Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

Morten St George: If you do not like my theory, you should propose an alternative theory, so that we can judge how well each of them fits the available evidence.

I'm not really interested in theories, and even though I've been studying this beast for over 10 years now, I still don't feel I know enough about it to propose theories. I'm still exploring it.

The problem with theorizing too soon is that it tends to channel our perceptions too narrowly.


The only opinions I have that could be considered theories (or hypotheses) so far are:

• that some of the marginalia MIGHT be from someone who lived or grew up in the borderlands of Alsace/Lombardy/Provençal (a very multicultural region)
  
• that whoever drew the zodiac symbols either had traveled in northeast France or had seen some manuscripts from that general area (and probably consulted more than one source) and had probably had access to a library (which may have included books from the previous centuries), and who possibly traveled
  
• that most of the VMS glyphs are based on medieval Latin letters/numbers/abbreviations/ligatures (this is closer to fact than theory)
  
• that the radio-carbon dating is pretty consistent with other aspects of the manuscript
  
• that a few of the plants are naturalistic and do not appear to include mnemonic devices, while others tend to be stylized or fanciful and some do appear to include mnemonic devices
  
• that the illustrator had trouble visualizing in 3d
  
• that there is more than one set of handwriting
  
• that there is more than one person who painted the drawings
  

Other than that, I'm not sure about anything (and even the above is subject to revision if I find evidence to the contrary), so it would be very premature to narrow my searches based on theories.


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As for not liking your theory, it's not the theory I'm concerned about, it's your arguments. As I've already pointed out, they don't specifically support your theory—the same arguments work just as well for other theories.

I tend to agree with you that the VMS is a premeditated fabrication. This implies that the Voynich text is not a language, either natural or unnatural. It's simply code.

I read that the VMS month names, same spellings, have been found on an astrolabe from northern France dating back to the 13th century. This does no harm to my theories as Catharism prospered in that region. 

One of the decoders spent early childhood in Grisons, so you might not be too far off with Lombardy.

Note that I have no rigid theories. They change with the evidence and have changed frequently in the past.

At present, my investigations lead me to believe that

1. The VMS recipes include the sacred text of the Cathari (their "great treasure" that escaped the siege of Montségur on 14 March 1244). Since the VMS shows no signs of having been written in heaven (like emitting light), it is clearly not the original text (which, according to reports, was destroyed) but merely a transcription of its words.

2. The VMS recipes were decoded by the Rosicrucians during the 1580s, then translated into French and published under the name of Nostradamus. The sacred text of 39 quatrains was masked by 902 similar quatrains written by the Rosicrucians themselves.

While encryption could keep the Inquisition from reading the sacred text of the Cathari, it was useless for ensuring the long-term survival of that text. When it came to the Cathars, the Inquisition simply burned everything, whether they could read it or not. But by openly publishing it as the work of a devout Catholic and under a heavy mask (the ingenious idea of the RC for conserving the sacred text), the Inquisition was unable to recognize any of it as Cathari. Not until the discovery of the planet Uranus nearly two centuries later do we find a Papal Bull condemning that publication and promising the galleys to anyone who dared to read it.

By legend, Christian Rosenkreutz was educated by the Cathars and, presumably, had himself become a Cathar at least in spirit.

3. The VMS was brought to London either 1) by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa who acquired it in Mexico or Peru, or 2) by Isaac Luria who acquired it in Egypt, the Holy Land, or Provence.

What surprises me is that this dilemma should be easy to resolve but apparently it's not. There are good arguments for and against both possibilities. Also, I have not ruled out the possibility that the VMS came from the New World whereas Luria had sight of or knowledge of the heavenly original.

4. Regardless of whether the VMS was compiled in the New World or in the Old, it likely employs cabalistic encryption.

The published output arranged the passages of the sacred text into three great spheres (Kether, Hohkmah, Binah) each having a superior and inferior world component.

The first publication (a partial edition of 1588 with "Trente neuf articles" on the title page) deleted 39 quatrains and replaced them with quatrains from elsewhere in the text. Many years ago I noted down the 39 distances (between deletion and replacement source) and placed them around a circle with a rotating pentagon (eight places on each side for a total of 40 to move one spot to the right on each turn) in the middle. By rotating the pentagon, I got consistent up-down movements (lower to higher to lower to higher numbers) but could never figure out the next step.

The concentric circles with glyph sequences on page 57v reminds me of the cabalistic spheres. I plan to try viewing the 161 red-star passages as strings around a circle, and see if a rotating pentagon (with the size of its sides based on string size) can produce a meaningful re-ordering of the glyphs. This means that prefixes like 4o and suffices like 89 might be nothing but fillers playing no role in the decoding. Only the glyphs picked up by running the pentagon in reverse would be relevant.

Well, wishful thinking. What's certain is that we need to decode the VMS to resolve its many mysteries.