Trying to create a cipher based on Roman numerals that would give a result similar to VMS, I came across the fact that even after all the manipulations with the text, it was not quite similar to Voynichese. But by adding various third-party rules, such as turning er into or in the right places, I gradually crept up on the most Voynich-like result.
I couldn't create an accurate algorithm that would immediately give me the desired result, no matter how much I wanted to (if anything, I made a cipher based on Roman numerals).
In the course of these attempts, I wondered how accurate the Voynichese itself was. How perfect and accurate is this algorithm from the point of view of cryptology? Is it an algorithm at all?
These questions call into question the usually unconditional "presumption of perfection" (my name for this cliche ), which is implied, in particular, by referring to the "scribe's mistake". For some reason, errors on the part of the author are often omitted.
One of the difficulties for analyzing Voynichese may be that it is not suitable for analysis as a cipher due to the lack of a clear encryption algorithm. By a clear algorithm, I mean a strictly defined and mathematically clear technique that gives and gives the same result (APPLE - GVVRK, the shift is 6; if I do the same with the word GVVRK, I get APPLE back). You can try to complicate this algorithm by adding non-mathematical rules. In the example with the Caesar cipher, I may want the first consonant to be I, the middle consonant is shifted by 2 again, and the final consonant is not encrypted. So I'll get GIXXRE from GVVRK. It became more difficult to determine the encryption algorithm and the specific substitution method that I used, the letters G and R, unaffected by my crazy rules, will not give me anything (I can shift them back to 6, there will be AIXXLE. Of course, although it's easy to guess the word APPLE, we may be confused by the two XX's in the middle and by the I. Or maybe it's not APPLE, but ACCEPT, but E is put at the end, C = X, and P and T are put in other places?). Briefly, we have the opportunity to blur the algorithm, making it difficult for a stranger to decipher it.
And now we ask ourselves the question - why should the Voynichese be a clear cipher? Why do we believe that the author was so brilliant and talented that he created a great undecipherable method unknown to science? In general, a person who is ignorant of cryptology is not expected to create the cleanest algorithm, but to use conditional substitution as a basis, having previously complicated it. There is nothing supernatural in the fact that Voynichese is unlike other ciphers of its time, because I can also mock an ordinary substitution to bring it to "perfection" without changing the algorithm itself. At this rate, I won't have any trouble, but...
By abusing these so-called "rules", I can't complicate the cipher, but distort it, making decryption difficult even for a person who knows the cipher, especially if these rules are unclear (for example, not "after every first consonant I", but "after some first consonants I"). In theory, it is possible to complicate the cipher so much that decryption will be a great challenge for the expert (that is, I will ruin it), which should not be. And there's no guarantee that Voynichese is not a corrupted cipher. There's no guarantee that even with an algorithm, we will immediately decipher the entire manuscript without difficulty. It is possible that it is impossible to decipher Voynichese a priori (more precisely, it is possible, but the decoding will be incomplete). Perhaps that it's impossible to decrypt Voynichese a priori (or rather, it is possible, but the decryption will turn out to be incomplete) due to the fact that the author knew very little about the logic of ciphers and, without realizing it himself, made his possibly rather simple cipher very difficult to decrypt.
In general, questioning the presumption of perfection applies not only to cipher theory. Some linguistic hypotheses also depend on it, for example, Chinese theory, but to a lesser extent (most likely, the author was not a professional linguist, and his transcription of Chinese could be completely unreadable. Historical example: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for Armenian and, maybe, Hebrew, which requires knowledge of the language itself to read).
What are some historical examples of a "corrupted cipher"?
Codex Copiale (but here, rather, an example of a complicated substitution with the addition of zeros) and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (still not deciphered, but it is believed that this is a complicated Polybius square).
How did the owners read this manuscript?
By owners, I mean a team of people who understood what VMS was about and may have participated in its creation. In this case, they have an advantage - they know in advance what should be written, and therefore at some points they can, for example, guess undeciphered words from the context, or even intuitively understand the meaning of what is written without deciphering it (for example, if the balneological section is anatomy, then the reader can take a look look at the illustration, remember what kind of organ it depicts, and from there remember what he knows about this organ. In this case, he probably won't need to decrypt anything anymore).
What should I do with VMS now?
It's worth thinking not about how to create the most warlike cipher possible, but about how we can achieve this result in more mundane and accessible ways. What we can learn from these attempts can be applied directly to the text of the manuscript to find any coincidences or something else...
In any case, it seems to me to be a satisfying food for thought...
This unique symbol appears in the text several times, but it seems to me that given this number of appearances, it can't be called "unique".
There were also his appearances in botany, but I couldn't find them. Most often, there is no additional loop (as in the first two screenshots).
Outwardly, it looks vaguely like an f with a second leg, but I think that's not the case, because we already have an f with a second leg:
Eggyk volunteered to take over managing the excel sheets for Zodiac imagery rating, which I am very grateful for.
As you may recall, we started off with Taurus: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Eggyk will also transfer this sheet into a new, standard layout.
So now, let's discuss which features should be tracked for Virgo. Here is the VM Virgo for reference:
Some initial ideas, all subject to change depending on your input and a trial run:
Headgear: how do we describe this hat? Should "wearing hat" and the type of hat be separate categories?
Blue dress: the main color of the clothing is blue.
Wide open sleeves at wrist/forearm level
Dagged edges of wide sleeves (we can include lace finish here as well, anything that provides a wavy or jagged edge).
Line at wrist level indicates undergarment with tighter sleeves (only if there is a wide-sleeved overgarment, this combination is the salient feature)
double line at the neck?
short hair style?
holding flower? Instances where she holds a star deserve special attention, but holding a flower seems like the most common approximation. The thing that she's holding could even be taken as a flower.
Standing on outdoor terrain (I wouldn't specify too much here)
Something about the width of the dress at the bottom? How to best describe this? Her dress flares up behind her to shoulder level. Is this due to the circular arrangement? This may become clear after a trial run.
Facing left
Both hands extended forwards? Not sure if this may be useful.
Things to ignore:
I have always interpreted her as standing, but some think she's sitting, so the overall pose may be ambiguous, I wouldn't include this.
Her pose does not allow us to see whether the garment is belted.
Please let me know if I missed anything important, or if you would omit or change anything.
The recently released Gothic 1 remake shows one page of the VMS in the game.
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Quote:While playing yesterday, I noticed something inside the captain's cabin of the shipwreck that I'm somewhat familiar with. A page from the real-life Voynich Manuscript (see the second image for actual page). It's really interesting because the Voynich Manuscript is a 240-page medieval book written by an unknown author in an unidentified language. No one has ever deciphered it, so we don't know what it says. It features drawings of mysterious plants, bathhouses, zodiac symbols, stars, etc in detail.
BTW: Alkimia isn't the first studio to display pages from the VMS. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 also showed it in the Kickstarter video (3:53).
edit: The VMS also appears in older games and is even part of the game’s plot in some cases:
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (2003, PC, 3D adventure) – the manuscript is part of the game’s plot. Its text contains prophecies of natural disasters in the near future.
Radiata Stories (2005, PlayStation 2) – the Voynich Manuscript appears as one of the books in the Vareth Institute.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013) – the Voynich Manuscript is part of the Animus database.
Assassin’s Creed Rogue – the Voynich Manuscript is a key part of the plot.
I tried searching the forum, google, and the search engine and came up empty. Has this manuscript been discussed before?
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1475-1500AD
Germany SE / Austria
Southern Bavaria (based on southern bavarian dialect)
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The section from 71v-115r (scans 148-236) contains badly drawn herbs which are terribly coloured in. The text often wraps around the pictures, similar to the VMS.
(It also has an abrelenn and augst, but that's not very relevant)
As many of the manuscripts being logged for the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread include calendars, I have created a sheet to log all of the instances of zodiac imagery within the manuscripts that have been found (zodiacs are often found near calendars). It was becoming more and more difficult to find and remember which entries were interesting as the list grew. My hope is to use this thread as a home base for myself and others who wish to collate, compare and discuss that imagery and their sequencing in general. I hope that with enough sequences, we may be able to start talking statistically about the general dating and location of the sequence based on general trends, similar to what has begun to happen with the month names.
More specifically, this thread is about the generalisation and categorisation of sequences and styles across digitised manuscripts in order to come to a better understanding of what was standard, along with when/where. It is also to permanently catalogue the exact sources along with their context (the whole sequence, the use case, the location, the language, the handwriting, connected works), so that future efforts may be able to analyse them. Hopefully, we will be able to compare those trends and patterns (if they exist) with the sequence found in the VMS, perhaps quantitatively, probably subjectively.
Finding connected works or patterns may also help in locating more examples. For instance, if we know voynichy lions accompany works on bloodletting, searching out bloodletting works may lead us to voynichy lions.
I'm aware that many previous threads discussing various aspects of the VMS zodiacs exist like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and that previous collections of imagery exist. The issue is that many/most of the sources for the imagery in those threads are no longer easily findable, the data sometimes not easily usable (or full of dead links), often with discussions that are now years untouched. This spreadsheet and thread are intended as a continuation of that work, while collecting and archiving the sources in a different way.
The sheet
Link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The sheet 'Imagery Categorisation' contains headers for each zodiac symbol, with colour codes to show which symbols are within each source. There are also headers for 'labours of the months', 'planetary imagery' (normally the planets personified and depicted with zodiac symbols), and a catch all 'other' for other interesting/relevant imagery.
Unlike the month names, this sheet does not set out to score the sequences (yet), only to collect them. If we can work out a way in the future to score the "voynichy-ness" of the sequences, we can use the data collected here to do so.
This thread can also serve as a place for people to post/cite instances of medieval zodiac imagery, especially in cases where the imagery is not interesting enough on its own to merit a seperate thread. So please feel free to post examples, preferably including the following info so they can be added easily:
-Title + Manuscript reference/number -Link(s) -Contents (what is in the source and where)
For searchability, detailed references are better - "Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Ms 34" instead of just "Ms 34".
Understandably, many of the manuscript examples in this spreadsheet were already seperately found numerous times, and their zodiac imagery posted across those previous threads. If anyone still has repositories of zodiac imagery and are happy for me to try and log them in this way (preferably with the original manuscript source or a potential way to find it), please share! I am happy to go through and do some digging on dates, locations and other info for the manuscripts. And again, I apologise that this will almost certainly cover already covered ground at various points; I appreciate a lot of work has been done already.
As of the writing of this post, there are only ~60 manuscripts containing zodiac imagery logged on the spreadsheet out of the ~350 entries i've gone through so far. There are currently around another 200 for me to go through and check which I will do over the next day or so.
With the exception of the inscriptions in the Zodiac, I believe it is possible that the marginalia on f17r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (specifically "der musdel"), and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were added by someone who understood the manuscript.
The marginalia on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at the end contain two words in Voynich: oteeeor (otcheor) aim, where oteeeor appears in f68r2 and otcheor appears in f70v2. If we do not attempt to interpret the meaning of this text, we can infer that the person understood the significance of these two words.
The part of "der musdel" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks "fresh" in terms of ink color, compared to the inscriptions on the Voynichese and the drawing of the man. It is evident that the man was drawn by the same person who wrote the manuscript, and during the process of writing. It is also possible that the bowl and balls were drawn by the author of "der musdel", but I am not certain. In my opinion, this inscription seems meaningless in any other form, as it is supposed to clarify the drawing on the right.
As for f116v, I can only say that this marginalia contains aror sheey, and the handwriting is similar to that of "der musdel" (at least the "m" letters are identical).
Based on this, it would be possible to try to provide clues to the text in these marginalia. For example, der musdel could be a "continuation" of the text above (roughly speaking, otcheo daiin chty ykchscheg could mean "how to treat this person?" or "it is treated with flour", in which case "der musdel" would specify the type of flour). At the very least, we have reason to believe that the author of these marginalia knew the content of the text. Perhaps he can share his knowledge with us...
Here I want to express my opinion that the ambiguity in reading the text of VM is not a failure of the writing system, but the goal of the coding.
Let us consider the word from f2r-6 row:
It could be read as:
Consider that this word appears 144 times according voynicese browser. It is important for the text. Its decoding -too.
The language is structural and the placement of the glyphs is not random, but ruled based.
Hello everyone! I'm new to this site and to a lot of the research that has been done on the Voynich Manuscript. However, I found myself with some free time so I thought I'd play with some techniques I used in previous lives (I studied high energy physics and worked in Machine Learning, both a while ago). Since my knowledge and experience isn't super recent, I used the help of Claude to actually do the specific analysis, but to be clear the direction/hypothesis/questions were driven by me (and when I say "we" below I mean me+Claude). I hope this meets the community standards, and if not I'm happy to remove the post and just learn from the community.
All of the work is publicly available, including source code, a pdf writeup, and a step by step guide to what I did.
The work is available here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The pdf is here and attached to this post: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
What this is and isn't: this is not a decipherment, nor was an attempt to decipher the manuscript. It's an independent replication and methodological extension of existing statistical work asking the question "was this manuscript generated from some kind of natural language." All code is public and every result comes with a permutation-based null model, so everything is reproducible from scratch.
Two main findings:
1. Immediate word-doubling at ~2x chance (word[i] == word[i+1], within a manuscript line). This is a well-known anomaly, but I tested it more carefully than I'd seen done before, across six languages and registers with formal z-scores throughout. I used some language samples that I thought could potentially contain word doublings naturally, to compare against the manuscript, including:
- Culpeper's Complete Herbal (English, genre-matched): zero doublings, far below its own chance baseline. The hypothesis here was that if the manuscript was some kind of list (recipes, etc) perhaps a contemporaneous similar list could show the same pattern.
- Carmina Burana In Taberna (Latin verse, maximally repetition-saturated, "bibit" repeated 24 times consecutively): zero doublings. The hypothesis here was that perhaps a contemporaneous document that was more poetic in nature could show similar doublings.
- Arabic Al-Baqarah and Yusuf (consonantal): at or below chance. Arabic and Hebrew were including to look at languages that don't contain consonants and could show patterns that don't exist in long-form Latin languages because words could have multiple meanings.
- Hebrew Psalms 113-150 / Hallel (liturgical Hebrew poetry): z = -2.87, p = 0.998- significantly SUPPRESSED below chance. The hypothesis here was that perhaps poetry in a language with a different structure could show similar doublings.
- Hebrew Psalms full 150 chapters (19,662 words): z = -3.73, p = 1.000- even more strongly suppressed
- Sanskrit Rigveda (complete, 135,279 words, IAST romanization): z = +3.04, p = 0.002- elevated above chance, though we flag this needs verification due to potential IAST sandhi encoding artifacts. Same hypothesis as liturgical Hebrew.
The Hebrew liturgical result is the one I find most interesting. Psalm 136 repeats the same phrase 26 times. Psalm 113 opens "הללו יה הללו". And yet the doubling rate is significantly BELOW chance — because real liturgical repetition always inserts at least one different word between repetitions of
the same phrase. "הללו יה הללו" is not "הללו הללו." That's also exactly what Carmina Burana does: "bibit hera, bibit herus-" same verb, different subject every time. Real repetition, whether poetic or liturgical, doesn't produce literal self-adjacency. Voynichese does, at ~2x chance, stationarily across the full manuscript.
The effect also survived a cross-section permutation test (p = 0.144 for the section gap — consistent with a single stationary process throughout), and a
local scramble test showing it depends on line co-membership rather than exact write-order.
2. Word-class ordering asymmetry — new to our analysis. Classifying words by their 2-character suffix (following Stolfi's grammar framework) and measuring directional ordering preferences between classes, both Currier languages show significantly asymmetric ordering: z = 4.72 for Language A, z = 4.77 for Language B, both p < 0.0001, robust to a frequency-matching control. Every other structural test returned null — this is the first positive,
grammar-suggestive result. I want to be careful: positional structure doesn't prove meaningful language. But it is something simple stateless generators don't produce by default, and the effect is equally strong in both Currier languages on the full validated corpus.
On the corpus: I used the complete FSG transliteration (Reeds 1994, from voynich.nu), validated word-for-word against the source file. In the process
we found that several Stars-section folios in our working corpus had been severely truncated (some folios had only 20-25% of their true content).
After rebuilding from the full authoritative file the corpus grew from ~14,000 to ~33,600 words (~88% of the manuscript). All findings were re-validated on the full corpus; the word-class asymmetry finding in particular changed meaningfully — what had looked like a gap between Language A and Language B disappeared entirely, with both now showing indistinguishable z-scores.
Happy to discuss methodology, findings, or criticisms. Hopefully it's clear what does and doesn't hold up (the Sanskrit result needs verification; an
earlier attempt to add corpus data produced fabricated text that was caught and removed before any analysis used it, and is documented in the repo). The GitHub repo has full documentation of every finding including the ones that failed or changed.
Thanks everyone, and looking forward to discussing.
It seems strange to me that very little attention has been paid to this marginalia.
The first letter is n with an underscore. The second letter is similar to the red letters on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in shape, there is something similar on f68r2:
I have not found any information about reading this letter combination. Most likely, this is a color designation, but what kind of color is it?
), which is implied, in particular, by referring to the "scribe's mistake". For some reason, errors on the part of the author are often omitted. 
