Hello all,
Thank you for your replies. Who said anything about giving up? Not me. But I think a new kind of fire is needed when looking at the text, a new perspective. All the text analysis done so far is correct and has given us some clues, but it is not enough. The difficulty is staying in the objective zone and not drifting into subjectivity or making non-scientific hypotheses. Still looking for that path.
Not to sound like a looney, but... There is a path within the VMs - the path of pairing. It starts with VMs Pisces and includes the medallions of the first five houses of the VMs Zodiac sequence. Lots of pairing.
It then goes to heraldry in the paired tub patterns at the top of VMs Pisces. Then, heraldic pairing goes to history and the origins of the cardinal's red galero.
On VMs White Aries, one historical figure is paired with / connected to one patterned text marker. There is a pair of these makers on White Aries, with a third example on VMs Cancer. Markers with other patterns are found in circular texts in other sections. Are these markers merely artistic filler or are they intentional indicators?
On the two zodiac pages preceding White Aries, each one has a tub with the pattern of an obscure heraldic fur, matching in sphere and quadrant with the placement of the pair of historical figures on White Aries. Historical identification is confirmed by heraldic canting.
The path of pairing leads to 'hidden' texts. Text is still problematic, but the structure and the historical connections should indicate something.
I’d like to add one thing: the reason the manuscript hasn’t been deciphered yet may be very simple, and it’s usually overlooked.
1. It may be a very, very poorly constructed cipher that ultimately destroys too much information. (I now assume this to be the case). I understand that cryptologists would like to assume that ciphers are complex and clever. But why not simply assume that the inventor of the cipher was not an expert? Rather, a complete novice, terrified of being imprisoned, so that he designed the cipher to be extremely complex. Perhaps he did not even check whether someone else, not in the know, could decrypt the cipher.
2. It may be a language that is almost impossible to decipher.
a. For example, he may have developed his own (possibly poor) language or ciphered shorthand, which he then encrypted.
b. As Stolfi suggests, it could be Chinese, perhaps even no longer decodable because the actual dialect (phonetically) can no longer be reproduced (who knows how many dialects have been lost). But it could also be any other language, e.g. as I suggest, a Bavarian dialect from a village. A dialect that was never written down and has been extinct for hundreds of years. Or another language that has died out and vanished.
3. I have spent some time studying magical symbols and languages (as part of the VMS) – in fact, there are similarities here too to alchemical symbols that appear sporadically in the VMS, which can be traced back to Greco-Egyptian magical symbolism. A basic knowledge of alchemy must have been present. And there are also some areas there that are considered unknown today and can no longer be deciphered (ring letters).
4. They may be spells or charms that for the most part produce nothing but gibberish, as was customary in such charms back then! That would also explain a great deal. I have highlighted a few clues here in the forum.
a. A person (perhaps due to excessive drug use, as was so common among botanists of the time) who developed a severe drug-induced psychosis and, in the mythical, hallucinatory worlds of drug abuse, wrote down a secret script that was dictated to him by God, the Devil or some other mystical being. There is a technical term for this: glossography (also: automatic writing, or in a broader context, xenography) – writing in unknown, indecipherable symbols whilst in altered states of consciousness.
Incidentally, that would also explain many of the images and texts.
All in all, there are many possibilities, even without assuming a deliberate hoax, that would result in the VMS no longer being translatable or indeed being untranslatable.
Charms are very much a possibility - the Voynich Manuscript even has one in Latin script in the marginalia that has to this day defied understanding and I've seen it described as statistically "behaving more like Voynichese in Latin script", and it even includes "aror sheey" in Voynichese.