The Voynich Ninja

(02-12-2025, 08:35 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Patterned text marker: A herringbone pattern at 5 o'clock.

Do you mean the “alamy” symbol?

In the circular band of text, there is a patterned marker at 5 o'clock. Examples of markers of different types (herringbone, quatrefoil) are found in circular text bands scattered throughout the VMs. In all the zodiac sequence, there are only three examples: two on White Aries, one in Cancer. Are they intentional placements or not?

These patterned marker can be seen in each of the circles on 85v (In the middle, even twice). I guess it simply indicates where the sentence begins/ends. We see this in other circles too; the fact that it doesn't appear everywhere is not proof to the contrary.

But, that's just a guess.


This leaves room for a lot of speculation.

Markers are also in the cosmos and the zodiac. They can be sorted by location and pattern style. The sentences would form a reconstituted "hidden" text. Seems like it would work, but was it used?

I have found another clue that supports the theory that these are cross-sections of plants.

Image 85 ( below right the page with the plant cross-sections)

It is a process description:
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The first thing that stands out is the circle with the three lines. When you cut a plant stem crosswise, the first thing you see is a clear outer circle, the epidermis + hypodermis – there are indications that these three lines could refer to the fibrous structure.

Inside the circle is a symbol that is an alchemical process symbol. I found it in LA:

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Triple-distilled vinegar. Since these alchemical process symbols often indicated 1, 2, or 3, it stands to reason that the one with two legs represents a two-step process. (Why not three times? Perhaps because it would damage the plant too much.)

Vinegar also makes sense: in the Middle Ages, pigments were often processed with vinegar.
If you treat a cut plant stem with vinegar, the following happens:

The vinegar slightly attacks the soft cell walls and saturates the tissue. The ink runs mainly into areas where there are cavities and capillaries: conducting vessels, cracks, softer areas. Harder, heavily lignified zones absorb less and tend to remain lighter in color.

If you then press the stem onto paper like a stamp, you get:

A darker circle where there are many vessels/conducting bundles. A differently colored area in the pith (inside) and in the bark on the outside, depending on the plant. Individual dots or rings of dots if the vascular bundles are clearly separated.

This means that you would get a picture of the distribution of “soft vs. hard / hollow vs. compact” – in other words, a kind of structural fingerprint of the stem – as we see here on these pages.

Then you just need to stamp it several times and use a slightly stronger reading stones (magnifying glass), which already existed in the Middle Ages.

That would also explain why the colored plant cuttings I have shown here fit so well with the circles here.



PS: I looked it up: triple distilled. With vinegar, the water would evaporate beforehand because water boils at around 100 °C and pure acetic acid only at around 118 °C. The remaining liquid would then be more concentrated

From around the second half of the 13th century onwards, very good reading stones were already being made from rock crystal, for example. By 1300, the same glass and grinding techniques had led to the first spectacles, showing that the quality of the lenses was sufficient for precise optical applications.

What I also find interesting in connection with the theory presented here, which describes a conduction system, is this image:

The lower part looks very much like one of the typical root drawings familiar from the VMS.

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As I said, I know that the theory seems a little abstruse. But there is more and more evidence that is noteworthy. What struck me.

The pages from 67v onwards are a process-like representation of the function of plant conduction systems. See the images:
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Let's assume:

Image 1 shows a cross-section of a plant stem (see evidence above).

What struck me about Image 1: You could also view it in three dimensions: then you can even see the stem (black lines) running down into the root (middle circle only partially visible here below).

Image 2 shows the probable astrological classification of the segments of the stem and thus also the classification of their “energy.”The assumption that the grand order (the cosmos) is reflected in everything, in plants, etc., was already known to the ancient Greeks. This view was also quite widespread in the Middle Ages. 

Image 3 shows another cross-section of a plant – note that these could be “tubes,” as is made clear by the somewhat clumsy perspective drawing here, i.e., the ellipses at the edge (see black arrow).

Image 4: As far as I know, no one has noticed this yet: if you tilt image 3 backwards, it looks exactly like the upper part of image 4. You can even see a kind of “nail” (green arrow) in the middle. This proves that this upper part is a circular construction that is slightly “bent.” The black arrow indicates that there are also something like tubes here, matching the black arrow in image 3.

The pattern on the two discs is identical.

The red arrows point to something that looks as if this area has been cut open and water is flowing down into a first root. Here, too, the “perspective” arrangement is the same as in the first circle.

On the side, we can even see the flowing water, blue arrows, and a structure underneath that is probably supposed to represent something like a leaf (?).

The female nymphs represent in this case something like “life energy,” naturally female (life-giver) and naked. (I don't think I'm the first to make this comparison, though). Life energy flowing through the stems of plants nnd that is what the author is concerned with. He wants to harness this life energy.

Conclusion: What the 4 images show is that my theory that these are plant conduction systems would summarize the entire section from 67v onwards. It all makes sense and fits together perfectly. I will publish more things I have found on this subject. 

Even if you still think my theory is absurd, which I find increasingly difficult to understand (but don't worry, I still understand it enough )
the similarities between the circle on image 3 and the circle viewed sideways on image 4 are definitely worth mentioning.

The more seriously I took this theory about plant pathways, the more I wanted to find evidence that the herbal section was not a collection of recipes.

To do this, I moved to the functional level and used the most frequently occurring word groups as functional units, as others have done in a slightly different form. I also split the words into prefixes and suffixes and assigned them new functions. The initial aim was not to achieve a correct assignment, but to develop a system that could be compared to recipes.

I then compared the structure of the Voynich lines with about a hundred Latin recipe texts from that period, tried out various assumptions, broke them down into smaller units, reassembled them, and so on. It would be too extensive to describe the process here. Therefore, I will only present the insight I gained from it, which actually has a certain logic even without a detailed list of the steps involved:

No matter how I approached it, the difference between the Voynich structure and the recipe structure was simply too great. Medieval recipes have a much wider range of vocabulary, ingredients, verbs, small subordinate clauses, and variations. The Voynich lines are far too condensed and contain far too little information to be able to reflect this, unless there is a completely crazy coding system that can resolve this discrepancy.

Even when I tried to interpret the words not individually, but as recurring blocks or “functional classes,” the whole thing still did not behave like a recipe corpus. So if the Voynich manuscript is a collection of recipes, it would have to be an extremely condensed and unusual type of almost tabular recipe manuscript—basically something that simply does not exist in Latin, German, or vernacular medical texts of the time. It would fit more into modern technical shorthand than into the medieval herbal tradition. So yes, I can't completely rule out recipes, of course, but based on this research, this scenario seems rather unlikely to me.

At the same time, the text looks more and more like a kind of tabular description of something, at least to me. Based on the images, the most obvious candidates would be plant structures and/or vascular systems. Words that differ only by tiny changes make sense if they fall within the same functional area and form close families. Here, minimal differences in very similar surface forms would simply be “hidden.” Other classes remain separate and stable over long distances.

In this respect, the theory of plant conduction systems gains one or two more points of probability.

On the other hand, it is of course completely frustrating that I recognize patterns but am stuck in that I still lack the missing bridge that would allow me to get from structure to meaning without too many assumptions. But I don't think I'm the only one here...

I think I'll take a little break now, enjoy Christmas without delving too deeply into my AVA . Maybe I'll post a few more clues for possible conduction systems here, and then in the new year I'll think about how I can make the leap from patterns and context to a plausible system.

Conclusion: The probability that these are recipes has decreased significantly in my understanding. A system of plant descriptions with much less variation, in connection with possible plant pathways, is somewhat more likely.

Addendum: I didn't make one thing clear enough.

If they aren't recipes, then there aren't many possibilities left.

1. Everything is a hoax.
2. The plants are just a cover for a completely different secret text.
3. Some other language and/or code can “inflate” this low-level information into a reasonable context.
4. Parts of plants are described because they don't need that much information, and a list-like structure would make a lot of sense here.

Well, as long as we don't know, we have to assume one of these possibilities. My decision here is the fourth.

Something that makes me uncomfortable regarding the plants in "pharma", and taking them seriously (like a recipe), is labels.

• A decent % are missing.
  
• This example makes me very suspicious. To me it looks like they realised they wrote the same name twice so went back and bodged "o" into "y".
  
• Logically, I think they are meant to look like recipes. But how many time correct examples do we have of groups of plants being drawn and label next to a vessel where the intention is "recipe"? - I think comparisons would be needed to add weight to the hypothesis. 
  

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