Speculative fraud hypothesis

[RenegadeHealer]

Someone well educated, potentially well-traveled, and not artistically gifted. What does the VMs artist know? All the things from swallowtail merlons to nebuly lines to mythical Melusine and the Agnus Dei.

It's not a hoax. It is a trick. In particular examples, the VMs cosmos and White Aries, trickery is an intentional part of the illustration. The papelonny patterns are in place, but the trick fails if the reader can't do the canting.

The VMs was constructed as a puzzle, a hiding place for something, but it is unclear if the remaining parts are sufficient to recover that information.

R. Sale, I hope you’re right, because (like a lot of us here, I ween) I love a good mystery, with many trails of tasty breadcrumbs. Just for the sake of playing devil’s advocate though, have you ever seen the film You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.? Spoiler alert: the story-within-a-story that makes up most of the film’s plot is full of strange, highly specific, sometimes credibility-stretching details and references to other things, such that it creates an intriguing rabbit hole, that makes you want to know more and why and how those specific details fit together. The twist ending is both mind-blowing and paradoxically, at the same time, incredibly anticlimactic: The story-within-a-story was made up on the spot by the practiced liar / con artist played by Kevin Spacey, using nothing but the random assortment of words and names around the room where the police are interrogating him.[url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114814/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_6_nm_2_in_0_q_usual%2520s][/url]

What if our VMs creators were charlatans who somehow had access to some rich book collector or monastery's collection, and assembled their highly specific iconographic references and memetic trails that lead nowhere, from nothing more than what happened to be in the books they had access to, when they could do their work?