In You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. the characters in the middle ring repeat in a 4x17 pattern, and there are also 4 figures inside the circle. Going around the circle, the faces alternate towards and away from the viewer (towards-away-towards-away). The faces looking away have two outstretched hands and the faces looking towards have one raised hand which appears to be pointing at something.
It seems like an obvious pattern but I haven't seen any discussion on this. Is there any idea on the alternating towards-away faces? Do we know what this is supposed to symbolize? Are there parallels in other medieval scripts?
One interpretation is that the figures are supposed to represent four people in a circle in 3d (imagine children playing a game), but then it should have been towards-towards-away-away, not towards-away-towards-away.
I've long suspected they are the cardinal winds and the Archangels associated with them, but this all goes to the incredible difficulty of interpreting the Voynich drawings
(04-12-2025, 09:08 PM)anejati Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there are also 4 figures inside the circle. Going around the circle, the faces alternate towards and away from the viewer (towards-away-towards-away). The faces looking away have two outstretched hands and the faces looking towards have one raised hand which appears to be pointing at something.
I have no ideas about the meaning, but on f86v4 there is a somewhat similar arrangement: four figures in a circle, two facing the reader, one facing away from the reader, one turned to one side, all four holding an object on each hand.
All the best, --stolfi
(04-12-2025, 11:42 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have no ideas about the meaning, but on f86v4 there is a somewhat similar arrangement: four figures in a circle, two facing the reader, one facing away from the reader, one turned to one side, all four holding an object on each hand.
All the best, --stolfi
I'd never actually connected these in my head for whatever reason.
Its remarkable how many similarities there are with poses (north, not so much)
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attachment=12807]
(04-12-2025, 11:42 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (04-12-2025, 09:08 PM)anejati Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there are also 4 figures inside the circle. Going around the circle, the faces alternate towards and away from the viewer (towards-away-towards-away). The faces looking away have two outstretched hands and the faces looking towards have one raised hand which appears to be pointing at something.
I have no ideas about the meaning, but on f86v4 there is a somewhat similar arrangement: four figures in a circle, two facing the reader, one facing away from the reader, one turned to one side, all four holding an object on each hand.
All the best, --stolfi
Thanks Stolfi. Indeed there are some similarities, although it seems only one figure is turned away (unless you're talking about something I'm not seeing).
I was considering that it's a lot like f67v2, where there are the sun and moon arranged in a circular group of 4, as sun-moon-sun-moon.
(04-12-2025, 09:08 PM)anejati Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the characters in the middle ring repeat in a 4x17 pattern
It seems to me that these characters must represent numbers such as:
O 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
or
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000
or
I V X L C D M
or some other variation on this
I used this to develop a cipher. I thought that if you take the Voynich letters of the words from the quadrant at the start (top left) and look for two of them on different circles, this results in a line that points to a letter in an imaginary 5 ring containing the Latin alphabet. (see image). If another letter appears on the line on a third circle following the two selected letters, there would be three letters for one letter. If the line points to a word, it is the letter in the word that is hit. If a line goes through the middle of two letters, then it is both words.
This way, you could write a letter with two to four letters. Since that would shorten the text, I switched to letters and standard syllables. With each new letter, the next quadrant was selected. With each new word, everything was reset to the beginning.
The order and approximate alignment of the lines that could be drawn had to be aligned
with the hands of the nymphs.
I was actually able to find a few initial lines, but they did not form meaningful words, and with more lines, the system collapsed. In addition, typical Voynich syllables were massively underrepresented, others not at all, etc. In short, it failed miserably.
-----
But I found it to be an interesting cipher because, in my opinion, it's very hard to crack it. Why? Because when you encrypt a text, you can move very freely from the letters/syllables on the outer circle inwards into the circles. And that's in four quadrants. So for each letter/syllable, there were many different possibilities, which also overlapped with others in other quadrants. So two letters in one quadrant would mean something different than the same two letters in another quadrant. And with the key, it can be decrypted very quickly, using only a ruler.
All that remained was to optimize the labeling of the circles, as unfortunately duplicate letters were also possible within a quadrant. As I said, the system crashed.
(05-12-2025, 05:36 AM)anejati Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it seems only one figure is turned away
Yes, that is what I meant.
(04-12-2025, 09:08 PM)anejati Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the characters in the middle ring repeat in a 4x17 pattern, and there are also 4 figures inside the circle. Going around the circle, the faces alternate towards and away from the viewer (towards-away-towards-away). The faces looking away have two outstretched hands and the faces looking towards have one raised hand which appears to be pointing at something.
It seems like an obvious pattern but I haven't seen any discussion on this. Is there any idea on the alternating towards-away faces? Do we know what this is supposed to symbolize? Are there parallels in other medieval scripts?
One interpretation is that the figures are supposed to represent four people in a circle in 3d (imagine children playing a game), but then it should have been towards-towards-away-away, not towards-away-towards-away.
For a long time, I’ve had the feeling that You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. might hold the key to decoding the VM. Here’s a rather wild idea I once had about the four figures: what if they represent the four pages of each bifolio; front and back, left-hand and right-hand? I’d forgotten about this theory for a while, but it came back to me after seeing LFD’s theory that the VM was originally a set of individual bifolia.
In that case, each page of every bifolio might have its own coding scheme, with clues hidden somewhere in f57v. It should be testable; I just never got around to trying it.
Hi JoJo_Jost,
Could you tell me what software that you used to write alphabet in the circle?
Thanks in advance.