Alchemy Theory

[GracefulShinjo]

Honestly I strongly favor this theory. It would explain why it was encoded. As the Reformation approached there was a growing consensus against magic and occult knowledge, which included alchemy. If the manuscript was meant to be an alchemist’s notebook I can see the people involved creating a code to protect it from being destroyed. And ironically if that is true then the Voynich manuscript ending up in the collection of Jesuits feels bittersweet as the Jesuits are focused on knowledge (based on my experience having a grandpa who was good friends with a Jesuit priest who, by the way, actually officiated his second marriage to a woman I fondly called grandma and still miss even after her passing even though grandpa was Jewish) that a book of what the Catholic Church fought against ended up in their hands. If the book is cracked and it is a tome of alchemical knowledge it would give us a new window into the world of alchemists working in the early Renaissance. Well that and it being a tome of folk magic. I might begin to joke that those High German words were written by a distant relative of mine from what is now the Rhineland-Palatinate (hey I’m apparently descended from a famed rabbi of Lithuania so why not have an ancestor who dabbled in folk magic).