Your opinion on the Voynich Manuscript (help a book club)

I’ve volunteered to do a presentation for a friend’s book club. I’ve chosen to present the Voynich Manuscript. As part of their assignment I’m having the book club members create an ATS account and participate in this thread over the next month or so.

I hope you will be kind enough to give them a warm welcome.

Most importantly I hope that you will offer your favorite theory on the origin of the Voynich Manuscript. Tongue in cheek theories are welcome. Stars will be dispensed handsomely for creative and comical opinions.

Links to your favorite Voynich Manuscript resources online are also much appreciated.

Voynich Manuscript Wiki:
en.wikipedia.org...

Voynich Manuscript PDF:
archive.org...

Cheers!
CraftBuilder

Well It would seem to be a botanical notebook of some kind. I typed the name of the book into the ATS search engine and lots of threads showed up about it. If they read through that list, they'll find tons of opinions and comments, including some great pictures. It sounds like a fun project. Wishing you and your friends all the best in this adventure!

There's actually a few great threads on ATS about it. I redrew a couple of the images and posted it in one of those threads. Try searching ATS,

www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Someone figured it out... I don't remember who but I was fairly obsessed with this bad devil for a month or so, I remember feeling very satisfied with I believe an older ladies idea and another groups expansion on that idea. Was very thorough.

a reply to: aboutface

I will be directing them to some of the material on this site. The main purpose for creating this particular thread however is to broaden their experiences by introducing them to the online alternative topics community and having them actually participate in a thread. This is quite a step out of the comfort zone for many of the book club members. Any advice or opinions you choose to share with them is appreciated.

a reply to: mindseye1609

Yup, somebody claims they have figured it out about once or twice a year.

a reply to: Rosinitiate

Thanks Rosinitatiate.

What is your opinion on it?

a reply to: CraftBuilder

Yeah Perfect

It changed my life.

My Thread Here

a reply to: CraftBuilder

Cool topic!

My theory is: It's one Darwinian evolutionary path of how women came into existence from plants - separate and distinct from men who come from the Darwinian path of mammals and apes.

It discusses cycles, the birthing process, the analogizing of the fertilization process to one which resembles nature's pollination processes, maturation, age, and the like.

In a nutshell, it demonstrates the absolute differences between the female and male - not just based on physiology, but also - historical psychology which may be why men and women think so inherently different.

I don't understand the language. I'm suspecting it's gibberish - a red herring. That or there's another 'dimension' to the writing that our technology didn't or couldn't capture with the PDF and traditional scanning technology.

The pictures make this dialog and analogy to the woman's life pretty evident to me.

That is: that female 'evolution' took a dramatically different path from the male's.

And there's a collective nature to the female form based on her ancestry.

I'd be darned curious about the manuscript in real life.

Does anyone have access to this?

Does it show any unusual signs, like conflicted carbon dating readings and/or unusual lighting and colors which for some reason can't be captured leveraging digital technology?

a reply to: universalbri
Well your comment is a lot more constructive than the new guy's.

Are you thinking this is how they thought at the time or that this is actually a viable theory on female evolution now?

It seems to be a coded medical manual. A how-to book that competitors or patients can't read.

a reply to: CraftBuilder

For literature lovers, an interesting review of the Voynich Manuscript can be found here.

Also, thanks to Pteridine for linking my ATS thread on the Manuscript earlier.

Its a doodle folder. Nothing but gibberish and drawings.

IMO, it is the notes of someone who traveled to the Americas. There are several people who propose that some of the plants therein are found only in south and central America.

The language could be a one off that some random family or group created for governmental purposes, family secrets, fraternal order that never made past a few decades...what ever. Its not hard to make a script, I made one in HS for fun. This is not some random BS. The source language is probably some far off unexpected language that we wouldnt ever think of. Possibly a dead language. The idea that some family or group somewhere was cataloging plants they had seen somewhere for whatever reason is strong.

IMO, disease, war, or some other happening made this family or group die off and their only legacy is this strange book.

I am not saying that it cant just be a copy of some other works from a remote past when these plants were common place...somewhere. I am just saying that traditional sailing is often seen as primitive, though a sailboat can get you from Europe to Japan as surely as a jet....

I am thinking merchants who found a terrific route to the Americas and died when they made their last trip due to weather. Perhaps they were making several runs and the weather was off that year or decade making a route to the Americas more direct. Then weather normalized and they no longer could make it back home or were killed at sea.

Maybe they just decided to stay where ever they were going.

SO, I think its the flora of the Americas, written in a nondescript script that some group invented for the purpose of clandestine information gathering....perhaps a family or a fraternal order that died off in the pursuit of these far off natural rare treasures.

It could be copies of other older works from Europe or the ME, Africa or Asia....when these plants existed there...

Just a thought.

originally posted by: CraftBuilder
a reply to: Rosinitiate

Thanks Rosinitatiate.

What is your opinion on it?

Here's my personal take for what it's worth.

It seems genuine regardless of argument.

It isn't original. I believe it was copied and likely in haste. Well, actually, the drawing was not at the same caliper as the font. They lacked a skill needed to truly express the image which leads me to believe rushed or copied by maybe a student of sorts.

No known species in the book exist on earth as far as I know but I do recall reading an article showing a stark similarity to one known plant here.

The drawings that look like castles, tunnels and water pipes look uncanny to a plant cell under a microscope.

I think it was a research paper on plants written in code to not risk impriosnment or death for studying "witchcraft". Certainly intriguing if nothing else.

Letters are too consistent to be nothing at all.

this book is very fascinating to me. My intuition tells me that it is not fake and content is not gibberish. There was maybe an older original book from which somebody copied content into this script we have today.

The language in the book is very old and probably long gone. Maybe from some previous ancient civilizations? And that is way we have so much trouble discovering the meaning.

originally posted by: Rosinitiate

originally posted by: CraftBuilder
a reply to: Rosinitiate

Thanks Rosinitatiate.

What is your opinion on it?

It isn't original. I believe it was copied and likely in haste. Well, actually, the drawing was not at the same caliper as the font. They lacked a skill needed to truly express the image which leads me to believe rushed or copied by maybe a student of sorts.

Antique fraud seems to be the most likely mundane explanation but, there are some problems with that.

If it was created as a fraud to sell to some nobility as an ancient mystical or alchemical tome whose key has been lost to the ages, it would have needed to look old at the time of delivery. The vellum itself was only written on once so, how could the fraudsters have made a convincing faux relic? Maybe they found an old piece of vellum? How did they make the text appear non-contemporaneous?

The Voynich MS is written on parchment made of calf skin. The limp vellum cover is made of goat skin, and was added at a much later date i.e. it is not part of the original MS (1). The quality of the parchment of the pages is reasonably good, but certainly not top rated. Also the edges of the skins were used, as some folios show concave outlines. Folios with holes were equally used, and in some places stiches, applied during the parchment production process (stretching), are still visible. These minor deficiencies are not uncommon in parchment codices. Parchment was a relatively expensive material, and top rated vellum (e.g. uterine velum) was very expensive indeed. The parchment used for the MS was certainly prepared with extreme care and significant effort, and it is barely possibly nowadays to distinguish the hair side from the flesh side of the leaves in the MS (2). In many places marks of the stretching of the parchment during its production are visible - mostly under the microscope, but it is easily visible to the naked eye even on some of the lower resolution images, for example folio 44r (top right corner). The MS has been analysed under the microscope in January 2009 and in October 2009, both by McCrone and Yale specialists, and they concluded that the parchment does not show any signs of scratching, such as to erase previous writing. The parchment was not previously written upon.

a reply to: greencmp

I wouldn't call it a fraud, no doubt a very wealthy person had this commissioned. Wether original or not this book (or copy) was made with a lot of care. For the quality of goat skin and the knowledge of literacy, no was was it a simple feat to create. Someone with a lot of wealth may have commissioned someone to create a copy of an existing ancient relic. For all I know it was once an Atlantean text book.

originally posted by: tadaman
IMO, it is the notes of someone who traveled to the Americas. There are several people who propose that some of the plants therein are found only in south and central America.

My understanding is the 'book' is dated to the early 15th century, putting it over 50 years before Columbus arrived in N. America. I like the idea you put out of trying to track down the 'plants' that were drawn. I'm not sure of the Americas link with the plants.

The language could be a one off that some random family or group created for governmental purposes, family secrets, fraternal order that never made past a few decades...what ever. Its not hard to make a script

I agree. The script would seem to be an invention to hide secrets that are being passed down from master to student. There are some seemingly later notes in the margin, in the script, that might imply the knowledge to decipher the script was passed down to others.

Personally I lean to a Northern Italian botanist who was 'experimenting' with Plant Grafting and wanted to maintain his secrets. Some illustrations lead to Northern Italy. It is too bad the MS can't be read as there could be some amazing plant discovery it is hiding from the world.