Voynich Manuscript 'Has Genuine Message'

Mysterious Voynich manuscript has 'genuine message'

A long-running ATS thread about the very strange and mysterious book known as the Voynich Manuscript can be found here: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Unfortunately, the claim there made, that the manuscript has been partially decoded, is spurious.

The Manuscript has not been decoded. But – very interestingly – some brilliant scientific detective work (the results have just been published) strongly supports the idea that it contains genuine content and is not the empty hoax many believe it is.

The original, peer-reviewed paper on the subject is available, open access, here.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Voynich Manuscript: it is a thick, handwritten and profusely illustrated parchment book written in a mysterious script and language, neither of which have ever been deciphered. It is full of detailed, naturalistic illustrations of plants, yet none of these plants are known to exist. It also contains lots of pictures of naked women, astronomical diagrams (including one that looks a bit like an upside-down picture of the Galaxy) and what looks like some kind of weird biochemical experiment involving humans. The Manuscript is thought to date to the sixteenth century.

You can look at the entire manuscript here.

I think I've solved it. (99% joking, 1% serious.)

I started looking at the pages which were just manuscript, image 101. I was surprised at the frequency with which the letters "GOLF" occur, sometimes three times a line. I spot checked a few other pages and found the same thing. (That's the end of my serious contribution.)

My conclusion? He was an avid golfer, and the drawings are pictures of the plants he encountered after landing in the rough. (I didn't look for naked ladies, but foursomes are standard in golf.)

reply to post by charles1952


What a brilliant synopsis of such a mysterious book.Golf. Of course!

Great catch Op... The use of statistics and organized structure to help solve this mystery is a good addition...

reply to post by Astyanax


Dear Astyanax,

I am familiar with the manuscript and just had a thought. If the language is a code, what if the pictures are too? What if the drawings of plants represent different types of people or systems? As for the language, what if it were phonetic? Imagine that the whole book was written in Latin; but, used a different series of symbols to represent different sounds. S would look like Qr. What if it were like Braille. It is much easier to decipher a code than a phonetic language.

I met a missionary once, she had lived in Papua New Guinea with a tribe that had their own language. It took over 20 years to learn it and come up with a written way of expressing it. Look up the Navajo code talkers, the Nazi's and Japanese could never break that code because it wasn't a code, it was a language.

reply to post by AQuestion

If the language is a code, what if the pictures are too?

All language is 'code' – a means of capturing information through the use of a set of symbols whose meanings are generally agreed upon by their users. If you are suggesting that the symbols used in the Manuscript are an encrypted form of an existing language, the possibility has been considered; the linked page considers the arguments for and against.

What if the drawings of plants represent different types of people or systems?

What if, indeed. There is no way of knowing until the manuscript is deciphered.

Look up the Navajo code talkers, the Nazi's and Japanese could never break that code because it wasn't a code, it was a language.

'Never' is incorrect. All they needed to do was identify the language and find a Navajo speaker.

Languages written in unfamiliar scripts can be deciphered, though not easily. Perhaps the most famous example is the deciphering of Linear B.

After carefully examining the pages of the manuscript my personal conclusion is that it's an experimental language created by someone who had a wild imagination or was on drugs. Judging by the pictures it may be possible that it's some sort of dream diary or "trip diary". For some reason the writer invented their own language to write the book, possibly because they didn't know how to write in any other language, but I highly doubt that's the reason. What really stumps me about the book is the apparent effort that went into writing it... apparently there isn't a single error or correction made in the entire book.

Based on the dating of the manuscript, I wonder if this was some kind of witch doctor that was trying to preserve some medieval thought on the universe without being "found out" and burned at the stake for some ancient esoteric practices.

It looks like they did find some Latin in the book.

Two things:
1) The insignia of yale (page 2 of the manuscript link) has two mottoes "Lux et Veritas" (Translation: Light and Truth) and in hebrew "Urim and Thummim" (Translation: Lights and Perfections). Makes me wonder about the origins of the university and the motives in having a translation of the manuscript.
[Wiki used for above info]

2) What is on page 156? (Link) It makes me think of what i imagine a map of Atlantis would look like.

I spent time years ago looking at this and couldn't make heads or tails of what I was looking at.

Now however, it seems so elementary.

This appears to be a students botany journal and nothing more. I would think a student the equivalent of a High School student on our planet only for obvious reasons....not from out planet.

"Ok boys and girls, I have everyones parent approval forms here and in order. Please step onto the platform in an orderly fashion and I need everyone to behave on the flight to Earth. Once there you will research the commonalities and differences of the local flora to our own. Once you have identified at least 15 plants similar to ours you may begin researching the more advnced species on the planet. As extra credit, tell what type of reproductive process they have."

reply to post by Rosinitiate


Except the manuscript covers a lot more than just botony.

reply to post by Deetermined


What you never used a history notebook in school to reccord notes from another class?

At least the student cared enough about more than one class. and they all fit under the sciences....so it would be fitting.

What stands out most to me is the use of a particular letter. Notice how regardless of what word or where the letter is located, doesn't change its appearance (best I can tell, no letter change based off of order and location):

reply to post by Astyanax
Just throwing it out there, but what if the manuscript is the journal of an alien or inter/extra dimensional visitor who was making field notes of the various plants, medicines, etc. that it learned of here, and for some unknown reason there was a quick departure and the journal was accidentally left behind?

Yeah, I know it's a little "out there" but so far no one has been able to decode the manuscript, and everybody and their brother has been trying to crack it for years. First time I saw it and read of it "field notes" that have been neatly re-copied was what popped into my head.

Good to see new discoveries with the Voynich Manuscript, even if the discovery is just that they think it's not a complete hoax.

I stared at this thing for awhile a couple years ago and made some slight headway. I can tell you right now that there is a language involved in the VM and not just code, and I don't need a supercomputer to prove it. If you go to the pages in the 70s in the link the OP provided, you'll see circles with people in bathtubs drawn around them. In the middle are pictures of zodiac sign and a word. Example: pages 70r and 70v. 70r has two fish - pisces - and the word "mars" - march. 70v has a ram - aries - and the word "abiril" - april. If this is written in code, proper names would also be written in code. Since they are not, it seems logical that this is written in a language that has adopted the proper names instead of encoding them.

Note: the link in the OP for the VM does not provided all the pages. The one I have downloaded contains pages to support the theory that this portion is some sort of calender in that there are drawings of 12 different central images that all relate closely to signs of the zodiac and all with names that closely resemble the 12 calendar months. Each also has 30 or so women and/or men bathing drawn around the outside to represent the days of the month. Please also note that some pages combine into one month, like 70v and 71r are both for the 'ram - abiril' page.

If the great minds analyzing this text have at least gotten this far, my advice to them would to be to analyze the three aforementioned pages. The same goes for anyone else here who might be curious.

Do the words on 70r and 70v/71r have any correlation?

If so I would bet that this is the numbering system for the language. You can see plainly that the words are all very similar on these pages which also supports my theory of this being the numbering system since numbers tend to build on and contain previous numbers.

Thanks OP for the article!

reply to post by Astyanax



Mysterious Voynich manuscript has 'genuine message' ??

Maybe I missed it...what exactly was or is the "genuine message" conveyed here?

Voynich Manuscript - Revisited and My theory, page 1

My theory about this book goes like this: When I see the pictures illustrated, I fail to find any that seem to include men, they all appear to be women to me. The language it is written in could be a language from an entirely different civilization, perhaps dating back as far as Atlantis/Lemuria. Or it could be a language of a different planet, like Venus. Many strange plants and pictographs that have 'crop circle" written all over them. Maybe they are in another dimensional existence, like the fairy's written about in folklore, or they reside in the inner Earth. Either way, I find this subject very fascinating. I was curious why there doesn't seem to be any men in the pictures...maybe I am just not seeing them, they all look like women. There has been folklore surrounding a race of beings that were entirely women, maybe they wrote this. That is all I have at the moment. Please, share your thoughts. Oh, I watched a short documentary with William Shatner for those who care to view it...It was a little silly but moves along fairly quickly, if you don't mind his humor......

It's the work of a scribe who wrote made-up glyphs for a Middle Eastern language, about the wisdom of plants in medicine. The scribe worked for an incredibly wealthy family who commissioned his work. The wealthy family had servants and their Middle Eastern visitor was invited as a curiosity at the time.

The message goes something like, make an ointment out of yak butter and powdered plant and apply it for boils of the eye. Not exactly but it's a medical treatment book. It may even be encrypted for the sake of evading religious critics who would dismiss the remedies as a heresy or witchcraft because it came from a foreigner who probably wore out of place clothes.

reply to post by Rosinitiate

what if the manuscript is the journal of an alien or inter/extra dimensional visitor who was making field notes...

Oh, you're going to love this page of the Manuscript, ma'am.

Note the interesting location of the big blot, compared with, for instance, this.

The best, and most likely, explanation in my opinion, is that it is a coded book written at a time when tabboo topics were punishable by death.
What is the subject?
Aborting babies.