The Voynich Ninja

If we think about the intent behind the image from Sacrobosco, it's quite likely that it shows a certain variation of Thema Mundi, one that was designed or regained popularity in XV. I think I mentioned it before in this thread, Thema Mundi is the configuration of planets that the God used when initially setting the spheres in action. It's kind of the Big Bang Theory of ancient and middle age astrology or cosmogony. The classic Hellenic configuration was just to put seven planets in a row alternating between the day and the night domiciles.

However, the excerpts from "Giuntini, Francesco: Fr. Ivnctini Florentini ... Commentaria in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco accuratißima", published in 1578, show all kinds of variations on Thema Mundi as square horoscope charts. From a cursory look none of the patterns in this book match the pattern in Sacrobosco (or Voynich). I haven't studied them in detail though. 

It's possible that someone in XV made this particular 4-1-1-1-1 version of Thema Mundi. It's also possible, then, that the general idea of f67r2 is the creation myth of some kind.

Full res: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

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Compare also with the following images from another XVI book, showing the creation day by day and culminating in a chart of the spheres: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Edit: Also of interest could be Ymago Mundi by Pierre d’Ailly, but the chart there doesn't match Sacrobosco either.

Hopefully you've had a chance to read the article about the early printings of Sacrobosco in Leipzig during the fourth quarter of the 1400s in Post #54. While it has a lot to say about the different editions, it mentions the specifics of the zodiac illustrations only briefly, but they are visually obvious in Fig. 2.

While Paris and Venice printed standard versions of Sacrobosco's cosmos, Leipzig went another way. The 1488 edition by Landsberg has undergone a code shift. It does not use the astrological symbols of the seven planets. It does not use the pictorial representations of the four elements. It does not have a zodiac ring. The cosmic diagram consists of words to name the different planetary spheres. Switching from pictorial depiction to written language is a code shift.

In 1488, the Leipzig cosmos had no astrological connections, but the 1494 Leipzig cosmos is full of them. It is the same cosmos to which a number of things have been added, ostensibly due to the influences of Wenzel Faber. The central, empty 'sphere of elements' is all but unique to the Leipzig cosmos. Other examples may use linguistic designations, but they still list the four elements in their spheres. The Leipzig cosmos no longer designates the elements individually.

What has been added in the 1494 cosmic diagram is a zodiac ring. The use of astrological symbols for the seven planets is also instituted. But the symbols are not stacked in the standard position. They are positioned at certain places in their respective rings. Other illustrations have shown this with different versions - often this takes the form of a spiral pattern. 

Additionally, there is another astrological factor, and that is the identification of the particular planet with its traditional zodiac sign(s). Spiral patterns don't really aspire to good astrological connections. So far, the Leipzig cosmos appears to be the earliest, extant 'historical' representative of a 4-1-1-1 pattern. The presence of this same pattern in the VMs is either a chance occurrence or something like a fingerprint.

The illustrations from Johannis de Brunswic also have a certain familiarity about them. The list or sources from which the VMs artist seems to have "borrowed" continues to grow. His diagram of the cosmos simply names the planets, yet the four elements are still pictorial.

(21-10-2023, 11:29 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hopefully you've had a chance to read the article about the early printings of Sacrobosco in Leipzig during the fourth quarter of the 1400s in Post #54. While it has a lot to say about the different editions, it mentions the specifics of the zodiac illustrations only briefly, but they are visually obvious in Fig. 2.

Yes, I read the article, thank you! and tried to follow up on a few names mentioned there, looking for a person who would produce this specific domicile chart, but I couldn't find any information so far. I have a suspicion that this arrangement could be from some Greek school of 500BC - 500AD, but based only on general evidence of the type of astrological ideas these  schools considered. Domicile based Thema Mundi seemed a big topic in Greece both for pre-Christian schools and those related to the Christian cosmogony. Judging from references in medieval European books.

(11-10-2023, 07:48 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am not sure I understand correctly, but I don't know how these ideas explain the available evidence.

1. Though average word length is comparable for Voynichese and ordinary European languages, the  shape of the distribution is significantly different. In particular, Voynichese has fewer short and long word tokens than ordinary languages (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

2. A simple example of a many-to-many cipher would be a Caesar cipher where words are written in "Boustrophedon" style, i.e. alternating left-to-right and right-to-left for each line, so that 'wolf' can be ciphered as 'XPMG' or 'GMPX', and both 'XPMG' and 'GMPX' can be decoded as both 'wolf' and 'flow'. This would increase character conditional entropy (while we are looking for methods that decrease entropy) since each bigram would occur in both its original and reversed form with the same frequency (e.g. TH vs HT, CK vs KC). Also, this cipher does not explain why consecutive words tend to be similar in Voynichese (e.g. <f108r.42> okeey.qokeey.qokeedy.qokeey). Maybe this method is not what you are thinking of, but it seems compatible with the description you gave.

Here is an example from my text on distance based ciphers (one example of one-to-many almost stateless ciphers - with a local state that spans several character pairs at most - dictated by necessity to pick ascender/descender types that have no unclosed pairs at a given locus). At the top the word "mouse" is encoded in two different ways showcasing the decoding step by step, at the bottom there is a simple English phrase which demonstrates how all visible structure of plaintext is obliterated by this cipher. As you can see, there is no direct connection between the source word length and the target word length, and the entropy of the ciphertext is quite low.

Link to the section that explains how this cipher works: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I claim that after about an hour or two of learning and practicing this cipher it's possible to read it off the page without any external tools of reference tables and write it without using any special tools either. It is possible to improve this, by adjusting the cipher to make various kinds of mnemonic connections between the plain text letter shapes and the ciphertext (e.g., assigning wide distances for naturally wide letters, assigning first or second circular/crossbar/fork bases to characters of corresponding shapes).

Note that while all separate design principles of this cipher are mentioned at least in 1624 Cryptomenytices, and some of them in Traicté des chiffres ou Secrètes 1586, this specific mix is of my own design and I haven't seen this combination in literature. However, I suppose anyone who spent substantial time trying to work with distance-based ciphers would invent a similar scheme just by trying to gradually optimize the process both in terms of space that the ciphertext takes on a page and in terms of complexity.

I have no specific evidence at the moment, that the Voynich manuscript uses a cipher like this, but I have no evidence to the contrary either.

Question:
If VM-4 is a character that only appears in the front, then with the possibility of o,v,+,- in the variants, the character "4" should still appear in different places, since there are other letters on the left and right. But it does not.

Do I see this correctly?

(23-10-2023, 12:18 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Question:
If VM-4 is a character that only appears in the front, then with the possibility of o,v,+,- in the variants, the character "4" should still appear in different places, since there are other letters on the left and right. But it does not.

Do I see this correctly?

I was not designing this cipher to resemble or mimic Voynichese. I doubt that Voynichese mainly matches visually similar characters, otherwise there would be many more patterns like rasy, saiir, etc.

If Voynichese is a distance based cipher, q could be a qualifying mark (essentially qo and o being two separate terminators). I mention a similar scheme at the end, when I use You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a prop to discuss physical limitations and problems when attacking distance based ciphers: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quoting the relevant part:
"Is it possible, that two kinds of marks are used here? I see no obvious candidate for a separate mark, but it's remarkable that almost all of the crosses are preceded by one of four characters: 8 (or EVA d), c (or EVA e), x and a. The sequence goes +...8+...8+.c+.....c+...8+?+ (line break) ..x+...x+...x+...x+..a+..(a+)..a+. As shown in "Ne faites rien qui vous puisse offenser" code before, special symbols preceding the distance marks can be used to map different charactes to the same distance. In which case an alphabet of at least 16 characters could be encoded on this page."

BTW, I'll be posting on Twitter some bits and pieces of what I'm working on. Most of those won't lead anywhere, but if you'd like to see more of the process, feel free to subscribe: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

If you are only interested in my finished texts, then you can just check my posts on voynich.ninja, I'll keep posting links to all new texts on this forum.

Reading about Thema Mundi, I found an example of a planetary sequence called the Chaldean Order. It arranges planets in a sequence of their speed of apparent motion from the slowest, Saturn, to the fastest, the Moon. From fastest to the slowest, starting with the Moon in Cancer, it is followed by Mercury, then Venus, and the Sun is fourth; not second like the Thema Mundi from Macrobius.

While Macrobius may seem more likely. The Chaldean Order may be an alternative possibility to affirm or contradict. If you accept that the artist knew the "Oresme" cosmos and Shirakatsi's 'Eight Phases of the Moon' diagram, Chaldean astrology isn't that far out. There is a growing set of examples of a certain level of unexpected "sophistication" and the VMs cosmos is such an example. The use of heraldry and heraldic canting are others.

The 4-1-1-1 pattern would be made the same way in either case, but the label correspondence for Mercury, Venus and the Sun would be altered.

Is either version readable in a known language?

(06-11-2023, 10:09 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Reading about Thema Mundi, I found an example of a planetary sequence called the Chaldean Order. It arranges planets in a sequence of their speed of apparent motion from the slowest, Saturn, to the fastest, the Moon. From fastest to the slowest, starting with the Moon in Cancer, it is followed by Mercury, then Venus, and the Sun is fourth; not second like the Thema Mundi from Macrobius.

As far as I understand, this specific order from the slowest to the fastest is the order of the Spheres. E.g., the chart in De Sphaere (any edition) shows this order as the sequence of rings from the outmost to the central.

The potential problem is that there are several differences between the sequences in the 'apparent velocity'-based order of the planets and the Thema Mundi-based order of Macrobius. 

Both systems place the Moon in Cancer.
In Macrobius, the Sun is in Leo. In velocity-based order, the second planet is Mercury.
In Macrobius, Mercury is in Virgo. In the velocity system, Venus is third.
In Macrobius, Venus is in Libra. In the velocity-based order, the Sun is in fourth place.

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn follow in both systems to make a sequence of seven.
Seven in a row can be changed to 4-1-1-1 by moving Mars and Saturn as in the example of 1494 Leipzig.
What is the sequence of the four inner planets used in the VMs diagram?

Is there any 'linguistic' evidence to support one interpretation of these labels over the other?