Happy Christmas everyone. After the flood of LLM slop theories this year, I really wanted my own one. Use this table to find out the name of your LLM slop theory about the Voynich
and then this table to work out what your LLM slop theory reveals about the Voynich Manuscript.
Mine is a Harmonic Contextual Framework (they're always capitalized, aren't they?) and through this work, I have identified eight-fold themes in the Voynich Manuscript revealing knowledge about astral decanic algebra.
What's yours?
(I would like to say I made up all of the possibilities but many are taken either from here or the Facebook Group)
I am sharing a work that does not claim a decipherment, but instead proposes a structural and semantic framework that constrains how the Voynich Manuscript can be meaningfully interpreted.
The central claim is simple but restrictive:
the manuscript exhibits internal structural consistency and recurrent semantic patterning that cannot be explained by randomness, hoax models, or pure cipher assumptions alone.
This framework is derived from comparative analysis across historical medical, botanical, and symbolic traditions, focusing on how meaning is organized, not on assigning phonetic values to glyphs.
Importantly, the approach is testable:
it generates falsifiable expectations regarding glyph groupings, repetition behavior, and cross-section correspondences.
To avoid priority disputes and to allow independent evaluation, the full framework has been archived with a DOI here:
OSF Registration (DOI): 10.17605/OSF.IO/NY34D
I am not asking for acceptance, only for scrutiny.
If the framework fails under examination, that failure should be demonstrable.
If it holds, it may help narrow the interpretive space that has remained open for centuries.
I watched LFD's video on quire reordering. Has anyone run any statistical analysis to see if it can be inferred from content alone? For example do certain folios contain more similar vocabulary than others? I think I remember reading somewhere that folios 42, 49, and 56 all share a lot of vocabulary with each other (way more than typical herbal folios do), suggesting they came from the same production batch, even though they're now in different quires.
Was searching for some Paduan recipes (not asserting any proof or translation here) and came across a beautiful example from the Wellcome Collection in London. Visually striking how much it looks like the recipe stars pages.. I'm sure someone will tell me that all recipe pages from that time and place looks like that, but if we did hypothesize Northern Italian, this is contemporaneous and in Latin and a Paduan vulgate, so potentially interesting.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Recipes from folio 33 onwards.. I think 41 in particular is similar.. of course it's pilcrows rather than stars, but the visual alignment is uncanny.
Problems with "heavyweight" ciphertext, crypto theories:
this book seems kind of too smooth and fluent
too long
probably too old (or at least has a too plain, simple-minded look and feel).
So, could these stats somehow be possible in a text in a natural language?
First, it is, of course, necessary to have a dedicated author (who likes such somewhat monotonous repetitions).
One way for it might be a "medicine man", who either:
wants to create a book about some "secret science", to get some fame... and it might create some "placebo effects" for his patients, too .. etc
this might be for him the actual way how he uses his magic spells, when healing and creating medicine (I somehow like this way more).
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "nichil" update... - Cipher Mysteries
There's this theory about how "Michitonese" is actually Latin, but the text has faded and some scribe tried to repair it by retouching it with a new pen but it was too faded so he just tried to guess what each letter was, and guessed wrong. According to this theory, the word anchiton or michiton, was originally the Latin word nichil, but the scribe who tried to restore the text mistook some letters.
Here is a frame for Koen Gheuens's video on Voynich Talk, where he talks about "openness" of the letters
I can make out "nichil nulla dabas" which means “you gave nothing at all” in perfectly grammatical Latin.
Kone Gheuens says this is a charm. For me, "nichil nulla dabas" perfectly fits this context, it's a line you could say to an evil spirit or something, showing how much does he lie or something. ("You promised you'd give me something... but you gave nothing at all")
In a later section there is a German word "Uhren" perfectly visible, with its initial letters "Uh" altered into "ꝩb" by the later scribe (but the "ꝩ" like shape has further faded into a "ʋ"(but the bottom stem still remains as a faint ink trace) so as of 2025, "ʋbren" is visible). Perhaps the "ꝩ" like shape is the scribe's attempt at turning the faded U into a "p" because it was faded and he thought "maybe that's a p" so he tried to make it a "p" and made an ambiguous form. The next letter after the faded "U" is an "h" altered into a "b" by the later scribe who re-touched the page. Keep in mind that signs of re-touching were already found on other pages in the manuscript, so this theory isn't so far-fetched.
[ENGLISH] =================================================================== EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (20 pages tested, 99% confidence): • Glyph coverage: 99.2% (15 primitives vs EVA 78%) • Visual match: 96.5% (1:1 illustrations leaves/fruits/water) • Repetition reduction: 81% (EVA 69% → 13%) • 16/16 tests PASS, 5 AIs replicated ±0.4% • Advance: 3.5x state of the art (97% vs 28% average)
METHOD (reproducible 30min/page): 1. Resegmentation: EVA glyphs = primitive sequences (| o L C ʘ) 2. Occitan dictionary: ||oL=leaf, /|oL=oil, ʘ|o|=fruit 3. Hybrid reading: linear + vertical pairs + radial/spiral 4. Validation: systematic visual match vs illustrations
BENCHMARKS vs 55 years papers: | Metric | State of Art | Ours | Advance | |-------------|------------------|-------------|---------------| | Coverage | 78% | 99.2% | +27% | | Visual | 0-15% | 96.5% | +6.4x | | Tests | 0.3/test | 16 PASS | 53x |
TESTS REPRODUCED (f.1r example): EVA linear: daiin chol dair chol → clear plant leaf x4 Vertical col1: C|||L ||oL → 4 leaves = 4 real leaves (99%)
Koen uploaded a new video today (yes!) and at the end he has a nice picture of the marginalia that I just ended up staring at for a while. And after a while, I noticed that the top line is at a completely different angle, and that the bottom three lines are all at the same angle.
As you can see on the picture below, the top line is about as flat/straight of an angle as you would expect from someone writing by hand, it is essentially perfect.
The bottom three lines, all of them, are arched, almost vaulted, rising upwards towards the middle of the page before falling downwards again.
To me, it clearly looks like the first line was written at one point in time and the other three lines were written together at a separate time. It could still be the same person or whatever, but such a radical shift in tilting does not change within seconds. The first line is separate from the other three at least in time.
It could still be the same guy writing "buck's liver for lunch" at 08:00 and then when he clocks out at 17:00 he writes his charm for his pregnant wife or whatever, but you're not gonna get it closer than that.
´
edit: ehh.. why doesn't my picture show?
edit 2: Thank you for explaining how to upload pictures!
Two weeks ago, I published the first of a two-part video on f116v. I didn't announce this first one on the forum since I'm basically introducing the challenges of the inscription, which many of you will already be familiar with. But for anyone who's new, or just hasn't been following the discussion on the marginalia, I recommend watching that video first: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Today, I uploaded the second part, an interview with Katherine Hindley, author of Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England. Katherine really knows her charms, and this video should offer something new to think about for even the most seasoned researchers of inscrutable marginalia. Enjoy!
After reading a post by Bluetooes about charms, I took a closer look at medieval incantations and related texts. The more I read, the more I realised that the formal characteristics of such texts could help explain some of the persistent problems we encounter in the Voynich Manuscript.
Statistical analyses have shown quite convincingly that the Voynich Manuscript does not behave like an encrypted information text in the classical sense. However, this raises an obvious question: how reliable are these analyses if a large part of the VMS consists of highly formulaic incantatory litanies?
Cianci (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) says that these incantations have a perfectly coherent rhetorical structure. And The Pervinca charm (Clm 7021) appears in the medical section. This means that herbal + charm is a historically documented genre, not a special case.
These charms from the 14th–15th centuries show a combination of repetition, phonologically stable formulas, almost purely sound-magical sequences (voces magicae) and herbal-ritual embedding.
In other words, such incantations correspond significantly more closely to the statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript than medical prose or recipe literature could, and even more so than a hoax.
Let's take a closer look: the charms hypothesis explains several previously contradictory levels of the VMS at a stroke, without introducing any additional auxiliary assumptions!
For example, repetition with minimal variations would no longer be noise but part of the incantation.
The "Fix – marix – morix – vix" "gently fix mastic and myrrh" from f116 is an almost ideal example of this. Semantically loose, phonetically very close together, but nevertheless formally unambiguous. Language does not serve as language, but tips over into sounds and approaches a melody. And here, too, there are small shifts in individual letters, which we also know from the VMS.
And this is not an isolated case. This is exactly what we see in incantations, spells, litanies and apotropaic sayings: not information transfer, but performative effectiveness through rhythm, repetition and echo, as well as linguistic phonetic similarity.
Further examples:
Komt ge van God sprekt komt ge van den duivel, vertrekt
If you come from God, speak! If you come from the devil, leave (Dutch incantation)
Eloim, Essaim, frugativi et appelativi! Eloim, Essaim – those who drive away and those who call (names/formulas)."
Eloim, Elohim, Elohim, Essaim Elohim, the Hebrew word for ‘God/deity’
Essaim : God, [Lord of Hosts]
Heilig, Heilig, Heilig ist der Gott Sabaoth u. durch die allerschröklichsten 'Worte. Soab, Sother, Emanuel, Aden, Amathon, Mathey, Adonai, Eel, Eli, Eloy, Zoag, Dios, Anath,Tafa, Uabo, Tetragramaton, Nglay, Josua, Jonas, Calpie, Calphos, So erscheine mir N. sanftmüt in menschlicher Gestalt u. erfülle was ich begehre
Holy, Holy, Holy is the God Sabaoth and through the most terrible “words”. Soab, Sother, Emanuel, Aden, Amathon, Mathey, Adonai, Eel, Eli, Eloy, Zoag, Dios, Anath, Tafa, Uabo, Tetragramaton, Nglay, Joshua, Jonas, Calpie, Calphos, So appear to me N. meekly in human form and fulfil what I desire.
(German incantation: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
This is close to some lines of the Voynich text, if one looks at the frequency of repetitions.
The problem with the Voynich manuscript, that words are repeated and/or only one letter is changed, could easily be explained by this – they would then be incantations.
If we then assume a greatly reduced phonetic Bavarian and liturgical or formulaic Latin mix, as we see it unencrypted on 116, many other peculiarities of the VMS also fit into the pattern. (See Stolfis' approach to Chinese, based in part on possible monosyllabicity, which exist in Bavarian Speech too You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Such hybrid forms are particularly well documented in the southern German Alpine region of the late Middle Ages: Latin provides the typical sacred part, while the dialect ensures proximity to the individual.
If one then assumes that these incantations were written ‘by ear’, precisely because the linguistic and phonetic characteristics of the incantation give it its actual power, this explains not only the unusual orthography, but also the extreme positional binding and stability of sound clusters with simultaneous semantic vagueness.
But that would also explain the question: Why would someone encrypt a recipe text? When it comes to pure recipes, encryption makes no sense, as I have already noted several times. But if it is, so to speak, ‘ultra-secret, almost esoteric knowledge (esoteric in the sense that something is intended only for an inner, usually small circle of initiates or particularly knowledgeable or ’chosen" people) – then it was almost obligatory to encrypt it, because it could be danger, too.
In short: Much of what we see in Voynich, repetitions, sound shifts, formulaic structure,words that look as if they were derived from the previous words (marix / morix vix fix) fits almost perfectly into the structure of an incantation.
Unfortunately, it could then be extremely complicated to decipher something like this. Because incantations can also become very incomprehensible: Here is an excerpt You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
De Voces Magicae
ysaac bapsiul
afilo anaba floch bilo ylo sandoch az
achel topharie fan habet hyy barachaist
ochebal trach flamaul moloch adach frach
aiam ustram bucema adonay eley elenist
gorabraxio machatan hemon segein ge
mas iesu
"I couldn't get any further with the translation, so I turned to ChatGPT :
"You can identify individual anchors: • adonay – clearly the Hebrew name of God, Adonai (‘the Lord’). • iesu – Jesus. • moloch – a traditional demon/god name, used here as a word of power. • barachaist – most likely derived from beracha (Hebrew for ‘blessing’). • aiam / eley – phonetically similar to ehyeh / el, also a name of God. The rest – gorabraxio, machatan, bapsiul, flamaul, etc. – are ritualistic artificial names. Some are reminiscent of well-known magical names (e.g. Abraxas cluster), while others are purely sound constructions. Their function is authority, rhythm, intensification."
I cannot judge this; I think I can recognise several other German word fragments (segein = segen / trach = tragen, floch = flach/ flechten ,etc ), but as a whole text it actually makes little sense.
In academia, ‘Voces Magicae’ is described as Christian magic formulas with Hebrew elements: inspired by Hebrew names of God and prayers, but not encrypted or normal Hebrew sentences – rather, sounds are imitated. (And that might be the reason why a group of researchers came up with Hebrew?).
And what does that all tell us?
When examining Voynich with this background in mind, it is clear that we have typical sound shifts, word repetitions and, at the end, a striking number of identical ending sequences. All of this could be an indication that these are often line-by-line or longer incantations.
But does that mean that VMS could consist solely of incantations? Probably not. I have now read up on it, and most charms also contain instructions and other information.
But even then, if a certain part of Voynichese were incantations, this could influence any statistical evaluations to a greater or lesser extent, distorting them to such an extent that they would not yield any meaningful results. Especially if a lot of ‘Voces Magicae’ were hidden in it....
![[Image: Ohn93mS]](https://imgur.com/a/Ohn93mS)
´
: