Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

Sadly, my most important theories never came up for discussion. These concern the VMS encryption. I theorize that

1. the red-star passages of the recipes section encrypt 161 verses of prophetic text. The underlying language is sixth-century Latin. One distinction with classical Latin would be an expanded vocabulary with more words borrowed from Greek.

Morten St George,
I have already shown to you that your count is incorrect.
There are 163 red stars, not 161, AND keep in mind that we are missing four pages (f109r&v, 110r&v) which puts the original total even higher, probably around 210 based on the average 7 per page.

I am not counting the miniature star attached to larger star on page 106r as it does not denote a new text passage. And I am not counting the dotted star on the top of page 105r for the following reasons:

1. Unlike the other 161 dotted or solid red stars, it has no text to the right of it.

2. The text below this star begins with a rare glyph with which none of the other 161 dotted/red star passages begin. I am looking at it as a possible signal to turn to page 57v for decoding clues.

3. The rare glyph was overwritten by the decoders with a series of 7 or 8 question marks (?) and I take this as another sign that the respective passage was not published.

I have a question to ask: Are you able to determine if the red dots are the exact same shade of red found elsewhere in the VMS? In other words, is there any chance those red dots could be marginalia?

On missing pages, I also have a few comments to make:

1. It seems to me unlikely that the pages were numbered by the original authors of the VMS. Thus, if the numbers are marginalia, we can hardly confide in them as there may have been sinister motives at play.

2. Even if four pages are truly missing from the text section, you cannot possibly claim that those pages contained text and not something else. For example, the reason those pages are missing could be because they did not belong there.

3. Like other sections of the VMS, the text section appears to be hopelessly out of order:

a) the bunched up writing (a sign that they might be running low of parchment) like what we find on page 111r should be expected closer to the end.

b) assuming that each red star should be followed by a white star or stars from page to page (like what we see down each page), then the 16 pages that end in a red star (for which only 5 begin with a white star on the next page) would suggest that 11 pages (not 4 as you claim) are missing.

4. Even if 11 pages are missing, it does not necessarily mean that we do not have all the published passages. The decoders in their prose writings inform us that they did not publish all of them but only the ones that they considered to be "the most urgent." Thus, it is possible that they retained for the VMS only the published passages and tossed out the remainder.

Note that, beyond correlation on number count, there are other pointers (to which I alluded in prior posts) to the VMS as the source of some of the passages found in that 16th-century publication.