RE: Can we go further?
JoJo_Jost > 14-03-2026, 06:35 AM
I’d like to add one thing: the reason the manuscript hasn’t been deciphered yet may be very simple, and it’s usually overlooked.
1. It may be a very, very poorly constructed cipher that ultimately destroys too much information. (I now assume this to be the case). I understand that cryptologists would like to assume that ciphers are complex and clever. But why not simply assume that the inventor of the cipher was not an expert? Rather, a complete novice, terrified of being imprisoned, so that he designed the cipher to be extremely complex. Perhaps he did not even check whether someone else, not in the know, could decrypt the cipher.
2. It may be a language that is almost impossible to decipher.
a. For example, he may have developed his own (possibly poor) language or ciphered shorthand, which he then encrypted.
b. As Stolfi suggests, it could be Chinese, perhaps even no longer decodable because the actual dialect (phonetically) can no longer be reproduced (who knows how many dialects have been lost). But it could also be any other language, e.g. as I suggest, a Bavarian dialect from a village. A dialect that was never written down and has been extinct for hundreds of years. Or another language that has died out and vanished.
3. I have spent some time studying magical symbols and languages (as part of the VMS) – in fact, there are similarities here too to alchemical symbols that appear sporadically in the VMS, which can be traced back to Greco-Egyptian magical symbolism. A basic knowledge of alchemy must have been present. And there are also some areas there that are considered unknown today and can no longer be deciphered (ring letters).
4. They may be spells or charms that for the most part produce nothing but gibberish, as was customary in such charms back then! That would also explain a great deal. I have highlighted a few clues here in the forum.
a. A person (perhaps due to excessive drug use, as was so common among botanists of the time) who developed a severe drug-induced psychosis and, in the mythical, hallucinatory worlds of drug abuse, wrote down a secret script that was dictated to him by God, the Devil or some other mystical being. There is a technical term for this: glossography (also: automatic writing, or in a broader context, xenography) – writing in unknown, indecipherable symbols whilst in altered states of consciousness.
Incidentally, that would also explain many of the images and texts.
All in all, there are many possibilities, even without assuming a deliberate hoax, that would result in the VMS no longer being translatable or indeed being untranslatable.