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Huth's reading of f116v: ...
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The claimed Voynich page
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The Book Switch Theory
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Voynich Zoom CFP
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Water, earth and air
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Can we go further?
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No text, but a visual cod...
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The origin of Fabrizio Sa...
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f17r multispectral images
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Why and how the text coul...
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| f67v2 - Some comparisons |
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Posted by: Bluetoes101 - 06-09-2025, 10:39 PM - Forum: Imagery
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Egerton MS 845 (F.21 v)
Probably just a coincidence, but I thought the top left triangle design and top right cross design (scroll) might be note worthy given the general similarities between the two images in general. The overall layout has quite some similarities also. I can't find scans for this MS anymore, though it was linked on here years ago and noted as "first half of 15c" in 2021.
On a side note - The image also shows up as being part of Harley 2407 which was 15c and contained many later notes by readers, the most famous of which were Dee and Ashmole.
The other is from Micheal Scot - Liber introductorius, which is a very interesting work, and person (if you like rabbit holes)
This is a 14c copy (around 1320) - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The images are regarding eclipses, though I found the general way it was drawn to have some similarities with the VM images, even if the meaning is seemingly different
You will be able to find many great images in this MS, if you browse backwards from this page you will find all sorts of great images for planets and zodiac signs, some more relatable to VM than others.
Bonus merlons and weird sun face for Koen 
I don't really have much to claim on these, just thought I'd share and not let it rot in the list of things I'll probably forget about.
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| My Theory: RITE — Ritual Instrument of Textual Esoterica |
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Posted by: GrooveDuke - 06-09-2025, 09:40 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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[Theory] RITE — Ritual Instrument of Textual Esoterica
Thesis. The Voynich Manuscript is an authentic early-15th-century object whose unreadability was the point. It functioned as a Ritual Instrument of Textual Esoterica (RITE)—a performative prop that looked like language and conferred authority on its owner in consultations/rites—rather than a book intended for general decoding.
That's my TL;DR. If it intrigues you or reminds you of something that has come before of which I am unaware, read on...
Motive. The same motive as many medieval forgeries: money.
How I got here. Statistical work persuaded me the text isn’t straightforward natural language. A recent Voynich Day 2025 talk by Michael (“Magnesium”) showed that historically plausible 15th-century methods can generate Voynich-like strings from meaningful text. That demonstrates feasibility of a ciphered surface. It does not establish an intent to decode. My claim: unreadability was a feature for performance, not a bug to be solved. (Modern analogue: Joseph Smith’s plates—power via exclusive “translation.”)
Function, not content. I use “rites” broadly—any performative act (divination, healing, religious consultation) where the owner interprets an unreadable authority object for a client. Images anchor recognition; unreadable text supplies mystery; performance supplies authority.
Historical timeline (why RITE fits the period) - Creation (1404–1438 vellum window). Late-medieval Europe supported markets for “books of secrets,” astrological images, and esoteric medicine. A convincing pseudo-language manuscript could be produced relatively cheaply yet serve high-value ritual and consulting roles.
- Use phase (15th century). The manuscript shows wear consistent with handling. Unreadable/arcane texts could operate openly: monastic settings, itinerant healers, court astrologers.
- Shift and decline (post-1517). The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation hardened attitudes toward “magical” books and spurious relics. An unreadable prop without sanctioned theology becomes risky for Protestants and Catholics.
- Afterlife (16th–17th centuries). As “duping the locals” gets harder—and penalties greater—the manuscript’s functional value collapses. It survives as an exotic curiosity, eventually sold when it’s no longer useful (or safe) as a working prop.
Section-by-section: how RITE could operate in practice- Herbal (plants/roots). Healer points to a strange plant with dense glyphs: “The remedy is written here.” A potion is prescribed. Plant imagery makes it feel concrete; the text signals hidden expertise.
- Astrological (zodiac, stars). For divination: gesture to a zodiac wheel—“Your house this year aligns thus; the text confirms it.” Recognizable symbols guide the client’s imagination; unreadable labels make it authoritative.
- Balneological (nude figures, pipes, baths). Esoteric therapies: “These are purifications for health/fertility.” The imagery implies procedure; the script implies exact doctrine only the interpreter can unlock.
- Pharmaceutical (jars, roots, compound lists). “Codified pharmacy.” Point to a jar vignette, narrate a “translation,” mix a preparation. The book serves as the credential behind the recipe.
- Recipes/Stars (short paragraphs, star markers). Performative instruction: “Each star is a step.” Trace lines as though following a protocol, then deliver a chant, cure, or prognosis. Structure without readability.
What would falsify RITE- A coherent, page-level decipherment that preserves known statistics and yields content matching the imagery domains—showing the book was meant to be read beyond its maker.
- Provenance tying it to a didactic or bureaucratic purpose inconsistent with staged opacity.
- Material/ink sequencing inconsistent with extended practical handling.
What would strengthen RITE- Documents describing unreadable “books of secrets” used in healing/divination ca. 1400–1500 (especially Central Europe).
- Inventories, bans, or trials referencing pseudo-alphabet manuscripts pre-/post-Reformation.
- Close analogues (e.g., Trithemius/Dee) where cipher-like text doubled as a ritual prop.
Bottom line. RITE doesn’t deny the possibility of meaning; it argues the manuscript’s purpose was performative unreadability. It was used for something—authority in rites—then lost cultural utility as the religious/intellectual climate changed.
I looked for earlier posts beyond the “medieval forgery” umbrella and didn’t find this exact framing. If RITE (performative unreadability; prop-cipher use) has already been proposed, please link threads/papers/blogs—happy to read, credit, and continue there. Mods: fine to merge if redundant.
Most helpful feedback right now:- Pointers to prior art on “prop/ritual use” models of the Voynich.
- Counter-arguments/falsifiers I haven’t considered.
- Historical breadcrumbs (inventories, bans, trials, testimonies) mentioning unreadable “books of secrets” c. 1400–1500.
- Method ideas to test RITE vs. alternatives (e.g., wear patterns, long-range glyph correlations, material sequencing).
Thanks in advance for links, critiques, and corrections. If this is old hat, I’ll fold into the existing discussion and refine accordingly
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| Resonance |
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Posted by: InkandGrace - 06-09-2025, 03:16 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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You can translate all day, and if you aren't a medieval music major you won't accomplish much.
Its the same exact format as many chants and mantras the world over. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 4, and 5 chorus fingerprint (parsons) 8 unit cell is RURUUDR and
full chorus is RUDRUUDRRUDRUUDRRUDRUUDR
That is as far I have gotten.
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| [split] Word length autocorrelation |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 05-09-2025, 12:27 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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(04-09-2025, 09:59 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In real languages, the correlation is usually slightly positive: long words tend to follow long words, short after short. But in the Voynich, it’s negative (about –0.07). That means the text tends to alternate — long words are followed by short words, and short by long.
It gives the text a zig-zag rhythm.
If that is a 'normalised' correlation, i.e. not a covariance, then the value -0.07 means 'no correlation'.
So, it depends on how it was calculated.
(04-09-2025, 09:59 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.When I scrambled the text within lines as a test, the alternation got even stronger, which proves the manuscript isn’t random, but it’s still unlike natural language.
This is not expected, and suggests that both cases effectively show 'no correlation'.
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| Combination of two manuscripts as a way of reading the text? |
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Posted by: sfiesta - 03-09-2025, 07:01 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hello everyone.
Do you think it is possible that two manuscripts were used to read the text - one known to us as the Voynich Manuscript, and the second lost one, which contained the same illustrations and diagrams, but a different text? For example, the words of manuscript №2 could consist of ordinary, but cleverly mixed Latin letters, and the sequences of symbols in the Voynich Manuscript could be a visual instruction for bringing these words into a readable form. This could explain the strange statistical distribution of words in the Voynich Manuscript - it's just that in the hypothetical manuscript №2, the same normal word of a European language could be encoded by many variants of mixing the original letters - accordingly, the visual instruction for decoding the same word could be different in different places of the manuscript.
I understand that this theory is not the path to solving the mystery, but I believe that this theory also has a right to exist.
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| Why the Voynich Manuscript Text Hasn't Been Deciphered – and Why It Never Will |
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Posted by: Gregor - 03-09-2025, 05:29 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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For over a century, the greatest minds – from Friedmann to modern artificial intelligence algorithms – have been trying to decipher the text of the Voynich Manuscript. And for over a century, they all have ended the same way: helplessness. Some have seen it as a Romance language, others as an Aztec language, still others as a medical or astrological treatise. No theory has stood the test of time.
I don't want to belittle anyone or diminish the researchers' efforts; on the contrary – I admire their passion and perseverance. However, the problem lies in the premise itself: everyone is stubbornly staring at the letters. Yet the text could be a deliberate veil, a labyrinth intended to entrap those seeking meaning.
In my opinion, the true code is hidden in the illustrations. Semiology suggests: sign, symbol, ideogram. Plants, bodies, diagrams – these are the ones that convey meaning. The text serves more as decoration than as a carrier of information.
A few years ago, I proposed viewing the herbal section as a kind of compendium of history – from the Big Bang, through the evolution of life, the birth of civilization, to the present and the future. Every root, leaf, and flower is a record of events. It's the medieval equivalent of the Pioneer's golden plaque, a testimony left for future generations.
Researchers are therefore battling not a simple cipher, but something I would call a multi-level intelligence from 600 years ago, created by people with access to a source of knowledge that we cannot clearly understand today. Therefore, all traditional methods – whether linguistic, cryptographic, or computer – may prove insufficient.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. The Voynich Manuscript will likely never be cracked using either classical or digital methods. This isn't because the researchers are incompetent – they are exceptional – but because we are dealing with a structure that has transcended classical boundaries from the outset. The text will deceive endlessly, and the solution lies in the images. Deciphering them requires not only intellect but also a different perspective - one that allows us to view signs and symbols as a language in themselves.
My post should therefore be considered a polemic, an invitation to a shift in perspective. This is not to undermine the efforts of others, but to point out that in the game of the Voynich Manuscript, the winner will not be the one who calculates and encodes, but the one who can read the symbols and images. Because this book was not created to be broken by the methods of reason, but to open the way to a different kind of knowledge.
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| Can LAAFU effects be modeled? |
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Posted by: pfeaster - 03-09-2025, 12:42 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I always enjoy reading about people's efforts to model systems that can generate text mimicking the vord structure and frequency ratios of Voynichese, and I think we stand to learn a lot from them. Sure, there's no guarantee that a system that can produce output superficially like Voynichese resembles the system actually used to produce Voynichese. But much of the time we seem to be at a loss to come up with any plausible explanation for the weird patterns we find, and in those cases the models -- if successful -- can at least help show how those patterns could maybe have come about (which seems like an improvement on having no leads to follow at all).
On the other hand, we hardly ever see comparable efforts to model LAAFU ("Line As A Functional Unit") behavior. To summarize what's at issue for anyone who might need it: Voynichese running text displays clear patterning at the line level. The first vords of lines have distinctive statistical properties, as do the last vords of lines. But so, sometimes, do the second vords of lines (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at Agnostic Voynich). And You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that many vord features have subtler "preferences" for earlier or later positions deeper within the mid-line.
My feeling is that most proposed explanations don't bear up particularly well to scrutiny.
1. Do line-start and line-end features correspond to parts of words split across line breaks? Likely not, since line-start and line-end words aren't shorter on average than mid-line words (I don't recall offhand who studied this, but someone did).
2. Are line-end features abbreviations employed when the writer was running out of space? Maybe -- but my sense is that, in practice, abbreviations didn't typically cluster at line-end in manuscripts of the period, so this would be a stranger explanation than it might seem at first glance.
3. Do line-start and line-end patterns reflect a linguistic phenomenon, or some other patterning of underlying content (such as poetry)? That would be hard to square with line breaks seemingly inserted as necessary to fill available space around illustrations.
4. Do line-start and line-end patterns reflect contextual scribal variations -- i.e., different ways of writing the "same" glyphs at the beginnings or ends of lines? To be sure, there was plenty of contextual scribal variation in other European writing systems of the period (though not a lot specific to line ends and line starts). But that variation was conventionalized and had emerged over many generations. Unless Voynichese had a long undocumented tradition behind it, when -- and under what pressures -- would such conventions have evolved?
I don't claim that any of those explanations is weak enough that we can completely dismiss it, but at the same time, none of them strikes me as very persuasive -- certainly not enough so that we could say, "Oh, that's probably just X, so it's most likely safe to ignore."
On the other hand, I can imagine a system that would predictably produce line effects as a natural byproduct of its use, and that also falls well within the range of hypotheses people already entertain about how Voynichese might have worked (along the lines of Rene's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Consider this set of specifications:
(1) Lines always break at word boundaries.
(2) Within lines, words are run together indiscriminately.
(3) Text is chunked for encoding into units consisting of one or more consonants followed by one or more vowels, with each "chunk" being encoded as a vord.
(4) It's possible to encode an isolated consonant or vowel (or isolated clusters of either), but this is done only as needed to satisfy rule (1).
(5) Vords that are similarly structured represent similarly structured "chunks," but not in a straightforward letter-by-letter way (imagine something like Naibbe encoding tables not being randomly interchangeable, but each encoding a different category of "chunk").
I've brought this idea up here before, but only as a thought exercise. Now, to try it out in practice, I've just cobbled together a little over a million characters' worth of miscellaneous transcribed medieval Latin and run a few experiments on it to see what would happen to the plaintext (prior to any further encoding) if it were "chunked" as I've described. Note: it isn't actually necessary to break the "chunked" text into lines to gather data about what characteristics different line positions would have -- presuming that line breaks are inserted arbitrarily, we just have to work out how each word would be "chunked" in each of several positions and compare the results.
Based on my sample, the top twelve most common "chunks" in the middle of the line (i.e., the units we get if we run all text together) would be:
[re] 2.53%
[te] 2.02%
[ta] 2.02%
[tu] 1.89%
[mi] 1.63%
[ne], [ra] 1.62%
[ri] 1.59%
[ti] 1.54%
[si] 1.45%
[ni] 1.43%
[se] 1.38%
At line-start (considering only the first "chunks" of individual words), the top twelve most common values would instead be:
i 8.18% † -- yes, the "i" should be in brackets, but that gets misinterpreted as an italics flag! Darn forum formatting.
[e] 8.16% †
[a] 7.04% †
[co] 3.12%
[re] 2.51% *
[o] 2.31% †
[se] 2.20% *
[no] 2.16%
[si] 2.10% *
[de] 2.07%
[u] 1.95% †
[pe] 1.53%
The asterisks mark cases that overlap the mid-line "top twelve," while daggers mark cases that could only occur line-initially. Meanwhile, at line-end (considering only the last "chunks" in individual words), the top twelve most common "chunks" would be:
[s] 18.10%
[m] 16.06%
[t] 11.90%
[r] 4.16%
[n] 3.94%
[d] 2.74%
[re] 2.45% *
[nt] 1.85%
[c] 1.79%
[ns] 1.38%
[ne] 1.26% *
[st] 1.22%
The two cases marked with asterisks overlap the most common mid-line "chunks," but the others would be exclusive to the end of the line.
The second "chunk" in the line -- analyzed so as to permit crossover to a new word, e.g., the second "chunk" in [ex urbe] would be [xu] -- also seems likely to have distinctive characteristics because it will tend disproportionately to represent the second syllable of a word. And indeed it does. For example, [re] is significantly less common as the second "chunk" in a line (1.03%) than as the first "chunk" in a line (2.51%) or in the mid-line as a whole (2.53%). Meanwhile, [mi] is somewhat more common as the second "chunk" (2.11%) than in the mid-line as a whole (1.63%).
As this illustrates, a syllabic encoding scheme along the lines I've described should predictably generate LAAFU effects considerably stronger than the ones we see in the Voynich Manuscript -- and they would affect not just first and last vords, but second vords as well (compare You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at Agnostic Voynich). I'm less sure about it producing subtler mid-line patterns, but I wouldn't rule out that it might, in practice.
If these effects seem too strong to be comparable to Voynichese, one way to weaken them would be to substitute this for rule #2:
(2) Within lines, the words that make up phrases are run together indiscriminately, but the phrases themselves are not run together.
The beginnings and ends of lines would still have heavily skewed statistical characteristics, but there would be fewer forms that could only be found there -- now limited to "chunks" that occur at beginnings and ends of individual words, but not at beginnings and ends of whole phrases.
Magnesium writes as follows about Voynichese LAAFU patterns:
(12-08-2025, 10:01 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the things I want to explore is the extent to which the structure of the plaintext can create these biases within Naibbe ciphertext. For example, if the Naibbe cipher were used to encrypt a poem such as Dante's Divina Commedia, the poem's line-by-line structure would have rhyming, repeated phrases, etc. that would theoretically impose greater line-by-line positional biases in the frequencies of plaintext unigrams and bigrams relative to prose such as Pliny's Natural History. Is that sufficient to explain the full extent of the VMS's "line as a functional unit" properties? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe it becomes much easier to achieve "line as a functional unit" properties within a Naibbe-like ciphertext if the plaintext is a poem or poem-like in its structure.
There's certainly no harm in exploring that. But since one of his goals is to "(b) consistently replicate these properties [ = 'well-known VMS statistical properties' ] when encrypting a wide range of plaintexts in a well-characterized natural language," I assume he'd prefer to model a system that would reliably produce LAAFU effects when applied to any source text.
Just wondering: how difficult would it be to adapt the Naibbe approach from a unigram/bigram system to a syllabic "chunk" system? Might the frequencies of different "chunk" types result naturally in something like the frequency distributions simulated through playing cards?
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