| Welcome, Guest |
You have to register before you can post on our site.
|
| Online Users |
There are currently 660 online users.
» 6 Member(s) | 649 Guest(s)
Applebot, Baidu, Bing, Google, Yandex, cowcrap, Gregor, obelus
|
| Latest Threads |
I am not convinced by the...
Forum: Provenance & history
Last Post: JustAnotherTheory
23 minutes ago
» Replies: 20
» Views: 690
|
15thc perception on swall...
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Koen G
2 hours ago
» Replies: 602
» Views: 335,009
|
No text, but a visual cod...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: ololololo
2 hours ago
» Replies: 1,869
» Views: 1,305,680
|
Voynichese is a numeric c...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: ololololo
2 hours ago
» Replies: 196
» Views: 20,663
|
New members: trouble regi...
Forum: News
Last Post: Koen G
2 hours ago
» Replies: 0
» Views: 44
|
[split] Measure uncertain...
Forum: Analysis of the text
Last Post: Grove
4 hours ago
» Replies: 7
» Views: 236
|
Voynich is encrypted ENOC...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: Radim Dobeš
4 hours ago
» Replies: 361
» Views: 52,291
|
The 'Chinese' Theory: Fo...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: Linda
4 hours ago
» Replies: 799
» Views: 212,317
|
A Glyph Is Not a Letter, ...
Forum: News
Last Post: rikforto
11 hours ago
» Replies: 22
» Views: 1,226
|
Voynich Reconsidered
Forum: News
Last Post: dfs346
Yesterday, 08:47 PM
» Replies: 151
» Views: 108,712
|
|
|
| Could Botany and Pharmacy have been one department? |
|
Posted by: ololololo - 13-07-2026, 07:10 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (5)
|
 |
I read an article by Layfield and Davis about how the creators of the manuscript did not intend for the folios to be bound. As I understand it, the binding is a major mistake by one of the owners (and we can see this, for example, in the confusion of the beginning of the sections). The manuscript was supposed to be read as a set of four folios (so are these the Voynich folios or the Voynich scrolls?)
It is possible that this was done by someoneYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
This led me to believe that the manuscript was originally more cohesive in terms of its sections.
Couldn't the pharmaceuticals be located near the Botany? This could explain the "Small Herbal" (images of herbs f90r1-f96v), which is located "inside" the pharmaceutical section. It also makes sense - there's no need to separate these two essentially identical topics...
|
|
|
| Voynich Manuscript and Milan Connection? |
|
Posted by: GracefulShinjo - 12-07-2026, 09:41 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (7)
|
 |
So I have mentioned this a few times on Voynich Talk in the comments section but I have speculated a connection between the Voynich Manuscript and the Duchy of Milan.
One of the pieces of evidence I have hinged this theory on is the presence of dovetail walls on the structure in the Voynich Manuscript. Now as Voynich Talk has pointed out that doesn’t exactly narrow down the zone where the manuscript was crafted as it was a common architectural motif in parts of Europe at the time but then there is the presence of German words in the margins. For those unfamiliar with the House of Visconti they arranged many marriages between daughters of their house with the male members of German ruling houses including the House of Wittelsbach, House of Württemberg and the House of Habsburg. Not only that but at one point in time the Duchy of Milan did control the Canton of Ticino which is the only Italian-speaking Canton in Switzerland. Meanwhile for the French connection there was a marriage between a scion of the House of Visconti, a daughter of the House of Wittelsbach but also a marriage between a member of the House of Valois-Órleans and a daughter of the House of Visconti as well as a marriage between a Princess of the House of Valois and a Lord of the House of Visconti hence why the art used in the manuscript is reminiscent of the International Gothic movement. For those bringing up a connection to the Most Serene Republic of Venice parts of what now forms the Veneto were controlled by the Duchy of Milan before coming under the control of the Most Serene Republic of Venice including Vicenza and Verona.
Now that it has been determined that at least one writer was likely of German descent this would strengthen the potential connection for the Voynich Manuscript with the Duchy of Milan. The creator could have been one of the citizens of the Duchy of Milan that had Germanic roots, possibly between Württemberg or Bavaria or else the Canton of Ticino, who trained in one of the Central German/Southern German-based states that had a long-standing relationship with the Duchy of Milan before, perhaps, receiving appointment for a position in the Ducal Court itself.
Sources used for support
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
|
|
|
|
| f68r: eclipse from 1419? |
|
Posted by: mgvtheus - 12-07-2026, 05:34 PM - Forum: Astrology & Astronomy
- Replies (39)
|
 |
Hello everyone,
I'm Matheus, a Voynich enthusiast. I am not an expert nor a researcher. Therefore, I don't know if this is a well-known fact, if someone has already made this hipothesis, or if I'm the first. I didn't find anyone talking about the same thing, so I decided to post it here for more experienced people to analyse.
I was looking at some old posts in Stephen Bax's blog and found one that really caught my attention, about the eclipse in folio 68r. Andrés Eloy Martínez Rojas argued at that time that it might relate to an eclipse in april 15, 1409.
While looking at the folio, it's pretty noticeable that there's a line drawn from the sun to a group of seven stars. Andrés argues that it's the Pleiades, but this just didn't make sense to me: why would the Pleiades have a line like this?
This made me start a search for more reasonable guesses. After some days, I was able to identify something that caught my eye:
This is a possible view of an eclipse that happened on march 26, 1419. Notice that the Pisces constellation is oriented in a way that (in my view) matches exactly the drawing, even the curve drawn in the manuscript is extremely similar to the "tail" of the Pisces. Also notice that the manuscript has seven stars drawn, and that the Pisces "head" also has seven stars.
"But Matheus, where was the eclipse visible from? If it were only from the Americas, for example, this is useless!"
Yes, and that's the most interesting part (in my opinion): the eclipse could be seen from pretty much anywhere in not only Europe, but many parts of Africa and Asia too at that time:
If we were to get a glimpse of what the sky looked like specifically on northern Italy (given the handwriting, castle, etc.), it would be something like this:
If we disable the atmosphere features:
And if the orient the Pisces constellation to the manuscript's orientation (almost a 180º turn):
From this, we could draw some questions and hypothesis:
1. Which star is the one next to the (suposedly) Pisces constellation in the manuscript? My guess: it could be Uranus, Diphda or Fomalhaut. It matches the orientation.
2. Which stars are the two at the top right? My guess: Venus and Jupiter OR Mars and Aldebaran. They also match the orientation.
3. Which stars are the three at the bottom right? My guess: Schedar, Caph and Navi OR the three from the Camelopardalis constellation. Best fitting, the orientation is a bit messed up.
4. Which stars are the four at the bottom left? My guess: Algenib, Alpheratz, Markab and Scheat? These were the most fitting ones I was able to find.
5. Why would someone be drawing the eclipse? My guess: some kind of divination or mere description of the occured. If we take a look at the other parts of the folio:
It looks like (at least to me) that there's a pretty solid order: we see the sun and the moon (is it the sun and the moon?) approaching and kinda switching phases, and this could be the author(s) saying something like "This happened, and right after we got an eclipse!" or something similar.
Something though caught my eye: there's a star that almost repeats it's name in the full folio:
f68r3: "dcholday"
f68r2: "dcheoldy"
Could they be the same star in different "states"? I don't know, but the word is almost the same. One could argue that the (possible) "root" is different (ol for one, eol for the other) but I don't know, maybe the root is just "old" or "ol" and "dch" and "dche" mean some kind of "state" of the star? Just speculation. If we get the sky everyday before the eclipse:
(My Stellarium is in Portuguese, so be aware that "sol" = sun and "lua" = moon)
March 25
March 24
March 23
March 22
March 21
March 20
March 19
Considering the position, the similarity of the words and my hypothesis on which "star" that one next to the (alleged) Pisces represents, I think that dcholday/dcheoldy is in some form a label for "Uranus" or different states of the planet.
Another thing I wanted to point out is the progression in the manuscript moon phases:
One thing I noticed is that the moon goes new (at least it's what it appears to me). Indeed, in march 26 1419, the moon went new:
According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
So maybe what's written around the moon is something talking about this? Like "last quarter" and "new" for each one? I don't know, it's an hypothesis.
This is all, let me know what you think! I'm 100% NOT professional in this field, so I don't know if there are serious flaws here. Thank you!! 
|
|
|
|
| A turtle-shelled dragon |
|
Posted by: Dracaena - 12-07-2026, 05:18 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (6)
|
|
The small "dragon" at the root of the plant on folio 25v is often dismissed as a doodle. Other investigators have noticed the shell of the the animal on f25v, which lead to speculations of it being an armadillo or a pangolin. However, is there an actual turtle-shelled dragon in european medieval tradition? Indeed, there is. This could be a depiction of the Tarasque, the famous (female) monster of Saint Martha associated with Tarascon in Provence.
I am are not claiming this proves a Provençal origin for the Voynich, but it may be one more small piece of evidence worth considering. Depictions of Tarasque with turtle shell span along the Rhône and into the western Alps.
A more detailed writeup here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. |
|
|
|
| The Singulion and the Sequence: A Methodological Review of Layfield and Davis 2026 |
|
Posted by: Torsten - 12-07-2026, 09:34 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (12)
|
 |
The Singulion and the Sequence: A Methodological Review of Layfield and Davis 2026
by Torsten Timm
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:In two recent companion papers, Layfield and Davis apply latent semantic analysis (LSA) to the Voynich Manuscript and derive two hypotheses: that the manuscript was conceived as a sequence of single-bifolium quires (“singulions”) later bound out of order, and that the intended sequence of bifolia can be recovered by maximizing textual similarity across page transitions. This review examines both hypotheses against the papers’ own published data. The empirical core of the first hypothesis, an elevated textual similarity within physical bifolia, is real and independently confirmed. The reading-order interpretation built upon it, however, is underdetermined by the data and contradicted by the authors’ own explanation of the herbal section. The second hypothesis rests on the premise that the intended order of a meaningful text maximizes lexical similarity between adjacent pages. This premise is refuted by the authors’ own calibration manuscripts, and the resequencing experiment lacks two controls that would make its reported improvements interpretable: a permutation null distribution and a calibration on deliberately shuffled known text. A similarity-based resequencing of the manuscript is nevertheless methodologically sound under one specific model of the text, namely that page-to-page similarity reflects proximity of production rather than continuity of meaning. Three concrete experiments, each executable with the authors’ existing pipeline, would discriminate between the competing interpretations.
|
|
|
|
| f116v is a decryption attempt? |
|
Posted by: ololololo - 12-07-2026, 08:38 AM - Forum: Marginalia
- Replies (67)
|
|
I have long suspected that the marginalia may be an attempt at translation or a translation of a manuscript. There is no way to prove this at the moment, but it is possible to speculate...
What if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an attempt to translate a recipe? It's possible that the person thought they could translate the manuscript (or they could, but they weren't very good at it), so they decided to take a random recipe and translate it on the last page. He may not have been able to translate the letter d, as it appears in the words, and he may not have been able to translate aror (oror) sheey, and the only thing that made sense in his "translation" was "so nim gas mich". "marix morix vix" may be a repetition as "qokedy qokedy qokeedy"
I could not find the combination aror sheey or oror sheey in the manuscript. There are recipes where the word before sheey is similar to oror: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (...ol rar sheey ylar...); You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (...airal sheey...); You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (...ar sheey...).
What do you think?
|
|
|
|
| Did Voynich manuscript illustrator never see women breasts? |
|
Posted by: Jimmy123 - 12-07-2026, 07:55 AM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (38)
|
|
If we look at the women illustrations in Voynich, we can see that breasts are incorrect. They are not like real brests. So is it possible that the illustrator, actually never saw breasts in real life?
Can we conclude from this something about that person?
- The person was a child artist,
- The person was intentional celibate, like hermit,
- The person was young apprentice.
It is not possible that someone who has seen naked women will draw something so badly.
|
|
|
|
| A Possible Use for Generative AI |
|
Posted by: ThomasHairBrain - 11-07-2026, 01:59 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (2)
|
|
Hello,
This is my first post here and it is quite likely that this is either quite a bad idea or one that has already been tried (although I couldn't find it).
It also might be a bad idea as this thought was spurred by watching the most recent Voynich Talk video which calls out the use of AI here. I think this method may be distinct from those but if I get banned and the thread gets put in the slop drawer then I probably only have myself to blame.
The basic idea I have is what if someone trained a local AI model from scratch on the VM? A transcription of the manuscript could be fed into it for training and then see what new VM style text it can spit out. Of course we couldn't read this text any more than we could the VM but it might help to understand the characteristics of the text more, see what strings of Voynich script fed to it produce an output with a similar structure to the VM itself and what produce unstructured garbage. See if any sort of prompting can cause the script to break and see if it breaks in interesting and repeatable ways possibly across multiple models.
From what reading I've done it looks like the best approach would be using an LSTM model although even with that we have some possible issues of having material for the AI to work with.
Some possible concerns:
1. This might be a lot of time and effort chasing basically nothing and there might be little chance of this approach producing anything useful.
2. There is no universally agreed upon character inventory, there appears to be quite a high likelihood of positional variation playing a significant role in the Voynich script and an AI model could simply fail to take this into account. Alternatively variation in style could result in characters that are actually distinct being classified separately. Either one of these problems could result in gibberish or worse - real looking data that is misleading.
3. In order to make it work Latin characters (or other characters a computer can work with without a lot of adaption) would probably have to be used in substitution of Voynich characters, possibly causing issues as some human subjective thinking may be needed here. One approach would be to give every possible variant of a Voynich character a separate character but that could a) reduce the functional training data or b) produce more gibberish. Possibly could be mitigated with using several different competing models.
4. There might be insufficient data to produce anything meaningful even with a workable model.
So what do you lot think, worth pursuing and seeing if any interesting things can be discovered about the Voynich script this way or waste of time?
|
|
|
|
| Inspiration for Philosophers like Marsilio Ficino? |
|
Posted by: GracefulShinjo - 10-07-2026, 11:53 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (5)
|
|
So I was recently (I mean that literally as it was only a few minutes ago as I write this) struck with an idea: could the Voynich Manuscript have in part influenced the Renaissance philosophers who were interested in reviving paganism/seeking hidden truths in paganism such as Marsilio Ficino. We know that in the time leading up to the start of the Renaissance in Florence there were rediscoveries of formerly lost manuscripts and a revival in interest in other pagan philosophers other than Aristotle such as Plato and even new looks into Aristotle’s work. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy the University of Padua was a center of interest in the works of the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd whose translations of Aristotle’s work was influential in the medieval world, especially in the Italian states. Meanwhile the rise of humanism focused on understanding the human condition and how to harmonize with the world (as I understand it) and with that came the revival of Neoplatonism.
Among the figures who used Neoplatonism for finding hidden truths/reviving paganism in search of finding the veiled secrets of the world was Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola whose works fused Kabbalah, humanism, Christianity and ancient religious practices to uncover the secrets of existence.
So where does this lead the Voynich Manuscript? Well I want to propose that the manuscript was created by an alumni of Padua, a German scholar who studied in the University of Padua and later worked in the Visconti court as an alchemist/philosopher, writing a book that fused alchemy with philosophy via Aristotle’s interpretation and herbalism, perhaps incorporating hidden interest in ancient paganism. Perhaps this writer was the precursor to those like Mirandola and Pletho who sought insight into the universe via studying the religious practices of ancient civilizations. I know this does have holes but theoretically this would mean the Voynich manuscript was part of a greater path of philosophical texts written as a result of rediscovery of texts thought lost, being perhaps one of a few early works that survived.
|
|
|
|
|