Hi all! I'm a longtime Voynich fan, and I decided to expound my analysis as a short story in historical fiction. TLDR summary:
The manuscript and its alphabet were invented by a scribe for "fun," where "fun" includes "mental escape from a dull, grim, misadventured life."
The distinct styles (e.g. Currier A and B) are different moods and writing speeds of a single scribe.
The text is basically a work of automatic writing, without meaning in any language. When we observe patterns, we are learning the scribe's preferences for how the symbols should be arranged.
The artistic quirks and absence of Christian imagery reflect a scribe whose outlook was idiosyncratic, skeptical, and aloof from society.
If you enjoy the VMS as an escape from modern reality into a mysterious sub-world in medieval Christendom, you'll enjoy my tale too!
Hi, my name is Sean aka TheVisad, and over the course of the last several months I have been working on the manuscript. Instead of approaching the systems as a language, I decided to look at it from a perspective that it was a data system instead. I have long worked with data systems and saw this as just something fun to poke at. Outlined below, is what I have discovered so far regarding the Manuscript.
By no means is this a decipherment, from the moment I picked up the book I knew it was not translatable. This is a computational demonstration that the Voynich Manuscript is a deterministic, reproducible structural system. That every token of it's 37,671 word corpus can be derived from first principles with zero residual entropy. That the machine is based in the Ottoman Anatolian Turkish Eastern Arabic abjad system and used as mathematical formula based on mod35, which has historical aspects in the Eastern systems. That the machine is a two-sided wheel that provides the triple-layer word structure that maps directly to the only period in Turkish linguistic history where the language simultaneously used all three morphological systems.
What I propose is that the Voynich manuscript is the operational log of a 14 selector volvelle. The Voynich Manuscript is the output of a medieval Islamic pharmaceutical look up device used by the letterists in the Ottoman Empire in the 1420's. Voynich is not a natural language, it is not a cipher over a hidden plaintext, and it is not a meaningless hoax. The manuscript itself tells us the story in several of the folios. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. IS the machine described below, the 9-page fold out IS THE internal mechanism of the volvelle. The four gated dial on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. IS THE gallows. The pages outline the machine itself, and it's not until we the "Frankensteinian Morphology" of the three linguistic families, Persian Prefixes, Arabic Interiors and Turkish Agglutinative Suffixes that the system clicks.
The device consists of 14 mechanical selectors, arranged into two functional layers, the machine, and apparatus layers. The machine layer is a 14-selector deterministic finite state machine with four outer wheels, eight interior position dials, a walk state selector derived from sequential context, and a binary tashdid doubling operator. This machine layer generates all tokens, with zero residual entropy at 100% token determination. The interior dials operate via a linear congruential generator over residues modulo 35, where the gallows detent selects the multiplier. Four specific abjad numerical positions (q=Qaf=19, r=Ra=20, s=Sin=15, y=Ya=10) match the Eastern Arabic abjad system exactly, confirming the arithmetic base.
The apparatus layer is a 13-slot cyclic ring machine operating concurrently with the machine layer. The apparatus labels correspond to ring positions clockwise from an output gate: collection, preamble, reset gate, cosmological transformation mediator, transformation operator, herbal routing, cosmological routing, cycle-completion gate, and five vapor/formula tracking labels.
The machine's structure maps to the medieval Arabic za'irajah, a mechanical divination device documented by Ibn Khaldūn in 1377. The za'irajah has 8 concentric circles, 12 zodiac spokes producing 13 operational states (12 zodiac chords + 1 pole/vers-clef), a 55 × 131 lookup table (7,205 cells), and a fixed operating poem by Mālik b. Wuhayb that indicates the description and operation of the controls for a full cycle completion. These are matching, respectively, the volvelle's 8 prefix channels, 12 active apparatus slots + 1 K-GATE pole, ~4,243-entry dictionary (interior lookup space ~7,861 cells), and the k-label cycle-completion gate.
I propose that the Voynich manuscript, is the mechanical output, of a paper machine, created by two medieval Islamic scribes. These scribes worked on the manuscript sometime in 1400-1420, and wrote the book based on the output of the machines deterministic view. The manuscript we have is the written record of this process. There are no visible mistakes, there are no visible cross outs, and no observed locations that the scribes ever made a mistake. Across the entire 37,671 tokens, the manuscript presents a clean execution record, not a drafted prose text.
I have additional theories that are associated with the OAT morphological aspects, and how they correlate to medical purposes. I am pursuing a line of research that the pages are an actual recipe. Not in the normal sense that you and I are familiar with, grab two teaspoons of salt to do this with it. Rather, they are a machine record of a process to take a set of ingredients and use the machine to determine the process. The users of the za'irajah created a question; this question was broken down and used as the input of the wheel. Then following the guidelines of the poem, allowed for one full cycle of the device to obtain its output. The output of the device was the medical recipe that divination provided from the device and was used to “cure” the patient.
The attached images show some of the output from the scripts I have created, and the zip file contains a demo of the wheel's processes as it moves through the folios. I welcome any and all questions, feedback, and criticism. I have a ton of research, files, data, scripts, grammar output, and more. I would welcome working with someone to verify the data, the machine, and the findings I have. I am still assembling the public repository, but have a private repository I can share readily and over 2tb of data offline that can be shared that is directly related to overall project.
Sean Rice aka TheVisad
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Koen has produced a map where people can mark locations associated with swallow-tail merlons.
As is well known, I have studied and collected ciphers from around the time at which the Voynich is carbon dated to. I had a thought about what a map would look like where each cipher is marked at a location that it is associated with. I suspect that broadly speaking it would not look so different from the swallow-tail merlons map in terms of the clustering of points in the same parts of Italy as on that map. Of course, they would not be identical. There are some geographical areas which have ciphers associated with them like the Kingdom of Aragon which have no swallow-tail merlons and some geographical areas which have swallow-tail merlons which have no known ciphers associated with them. However, overall I suspect the maps to be quite similar.
Obviously, there are other similar geographical distribution maps that could be produced.
One could produce a map of locations associated with alchemical herbal manuscripts or more generally herbal manuscripts from this period of history.
One could produce a map of locations associated with zodiac diagrams from this period of history where the distribution would be more skewed to South Germany/Northern Switzerland.
I am not sure how useful any of these maps might be. Though in theory they might be combined to produce some probability frequency distribution for the place of origin of the Voynich.
I myself have a theory as to precisely where the two sets of swallow-tail merlons on the Rosettes folio correspond to(Milan and Bellinzona) which is in part why I may not have been too focused on identifying all the locations with swallow-tail merlons on Koen's map.
Yes it's another anagram post, but I think I've got something here that's worth the pulling of the thread.
The anagramed plant names that Edith Sherwood has found in the manuscript could well point us towards onomastics and anagrammatismi
Historically names were rearranged in an attempt to reveal its true nature or inner power.
Edith’s work has found many examples of plant name anagrams on the same page that shows that plant.
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I think that those were used to reveal the essential nature of the plant. Alchemists (along with Christian Kabbalists, poet diplomats and others) in the 15th century are known to have used this kind of technique. Alchemists used it as a form of protection, to ensure that only a trained initiate would understand the plant’s true medical purpose.
For example:
f4r: cam us: camus (tool for chamoising), Sumac (sumacchio) was used to make leather soft
f7r: onar: (honor the body, allowing it to heal), Arno (arnoglossa, ribwort) was used to join wounded flesh together
f7v: colco: (colcare meaning lay down), Coclo (coccole, bay laural), oil and pigment source must be allowed to settle and lay down to separate the dye
I’m not claiming that much of manuscript was anagramed. We do however have what looks to be clear evidence that plant names were anagramed.
What I am claiming is that onomastics was used in the time period to help reveal the true nature of things, and seems to have been used in a small part in relation to plants in the book.
Is it a stretch? Maybe. It does however though seem to be a waste to ignore this line of questioning.
Also related: Spagyrics wrote in Decknamen (cover names), using magical names for common ingrediants such as calling mercury white eagle.
Eagle - "A Deckname used in the Philalethes treatises for a distillation; that is, sophic mercury of seven eagles has been distilled seven times." from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Obligatory Disclaimer: The above is all my own work, no AI was usef to write it. All spelling mistakes are purely my own.
Sorry I'm not very good with historical books and maybe you already know this one but I found this book from "Bonaccorso Ghiberti" in 15th century. It has engineering diagrams, but it's interesting because it is written in cypher text. Here some images from internet:
There are also columns/pillars designs like Mariani and Taccola (from the other thread), that look like containers in Voynich manuscipt.
EDIT: I found full scan of book, here:
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Maybe you can look if there are more similarities with Voynich manuscript?
Working on the recipe section (folios 103r–116r), we found that ch and sh appear to carry two independent signals simultaneously.
The first is paragraph-level structure. A logistic regression using ch/sh-based features predicts tail vs no-tail paragraphs at balanced accuracy 86%, confirmed by within-folio permutation testing.
The second is folio-level language. The ratio of (ch sh)o-type words predicts which Currier language a folio belongs to with ~99% accuracy manuscriptwide, even though all recipe folios are Currier B. The cho/che balance appears to encode a stable folio-level property operating above the paragraph.
The key thing is that these two signals are orthogonal.
In the recipe section, I annotated the stars showing a tail and the stars without a tail.
I then trained a simple statistical model to predict whether a paragraph maps to a “tail” star using only internal text features (no external information, no hand labeling tricks).
The model correctly identifies tail paragraphs about 86% of the time (balanced accuracy), which is far above chance (50%).
(I also ran permutation tests where we randomly reshuffled the data within each folio, preserving structure but destroying signal. In those tests, performance dropped to about 52%, which is basically chance. This suggests the model is not just exploiting simple artifacts like folio grouping or class imbalance.)
Is anyone aware of similar studies? I'd be interested to know if star morphometrics correlate to textual contents.
Hi: I was hoping someone had a copy of the gigantic 600ppi tif of the Marci Letter recto. I think it used to be here:
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... but when you click on the download link for "Full Size Original (Tiff)", you it downloads the 1170955.tif, which is "only" 3470 x 4952, 96 dpi, and 4952 pixels. The full size .tif was actually a massive 6500 x 7908, 600 dpi.
The reason I know this is because I do have both these recto and verso larger tiffs, labeled 1170955-600ppi (recto), and 15754261-600ppi (verso), and I believe I did get it, years ago, from the above link, by clicking on "Full Size Original (Tiff)" button.
The reason I would like the original 600 ppi tif is because my old download is corrupted. Here is a small version of it to illustrate this:
Now as I remember, "back in the day" I had tried several time to download a good copy of this image from the Beinecke link, but they were all corrupted. I do not know if this was a problem with the image stored at Yale, or some gremlin in my own computer at the time. In either case, it seems that this is the only copy I have of the recto in 600, and wondered if anyone here happened to have, or know the location, of a un-corrupted 1170955-600ppi.tif ?
For centuries, countless people have claimed they already had the answer
— from Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, to Bavarian, Turkish, German, and many others. Yet none of these theories have achieved broad scholarly consensus.
So how do you rise above the noise?
How do you distinguish a genuine discovery from the endless stream of speculation, projection, fraud, and self-proclaimed breakthroughs?
That is the real challenge.
Human nature is a mixture of sincere curiosity and ambition. Some seek truth; others seek recognition, attention, or fame — even when they have not earned it.
In a field surrounded by mystery, the burden is not merely to claim a solution, but to demonstrate one with enough clarity, consistency, reproducibility, and evidence to survive scrutiny.
I know this is the right place to ask this question. I have seen genuine discussions here — some driven by ego, others by scientific curiosity and historical interest.
So I ask sincerely:
If someone truly believed they had identified a reproducible decoding framework for the manuscript, how should they present it responsibly while avoiding both sensationalism and premature dismissal?
Today I’d like to share one of my ideas about the Voynich script. Remembering my last experience here with you, I decided to approach it through a calligraphic analysis of the text, using an Excel spreadsheet.
After studying many EVA transcriptions and different interpretations of the Voynich manuscript, especially the work of Stephen Bax, I looked into phonetic studies and the attempts to match glyphs with specific sounds. In my opinion, those correspondences often seem sporadic and subjective. I also explored the idea of Gregorian chants derived from the manuscript.
The Voynich text has a remarkable lexical redundancy. With very few glyphs, a massive text was written, yet many pages almost feel like obsessive repetitions of nearly identical words. It gives the impression of something chant-like, melodic, repetitive — almost like a litany, a prayer, or something similar.
This aspect really caught my attention. How is it possible to generate a fully coherent text with so few letters?
I rule out the hypothesis that it was simply a fake or meaningless text created only for profit.
This is where medieval Gregorian chant comes into play. The Voynich text seems to share several similarities with it. For example, medieval Gregorian notation used four lines in the tetragram and only a few note heights. The notes, often written in square form and called neumes, were used to identify syllables. They could appear in different forms that modified pronunciation.
What interests me most is the number of lines and how, with only a few notes, an entire text could be written.
There are also compound neumes like podatus, clivis, torculus, and porrectus — groups of notes forming a single syllable — as well as simple neumes like punctum and virga, where a single note represents one syllable.
If we compare this idea with the Voynich text, the compound neumes could resemble compound glyphs such as ch, sh, ckh, cfh, cph, or cth.
Example of a neume with square annotations
While studying the Voynich script, what immediately stood out to me was the visual shape of the glyphs themselves. They reminded me of medieval Gregorian notation.
At that point, I started analyzing the glyphs and their heights, arranging them into a kind of scale. Of course, the text is written in cursive, so it isn’t as regular as Gregorian notes, but I tried to estimate the heights and see if this perspective could reveal something interesting.
Please ignore the heights marked with a “+” sign, which I used for compound glyphs with ligatures or connected forms. In Excel I couldn’t make the calculations work correctly with the “+” signs, so I had to leave them out. I suspect those glyphs may represent something additional compared to the others, but for now I don’t want to push the theory too far.
Now I’ll explain exactly what I did.
I took the manuscript and assigned heights to the glyphs: A high, M medium, B low, C short.
This is how I categorized the glyph heights.
I should point out again that the Voynich text is written in cursive. Someone might notice, for example, that in the word “ykal” I classified the glyph “l” as C, even though visually it could seem closer to B. But after checking most instances of that glyph, I noticed that, like the “y” glyph, part of it often extends below the line. In other cases, the “y” glyph appears shorter than expected.
Since I obviously cannot manually retranscribe the entire manuscript using these rules, I decided to catalog the glyphs this way and use the full EVA transcription by Takeshi, despite the errors I found in it. That’s another discussion entirely. What matters here are the calculations I’m about to explain. A few errors are acceptable
Method
What I did was import the entire EVA transcription of the manuscript into an Excel file: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. After that, I needed a way to understand whether this method could reveal any interesting patterns in the text. For example, I wanted to measure how frequently glyph heights changed across entire pages, to see whether there was some regularity or complete chaos — in other words, whether the glyph heights had meaning or were simply decorative or random.
Procedure
I took each EVA page and arranged it line by line into columns.
Then I created a formula that transformed the entire text into the height categories I had chosen, returning each line as a sequence of height letters. After that, I created additional columns containing the number of A, M, B, and C heights, so I could count how often each height appeared on every line. I also created another column to calculate the Runs for each line. By “Runs,” I mean the number of transitions from one height to another between consecutive letters. Then I created another column for the average Runs per page, combining all the extracted data. This was the result I was most interested in: the average Runs. I also generated columns showing the percentage distribution of each height on every page, to see how much the patterns changed from one page to another. I even tried to create a column for entropy calculations, but I couldn’t manage to make it work.
The Excel file I generated contains all these results. At the bottom right there are the average Runs for each page. In the center there are the percentages of each height category across the entire page. On the left side, I also made a comparison using a Gregorian chant. I took the notes written on four lines and converted them into my height categories. I wasn’t interested in identifying the actual notes themselves — I simply took them in sequence. As you can see, the distribution is very balanced, and the average Runs are surprisingly close to those found in the Voynich manuscript. It is impossible to get similar results with a natural language text, even with stylized texts that visually resemble Voynich. Those tend to produce much more chaotic and irregular patterns. Going back to the Voynich data: if you look at the average Runs on each page, they are all remarkably similar. The percentages of the different height categories also remain very consistent from page to page.
Conclusion
In my opinion, these results suggest that the glyph heights are not random, and that the encoding method could perhaps be related in some way to medieval Gregorian chant notation — though I can’t say exactly how. Still, these are the patterns I found. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
