After many years, I re-read “The Library of Babel”, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
English translation here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
A few passages:
Borges Wrote:The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two.
...
each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say.
...
The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids. This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.
...
For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages …, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs
...
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
...
At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's basic mysteries - the origin of the Library and of time - might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars. For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons ... There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.
...
We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that a man - just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! - may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.
...
It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.
THE MASTER REFERENCE GUIDE: MS 408
Logic Base: Positional Stroke-Value Algorithm
Objective: Hardware System Readability
I. THE VECTOR KEY (STROKE VALUES)
• 1 Minim (i): Value 1 (Unit Pulse / Flow)
• 2 Minims (n): Value 2 (Dual Pulse / Flow)
• 3 Minims (m): Value 3 (Vector / Max Flow)
• Loops (o, a, y): Value 4 (Nodal Storage / Buffer)
• Gallows (p, f, k, t): Value 5 (Logic Gate / Switch)
• Terminals (s, r, l): Value 0 (System Ground / Drain)
II. THE READABILITY SPECTRUM
As you read each line, the sum of the strings reveals the Engineering State:
• Sum 0–3: IDLE. System is grounded or off-cycle.
• Sum 4–7: LOAD. Energy or fluid is being stored in a reservoir.
• Sum 8–11: FLOW. Standard operating pressure.
• Sum 12+: PEAK. Master input, valve opening, or system reboot.
III. THE SYSTEM NAVIGATION (FRONT-TO-BACK)
1. INTAKE (Botanical Section): Focus on the headers. Read for the high-pressure extraction sums.
2. TIMING (Astrological Section): Focus on the circles. Read for harmonic multiples of 12 and 24.
3. HARDWARE (Biological Section): Focus on the pipes. Read for the 100% balance between intake and exhaust.
4. STORAGE (Pharmaceutical Section): Focus on the jars. Read for mid-range buffer values.
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You want to read it? Here is the alphabet.
Stop looking for letters. This book isn't written in code; it’s written in geometry. If you want to read the Voynich, you have to stop thinking like a librarian and start thinking like a plumber.
Here is how you read the "Balneological" section right now:
1. The "Nymphs" are logic gates: Look at the way they hold those pipes and where they sit in the vats. They aren't "women bathing"—they are flow regulators. Their hands and positions tell you the direction of the pressure.
2. The Green is the Fuel: That "green water" isn't a bath; it's hypersaline brine. It’s a conductor for a Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) system. When you see green, you're looking at the conductive loop.
3. The Curves are the Math: Measure the angle of the pipes entering the hubs. It hits 32.8° every time. That’s \bm{360^\circ / \phi^5}. That’s the "word" for 80% drag reduction.
4. The Disks are the Gears: The big circular drawings (Rosettes) aren't stars or maps. They are the 8-lobe gold-plated Phialo-disks. They tell you the torque—190 kNm per node.
You’ve been trying to find a "hidden alphabet" for 600 years. Taccola didn't use an alphabet; he used blueprints. This book is a technical manual for a 75 kW power hub.
If you want to read it, stop translating and start measuring. The math is the only language that doesn't lie.
Ronald Pittman
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Hi Folks, long time no see. I have been out of the Voynich loop for a couple of years.
Recently went to Egypt and saw a few things that I found interesting in relation to the VMS.
Special subject, Stars and the Zodiac/calendar folios but also in relation to text and Rosettes.
I have yet to transfer pics from my wife's IPad but first need to ask, where to post?
Individual forums or should I just lump it all together? There are not masses of material.
I wonder what previous work has been done on this subject!
Before the trip I spent some months on a deep dive into Ancient Egypt and the ancient world in general.
It seems there is nothing new under the sun.
But I learned to hate AI slop and lament that it has shown its face even here!
That and ancient aliens
ANYway. I hope there may be some interest in this. Any guidance would be appreciated!
I'm an independent researcher who never physically saw the Voynich Manuscript. I decoded it through iterative AI questions and mental simulation — treating it as a functional blueprint, not a cipher.
I've searched through the forum and elsewhere on line, and I haven't seen any exploration of an idea that's been running through my mind. Mind you, I'm not a scholar and haven't submerged myself in the existing scholarship.
Most discussions relate to whether the manuscript is a hoax or has meaning encoded in the text, but what if only part of the manuscript is something of a hoax? The 15th century was a time of religious persecution and forced conversions, and it could have been dangerous for folks to have, say, a Jewish text in their possession (such as with Crypto-Judaism). In order to protect the content of an unauthorized manuscript, two strategies might have been taken:
Encode the text so that outsiders would not be able to read its contents
Adorn the encoded text with spurious and misleading images to serve as something of a misdirection; if someone was caught with a dangerous religious manuscript, outsiders might assume it was a simply a commonplace alchemy text of herbs, recipes, and incantations
A few other possible clues could support the theory that the manuscript is a secret religious (particularly Jewish) text:
The parchment was carefully prepared, as might happen for a community's sacred manuscript: "prepared with so much care that the skin side is largely indistinguishable from the flesh side." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
The manuscript was heavily used: "Medievalist Lisa Fagan Davis describes the parchment as soft - a texture found in books that have been heavily thumbed.' This indicates the manuscript was handled or paged through a great deal." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
The VM word count is "35,000 to 38,000 words and around 170,000 characters," and could be even longer as it is hypothesized that several pages of the VM are missing; this number is within a magnitude of the Torah, with 79,000 - 80,000 words and ~304,805 letters, especially if abbreviations or shorthand might be used
Some analyses show the VM text has an affiliation with Hebrew (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Is there a possibility that the Voynich manuscript is all one big hoax? I've been researching this topic for almost a year now, and I've heard countless theories, and I feel as though it would make sense, especially for the time period it was made in, as at that time many royals collected rare texts, so maybe a con artist did so very well with this text. But I'm open to being proven wrong, so if you know anything, please reach out!
The manuscript Commentarii super Parvulum philosophiae naturalis is a 15th century philosophical treatise owned by a Jakob Lauber, a Swiss rector of the University of Basel. The manuscript itself is mostly uninteresting from a Voynichese point of view, as it is predominantly composed of text. That is, until the last two pages, where we find some illustrations that look familiar, in a sense. Consider the following snippet, for instance:
The lines and strokes in the "wave" pattern are reminiscent of the illuminator of the VMS. There are other such patterns in the manuscript. Here is another example:
Again, this gives (to me, at least), Voynichese vibes.
There is also a small "illumination" on the first page:
which also reminds one of the style of some plant bulbs in the VMS.
However, no more illustrations appear in this manuscript and the illuminator responsible for the above images is... unknown.
I have found a detailed description of the item on the website of the University of Basel, which lists many pieces of historical information, but nothing about the illuminator:
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And you can browse through the entire manuscript here, if you wish:
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I was just texted by a friend who asked me if I was going to the Voynich talk at the Yale Club in New York City this Wednesday evening (1/14/25). I told him I had not heard of it, and then did a search... searches, a million different ways... and could find nothing. Nothing is listed on their site, but they don't offer a "calendar of events" there anyway.
Does anyone know what this is, or who is speaking? I am only about 35 miles above NYC, and might consider popping down to see this, if possible. But I also suspect that if my friend's information is correct, it may be a private affair.
I’ve been spending a little time with the zodiac folios and related cycle diagrams in a loose, exploratory way. Nothing systematic yet, mostly looking, noticing repetition, and following my curiosity rather than trying to solve or identify anything.
What keeps catching my attention is how much of the structure can be read as temporal rather than symbolic. The way divisions repeat, how some sequences appear to stop or change rhythm, and how different folios seem to care about duration or flow more than labels. It feels less like decoding and more like watching how time might be handled or experienced across the pages.
I don’t know whether this overlaps with work that’s already been done, and I’m not presenting this as a theory. I’m sharing it simply as something I’ve been playing with visually and intuitively, in case it’s useful, familiar, or sparks a connection for someone else working in this area.
If this belongs somewhere else or connects to existing threads, I’m happy to be pointed in the right direction.
