10-11-2025, 12:11 AM
(09-11-2025, 05:04 PM)JoJo_Jost wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Voynich manuscript looks a little as if it had been poorly or very inaccurately copied from various books/texts... I have already noticed three similarities to other books – this may be a coincidence, or simply typical of the writing style of that time, and of course the writer must have obtained his information from somewhere, mostly from other books – but then why did he encrypt it? Something seems extremely illogical to me right now...
My theory (quite "non-consensus", be warned) is that the text is not encrypted at all. It just some East Asian language in an ad-hoc phonetic script devised by the Author. The contents would be transcriptions of the most important (according to the locals) medical and astrological books from that place; if not Chinese, apparently reflecting Chinese influence.
BUT that is only about the textual contents. The illustrations must have taken the essential details from those books (like "a diagram divided into 12 sectors, with these star names in each sector"), but most of the other details would have been provided by an European Scribe who was recruited by the Author to put his notes to vellum. In particular, I believe that all the nymphs, dresses, castles, animals, and most details of the plants in the Herbal section were invented by the Scribe, with at most some crude sketches or verbal instructions by the Author ("okay, you can put one of those "nymphs" of yours in each sector, if you want. And draw a star too. Just make sure that each sector has the right name.")
And the Scribe of course followed European scribal customs, such as the shape of paragraphs, and drew his inspiration for the drawings on European books of the times. In particular, he must have looked at European herbals, possibly the so-called "alchemical herbals", for inspiration when inventing the plants of the Herbal section.
All the best, --stolfi
