I found this wheel in Raymundi Lulli's book ‘Testamentum duobus libris vniuersam artem chymicam complectens’, published in 1566, and it reminded me of 67v of the Voynich Manuscript, only in a version that was 100 years younger and therefore more modern. But Raymundi Lulli lives 1232 / 1316.
To recognise the similarity, one simply has to imagine placing the two Voynich pages on top of each other, so the idea goes. Here we have the four elements: air, water, fire, earth, and the terms in the Voynich Manuscript in the four corners of the page could be the same words.
Chemical processes are described, for example: washing the black into the white (air), and then the various possibilities are described in the circle, for example through distillation, extraction, etc.
I then translated the page in its entirety and compared it with the texts in the rays on the second page – in the somewhat desperate hope of finding a key, but unfortunately I found nothing. Nor did I find anything in the other inscriptions, but perhaps someone else here will discover something I overlooked (which is certainly not unlikely)... But it could just as well be something completely different...
Just sharing a possible way to reframe the VM - what if it's not a 'text' but an espionage tool?
There's a reason it defies linguistic analysis - like a Soviet numbers station, it relies on temporary keys for externally imposed meaning.
Think about it. The Holy Roman Empire or one of its constituent states needed spies, and few people could read or write. Memory was far more critical then as it is today - so the system it represents was ingeniously designed to enable even illiterate people to memorise, encode and transmit vast amounts of intelligence securely.
This would have allowed for widespread espionage in an age of low literacy, so anyone regardless of education level could reliably spy for the state.
I posit a three-part system:
(1)
Illustrations: Functioning as topical reference guides, forming mind maps and vivid memory aids to organise information visually and unambiguously.
Observe the resemblance of the plants to the modern pedagogical tool:
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The plumbing and human figures could well be organisational charts for mapping out the structure and management system of say, a church, a city or a village. Think Renaissance LinkedIn.
Astrological charts may have been used to denote periodic patterns or strategic timing. This explains why they don't map to reality; they're meant to be memorable and 'sticky' to viewers, yet encode information in specific ways.
(2)
Text: A set of code words with familiar linguistic properties that make them easy to recall under pressure, yet meaningless without external keys.
Consider the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" (1972), which is gibberish yet follows English cues and so is easy to memorise. This explains its resemblance to natural language and following of Zipf's Law.
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(3)
Keys: The temporary and disposable assignment of meanings to the code words, ensuring operational security. There is therefore no 'sense' to be found in the text itself, and this explains the lack of punctuation and failure to 'decode' it.
Any written keys would have been memorised and destroyed, and any written references using a codename — thus explaining the Manuscript's uniqueness and lack of attestation.
Excerpts would have been copied for field use from this master volume, then used and destroyed on mission completion or periodically.
Crucially, this framework appears to satisfy all five of Lisa Fagin Davis' criteria (first principles, reprodicibility, accounting for linguistics and codicology,text that makes sense and integration with the illustrations).
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You may know I’ve been working on the Voynich Manuscript using machine learning and data science. Lately I’ve started a new line of research: the study of the Voynich through graphs.
Graph analysis is still quite new in languages studies, but it’s becoming a powerful tool in machine learning. It lets us see how words connect and interact. The idea is simple: each word (token) becomes a node, and we draw edges between them whenever they occur near each other in the text. Those edges can have weights (how often the pair appears), directions (which one comes first), and other information. When you do this, the text becomes a network, and that network has a structure we can measure.
In my case, I built co-occurrence graphs using a sliding window of 5 tokens. Two words are connected if they appear close to each other. I also repeated the same process for several other texts:
- Latin (De Docta Ignorantia, Platonis Apologia, Alchemical Herbal),
- La Reine Margot and Old Medicine French texts,
- Catalan (Tirant lo Blanch),
- Spanish (Lazarillo de Tormes),
- English (Culpepper),
- and a sample of the synthetic text generated by Torsten Timm.
Once you have the graph, you can study things like community structure, modularity, and assortativity: basically, how tightly the vocabulary groups together and how predictable those connections are. Well, yes, it looks this crazy...
The Voynich graph has thousands of nodes and over a hundred thousand weighted connections. It’s not random: it shows clear clusters of related tokens, similar to topic domains in real languages.
When comparing modularity (how strongly the graph is divided into communities) the Voynich ranks around 0.25. For context:
- Scholastic and alchemical Latin texts are around 0.28–0.33.
- Narrative texts like Tirant lo Blanch or La Reine Margot are only 0.14–0.19.
So the Voynich has a structured, technical-style network, closer to medieval treatises than to prose literature.
Nothing new here: I looked at entropy, which measures how predictable the next word is from the previous ones. Lower entropy means the text is more repetitive or rule-bound.
In this comparison, the Voynich again behaves more like Latin scholastic or medical texts, highly structured and formulaic, than like natural flowing prose.
To visualize everything together, I used a radar plot combining graph properties (modularity, assortativity) with token and character-level entropies. Each text forms its own fingerprint.
When we plot entropy (what should be the syntactic freedom) against modularity (what should be the lexical structure), each text takes its own position in what you could call a complexity space_
The Voynich lands right in the middle, between the tightly structured Latin technical and medical compilations, and the more free-flowing narrative works like Tirant lo Blanch or La Reine Margot. It’s not as rigid as scholastic Latin, but not as loose as prose either.
The same pattern appears when comparing character entropy (morphological freedom) to modularity: again, the Voynich sits halfway between those two worlds. This suggests the manuscript has an intermediate level of organization: structured enough to follow internal rules, but not fully regular like formal Latin treatises.
It might reflect a controlled or encoded version of natural language, or simply a writing system with its own conventions. It’s also interesting that the same language can produce very different results depending on the type of text: a Latin medical recipe and a Latin philosophical dialogue, for example, can have completely distinct structural profiles. That gives a sense of how much “style” and “purpose” shape the internal geometry of a text.
It’s also worth noting that the Torsten Timm generated text, which is algorithmic, shows a very similar position in this “complexity space.” That means internal consistency and structured co-occurrence can emerge from both linguistic and mechanical systems. So, these results don’t demonstrate that the Voynich encodes a real language, only that it behaves like a text with rules, not pure randomness.
Regarding faded ink and various retouchings: Here is a page of fairly pale text, but it does have scattered darker portions and does not appear to be reworked.
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I'm working on a translation – yes, yes, big laugh – I know, but it's already working reasonably well. I still have various doubts myself (nothing to do with AI), but I already have several small paragraphs that are even starting to make sense. I know that's what they all say (I've been reading here for some time now) and then the system breaks down in the face of the harsh Voynich reality. It wouldn't be the first time for me either – so it's all good – I'm calm.
On the subject
Now I come across these wretched duplications in the lines, which cause me massive headaches because my decoding breaks down like knocked-over porcelain. Lines without these duplications work, with them – they don't.
Then I noticed something very interesting, which leads me to a theory that I want to question here – in my translation attempts, it seems as if there are often several different versions of a small but very similar section of text, and these variations only concern conjunctions and declensions, which are also similar in the variations.
Thesis: It seems as if the writer himself tried to decode something, or more likely to decipher it, and since he was unsure, he simply wrote the two versions one after the other. Version a / Version b.
Of course, I did some research, and found that this was common practice, especially when copying texts – but only a few times and not as consistently as in the Voynich Manuscript.
So at the moment, I have this idea:
The manuscript is a transcription of a possibly older manuscript that was written in shorthand and was therefore very difficult to read and possibly also smudged or in poor condition, and the writers - who transcribed it - tried different variations that they could recognise in it and wrote them one after the other.
This would also explain the theory that several different scribes tried to decipher this text. It was probably also translated into the language commonly used at the time. That could - by the way - also be the reason why the plants are so difficult to recognise; they are also plants copied from a ‘notebook’.
What do you think, could it be that these are all different variants of a decryption, or is that too far-fetched and I'm just telling myself that to save my translation code? I'm not sure myself right now ?
While searching for older templates for the VMS, I came across Ms. Plut. 73.16. What was striking was the rough structure in the depictions of plants (which can also be found in older illustrations by Dioscorides, for example). In addition, however, there are multiple depictions of patients lying down during treatment. This would be a new interpretation of the illustration on folio f82r. Furthermore, there is a strange pipeline that allows water (?) to run over a plant.
Ms. Plut. 73.16 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Die Medikamenten-Lehre Friedrichs II, 13th century
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edit - Machine translation of the text (to be treated with caution):
“And with the same water, he shall sprinkle himself with a branch of the purified oak tree as the sun sets, with his right hand, and pray thus: Holy Goddess Earth and the rest who are written at the beginning.”
On the pages with the small plant drawings(roots and leaves) there are tall containers on the far left side of the pages. These containers often have text written in the middle of them, however the text is often hard to read as the containers are painted over with colours such as red. Has anyone worked out how to make this text stand out more, so that it can more easily be transcribed? (There are also other labels on these botany pages which are faint and hard to read, particularly on the far right hand margin.) It would be nice if all the text is as readable as possible.
We all have seen it - strange pipes and women bathing in green water in weird pools:
I don't know if it was already discussed but I haven't seen such a discussion.
So would would you say about a theory that it's not about bathing at all but about eating and digestion?
The pipes and pools would be stomach, intestines, spleen etc.
The green colour makes also sense then. If you vomit, then it's often kind of green so the artist could imagine the stomach as full of green liquid.
And women? Well, that's the hardest part to explain. I think we can exclude that the author was a cannibal So maybe they symbolically represent "components" of the food we eat? Of course the author didn't know about proteins, sugars or carbohydrates so he could think of four elements (earth, air, fire, water) or somthing similar. Or maybe some cosmic forces ruling your digestion?
By the way, if you were a kid in the 80s you may recall this series where everything inside a human body was represented as busy little men. Could VM author do something similar?
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For more than a century, the Voynich Manuscript (VM) has resisted every tool of human ingenuity. Traditional cryptanalysis, linguistic analysis, and computational modeling have failed to yield a definitive solution. Some claim the VM is a hoax; others believe it conceals an unknown language.
This thesis advances the DAI Anchor Method, a cryptographic-linguistic framework I developed through years of independent research. Unlike earlier attempts, the DAI method identifies recurring triadic anchors --- structural keystones within the script --- and builds meaning outward from their patterned invariance. By combining cryptographic rigor, statistical testing, and morphological mapping, I argue that the VM represents a structured, meaningful language system, not random gibberish.
I dismantle competing arguments, including Timm and Schinner's "self-citation" model, Rugg's hoax hypothesis, and Crowe's statistical skepticism. While acknowledging the manuscript's unresolved nature, I show that morphological regularity emerges far beyond baseline distributions like Zipf's Law.
This work is not the final decipherment but a foundational challenge. My methods demand review, critique, and rebuttal. I invite other researchers to test the DAI Anchor Method --- to refine it, or disprove it. Either way, the era of treating the Voynich Manuscript as statistical noise must end.
![[Image: Cascade.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Cascade.png)
so the artist could imagine the stomach as full of green liquid.![[Image: 250px-Once_Upon_a_Time_Life.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/71/Once_Upon_a_Time_Life.jpg/250px-Once_Upon_a_Time_Life.jpg)
