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.

This was the third time you challenged the count of red stars so I think it time we sort it out.

It looks like the original authors of the manuscript (circa 1420) put a small black dot into the middle of most of the stars. In order to avoid confusion with the newly-added red stars (which mark the published paragraphs), the author of the marginalia (circa 1590) applied white-out to the small black dots of the original authors but a few of them can still be seen.

Some of the red ink is so dark that it can also look black. The only way to safely distinguish the dark red ink and the original black ink is to enlarge the dots enough to see whether or not it has pixels with a tinge of red ink.

As I have stated previously, I am not counting the red-dot star on the top of page 105r because, unlike all the other stars, it has no text to the right of it. This is not to say that this red dot is not important. It lies above a rare glyph seen nowhere else in the recipes. In fact elsewhere we only find this glyph on one of the concentric circles on page 57v, where it is the 14th of a series of 17 letters repeated four times around a circle, so I take this as possible indication to use that particular circle in the decoding process. As previously stated, the circles oscillate back and forth, presumably to rearrange the order of the gates. I do not yet know the precise mechanism but I am working on it.

I am also not counting a miniature star (which appears to have a slight tinge of red ink in it) attached to the second red star on page 106r. This mini star does not independently mark any text.

Since all the red ink in the recipes section is marginalia, it is wholly irrelevant whether or not any pages are missing from that section.

I count red-tinge stars (excluding the two mentioned above) as follows:

page 103r = 7 red stars; page 103v = 7 red stars; page 104r = 7 red stars; page 104v = 7 red stars; page 105r = 5 red stars; page 105v = 5 red stars; page 106r = 8 red stars; page 106v = 7 red stars; 107r = 8 red stars; page 107v = 8 red stars; page 108r = 5 red stars; page 108v = 8 red stars; page 111r = 8 red stars; page 111v = 10 red stars; page 112r = 6 red stars; page 112v = 7 red stars; page 113r = 8 red stars; page 113v = 8 red stars; page 114r = 7 red stars; page 114v = 6 red stars; page 115r = 7 red stars; page 115v = 7 red stars; page 116r = 5 red stars

By my count, this adds up to 161 stars (paragraphs) marked with red ink. If you wish to dispute the count for any particular page or pages, please let me know which page or pages so that I can have another look at it and we can then discuss the issue.

I started looking for the original source of 161 prophetic verses around 35 years ago but encountered the VMS only around five or six years ago. At the time I was investigating John Dee as a potential consultant for certain astrological almanacs when I saw an article connecting him with the VMS, so I decided to check it out. Today, evidence that the VMS could be the source I was looking for goes far beyond a count of red stars.