My Theory: RITE — Ritual Instrument of Textual Esoterica

[GrooveDuke]

"Theorists can be wrong 999,999 times, but the one time they are right, they are a genius! Experts don't have that privilege.".
It's not fighting to be right, but the responsibility of experts. Don't take it personally. (I'm not one).

LOL
I was talking about other forums I used to post on. I don't know this one yet.

Now to your points:
“Sell to the rich folks” doesn’t really capture this. If you look at carnivals and other typical hoaxster operations, they mostly sell to regular folks. The numbers racket was specifically aimed at poor people—same with most psychics today. (Although, yeah, you’d never turn away someone willing to pay more for “exclusive access,” of course.) A friend of mine (now deceased) who was a magician used to say: “An amateur changes his tricks. A professional changes his audience.” Fly-by-night salesmen. Even medieval religious forgeries were aimed at taking alms from anyone willing to donate and moving on. So a believable guess would be a traveling "snake oil" salesman. But I also kind of think this was made by the persons actually using it at first. And that would fit more closely to the relic trade in the middle ages. So I actually think it probably stayed where it was created and use by the group that created it until it was no longer turning a profit then they sold it.

The other main topic of the last Voynich day is what got me thinking enough about this to want to interact with people more in the know and up to date. The other thing that hit me was the attempt to localize the marginalia. Way beyond my level of amateur scholarship. But it does give a place to look for the books to show up again in any context. And trying to localize it by iconography and the significant overlap of territory (if I remember right).

Regarding your three points:

1. Where are the others?
   Do you mean other forgeries in general, or other literary forgeries written for this purpose? A contemporary example is Joseph Smith (with due respect to any LDS members reading this). I believe he actually had plates (witnesses signed affidavits), and I also believe he forged them. When he forged them, he had no way of knowing whether anyone would believe him or join his church—though in the middle of the Second Great Awakening, it was plausible. Does this prove the Voynich did it 400 years earlier? No. But scams have a way of repeating themselves in different places with different social expectations to be fulfilled, the the basic structure is the same.
   
2. Why not alchemy?
   It could be. I’m not claiming it can’t be a coded alchemical book. I can’t prove a negative (that it has no meaning). My theory is disproved if the text is ever deciphered and the text clearly relates to the images.
   
3. Why not just lie?
   Because a great lie needs a believable backstory. The “made to sell once” forgery theories feel weak to me. Yes, there have been big cons (selling the Eiffel Tower, selling the Brooklyn Bridge), and sure, every con man dreams of the big score like Superfly (actually a bad example, I guess. It wasnt a con it was a drug deal) substitute The Sting. But most cons are small-time, repeatable gimmicks built close to accepted truths so they’re believable. Modern equivalents: the Nigerian/419 scam predates the internet; “toll road” text scams are everywhere—you get a message saying you owe a skipped toll, with a real-looking site. If you’re going to pull it off, it has to look real to the rube. A bound, consistent, unreadable “book of secrets” is a durable prop that makes the backstory look real again and again, for years. And it had to be thick because people expected it to be thick. So you have the scribes doing what little kids do when they don’t have enough to write for their essay—you put in filler. In modern times kids use bigger fonts; the Voynich seems to use pictures in a similar way, to my untrained eye anyway. I suppose scholars with more experience with medieval manuscripts would be better suited to say whether the manuscript checks the boxes the average parishioner would be looking for in a fancy book.
   
   Why not just lie?
   The following is Chat’s summation. I like to have Chat make summaries because they’re more eloquent than mine:
   Because props make lies stick. A bound vellum book with consistent glyphs and diagrams is a portable backstory. It lets you do repeat sessions for years, sell “recipes,” read charts, and rotate audiences. The up-front effort pays off as a repeatable business, not a one-shot score.
   Lifecycle I’m proposing
   • Early 1400s build → enters service.
     
   • 15th-century use → heavy handling fits.
     
   • Post-1517 decline → usefulness falls as the climate hardens.
     
   • Later curiosity (Rudolf II era) → practical use gone.
     
   Concrete checks (not vibes)
   • Wear map: uneven grime/handling in specific sections (e.g., baths or zodiac) = real use.
     
   • Rebinding/quires: signs of re-ordering and repair (a working book gets surgery).
     
   • Iconography: baths/herbals with missing furnace/retort gear → looks more like balneology/astrology than lab protocol.
     
   • Materials: inexpensive pigments/inks → “good enough for show,” not a luxury commission.
     
   That’s my lane: prop-book used in practice, not a one-off con.