The Voynich Ninja

Dear  Chris,

Yes.

I invite you to look at my ideas starting at:

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Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

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Dear Chris,

Here is something I posted a while back on VN. It shows how my ideas got started.

Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee



Okay, here is one of the neat parts I've been showing for five years.
 
It requires a bit of imagination - a downstroke to an EVA = o glyph turning it into an EVA = y glyph. (This was probably omitted to help disguise the third time an important sequence of glyphs would appear on the page - EVA = y ch y k ch y).
 
Starting on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at the end of the third line from the bottom of the page, six glyphs in from the end of the line, what now reads -
 
                                           ...9 19h19
891oh19 #K9 #k#9 #o k1oh98
4oh1oy 8e 89 #c9
 
would then read -

                                           ...9 19h19
8919h19 #K9 #k#9 #o k1oh98
4oh1oy 8e 89 #c9
 
and which I phoetically read (using the same glyph/sound alphabet I use for the code attributions) -
 
                                  ...h shesh
ahshesh i(ng)h inih ir nsre(ya)
presr(u/v) at ah ilh
 
or, when cleaned up a bit -
 
hashish, ahashish i(ng/een) in ihirn (iron) Syria preserve at a hill. 
 
Which refers to the Old Man of The Mountains who protected the ahashishieen (his henchmen, the assassins) and the hashish that he fed to them in mountain castles/strongholds in some of Syria's more treacherous hinterland regions.
 
I know it is a leap of faith to get this far, but, then, the page does show a Cannabis plant, from which hashish is produced, so maybe not that long of a leap. And I'm not anagramming anything or making up new ways to produce the phonetic text.
 
Isn't that a fitting end to the page? It produced a whole bunch more of glyph/sounds for the alphabet.

But, finding the first iteration of hshesh on the second line of the page was like finding just the right cartouche, don't you know?

Hi Don - thanks for taking your time to reply and for explaining your ideas. I like that a whole lot more than some zealots who might just say: "Come on! Open your eyes - don't you see it?!"

I'm on the verge of falling asleep (getting late in Europe) but I will keep a tab open in my browser with your "Method of exactly how to deconstruct..." blog post - and read it tomorrow.

Reading the quote you included here, though, I am far from convinced yet. As you say yourself, "it is a leap of faith to get this far", and yeah, okay, I see the similarities to the cannabis plant in the leaves and the flower buds, but what's going on with the root-to-stem transformation? Why are there extra stems with leaves coming out of the root? Why are the leaves and flower buds not together, but seemingly delegated to separate parts of the plant? Why are there so few leaves? Why is the plant so small, judging from the scale of the leaves?

I ask these questions because I believe they could incite thought and speculation - not to be rude! I like to keep the position of the "skeptical", not taking anything for granted. 

Also I want to commend you on the work you are doing, making .PDF files and so on. Even if I'm not convinced by your transliteration of the glyphs into Middle English (I think that if this were a simple substitution cypher, it'd have been broken centuries ago) or your expansion of the transliteration into whole words, I do believe you are making some correct identifications of mnemonic devices in roots and leaves. My personal "pet theory" is that the plants are not drawn in a way to identify them botanically, but rather that the drawings are just as (ok, maybe a bit less...) encrypted as the text.

The tough part about all of this, anything about this silly book really, is then to *prove* anything beyond doubt. We know so little. Baresch, Kircher, de Tepenec... then Jesuits owned it, W. Voynich bought it... it ended up at Beinecke. Vellum is c. 1st half of 15th century. Ink is iron gall... I mean, the list of knowns is so short, and the list of maybes is so long! Of course, this is why we all love it, right?

Dear Chris,

I think the leaves are the only VMS plant part relevant to the accurate identification of the images with the flowers and roots often being generic or purposefully misleading.

On f25v, the code for the plant is shown exactly one time as a Group I code. The author/artist may have felt the rather generic looking leaves needed additional identification. Since one of the names for the plant is bearberry, the small indistinct bear would be an ideal mnemonic that wouldn't need to be reidentified after the first time a person learned the code identifications.

Please remember, these claims have not yet been accepted by any group of adherents that I know about. They are, at this point, solely my own beliefs.

If you see anything that looks wrong or fudged, please bring it to my attention. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

Hi Don,

I have read your article now about the different code groups. I think it looks very interesting, and nothing jumps out to me as wrong.

I do wonder though, how quickly one would be able to "read" the VMS knowing these codes (and the following steps required to turn it into plaintext). It seems like a reader would need a table, just like you made, of which characters are in which code groups. And then slowly transcribe each word, letter for letter. Admittedly, it probably wouldn't be the slowest cipher in the world, and since we haven't cracked it yet, who am I to criticize!

Have to tried applying your methods of Voynichese -> Middle English on more than just a single word at a time? How does this method work? It seems like you need steps beyond identifying the code groups to get from qokeedy to red heron's bill (misquoted a bit, but hopefully you know what I mean.)

(Hm, maybe a moderator could be so helpful as to split off this thread? I realize I've derailed it quite a bit from the main topic!)

This folio is one of those where mnemonics are easiest to grasp, because the beast looks quite like a dragon.

Hence, my first look would be for something beginning with Drachen-.

Pritzel has a number of references, among which I picked up (looking at the respective plants' photos) three:

Dracaena draco - aka Drachenbaum
Eupatorium cannabinum - aka Drachenkraut
Polygonum bistorta  - aka Drachenwurz

Of these three, Dracaena and Eupatorium look better for me than Polygonum, and from these two, ceteris paribus I would pick Eupatorium, because Dracaena is a tropical plant, while Polygonum is European.

But: Pritzel lists also one more interesting plant, named Gummi draconis, which, in terms of mnemonics, would be the best fit, because what the dragon does in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it chews the leaves. This Gummi draconis has the folk names of Drachenbaum and Drachenblut. Pritzel says it's Calamus draco, Dracaena draco and Pterocarpus draco (which is Dracaena cinnabari). I don't know what is Calamus, but looks like it is also some sort of Dracaena.

So the tie-break seems to be in favour of Dracaena.

Now, Pliny writes about Dracaena, but only in a roundabout way - he writes not about the plant but about the pigment (cinnabaris indicus) resulted from the mythical fight between a dragon and an elephant. But in fact this pigment (in those times imported from India, I suppose) was derived from Dracaena which was unknown to Pliny as a plant. (I could not find the exact place in Pliny and just quote the Internet).

So my question would be: when Dracaena as a plant got known to Europeans?

Dracaena is quite variable.

Some species (the less tropical ones) do look like 25v. I'm not sure if these particular ones were known to Europeans. Maybe. Europeans made pilgramages as far south as Ethiopia.

Keep in mind that there are various trees currently called Dracaena. 

I don't see how European exposure to Dracaena draco should be too problematic given the contact between the Spanish and North Africa for example.
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Dracaena cinnabari, well, that's something else
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Both species look rather similar and wonderful, especially cinnabari - look at those branches.

What I mean is that, supposing that the figure is really meant to be Dracaena, then the depiction of the leaves is fairly naturalistic. This means that the guy not only knew about Dracaena by hearsay but he knew what it really looks like - perhaps not in person but by some other manuscripts.

There are other indicators that the original maker(s) of the images were well travelled or had a varied library. For example the elephant head in one of the small-plant leaves is of an accuracy that was only reached by medieval Europeans when they had a good exemplar or when they had witnessed a live specimen (a number of examples of this are documented).

(13-01-2017, 10:14 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I mean is that, supposing that the figure is really meant to be Dracaena, then the depiction of the leaves is fairly naturalistic. This means that the guy not only knew about Dracaena by hearsay but he knew what it really looks like - perhaps not in person but by some other manuscripts.

Of the Dracaena "dragon trees"You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and some of its close relatives are the ones that most nearly resemble plant 25v.


There are many plants with the word "dragon" in their names and some of them are in the old herbals quite frequently (e.g., dracontea), but they look different from 25v and are drawn differently from 25v.

I am not sure if Dracaena is in the old herbals as there are still a few plants (generic ones like this, with plain-looking leaf whorls) that no one has been able to identify.