(29-09-2025, 10:49 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, I find it disconcerting that people dismiss the Chinese Theory or the Retracing Hypothesis as "hallucinations", but accept pacifically the idea that there was some Medieval society or cult that devised the Voynichese "code", created a totally original cosmology and medicine, and set out to write down that esoteric knowledge in an encrypted encyclopedia...
Assuming this is a cipher and there is a meaningful plaintext, I won't be surprised if the topic of the manuscript has nothing to do with cosmology, medicine or plants. If the text for some reason demanded complete enciphering not leaving a single word in plain view, I think it's likely that the images should have the same level of obfuscation one way or the other. So, maybe we can't really use the images to identify the topics.
Then this could be a society or a cult, yes, but the document they chose to encipher would more likely be of political, iconoclastic or otherwise taboo nature, I think.
On the other hand, there has been a recent discussion here about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. So, who knows, I guess it's fairly hard to estimate what was possible and what wasn't.