| Welcome, Guest |
You have to register before you can post on our site.
|
| Latest Threads |
Visual Elements of Plato ...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: SherriMM
1 hour ago
» Replies: 0
» Views: 28
|
Starred Paragraphs are Py...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: SherriMM
2 hours ago
» Replies: 0
» Views: 33
|
Always impressive
Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media
Last Post: Aga Tentakulus
5 hours ago
» Replies: 55
» Views: 22,991
|
f52r "Ankh Root" and Pal....
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Dana Scott
6 hours ago
» Replies: 5
» Views: 467
|
The Voynich as a rhythmic...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: nintus
7 hours ago
» Replies: 10
» Views: 820
|
Month names collection / ...
Forum: Marginalia
Last Post: Koen G
8 hours ago
» Replies: 210
» Views: 46,983
|
Portolan Map Possibilitie...
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Linda
11 hours ago
» Replies: 51
» Views: 40,394
|
Vegetius De re militari -...
Forum: Voynich Talk
Last Post: Bernd
11 hours ago
» Replies: 9
» Views: 509
|
A One-Page Ledger Method ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: Dunsel
Yesterday, 07:52 PM
» Replies: 104
» Views: 3,244
|
Vampires in the Voynich m...
Forum: Voynich Talk
Last Post: Ruby Novacna
Yesterday, 07:10 PM
» Replies: 25
» Views: 19,343
|
|
|
Starred Paragraphs are Pythagorean Sentences, or Maxims |
|
Posted by: SherriMM - 2 hours ago - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- No Replies
|
 |
New blog post and theory: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
To summarize, "I believe the starred paragraph section of the Voynich are a collection of sayings, or moral maxims (or ethical aphorisms, or gnomes), of Pythagorean beliefs, of the specific collections proposed below:
In this section of the Voynich we have 324 stars, each aligned more or less with a sentence or a few. There are also at least two missing folios (109r / 109v and 110r / 110v). Each folio averages around 14 stars, with some like 103r higher at 19, and three folios at the lowest end of 10 stars (105r, 105v, and 116r), and the rest vary in amount. So if we assume our 4 missing folios at 14 stars each, it would give us 56 added stars, or 380 total goal (324 we have plus 56 estimated missing = 380). With me so far?
Here’s what I suggest:
- The Pythagorean Sentences = 123
- The Sentences of Clitarchus = 130*
The Golden Sentences of Democrates = 80 (some have 84?)
- The Similitudes of Demophilus = 59**
Adding these up we get 392. Pretty close to our 380 estimate.
It would mean our missing four folios would have to total 68, or average of 17 stars per page. Well within existing Folios (remember 103r has 19). I wonder if Folio 58r / 58v belongs in this section as well, which would bring our missing stars total down."
Please see my blog post for more information.
To clarify, I do not mean it is a word-for-word copy - I am still on the team of the text as a cipher.
I will post my other theory in a new thread, but this theory is very related to the overall theme of a Pythagorean influence. I would love some discussion on this, and welcome all corrections and feedback.
All the best,
Sherri Mastrangelo
|
|
|
| Decipherment Attempt: A ~1425 Alchemical Manual in Latin Scribal Shorthand |
|
Posted by: jredder - 21-05-2026, 06:22 PM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
- Replies (6)
|
 |
Hey everyone, what's the happyhaps?
I'm new here, the only other post I made was an introduction post. I'm not an academic, no affiliation with anywhere. I am an IELTS and TEFL certified ESL teacher living abroad (abroad being not my home country lmao).
I don't like mysteries. They confuse and frighten me. A door that never opens is just a wall, and a wall where a door should be is useless. To me, the Voynich Manuscript was a door where a wall should be.
The framework I developed and I are proposing that the Voynich Manuscript is a highly detailed alchemical workbook written in an idiosyncratic scribal shorthand Latin produced by a northern Italian alchemist around 1425 CE.
The author, very likely a Padua graduate from the faculty of physica, has this book full of stuff mostly to keep mercenaries alive. The author was almost certainly a Holy Roman Empire loyalist working to keep the HRE condottieri alive during the conflicts in Northern Italy between the HRE and the Papal authorities.
I know Latin has been proposed before, and every attempt to tie the two together has been beaten to within an inch of its life, but I promise this is at least a bit more robust of a framework than what this community is used to. Greek was proposed nearly to death by people before Ventris eventually proved Linear B was just some old weird Greek.
And I am not only asking you to trust me. I think I am my own worst skeptic, but that is certainly not true, especially not here.
I built tools to test all my work. From beginning to end, you can test it.
The link is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
All the code I used is there, you can run it on the website or copy and paste it and run it on your own machines.
There is also a live translator on the website so you can test what I made and see if it makes sense. Either it works or it doesn't lmao.
The framework was done while doing tests on the entire corpus at once mostly, instead of trying to make sense of every page individually. That was too much work and led to nothing.
The shorthand is kind of like an agglutinative abjad system, though there's no good way to describe it efficiently. You'll see when you look at my work.
The book is divided into multiple parts, I'm sure you're aware.
1st section: Herbal section. This section is chimera, or combinations of different parts of plants all frankenstein'd into one plant. It functions as a visual recipe for the potion. They were drawn in the Doctrine of Signatures, which was a common way to draw medicinal plants in medieval Europe, drawing them not by how they look but by what alchemical and chemical principles they had within them. The text on these pages are almost entirely harvesting instructions, distillation purity, what kind of distillation is required, etc. This is just the recipe section of the book.
2nd section: Zodiac section. You see, chemistry and alchemy weren't different things, right? They were the same thing, and they were both governed by the stuff in the sky. You needed to harvest or distill different stuff under different conditions. Harvest peony at night so the woodpeckers don't see you and peck your eyes out (this is a real thing lmaooo), harvest nightshade... at night. Harvest sun flowers when the sun is out, etc. The zodiac part is the reference for harvesting instructions. When certain things happen, moon cycles, etc. This part doesn't have much in the way of instructions, just observations.
3rd section: Balneological section. The weird one, aye? In medieval Europe, there was no periodic table of elements. When you wanted to talk about chemistry and alchemy in visual form, you had... allegory. See, alchemy was divided into three different principles that governed the whole thing. Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt. The mercurial part of alchemy was the raw essence contained within plants and the earth (above ground) that could be extracted and refined. Mercury, volatile, feminine (certainly a choice), and cool. When you see women going through the tubes, it is a very on the nose way to illustrate raw, volatile Mercurial essence going through distillation tubes. The author practiced secular alchemy, pioneered by the OG Maria the Jewess, and we know this because he uses her Balneum Mariae. The balneum mariae used aqua frigida (cold water for cooling the distillation rig) and aqua vitae (the alcohol that you actually distil with). Cold is blue. Life is green. The balneological section is distillation instructions.
4th section: Cosmological section. This one is insane, truly, to look at; however, it's much more simple than the secrets of the universe. It is... topdown equipment setup guide for a Tribikos, or a three alembic distillation rig, which is an invention of, you guessed it, Maria the Jewess.
These are the four main sections for creation, and the last two sections deal mostly with what happens after production, which honestly I am not super interested in explaining here.
As an example of what the parser shows on any given folio, here is a section from 13r:
foli--em radic--em cohobatum Sol-foli--ae
Luna-cum recipe-Luna-cum radic--am canal--us
Leaf, root, cohobation, solar leaf, lunar conditional harvest command, root accusative, vessel noun, etc.
The Tria Prima, which is the governing force behind Southern Alpine alchemy, is encoded in the grammar. Solar markers on solar governed plants, lunar on lunar, and none on salt governed, because nobody cared when you harvest or prepared 99% of roots. They were considered shielded, unaffected by what happens above the ground. It's all encoded in the grammar.
The clearest example of this is folio 28r. Before I looked at the illustration, the parser flagged simultaneous solar AND lunar markers on the same lines, which is statistically unusual. Most folios are dominated by one or the other. My prediction was that the illustration would show a plant requiring both celestial conditions simultaneously. I panicked, thinking my theory was unraveling in front of me, but it was just mandrake. This goofy lil' weirdo is the one plant in all of medieval herbology whose harvest protocol explicitly requires both solar and lunar timing at once. I did not know that before I looked at the picture. I didn't know much of anything before I looked at anything.
As a second example, here's what the parser produces on Folio 70r2, the April zodiac page:
The 2nd ring reads: Solis... cohobatum+magna_mutatio... canal... cohobatum+mensis... inde... cucurbit... foli... Lunam... Solem
That's: Sun's conditions... cohobated charge at Great Mutation scale... vessel... monthly cycle... thereupon... flask... leaf material... Moon... Sun
The token cccc appears exactly once in the entire 40,702 token corpus. On this page. In the astronomical c-series, repetition marks temporal scale: c = day, cc = month, ccc = year. cccc = the Great Mutation. I didn't know what the Great Mutation was when the parser flagged it, which again made me panic because the primary distillation token should only be able to max out at ccc, triple distillation, because... tribikos. The Jupiter-Saturn water triplicity conjunction of 1425 CE, the single most significant astrological event of that generation, falls in March-April 1425. The carbon dating window for the manuscript is 1404-1438. The cccc token sits on the April page. The author was writing during or immediately after the event and marked it in real time. That narrows the composition window from 34 years to roughly 1425-1430.
I did two Monte Carlo permutation tests (in the live repo on my website)
The first one shuffled the semantic assignments, taking all the Latin mappings and randomly reassigns which token gets which Latin value, then runs the parser 1000 times with randomized meanings. If my framework were just lucky or memorizing stuff, you'd expect randomized assignments to score similarly. But they do not! The maximum random coverage it could get across all 1000 runs was 28.02% with roots and suffixes both, where mine got up to 52.1% with my framework.
The second one scrambles the actual characters inside every token in the book. This destroys the internal structure of the text, and then tests the grammar against the fake corpus, which is now all noise. If the parser was just exploiting pure character frequency patterns rather than real structure, it would still score pretty well on random text. It could only do 14.21% in 1000 runs, while my framework did 41.62%.
This is me trying to attack my framework from all directions. One asking "are the right words being assigned to the right meanings" and the other asking "is there actually structure here to find and have I found it?"
They both returned p values of... 0.0000.
Papers are on Zenodo, go take a look:
A Computational Decipherment and Explanation of the Voynich Manuscript - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Tribikos Confirmation, 52.1% Corpus Coverage, and a Complete Translation of Folio 70r2nd_ring - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Tear it apart lads, and as always...
Thank you for taking the time to look at my work. Truly, this community is a blast.
If you have any questions, feel free to message me. I'll be around to talk about it.
|
|
|
|
| Proposed architecture of the Voynich system |
|
Posted by: Labyrinthinesecurity - 21-05-2026, 04:43 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (9)
|
|
The IVTFF cleanly separates captions (next to drawings) from the rest of the text.
I thought that captions could be semantic rich, and maybe different from the rest of the text from a grammar perspective?
Looks like they are.
Captions follow the following pattern, overwhelmingly: o-K-V-F (o + stop + vowel + final consonant), repeated 1-2 times. The ch/sh and e slots are used sparingly. What's more, captions dont carry the A/B distinction signal.
So... what if captions where surfacing semantically meaningful words, whereas words not containing o-V-K-F where just "elaboration"?
We would then have two channels in Voynich.
I ran some stats, and look at the results:
Semantic channel (o, a, t, k, p, f, d, l, r, n, m, y, s): stable across sections, preserved in captions, 73% of all glyphs
Elaboration channel (ch, sh, e, ee, q, i, ii, cXh): varies by line position, varies by A/B "language," largely absent from captions.
Semantic words have 29% redundancy => reasonable, close to natural language
Elaboration has only 3.2% redundancy => it's essentially memoryless. It barely depends on the previous elaboration. This is consistent with elaboration being either random padding, a simple positional marker, or an independent cipher layer.
Entropy Comparison
Each Voynich word carries approximately: - 7.73 bits of semantic core information (the message)
- 2.78 bits of elaboration information (position + dialect + some morphology)
- Total: 10.51 bits per token
The elaboration's 2.78 bits decompose further into:- PREFIX (~1.76 bits): primarily encodes line position (ch/sh at start, ∅ at end, q in middle)
- INFIX (~3.38 bits): encodes section dialect and some core-specific morphology
These two sub-channels share only 0.147 bits of mutual information (8.4% of prefix entropy), they are nearly independent.
Let me make two conjectures:
1) the Voynich has two layers: a semantic core (73% of glyphs, 49% of vocabulary) and an elaboration layer (27% of glyphs, carrying almost no sequential information)
2) proposed word architecture: [ELAB_PREFIX] + [SEMANTICAL_PREFIX] + [SEMANTICAL_STEM] + [SEMANTICAL_SUFFIX] + [ELAB_INFIX] + ...
ch/sh/q o/a/∅ k/da/ka/... y/n/l/r/m/∅ ii/ee/e/i
Example decompositions:
Full word Elabprefix SemPrefix Stem SemSuffix Elabinfix
chol ch o — l —
okaiin — o ka — ii ...
daiin — ∅ da — ii ...
shedy sh ∅ — — e + (d=stem, y=suffix)
qokeedy q o k — ee ...
Thoughts?
|
|
|
|
| Forward-Falsifiable Predictions from a Priority-Dated Decipherment Key: Structural Ev |
|
Posted by: jwilbur - 20-05-2026, 04:53 AM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
- No Replies
|
|
Every Voynich decipherment claim faces the same objection:
“The key was fitted to the manuscript after the fact.”
So I approached mine differently.
I priority-dated the key first, then derived structural predictions from it, then tested those predictions against the public IVTFF EVA corpus maintained by other researchers.
PDF/report link in first comment.
Python reproducibility code in second comment.
That is the point of this report: not “trust my reading,” but “run the test.”
The result is a forward-falsifiable validation layer for the Arabic/WAZN model — morphology, operational clustering, and grammatical position all behaving as the key predicted before verification.
This matters because a real decipherment key should not only translate words.
It should predict hidden structure in the manuscript.
Python file:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
|
|
|
|
| Could the Voynich Manuscript be a private educational system? |
|
Posted by: barienka - 18-05-2026, 11:00 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (4)
|
|
I have been thinking about the Voynich Manuscript from a more psychological and human perspective rather than as a pure cryptographic problem.
What strikes me most is the contrast between the highly disciplined writing system and the relatively naive illustrations. The text appears systematic and internally consistent, while many drawings look almost childlike or non-professional.
This made me wonder whether the manuscript could have been a deeply personal knowledge system rather than a book intended for the public.
One idea that especially interests me is the possibility that the manuscript may have been connected to teaching or transmitting knowledge within a very small private circle, perhaps even between a parent and child, or a mentor and a younger student.
The botanical drawings often look less like professional scientific illustrations and more like functional memory-images. Some plants appear to combine several stages of growth or important identifying features rather than trying to represent a realistic botanical specimen.
Another reason why I am drawn to this interpretation is the strange linguistic behavior of the text itself.
Perhaps the manuscript is not a true spoken language at all, but a hybrid system somewhere between language, classification, memory aids and personal notation.
This could explain why modern linguistic and AI analyses detect patterns that resemble real language, while at the same time many sections appear repetitive, mechanical or algorithmic.
If the author was organizing knowledge through a highly personal symbolic structure, then parts of the manuscript could naturally behave like technical notation or internally coded reminders rather than normal human communication.
I also wonder whether the author could have been someone highly intelligent but outside formal academic structures, possibly even a woman with limited access to official education in the 15th century. Such a person might have created a private symbolic system to organize botanical, medical and astrological knowledge gathered from fragments of learning available around them.
The astrological sections seem especially important because they connect the manuscript to real medieval systems of knowledge that remained relatively stable over time.
To me, the manuscript feels less like a hidden universal language and more like the internal operating system of a very unusual human mind.
I would be curious whether other researchers have explored similar psychological, educational or family-based interpretations.
|
|
|
|
|
