23-03-2026, 07:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 23-03-2026, 07:37 AM by Walter Mandron.)
Yes, I know that this has been described here; the resemblance to Llull is very striking and fits the time period—it would be a miracle if no one had noticed it yet.
But my theory isn't based on the idea that Llull's wheels encrypted the manuscript. It's based on the theory that there was no text to be encrypted—it isn't even an encryption. The wheels served only to bring the "divine" structure into the manuscript, without a single intelligible word being encrypted (okay, with one exception: the Latin word dolor = pain appears exactly the holy three (!) times; pain was a central concept of apophatic mysticism—the pain of the spirit at its own limit. Eckhart uses it, Tauler uses it—but that's just a small hint)—the theory is different; the meaning of the work was failure:
Llull, the apophatic tradition, and the Cusonian synthesis
Llull's art is combinatorial; this combinatorics forms the basis of the textual structure of the VMS. Yet Llull intends to make positive statements about God through the mechanical combination of divine attributes. But Llull operated within an intellectual milieu deeply shaped by the apophatic tradition—that is, the notion that God cannot be known through positive statements, but can only be approximated through the failure of thought. A truly interesting, almost modern theory, which, incidentally, is also found in this form in other cultures, such as Zen.
Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and Tauler all worked within this tradition, and their works found wide circulation particularly in monastic and university circles where Lullism was taught.
The key figure, however, is Nicholas of Cusa—not because he was involved (though he may well have been), but for another reason. He exemplifies the prevailing currents in theological philosophy of the early 15th century. He was demonstrably a Lullist and a cardinal at the center of European intellectual life, who owned several Llull manuscripts and annotated them. Cusanus took up Lullist combinatorics and the apophatic tradition and fused them in his work "De docta ignorantia" (1440). His concept of "docta ignorantia"—learned ignorance—holds that the mind approaches God not through understanding, but through the productive experience of its own inability to understand.
This synthesis—Lullian combinatorics plus apophatic theology—was very much alive in the 1420s and 1430s. It is precisely the intellectual milieu in which the VMS originated.
The VMS as a Contemplative Tool
My thesis is not merely that the VMS was encoded using Llull's wheels; that is NOT the actual core of my argument.
My thesis is that the VMS is a contemplative tool designed to evoke the experience of failure within a specific theological context. This is remotely comparable to the Zen koans, which are meant to bring the mind to a standstill in order to experience enlightenment.
Who had to learn humility through failure? Novices. In particular, novices in theological orders in northern Italy in the early 15th century, where Lullism was actively taught — major centres of Lullism existed in Valencia, Paris, Alsace, and northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, as a devotional practice and art of memory.
The nobility sent younger sons and daughters to monasteries because the inheritance went only to the firstborn. Monasteries were thus full of educated, intelligent, often snobbish sons from noble families who would actually rather be elsewhere.
The instrument would work as follows: Such novices are presented with something that looks like a herbal, an astronomical diagram, or a medical text. It triggers every pattern-recognition system in a trained scholastic mind. It looks as if it has meaning. It looks like Llull. It looks like medicine. It looks like the stars. It's hard to say exactly what it might have looked like.
Human curiosity is incredibly vast, one of the strongest energies there is.
And then? He can't solve it; he keeps finding pieces, but it doesn't work. (You can see how well this works here on this board—both the curiosity and the failure, and the curiosity remains.)
The mind hits a wall. Again and again. And this wall—following Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart, as conveyed by Cusanus—is the crux of the matter.
It teaches humility, and the constant failure will drive even the most arrogant novice into the dungeon of divine experience.
Why this explains what nothing else explains
The forgery theory fails for one simple reason: too much effort, too much structure. The VMS contains about 37,000 word tokens with statistical properties—Zipf distribution, long-range correlations, structured entropy—that a 15th-century forger could not have known about in order to imitate them. In 1953, Mandelbrot demonstrated that these properties can emerge automatically from rule-governed combinatorial systems. A forger working by hand would not produce this.
A Lullian wheel, however, which cycles through its positions, would—and indeed, it originated within that tradition. But as a genuine cipher—that is, one that works—it would be anachronistic.
The unidentifiable plants are not a failure on the part of the illustrator. They are a feature. Identifiable plants would make the herbal section legible—and legibility would destroy the instrument. The plants are composite, plausible, and false. Exactly as they must be to drive the mind to the brink of madness.
The nude figures in the balneological section are not bathing women in the strict sense. They merely represent another aspect that was known at the time. This, too, has already been discussed here in the forum. The wheel that operates within the realm of the human body, of the living, of the medical. Just strange enough to elude interpretation. Just familiar enough not to be surprising.
That is how it is with everything. The genius of the manuscript lies precisely in the fact that it alludes to all these areas (and does so poorly) without really addressing any of them.
It also explains why it was written on poor-quality vellum, for one certainly would not have used good vellum for this experimental manuscript. It was written by other students, and drawn by them as well, without knowing what they were doing. There are so many other points that suddenly fit with this theory.
Why the Manuscript Disappeared
In 1419, Pope Martin V formally rehabilitated Llull's teachings — precisely within the period to which the VMS vellum is dated. This created an ambivalent moment: officially permitted again after decades of condemnation, but the memory of persecution was fresh, and Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, continued to attack Lullism philosophically well into the 1420s. Nobody could be certain how long the "rehabilitation" would last. As it turned out: not very long. By 1559, parts of Llull was on the Index.
And so the theory of Llull and failure was practiced less and less. In the monastic context, only a small circle of people likely knew what kind of work it was. The less it was applied, the more it faded from consciousness. What remained was the instrument without its instruction manual. This, of course, is exactly what Baresch found in the early 17th century and could not explain.
The Elegance
The elegance of this theory does not lie in the fact that it explains a few things. It lies in the fact that it explains everything at once —the statistics, the structure, the illustrations, the illegibility, the disappearance—based on a single coherent premise that is historically grounded and theologically grounded—and which does not claim that it is an unknown language, a lost cipher that did not fit the time and requires no anachronistic assumptions.
You don't need Ramon Llull to build wheels. You need Ramon Llull—and Cusanus and the apophatic tradition—to understand why someone would build a wheel designed to be illegible and call this an act of faith.
But my theory isn't based on the idea that Llull's wheels encrypted the manuscript. It's based on the theory that there was no text to be encrypted—it isn't even an encryption. The wheels served only to bring the "divine" structure into the manuscript, without a single intelligible word being encrypted (okay, with one exception: the Latin word dolor = pain appears exactly the holy three (!) times; pain was a central concept of apophatic mysticism—the pain of the spirit at its own limit. Eckhart uses it, Tauler uses it—but that's just a small hint)—the theory is different; the meaning of the work was failure:
Llull, the apophatic tradition, and the Cusonian synthesis
Llull's art is combinatorial; this combinatorics forms the basis of the textual structure of the VMS. Yet Llull intends to make positive statements about God through the mechanical combination of divine attributes. But Llull operated within an intellectual milieu deeply shaped by the apophatic tradition—that is, the notion that God cannot be known through positive statements, but can only be approximated through the failure of thought. A truly interesting, almost modern theory, which, incidentally, is also found in this form in other cultures, such as Zen.
Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and Tauler all worked within this tradition, and their works found wide circulation particularly in monastic and university circles where Lullism was taught.
The key figure, however, is Nicholas of Cusa—not because he was involved (though he may well have been), but for another reason. He exemplifies the prevailing currents in theological philosophy of the early 15th century. He was demonstrably a Lullist and a cardinal at the center of European intellectual life, who owned several Llull manuscripts and annotated them. Cusanus took up Lullist combinatorics and the apophatic tradition and fused them in his work "De docta ignorantia" (1440). His concept of "docta ignorantia"—learned ignorance—holds that the mind approaches God not through understanding, but through the productive experience of its own inability to understand.
This synthesis—Lullian combinatorics plus apophatic theology—was very much alive in the 1420s and 1430s. It is precisely the intellectual milieu in which the VMS originated.
The VMS as a Contemplative Tool
My thesis is not merely that the VMS was encoded using Llull's wheels; that is NOT the actual core of my argument.
My thesis is that the VMS is a contemplative tool designed to evoke the experience of failure within a specific theological context. This is remotely comparable to the Zen koans, which are meant to bring the mind to a standstill in order to experience enlightenment.
Who had to learn humility through failure? Novices. In particular, novices in theological orders in northern Italy in the early 15th century, where Lullism was actively taught — major centres of Lullism existed in Valencia, Paris, Alsace, and northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, as a devotional practice and art of memory.
The nobility sent younger sons and daughters to monasteries because the inheritance went only to the firstborn. Monasteries were thus full of educated, intelligent, often snobbish sons from noble families who would actually rather be elsewhere.
The instrument would work as follows: Such novices are presented with something that looks like a herbal, an astronomical diagram, or a medical text. It triggers every pattern-recognition system in a trained scholastic mind. It looks as if it has meaning. It looks like Llull. It looks like medicine. It looks like the stars. It's hard to say exactly what it might have looked like.
Human curiosity is incredibly vast, one of the strongest energies there is.
And then? He can't solve it; he keeps finding pieces, but it doesn't work. (You can see how well this works here on this board—both the curiosity and the failure, and the curiosity remains.)
The mind hits a wall. Again and again. And this wall—following Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart, as conveyed by Cusanus—is the crux of the matter.
It teaches humility, and the constant failure will drive even the most arrogant novice into the dungeon of divine experience.
Why this explains what nothing else explains
The forgery theory fails for one simple reason: too much effort, too much structure. The VMS contains about 37,000 word tokens with statistical properties—Zipf distribution, long-range correlations, structured entropy—that a 15th-century forger could not have known about in order to imitate them. In 1953, Mandelbrot demonstrated that these properties can emerge automatically from rule-governed combinatorial systems. A forger working by hand would not produce this.
A Lullian wheel, however, which cycles through its positions, would—and indeed, it originated within that tradition. But as a genuine cipher—that is, one that works—it would be anachronistic.
The unidentifiable plants are not a failure on the part of the illustrator. They are a feature. Identifiable plants would make the herbal section legible—and legibility would destroy the instrument. The plants are composite, plausible, and false. Exactly as they must be to drive the mind to the brink of madness.
The nude figures in the balneological section are not bathing women in the strict sense. They merely represent another aspect that was known at the time. This, too, has already been discussed here in the forum. The wheel that operates within the realm of the human body, of the living, of the medical. Just strange enough to elude interpretation. Just familiar enough not to be surprising.
That is how it is with everything. The genius of the manuscript lies precisely in the fact that it alludes to all these areas (and does so poorly) without really addressing any of them.
It also explains why it was written on poor-quality vellum, for one certainly would not have used good vellum for this experimental manuscript. It was written by other students, and drawn by them as well, without knowing what they were doing. There are so many other points that suddenly fit with this theory.
Why the Manuscript Disappeared
In 1419, Pope Martin V formally rehabilitated Llull's teachings — precisely within the period to which the VMS vellum is dated. This created an ambivalent moment: officially permitted again after decades of condemnation, but the memory of persecution was fresh, and Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, continued to attack Lullism philosophically well into the 1420s. Nobody could be certain how long the "rehabilitation" would last. As it turned out: not very long. By 1559, parts of Llull was on the Index.
And so the theory of Llull and failure was practiced less and less. In the monastic context, only a small circle of people likely knew what kind of work it was. The less it was applied, the more it faded from consciousness. What remained was the instrument without its instruction manual. This, of course, is exactly what Baresch found in the early 17th century and could not explain.
The Elegance
The elegance of this theory does not lie in the fact that it explains a few things. It lies in the fact that it explains everything at once —the statistics, the structure, the illustrations, the illegibility, the disappearance—based on a single coherent premise that is historically grounded and theologically grounded—and which does not claim that it is an unknown language, a lost cipher that did not fit the time and requires no anachronistic assumptions.
You don't need Ramon Llull to build wheels. You need Ramon Llull—and Cusanus and the apophatic tradition—to understand why someone would build a wheel designed to be illegible and call this an act of faith.