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The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
- The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
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The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
oshfdk > 28-11-2025, 02:48 PM
Most theories, I think, try explaining various strange aspects of the manuscript under the following assumptions:
1) The manuscript was created voluntarily, the author(s) wanted to create it.
2) The author(s) had a lot of freedom in choosing the materials used and could fully control the production of the manuscript.
3) The author(s) has some clear intention about the future use of the manuscript, after it's completed.
While all of these could be true, I think it's much easier to explain some strange properties of the manuscript under scenarios that challenge these assumptions.
Just a few of more or less silly examples to explain what I mean. These are not proposed scenarios, these are thought experiments to demonstrate the iffiness of many assumptions that a lot of solution theories make.
1) A person (say, from a distant land) is sentenced to death and she or he offers to create a book of secret foreign knowledge in exchange for saving their life. Having no secret knowledge she of he invents a custom script and says that the contents can only be revealed after the work is completed. The whole manuscript is just a ruse to postpone own death. The longer and the stranger the MS is, the better.
2) The author is a hermit and only has access to limited quantity of materials and tools. The author writes to pass the time with no clear plan, develops a new writing system in the process, all this takes decades. She or he leaves a lot of works and notes behind on paper, but all of them are destroyed by the elements, the only exception is a sample codex made on scrap vellum.
And my favorite one so far (mostly because under this scenario the manuscript may have interesting non trivial content) is "the prisoner scenario".
A person is imprisoned for creating some provocative teachings or any related thought crimes. Part of the sentence bans the prisoner from writing ever again and prevents any contact with the outside world. If caught the prisoner will face a harsh punishment. Maybe there is a scant chance of being freed in some 30 years when some new king takes the throne.
Still, being a person of ideas, the prisoner wants to complete the work of their life and create one more manuscript for posterity, even with no clear understanding of who and when will be able to read it.
What is needed for this?
1) Some material durable enough to survive decades and possible mishaps.
2) Format small enough to be hidden.
3) Ink and impromptu writing tools.
4) Never get caught - writing at night, under moonlight, etc.
5) Plausible deniability if the manuscript is discovered - nothing should link it to the author, not only the contents should be enciphered, there should be no way to match the handwriting, so a custom script should be used. And the appearance of the manuscript should certainly be quite different from an expected work of the author, something innocuous, maybe an astrological herbal?
6) Ensure the future safety of the manuscript: maybe add a bit provocative images and unique foldout maps to make sure whoever finds this manuscript wouldn't throw it away and with time will decipher it. But the author has to err on the side of the caution, it's more important to not let the captors decipher it if the codex is found in prison, so the cipher itself is exceptionally strong.
It takes months or maybe even years to find a way to get all the materials needed by maybe bribing the food delivery guy or making friends with one of the guards.
Most of the job has to be done at night with barely any light, including mixing inks and mending the writing tools. This causes a lot of imperfections, but this doesn't stop the author, the author has a LOT of time on their hands. It doesn't matter if one page takes a month to complete, so the author is being careful and slowly fills page after page with tiny letters and decoy images.
Was it ever completed? Who found it? Nobody knows.
One thing that makes this scenario intriguing is that under it we are indeed the intended target audience of this manuscript. It was written for posterity, maybe the author didn't expect it to take 600 years, but the whole intent of this manuscript was to be deciphered and read by future generations. -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
dashstofsk > 28-11-2025, 04:47 PM
(28-11-2025, 02:48 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.some provocative teachings or any related thought crimes
It is a myth that people at that time were put into prison just for ‘provocative’ teachings. It was a time of new ideas, new philosophies. Belief in the secret sciences was strong, and new ideas were welcomed. An ambitious readership was fast growing. Raising people from the dead, summoning the spirits of dead people, addressing chants to the angels in heaven, incantations, offering burnt offerings to deities, suffumigation, demonic intervention, charting the planets, interpreting their positions to predict the future. All of this was not provocative at the time. These all had a theological basis and so they were accepted as genuine fact.
This was all strong and powerful stuff and only if you were a person of learning and education and had a strong personal faith could you be trusted that you would not use the knowledge for a bad purpose.
I cannot believe that the VMS could possibly be more provocative than manuscripts such as the Picatrix or Ars Notoria. These manuscripts did not hide their content. They were freely available, copied and consulted, unencrypted and readable.
There is a nice book about magic and the role of manuscripts with ‘provocative’ teachings in mediaeval times. I hope you will find it an instructive read.
'The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts' by Anne Lawrence-Mathers. -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
oshfdk > 28-11-2025, 05:59 PM
(28-11-2025, 04:47 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is a myth that people at that time were put into prison just for ‘provocative’ teachings. It was a time of new ideas, new philosophies. Belief in the secret sciences was strong, and new ideas were welcomed. An ambitious readership was fast growing. Raising people from the dead, summoning the spirits of dead people, addressing chants to the angels in heaven, incantations, offering burnt offerings to deities, suffumigation, demonic intervention, charting the planets, interpreting their positions to predict the future. All of this was not provocative at the time. These all had a theological basis and so they were accepted as genuine fact.
I'm not referring to scientific ideas necessarily. An ideology that dictates that <country A> has no business sending troops to <country B> or that the king of <country C> should not report to the pope in <country D> would most likely lead to imprisonment under the right circumstances. I mean, it would even in present days, in many (most? all?) countries there exists some text that if you publicly produce and distribute it would eventually put you in jail.
Under the prisoner scenario the doodles in the MS have nothing to do (at least not literally) with the content, so it could be not about natural sciences or magic at all. -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
oshfdk > 28-11-2025, 06:20 PM
And the plants are easily explained too: imagine that you need 100 decoy plant images to mimic a herbal, but you don't have are references (neither real nor images) and you are not a botanist. Probably you'll end up with something like there is in the Voynich MS. -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
Jorge_Stolfi > 28-11-2025, 06:41 PM
(28-11-2025, 02:48 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is sentenced to death and she or he offers to create a book of secret foreign knowledge in exchange for saving their life.
Something like that indeed happened to Edward Kelley, companion of John Dee in Prague. Kelley boasted that he had the recipe to turn metals into gold, and with that got access to the court of Rudolf II. When he failed to deliver, Rudolf locked him up in a tower and would not let him out until he delivered a recipe that worked. Look it up...
(Before I got into the VMS, I had no interest at all in Medieval history, which I thought was mostly about feudal lords and kings and battles. But the story of Dee and Kelley alone is worth wading through all of that. It is proof of Mark Twain's maxim: "the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must be believable"...)
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
rikforto > 28-11-2025, 07:01 PM
Heresy would also neatly explain the code if I am being open minded. The Church and other authorities were much more open to pushing those boundaries than modern pop culture would have you believe, but it was by degree not kind. Entirely feasible we get a screed by the last remnants of the Cathars and the herbal diagrams are decoys.
I doubt anything like this explains the manuscript for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a simple lack of evidence anything in the manuscript is actually heretical, but I understand how a thought experiment works -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
oshfdk > 28-11-2025, 07:16 PM
(28-11-2025, 07:01 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I doubt anything like this explains the manuscript for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a simple lack of evidence anything in the manuscript is actually heretical, but I understand how a thought experiment works
The very idea of plausible deniability requires that nothing in the visual aspects of the manuscript should give away its true contents or true author. So, under the prisoner scenario, unless we decipher it, there might be no evidence about its contents at all. And under this scenario the contents may be completely unexpected.
I think for some reason I struggle with expressing this point in a reasonably clear way, even when I first wrote about the prisoner scenario a few months ago, most replies were about how the manuscript doesn't look like a potentially damning book. Under the prisoner scenario it would be the specific goal of the creator to make it look intriguing but neither damning nor revealing. -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
Bluetoes101 > 28-11-2025, 07:18 PM
What I imagine for a plot of.. prisoner makes the VMS movie is:
A person claims they can do something very grand. Philosophers stone. A potion for eternal life. Whatever.
Somehow they manage to scrounge from some wealthy (and silly) patron, building up a large debt.
Eventually they run out of excuses, the patron locks them up.
They then agree to do the works, but as a "get out of jail card" they write it in the "original language" - Angels/Demons. Whatever.
They produce sheet after sheet and the Patron and his experts can't crack the code or read any of it.
When it is finished he reads to them what the manuscript says. They need a plant that is a third poppy, a third blackberry and a third tulip. They need to wait for 400th day of the year and then when the sun touches the moon....
Hey, don't look at me like that. Angels said all this, are you saying angels lie?!
Anyway.. what's for dinner? -
RE: The prisoner scenario: a though experiment
Rafal > 28-11-2025, 07:44 PM
I believe that creating Voynich Manuscript required contact with many another books.
It has been shown in other threads that some pictures are inspired by pictures from another works.
So our hypothetical prisoner had either photographic memory or access to expensive manuscripts.
