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• Speculative fraud hypothesis

  dexdex > 18-08-2025, 02:15 PM

  Preface: don't take this too seriously.
  
  During discussion with friends, I imagined a hypothetical explanation for the creation of the manuscript. My chief problem with most hoax theories is that the amount of effort required makes the proposition that it was made as a hoax to fool someone gullible out of money stupid: a fraudulent actor simply finds someone more gullible to con, not spend a year's worth of scribing effort to create a fraudulent artifact. Such forgeries do happen, but when the amount of money thus received is tremendous - like an art forgery. The manuscript, to my mind, doesn't fit this criteria.
  
  However, that is not the only way a con artist could use a manuscript like this. In fact, a travelling snake oil salesman could use such an artifact to bolster their credibility among marks, as a prop. After creation of such a prop, it could be reused, making for a much better return on investment. A con artist group could reuse the same artifact, making it a reasonable proposition for the five scribes to collaborate. And, the prop would also serve its purpose during creation: one could simply show off a single folio or quire and, noticing an uptick in marks catching the bait, spend more effort to create further and further pages, culminating in a book.
  
  The advantages of this speculative hypothesis:
  

  • Explains the amount of effort for a hoax
    
  • Allows for collaboration with common purpose by multiple people, explaining multiple scribes
    
  • A hoaxster could plausibly have enough cunning to invent a simple method to generate words (crust-mantle-core style) and then generate a document by basing it bits of meaningful books, thereby reproducing many of the features of the manuscript
    
  • A hoax would have little use for corrections unless they looked bad on a page, explaining the relative lack of retouching
    
  • Explains the signs of use on the manuscript
    
  • Explains how someone (perhaps after incarceration or death of the hoaxters) could find the document and then bind it/add things at a later date.
    
  • edit to add: The lack of occult or religious symbolism makes sense for such a hoax, as it gives plausible deniability that this isn't some cursed or heretical artifact, allowing for safer use as a prop in a Christian community.
    

  
  The disadvantages are still legion, of course:

  • This is still a lot of effort, but perhaps one spent to assure that someone can't realise it is gibberish at a glance - important when you're showing the prop to multitudes of people. But there are easier ways to con people.
    
  • The explanation for why the larger-scope semantic and textual analyses seem to suggest topic clustering is flimsy
    
  • Gives zero clues for a possible decipherment scheme
    
  • The parchment appears to have been acquired and prepared similarly, not congruent with being built up piece-by-piece (though not impossible)
    

  
  
  Still, I found it a fun hypothesis so decided to share. Would love to hear some thoughts. Thanks for a bunch of threads containing interesting info to pass the time looking into this silly mystery.

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  ReneZ > 19-08-2025, 01:54 AM

  I do not find this a bad idea at all, and in fact it has also been discussed before.
  
  This is close to a hypothesis from a reputable expert on ancient herbals: Sergio Toresella, described in this publication: Toresella, Sergio: Gli erbari degli alchmisti, in: L. Saginati, Arte farmaceutica e piante medicinali; erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri, 1995.
  
  A few comments on some of your pros and cons:
  

  (18-08-2025, 02:15 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Allows for collaboration with common purpose by multiple people, explaining multiple scribes

  
  Very subjective, but this is not so obvious to me. Possibly if he paid a group of scribes in order to have it finished quickly.
  
  

  (18-08-2025, 02:15 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The parchment appears to have been acquired and prepared similarly, not congruent with being built up piece-by-piece (though not impossible)

  
  We do not know if the parchment was acquired all at once or piece by piece. It may have been acquired over a 20-year period. The dating is simply not accurate enough.
  I never heard any opinion on whether it has been prepared similarly.

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  asteckley > 19-08-2025, 02:55 AM

  (18-08-2025, 02:15 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....My chief problem with most hoax theories is that the amount of effort required makes the proposition that it was made as a hoax to fool someone gullible out of money stupid: a fraudulent actor simply finds someone more gullible to con, not spend a year's worth of scribing effort to create a fraudulent artifact. Such forgeries do happen, but when the amount of money thus received is tremendous - like an art forgery. The manuscript, to my mind, doesn't fit this criteria.

  
  What do you consider a "tremendous" amount of money?
  
  I believe Lisa Fagin-Davis also said, in her recent UPenn seminar, that the idea of it being produced as a con to sell to a wealthy gullible buyer was non-credible. (Apologies if my memory on that is wrong.)
  
  If you believe the theory that the Marci/Kircher letters refer to the VMS, then you presumably also accept that the manuscript was -- or even just could have been -- bought by Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats. That's the equivalent of roughly $200,000.   That's a LOT of Starbuck's coffee (or if you have my wife's coffee addition, it is about 5 year's worth.)
  
  That pretty much defies any speculations that the Voynich could not have been produced as a fraud for profit.

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  proto57 > 19-08-2025, 04:46 AM

  (18-08-2025, 02:15 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My chief problem with most hoax theories is that the amount of effort required makes the proposition that it was made as a hoax to fool someone gullible out of money stupid: a fraudulent actor simply finds someone more gullible to con, not spend a year's worth of scribing effort to create a fraudulent artifact. Such forgeries do happen, but when the amount of money thus received is tremendous - like an art forgery. The manuscript, to my mind, doesn't fit this criteria.

  
  Wilfrid Voynich did hope to make a great deal of money from the manuscript. Early on he offered Newbold 10% "of the first $100,000", and I think 50% of anything over that, if Newbold's Roger Bacon attribution stuck. $100,000 in 1920 would be worth $1,673,823.83 today. Hans Kraus wrote that Voynich had wanted $160,000 for it (maybe he knew this through Anne? I forget how), and that would be worth $2,987,727.17, if Voynich came up with the latter figure in 1925.
  
  Both would have been a great deal of money, and a great incentive for forgery. Even if it took a year or two of laborious effort, there are few people who would turn down between $1.6 and $2.9 million dollars to do it. But in reality it probably only took about two months or so.
  
  Dexdex I'm not dismissing your alternate possible scenario, that does make sense. But making the Voynich as a hoax for outright sale, either for 600 Ducats in 1420 or 1588, or for $100,000 in 1910, that kind of money would pay for a huge "amount of effort", even if required.

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  Jorge_Stolfi > 19-08-2025, 06:04 AM

  (18-08-2025, 02:15 PM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a travelling snake oil salesman could use such an artifact to bolster their credibility among marks, as a prop. After creation of such a prop, it could be reused, making for a much better return on investment.

  
  It is a serious possibility.  IIRC Sergio Toresella, which Rene cited above, describes a cottage industry of such manuscripts that flourished somewhere in Northern Italy.  That was before the VMS carbon dating, though; I don't know whether the timeline would still work out.
  
  But this is a variant of the "hoax" hypothesis, and thus shares its objections.  The main one being that while "impress someone" could be a plausible motivation for creating a fake book, it does not seem adequate to explain the creation of this book.  It looks like too much work spent on details that would not impress anyone.
  
  The VMS is not actually a single book.  It is at least six separate books - Herbal, Pharma, Cosmo, Zodiac, Biological, and Starred Parags (StarPs) -- that have in common only the script, the "encoding", and the general handwriting and drafting style (nymphs, stars, scalloped fringes etc), but have very different contents and textual structure.  They even seem to have two different languages.  AFAIK no one has managed ti point out any strong link between the contents of these six books, except that some drawings in Pharma are almost identical to some details of Herbal. 
  
  But while Herbal, Pharma, Biological, and Zodiac might have impressed the clients of a quack doctor, the patron of a pretend alchemist, or a generous buyer of exotic books, the StarPS section seems pure wasted work.  Even the Cosmo section would have left those marks nonplussed.  What was their point?
  
  Moreover, only the Herbal section has acceptable quality to pass for a serious treatise. The other books look rather sloppy and skimpy.  I haven't seen any of Toresella's "achemical herbals"; are they like that?  Would you trust a doctor who gets his recipes and therapies from such a sloppy-looking book?
  
  And then there is the question of why -- not how, but why -- would the author bother to invent a gibberish generator  whose output is so like a natural language by many statistics (which were not known at the time) and yet so unlike the languages that the marks might have known.
  
  All the best, --jorge

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  ReneZ > 19-08-2025, 06:46 AM

  The original post distinguishes between two motives for creating the MS as a hoax.
  
  1) To sell at a profit. 
  2) To use as a prop for further (financial) advantages
  
  These are different. The original poster prefers the second case. I also find it interesting, but it is not without difficulties.
  
  The fact that Rudolf paid 600 ducats for it has been brought up many times in this context, but, of course, it is completely irrelevant.
  The fact that he bought it does not say anything about whether it is authentic or fake. 
  He paid 600 Taler to Strada for six books.
  He paid 310 Taler to Rauwolf for his herbals.
  
  Does that imply that either of these are fakes?

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  Koen G > 19-08-2025, 08:01 AM

  (19-08-2025, 02:55 AM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That pretty much defies any speculations that the Voynich could not have been produced as a fraud for profit.

  
  I don't think so. The original makers lived long before Rudolf. The fact that he was willing and able to pay a lot of money for it in his timeframe is irrelevant to their original motifs.

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  dexdex > 19-08-2025, 09:21 AM

  (19-08-2025, 02:55 AM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I believe Lisa Fagin-Davis also said, in her recent UPenn seminar, that the idea of it being produced as a con to sell to a wealthy gullible buyer was non-credible. (Apologies if my memory on that is wrong.)

  I agree with this, but coming at it from the perspective of someone who knows a bit about con artistry. For a one-time scam, it's easier to just find someone more gullible, and in fact such cons tend to be crappy on purpose so as to filter out people too intelligent to deceive. The only exceptions are if you already have a buyer set, for instance for an art forgery - but in the case of the VMS it is very unlikely you'd be able to secure such a buyer without having the fraud already created. So the creation would have to be a lot of effort for a dubious payday - extremely unlikely to be done.
  
  However, an iteratively built prop to aid in deception of educated marks might need to stand up to scrutiny and will be reusable, as well as being useful (and therefore profitable) from the creation of the first page.
  
  

  (19-08-2025, 02:55 AM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you believe the theory that the Marci/Kircher letters refer to the VMS, then you presumably also accept that the manuscript was -- or even just could have been -- bought by Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats. That's the equivalent of roughly $200,000.   That's a LOT of Starbuck's coffee (or if you have my wife's coffee addition, it is about 5 year's worth.)

  I think a reasonable assumption is that this was for a sale of MANY books, as the 600 figure has been traced to a bulk sale to Rudolf II. An individual artifact with no provenance would not fetch such a sum, and educated conmen would know this.
  
  

  Quote:Wilfrid Voynich did hope to make a great deal of money from the manuscript. Early on he offered Newbold 10% "of the first $100,000", and I think 50% of anything over that, if Newbold's Roger Bacon attribution stuck. $100,000 in 1920 would be worth $1,673,823.83 today. Hans Kraus wrote that Voynich had wanted $160,000 for it (maybe he knew this through Anne? I forget how), and that would be worth $2,987,727.17, if Voynich came up with the latter figure in 1925.

  Those prices are for a unique, antique artifact with decent provenance, not for what anybody educated would realise is a relatively newly bound tome with unknown provenance. Voynich also failed to sell the manuscript further. The 600 ducats figure is the upper bound of what you could expect for a sale, and even that was already being bought as an antique by a medieval ruler.
  
  For 3 mil, yes, you would make such a book. For 40k per person, it starts to be dubious to put in that amount of effort instead of finding someone more gullible. And if we then lower that even further, we start getting less money than we would just scribing regular books. But, as a prop, it can function for years and years and improve your take from educated marks, who had more money than regular townsfolk. The profit incentive fits better.
  
  

  Quote:I don't think so. The original makers lived long before Rudolf. The fact that he was willing and able to pay a lot of money for it in his timeframe is irrelevant to their original motifs.

  Exactly.
  
  

  Quote:Very subjective, but this is not so obvious to me. Possibly if he paid a group of scribes in order to have it finished quickly.

  To elaborate further: conmen like to work together, so it's not out of a question that a group of such people collaborated. Or, the main creator of the idea made the first short draft, it worked very well - then he paid scribes to make something even more impressive, as you said.
  
  

  Quote:We do not know if the parchment was acquired all at once or piece by piece. It may have been acquired over a 20-year period. The dating is simply not accurate enough.
  
  I never heard any opinion on whether it has been prepared similarly.

  Interesting. This may be just my misreading, but my impression was that the parchment preparation level matches (where the skin and flesh side are barely distinguishable). Of course it may have just been a supplier doing the same thing to his stock over a long period.
  
  

  Quote:The VMS is not actually a single book.  It is at least six separate books - Herbal, Pharma, Cosmo, Zodiac, Biological, and Starred Parags (StarPs) -- that have in common only the script, the "encoding", and the general handwriting and drafting style (nymphs, stars, scalloped fringes etc), but have very different contents and textual structure.  They even seem to have two different languages.  AFAIK no one has managed ti point out any strong link between the contents of these six books, except that some drawings in Pharma are almost identical to some details of Herbal.

  In my view, this actually fits the 'prop' hypothesis more. You generate the first bit based on something you know decently well, it works well to fool marks, maybe someone asks you if you got something for the zodiac - so you generate a zodiac section based on zodiacal books of the time. The book builds up as you go, and eventually you have an entire manuscript filled with esoterica. Maybe one of the sections you made is a dud, but it felt like a good idea when other stuff worked so well. And the quality is worse since you weren't so familiar with zodiacal books as you are with herbals.
  
  

  Quote:And then there is the question of why -- not how, but why -- would the author bother to invent a gibberish generator  whose output is so like a natural language by many statistics (which were not known at the time) and yet so unlike the languages that the marks might have known.

  This, I confess, was something I was thinking about. While such a prop would be useful, for most marks you could just use gibberish. 
  
  But then I had an idea: suppose the original conman tried a primitive version of this, and generated a scroll of 'magic' that was basically lorem ipsum, claiming it held arcane knowledge, but the fake was much less elaborate. This is something that you'd use on an educated mark with more money, and perhaps an educated mark noticed that words were repeated gibberish and didn't feel like a scroll. So, to improve your scam, you have an incentive to make a simple process that makes something that looks weird but also doesn't look like gibberish. The Stolfi (and later) hypotheses of word structure fit with such a relatively simple process to build a word dictionary that a 15th century conman would be capable of inventing.
  
  I still confess this is the weakest part of the hypothesis (or indeed a weak part of any fraudulent hoax hypothesis), but it's not inconceivable and the book can be used for scamming purposes before being the entire tome we see, making it a much better profit proposition.
  
  

  Quote:This is close to a hypothesis from a reputable expert on ancient herbals: Sergio Toresella, described in this publication: Toresella, Sergio: Gli erbari degli alchmisti, in: L. Saginati, Arte farmaceutica e piante medicinali; erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri, 1995.

  I will check this out.
  
  I was wondering, what possible clues would this (very radical in the sense of being quite specific) assumption bring. For one, we could expect a prolonged creation and so textual differences between 'books' should be big. And, the method of creation that fits best is crafting a word dictionary and then using the crafted words in place of words basing the book on some other text. I don't know how that would imprint itself in the syntax, though; nor how would it be different than just multiple books written from a natural language and then collated.

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  dexdex > 19-08-2025, 10:17 AM

  (19-08-2025, 01:54 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is close to a hypothesis from a reputable expert on ancient herbals: Sergio Toresella, described in this publication: Toresella, Sergio: Gli erbari degli alchmisti, in: L. Saginati, Arte farmaceutica e piante medicinali; erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri, 1995.

  I've found summaries of this publication, and while the hypothesis has things in common (and the idea of quacks using such herbals has precedent!), the implications do not appear to be elaborated on - it's simply a passing mention. I think it could be interesting to hypothesise what such a process of creation would mean, and see if the Voynich manuscript fits these criteria. To wit, some ideas: 

  • The creation method has to be simple, just enough to fool the type of mark the conman/conmen would be aiming at. It can't be super elaborate - but a word generation algorithm and facsimiling existing examples of herbals would fit. This fits the word structure of the VMS, and could imprint some potential signs in the larger semantic units of the manuscript. However, I can't see any conman going any further than this simple process - anything more elaborate basically falsifies the hypothesis.
    
  • It is likely to be prepared in chunks, and some chunks should have seen more use. This could be checked for in the signs of the usage, as well as the textual differences between sections. The 'standard' wear by later owners (flipping the first page etc) would mask some of this, but it could still be in principle detectable. Some of those signs of use would be atypical for a meaningful herbal - you'd expect a lot more "accidents" with dirt and liquids if someone travelled with it.
    
  • Corrections in content are unnecessary for a conman, so all examples of retouching by the original author(s) have to be in service of making a more convincing fake - so retouching a faint bit of script could work, but changing entire words wouldn't. As far as I'm aware, this is completely congruent with how the manuscript looks superficially, but more explicit statements and study of the instances of retouching could be done.
    

  
  So, it seems worth a deeper think about the implications of such a motive for the manuscript's creation.
  
  Rene, you mentioned there are difficulties with this hypothesis. I'm curious, can you think of other ones in addition to the ones I mentioned?
  
  Another thought: The foldables are quite unusual for a non-fraudulent codex from what I gather (though I am not an expert) - why wouldn't you just make smaller images that fit in folios? But, they would be extremely useful in a prop. "Look at these huge drawings!!"

• RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis

  ReneZ > 19-08-2025, 10:45 AM

  (19-08-2025, 10:17 AM)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rene, you mentioned there are difficulties with this hypothesis. I'm curious, can you think of other ones in addition to the ones I mentioned?

  
  It is all subjective, of course, but the main problem for me is that so much planning and attention has gone into the book, that the 'just a prop' idea isn't entirely satisfactory. 
  I recently decided to check a feeling I have long had, about the frequency distribution of the labels, in particular the zodiac labels. 
  I have You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
  I still want to add some other things to that, so I had not yet mentioned this, but this is perhaps a good occasion.
  Note that this is not proof of anything, but it is one of the things that shapes my opinion.
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