15-05-2026, 12:12 AM
(14-05-2026, 11:57 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(14-05-2026, 11:29 PM)PatrickZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What if everybody for 600 years was wrong on the meaning because designed like this by the VM writer(s) as a decoy ?
Yes, people have though of that too.
One objection to that theory is that those weird drawings plus the text in code would have attracted more attention and suspicion than just the text in code.
Even by Kircher's time, scholars in Europe would often run into books written in foreign languages and scripts that nobody around them could identify. For example, on Rene's site there is a letter by a Prague Jesuit (Moretus) to Kircher, asking if Kircher could identify the language of an attached document; which turned out to be some old version of Serbian in the Glagolitic script. When such unreadable books were eventually read, as in that case, the contents usually turned out to be quite uninteresting.
Thus I would think that the VMS without the drawings would be assumed to be one of those books, and not given a second glance.
As he tells in his letter to Kircher, Barschius became obsessed with the VMS because he believed that it contained medical and herbal knowledge collected from "Egypt or some other Oriental land" that surely would have been superior to the faulty medicine of Europe. He could have got that idea only from the drawings in the Bio section and the plants "that no doctor in Prague could identify".
If the VMS had only the text, with no drawings, with high probability it would have been thrown in the trash by the landlord after the Author died...
All the best, --stolfi
What if the secret was so important at that time, that it is related to the drawings in certain ways, but conceptually in accordance to a 15 century highly educated man in Alchemy...?
