Speculative fraud hypothesis

[dexdex]

Also: Wilfrid tried to sell this for a long time, and failed. If he was the perpetrator of the scam, one would expect that having failed to find a proper mark to sell the book he would not hesitate to start 'adding' things to it in an effort to increase its value. Easy additions such as this would be adding occult imagery, improving the detail on the illustrations, or adding more tractable 'cribtext' that would give some hope of decryption. There are, to my knowledge, no indications of this; in fact, many of the chronologically late additions make the manuscript worse. The only exception might be the de Tepenes signature - which is entirely in keeping with someone adding some extra provenance to an already authentic product. This was generally the modus operandi of the Spanish Forger. And, of course, the signature might also be genuine.