Could incantations explain some of the problems of the Voynich Manuscript

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The attempt to create a personality profile of the author.

That is indeed an important goal!

But what strikes me more and more is that the less the text is understood despite all the research, the more the discussion slips in the direction of ‘it must be something complex’. And that is precisely what I consider to be a fallacy. ‘Not random’ does not automatically imply ‘highly complex’ – we should be aware of that.

I would say that it is the assumption that the language must be "European" that necessarily leads to that conclusion.  

But I am still quite sure that the assumption is false.  The evidence that is offered for that assumption simply does not support it.

At first, one quickly arrives at pathological explanations: schizophrenia, delusion, compulsion. But the longer one thinks about it, the less it fits. The text is too calm, too stable, too uniform for that. Rather, everything points to a completely different type of person.  One can imagine someone who ... writes down page after page of ritual formulas. This does not require a creative explosion, but rather monothematic concentration – a skill that was by no means rare in the Middle Ages. This is not a diffuse zeal, but a calm, long-lasting fixation on a very limited formal space. Such people can remain in the same semantic and formal cosmos for months or years without feeling fatigue. On the contrary: it is precisely the repetition and the narrow structure that have a stabilising effect. Order does not arise from diversity, but from reduction.

Agreed.  The examples are not confined to the Middle Ages. Check the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or James Hampton's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or the Rohonc Codex...

The (very low) quality of the vellum and the (lack of) skill of the Scribe tell me that the Author was not a rich man, and the writing of the VMS put some strain on his purse.  But obviously he was convinced that it was worth it, and was worth setting it down in a way that (supposedly) would last for many decades. 

Perhaps he hoped to sell the book eventually to some doctor or scholar.  But I would guess that he kept the book for himself (as a stack of lose bifolia, according to some evidence) until he died; and whoever inherited it could not read it.

But I disagree with the rest of your theory.  The only part of the book that looks like a charm is the "vaguely European" writing on f116v; and I don't believe that the writing is original.  Most of the text seems to be running prose.  The Starred Parags do not look like charms. The structure of the Herbal parags look very much like that of the text on Medieval herbals, alchemical or not...   

And I see vidence of a broad range of topics with specialized non-trivial "knowledge" in each topic. Which to me means that the contents was not created by the Author, but was largely compiled from other sources.

If one seriously puts oneself in the shoes of the person who produced such a uniform text over 200 pages, one might just find the keys one needs.

There is a short story by Argentinian SF/surreal writer Jorge Luis Borges, about a young scholar who set out to understand and recreate the creative process by which Cervantes wrote Don Quixote.  

The easiest way, of course, would be for the guy to isolate himself from the present world and immerse himself in the cultural word of 16th century Spain, shaping his own knowledge, beliefs, values, and sentiments until they matched those of Cervantes.  And then set out to write a novel.

But that would be cheating.  Instead the lad decided that he would retain his 20th-century mind etc, and reconstruct Cervantes's creative process by pure logical deduction.  "If a person like Cervantes, living in that time and environment, decided to write a novel, what would be the theme?  What would the characters be like, and how would he name them?  What would be the most likely opening line?  Which word would he probably use in that spot?"  And so on.  All of that a priori, by logical inference that did not depend in any way on the actual text.

Alas, Borges tells us that the young hero died tragically after he had reconstructed only two chapters of the novel.  Which, amazingly, were found to be identical to the real ones, word for word.  What a loss to the world it was...

All the best, --stolfi