreed. It's a strange work and wherever we turn we are confronted by conundrums. So, the question for me is: what amongst the strangeness is most peculiar and unusual in the sense that it defies any immediate explanation? The herbal pages are strange, but not so much on first impression. My first over-all impression is that it is a rustic work, unpolished, amateurish. Cartoonish pictures, unruled lines of text. So I was happy to provisionally put a lot of strangeness down to that. The strangeness of the herbs, I figured, could just be because the illustrator wasn't very good. And he certainly struggled with the human form. Similarly, other strangenesses. It is like so-called 'outsider' art. I think "outlandish" is exactly the right word. I gave its eccentricities some latitude.

But the nymphs are an immediate conundrum. Even at a glance, these are not simple bathing scenes and the weirdness cannot be put down to a rustic illustrator. And, as I say, I was immediately struck by the map. I thought - if there is a key to this work, this is likely to be it. See how it folds out and demands our attention. But above all I couldn't explain the script. Why is it written in this script? Or rather, I wondered: why is it not written in Roman letters, regardless of what (European) language it is?  I still think that is the central question. It emerges that it is a carefully designed script apparently made just for this project. But why make one at all? 

The answer must be that existing scripts were not adequate to the task. Even if the criterion was aesthetic, the existing scripts were no good. I can't see why the manuscript - an admittedly weird and somewhat outlandish astrological herbal - wasn't written in Latin or German, or whatever. And if it is, then why in this unique script? My first thought was: it means it has a small readership. The chosen script for the work narrows its readership. It's a private not a public work. I have a contextual hypothesis about the authorship (see my other post to Voynichtalk) but I struggle to explain the script. (Although I find Brian Cham's curve-and-line model suggestive in a Cusean context.)

(14-07-2022, 11:32 AM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(14-07-2022, 02:17 AM)Hermes777 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On first impressions we have a medieval herbal with an astrological section and, it seems, recipes for herbal preparations. Nothing unusual in any of that (until we look closer.)

One can describe the VMS at a first view actually with this simple content specification. That is why it is all the more astonishing that someone has developed an encoding or a writing system for such a relatively banal content. Unless the text has little or no relation to the illustrations and contains an explosive content that should not be readable by everyone. On the other hand, the text may be just an intellectual gimmick and the VMS is indeed what it seems to be, namely a late medieval composite manuscript with the named sections (despite all the idiosyncrasies of the illustrations ).

That's right. There are ways in which the text and the illustrations don't match. On my own reading of the illustrations, I think we have a depiction of the Ladin northern Italian alpine herb gathering tradition, and in part the illustrations are suitably rustic. I would describe some of the illustrations as folkish. Some astrological charts are a bit more sophisticated and are better done, but there is a folksiness that would match the herbal tradition in question (as I see it). 

But the text was not written by a rustic herb gatherer from remote alpine valleys. It is a very sophisticated creation. It is the creation of a very considerable, highly literate mind. (Just the script, to say nothing of the language.) 

This need not mean the text and pictures don't belong together; it just means the text and pictures are different contributions. The simplest explanation is that the text (by a considerable, highly literate mind) is a commentary upon the illustrations supplied by the folkish illustrator. The pictures were done first. A commentary was added. But why in this script?

I agree that script, bathing nymphs and maps are probably the weirdest parts. But while the VM displays an almost fractal weirdness on every level, I think it is less alien than it was imagined some years ago.

We have good evidence now that the VM is clearly rooted within 15th century middle Europe in both script and imagery, most likely in the alpine region between Switzerland, South Germany, Northern Italy, Slovenia and Bohemia. It's most likely neither made by aliens nor in the New World. At least some images like Gemini are undoubtedly homologues to Diebolt Lauber's workshop that share a common ancestry.

And most glyphs are also not so unfamiliar from 15th century manuscripts either. It's the combination that's unique but if we consider the VM to be the personal work of a sole individual not intended for a broader audience, it does seem plausible to me, no matter what personal meaning it had for the author or what the actual plaintext (if any) is. It may very well be that it is impossible to read the text without a priori knowledge of the content which would not be a problem for the author and an explanation for our inability to decipher it. It also explains the poor artstyle if the author simply wasn't good at drawing because that wasn't his profession. I think the average person looking at the VM for the first time could also live with such hypothesis. Weird people do weird things.

What I cannot wrap my head around is the alternative option that the VM is the collaborative work of a community of encipherers, scribes, illustrators, painters and indeed intended to be understood and meaningful to a broader audience. Then things get really weird.
Every conspiracy theory dies with an increasing number of people involved and this would require some secret society that left no traces. Not impossible but it leaves many many questions I see no answers for.

But my personal opinion is irrelevant, only factual evidence counts.

Oh yeah, and then there's the epitome of weirdness, that single 19th century VM herbal page that's a very unfaithful copy (if any?) of the original. What's up with that? I find its existence almost weirder than the original.

(14-07-2022, 12:04 PM)Hermes777 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The answer must be that existing scripts were not adequate to the task.

Because we are constantly reminded about the weird script, little research is done into the similarity of the script with the medieval Latin. In my research, I found clear similarity for all VM letters, except the four tall glyphs. Looking at the 15th century manuscripts in different languages we can see how different Latin letters were being adopted, and here and there some new letter-forms were created. The Gothic script also underwent changes to make all those minims more readable and to form distinctions between y, i and j. Slovenian people who prior used Glagolitza, had to switch to Latin writing, because their territory was divided after the disolution of the Patriarchate of Aquileia. At the time of the Basel council, it looked the western Church would permit the use of vernacular languages in liturgy, which also triggered the incentives to commit national languages to written form.
However, the promotion of vernacular language started before the appearance of humanism. The question was first raised when the Slavic people of Moravia began using their their language and developed Slavic literacy in Great Moravia, which also included Large part of present day Slovenia. Slovenian (Wendish in German, Schiavone in Italian) became the fourth sacred language, recognized by the Roman pope. In the 10th century, the use of Slavic language in liturgy was suppressed, the land of Great Moravia was divided, but rebellion against that and against the feudal church was growing as different religious sects began appearing under different names (Bogomils, Patereni, Kazars, Catars...) Within those movements, the objective was to promote art and literacy, so that people can read and interpret the biblical books.
All these movements were called 'sectarian'. Members and particularly leaders were persecuted, their literary works burned. The so-called sectarian language was developed, as Gabrielle Rossetti explains in his book Antipapal Sentiment. Dante was the first to use it to express his ideas in the plain eyesight, but in such a way that only select (sectarian) people were able to understand, because he used the symbols that were familiar to them. Rossetti (in the 18th century) even explains how Dante changed 9 to I. In his book, we can find the explanation for the weird pictures in the VM and their double meaning.
The alphabet used in the VM is mostly based on Latin. In some European scripts, the combinations of Latin letters were used for certain sounds. The Latin z was problematic, because it was pronounced as c (while C was pronounced as K or Č (ch) in Italian. For German language, special shapes of K and H were created, but they were cumbersome to write in cursive. In some manuscript, a small T was used that could easily be confused with other letters when it was connected to them. In many German words, double T was used. We can imagine the author of the VM writing his letter T as TT written with one stroke. 
The Slovenian language does not have Q letters (KV or CV is used), so one of the first thing I changed in EVA was EVA-q

The most mysterious VM glyphs (EVA-f and p) might be inspired by author's own intention to connect it with the divine and solve the problems created by three different writing convention. With the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 15th century, those two glyphs would have been absolite.
Slovenian speaking people were divided among three different political entities in the 15th century - German, Hungarian, and Italian. As the Basel Council was counting on the use of the national languages in liturgy, it is possible that the Carthusians who united their four charterhouses, were attempting to write down the Slovenian language as it existed in oral form. This can be further substantiated with the fact that Nicholas Kempf, the prior of Jurklošter charterhouse, was one of the greatest proponents of the use of vernacular languages in liturgy and literature. Besides this, there are other possible reasons why he would write a book in Slovenian:

a) he had close ties with the Counts of Celje (the most powerful Slovenian noble family, rivaling with the Habsburg at the time;

b) there must have been an interest at the time Kempf was at Vienna, since Georgius de Sclavonia wrote a book on Glagolitza while he was a student there a few years before Kempf's arrival; 

c) as a monk and Carthusian prior, he kept in touch with his students and with the professors at Vienna university where Slovenian, Brikcij Preprost was a rector at Kempf's life-time;

d) he might have co-autored the Latin grammar book (Grammatica nova) with two Slovenians from Celje region - Bernard Perger and Brikcij Preprost. (The third author was Nicholas of Novo mesto (Rudolphswert), but there was no other outstanding learned men at the time in this town, except Kempf, who was a Carthusian prior at nearby Pleterje Charterhouse. Besides philosophy and Latin, Perger had also studied grammar, mathematics, astronomy and classical literature.)

e) for many years, Kempf was a prior at Gaming, one of the most distinguished European monasteries at the time, and for over 20 years, he was a prior at Carthusian charterhouses in Slovenian speaking lands, precisely, in the monasteries supported by the Counts of Celje that could have supported his artistic activity;

f) Kempf also  could have known Thomas of Celje, who was private tutor of Emperor Frederic's son Maximillian, and later the Bishop of Constance. It has been documented that Thomas wrote Slovenian grammar book and dictionary, but since the manuscript does not exist, there is no proof for that. 

In my opinion, the VM might be a collective work of those learned men and the story about the Slovenian book might have been a reference to the VM, which in some parts look like a dictionary (the labels) and a grammar book (pages with words starting with the same initial, or with the same prefix). But in general, the VM is primarily a religious book in style of humanistic 'sectarian' language, where each picture has a double meaning - one realistic and one symbolic, with just enough clues for the like-minded to understand the hidden messages.

To understand the VM, one needs to learn the symbolism of humanistic writing, the writing conventions used in the region of Northern Italy, Southern Austria, and present day Slovenia, and also a lot of history to find the reason why the language was written down. It took another 100 years, before the first Slovenian books appeared.

These are just a few ideas why I focused on the connection between Slovenian language and the VM.

I think it is a mistake to classify Beinecke 408 as weird, it only entices you to look for out of the way solutions

I don't think it needs to be black or white. One can perfectly recognize and admire the unique features of the manuscript on the one hand and remain grounded in reality on the other. The fact that the manuscript is weird is what has allowed a century of imaginative speculation in the first place. I put this down to the fact that many participants lack experience and knowledge in the relevant disciplines, not to the recognition of the VM as an outlier.