12-09-2025, 12:01 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-09-2025, 12:04 AM by robappleton.
Edit Reason: my bad spelling
)
Howdy there. I have been doing a little research and I wholeheartedly agree with you.
The Voynich Manuscript doesn’t really act like a normal alphabet or code. If it was just letters hiding real words, we’d expect the usual patterns you see in language—like how often certain letters show up, or how words repeat in predictable ways. AND, it would probably have been solved by some of the great cryptologists.
But instead, the symbols behave more like shifting rules: they change depending on the page, the layout, even what’s around them. That’s not how alphabets work, but it is how you’d design a system of steps or actions. It feels less like writing something to be read out loud, and more like writing instructions for doing something. You actually see similar approaches in things like Ramon Llull’s combinatorial wheels or George Ripley’s alchemical scrolls—texts that weren’t about reading words but about moving through processes.
Seen that way, and as others here have argued, it’s basically a set of operators—symbols standing for transformations or phases—kind of like math signs or computer commands, just older and wrapped in alchemical art. The drawings back this up: plants don’t look like real species so much as variations, the naked figures are showing cycles of water or energy, and the circles look like flowcharts of operations. Other manuscripts from the 15th century did the same thing, like the Rosarium Philosophorum with its symbolic stages or the Ripley Scrolls with dragons and kings showing chemical changes. So instead of being an encrypted diary or secret herbal, the Voynich is more like a symbolic toolkit—meant for insiders who knew the system, not casual readers.
What if the Rosarium Philosophorum was a copy, made to be readable, by one of the holders / keepers of the Voynich through its journey to today?
The Voynich Manuscript doesn’t really act like a normal alphabet or code. If it was just letters hiding real words, we’d expect the usual patterns you see in language—like how often certain letters show up, or how words repeat in predictable ways. AND, it would probably have been solved by some of the great cryptologists.
But instead, the symbols behave more like shifting rules: they change depending on the page, the layout, even what’s around them. That’s not how alphabets work, but it is how you’d design a system of steps or actions. It feels less like writing something to be read out loud, and more like writing instructions for doing something. You actually see similar approaches in things like Ramon Llull’s combinatorial wheels or George Ripley’s alchemical scrolls—texts that weren’t about reading words but about moving through processes.
Seen that way, and as others here have argued, it’s basically a set of operators—symbols standing for transformations or phases—kind of like math signs or computer commands, just older and wrapped in alchemical art. The drawings back this up: plants don’t look like real species so much as variations, the naked figures are showing cycles of water or energy, and the circles look like flowcharts of operations. Other manuscripts from the 15th century did the same thing, like the Rosarium Philosophorum with its symbolic stages or the Ripley Scrolls with dragons and kings showing chemical changes. So instead of being an encrypted diary or secret herbal, the Voynich is more like a symbolic toolkit—meant for insiders who knew the system, not casual readers.
What if the Rosarium Philosophorum was a copy, made to be readable, by one of the holders / keepers of the Voynich through its journey to today?