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

a reply to: WilsonWilson

Fake in what way? Was that the show where they were trying to say the text has no real meaning? Just random letter creation?

just because someone's not smart enough to figure out the encryption, that doesn't make it fake. i think that's the intellectually lazy approach put forth by someone who wanted to be the one who "figured it out".

a reply to: CallmeRaskolnikov

They said it was a hoax and showed how they thought it was done.
Didnt look that lazy to me, they had to try and recreate the words that were used in the manuscript. As they dont follow normal struture of encrytpted text.
Looked interesting to me and and seemed pretty valid.
They werent disputing the age of the document, just that it was always meant to be a hoax by the guy who wrote it.

originally posted by: CraftBuilder
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.

Hello...

I strongly disagree with all the offered deciphering systems available thus far and strongly with the one proudly claiming to have 'unlocked the secret' here voynich2arabic.wordpress.com...
I do not claim that i have unlocked it but this manuscript has kept me obsessed for a few good years back in 2003. I will only share what i am certain of and what i believe to be a possibility - nothing more.

I am an Egyptian so i know Arabic very well in it's multitude of dialects, in addition to some Farsi. The inscription, whether running from right to left or vice versa, whether is a step down cypher from English or Italian, is definately NOT Arabic - so the claims on the yellow image on the before-mentioned website is a false assumption. I will leave it at that.

Closest possibility: This manual was one in which a master-merchant, working in the glass manufacturing shops (like for artifacts and hookahs) who wanted to escape a city in Italy (believed at high probability to be Venice), to the now more powerful Islamic lower influence of the Ottoman Empire. He simply wanted to give favours to some important figure in Constantinople by HANDING him the secrets of the glassworks trade. At that time, smuggling secrets of this trade out of Venice (or closer alt) was punishable by DEATH. Only 2 or 3 major families, a la mafia style, mastered and guarded the secrets of this trade.

All the botanical illustrations and blooms in the manuscript teach of the species and kinds of plants needed for the COLOR with which the tints were added to the glass. like blue, red, green etc. -at the end of that century, Venetians still extracted colors for crafts and paintings from several sources like flora and natural occuring geology (rocks, marble etc)

The manuscript is most probably, but not definately, encoded in a secret cypher language called the 'Sforza' cypher (belonging to the Sforza family (at these times, every family had its own unique system of cypher, allowing it to send letters and messages to it's own members and not being read should it fall into the hands of a competing family)

The manuscript also smuggled primitive maps (the four circle two-fold page) of major cities in Europe at the time, designs for advanced sewage systems in Firenze and Milan, and designs for the newly invented 'Hospitaliere' - The first public hospital in the continent of Europe! (These were all considered top secret and dangerous things to smuggle at the time. But you see, the author was on a one way ticket and never wanted to get caught. He adorned and fascaded all this with beautiful, distracting illustrations just for some safety )

I have over fifty pages of ancient book photocopied material and hand-written notes, a half-assed attempt at decipherment, and some other supporting material - but i never really got the job done!

Would be happy to answer any further questions and if you are really buzzed up, will look up this material for you if you like. Just need to remember where i had it trunked to begin with )

Cheers...

Frater210 & timewalker here rolled their sleeves and got through like 5%!
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: Hawke

Good theory.

What do you say to those who claim the plants depicted include ones of no known species, and to those who claim that they are known species — but New World ones?

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: Hawke
Good theory.
What do you say to those who claim the plants depicted include ones of no known species, and to those who claim that they are known species — but New World ones?

I say 'Claims' - that's all. Spend enough time with the illustrations, contact a proper botanist, do some search (preferably in a library with BOOKS - remember those?) -and you will find them all. Some were imported to this trade to Venice (a huge hub at the time) from all over the world. In my humble research, i have found a very few to be believed extinct maybe, but one definite thing is that in the 15th century, Venice was were anyone would go for glass art and artifacts.

Also, keep in mind the author DID want to remain unknown in fear of his life and he succeeded! Obviously, his trip to the eastern continent went wrong - he had made a deal that went wrong? And by the way i am a Leonardo nut too. It is VERY obvious to anyone, phd or not, that Leonardo is not the author.

Again the author wanted to carry all these secrets to what would be considered a rival/enemy, as a resume if you will and to gain favor with the Ottoman allegiance. I only say what i am sure of, or what i think to be the case - never outlandish wild predictions - otherwise i prefer to observe and learn in silence...

Cheers...

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a reply to: Hawke

Hawke,
I recall visiting your website(s) a few years back perhaps when you were first starting to publish your work. I remember you postulated that the author was in Spain at the time of it's creation. I see there are still hints of a Spanish influence on your current up to date website. I am wondering if you were able to match any of the plants in the manuscript to certain colors/tints for glass art during that time period? Have you been able to decipher entire sentences and/or entire pages yet? I'd be really interested in seeing some of your transcriptions. Cheers!

Ok, here's my take on it.

I've "read" every page of it, and while it's awesome, no one can make heads or tails of it. It's clearly not a fake, as no one would invest the time and money to make page after page of gibberish. The ink was expensive, the paper was expensive, binding the book takes skill, and to pay someone to do it, would be expensive. The book is real, it has real info inside, so....

I believe the correct way to read it would require some kind of optical-trick glasses. Like, one eye would be some type of prism and the other may be a magnifying glass. The prism would lay one part of the page across another part, like maybe the full page width is actually just a half page width. Of course, for it to work, it would be a ton of trial and error, not to mention if you ever managed to use the correct optical trick, it may come out in a language you don't even recognise.
It could be a prism, with a mirror, under candle light, while holding the book upside down, and you read it back to front.

If it was developed with a method I stated, writing it would require the same method, and a skilled hand to look through prisms and mirrors while writing.

I think it's the real deal, and to decode it would simple, if we only knew how.


Personally, I like to think the code was created by accident. Like, some guy was making glasses to fix his own eye problems, just messing around, and made a pair that completely distorted his vision, showed his friend, and they figured out that messages they wrote to each other while wearing the glasses could only be decoded with the glasses still on. As secret messages are just as important then as they are now, some one made an offer to either buy the glasses, or have another pair made up.

One of these days, someone is going to figure it out, and either we are all going to be really surprised, or completely bored with the results.

a reply to: CraftBuilder
Thanks for your post OP.

I was interested in studying this book. I downloaded
it about 9 months ago or so, but haven't gotten around
to trying to interpret it.

You might find this interesting but the CIA also
studied the manuscript, and their study results
(which is a quite large report) is available on
the cia.gov website, just do a search for the
manuscript.

Rebel 5

originally posted by: DemiMoore
a reply to: Hawke
Hawke,
I recall visiting your website(s) a few years back perhaps when you were first starting to publish your work. I remember you postulated that the author was in Spain at the time of it's creation. I see there are still hints of a Spanish influence on your current up to date website. I am wondering if you were able to match any of the plants in the manuscript to certain colors/tints for glass art during that time period? Have you been able to decipher entire sentences and/or entire pages yet? I'd be really interested in seeing some of your transcriptions. Cheers!

I would truly hate to burst the bubble but that's not me!
Last website i had was back in 1990 and it was about me getting drunk with my old friends lol ) - i have never published anything or shared anything about the manuscript because i considered it incomplete - my firstborn warped into existence and back then my whole life changed... My obsessions slowly became... well.

And yes, i have deciphered and translated close to 90 pages of the manuscript if i remember correctly, all in a bunch of notebooks that i strung together and put in storage (i am already looking for that boxfile since i joined this thread, so i can pass on what i had found to a younger gen with more energy). Remember it was not a breeze getting the 'Sforza' code... and even then you still have to walk it to an older form of Italian first - i don't know any Italian but back then, determination and obsession ruled my existence. But i am tracking it and promise i will scan and upload all what i find )

I was not interested in publishing and credit, neither am i now, as much as i wanted to 'unlock the mystery' in self satisfaction. Yes, it is some form of sickness. But has always been an advantage, that proven! However i am certain that the author was a master of the craft in Venice, not Spain. And that the key to the inscription is the 'Sforza' family code, of which any member of the current generation in Venice would be happy to share with you out of pride. I'm quite sure they would also be happy to share with you much more about 'The Book of Stolen Secrets' -that's what they call it. Voynich is a name they do not believe in... If you can, i strongly suggest that you get on a plane to Venice (before it becomes another Atlantis) and find them. A wonderful family...

Cheers...


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a reply to: Hawke

I would love to see anything you have deciphered. You sir, would be the first person ever to have successfully deciphered ANY of it.

a reply to: Hawke

Do you mean as in "Catarina Sforza" the 15th century herbalist?

Thanks for your awesome posts,

I had not heard the Da Vinci theory before, and it is instantly my new favorite.

However, some questions about that idea could be resolved by hybridizing it with my old favorite theory (that it was a very elaborate and incomprehensible alchemical fiction that some Renaissance rounders such as John Dee and Edward Kelly tried to pass off on some wealthy nobleman).

Perhaps Da Vinci created the Voynich manuscript as a red herring- he took his horoscope, his childhood exercises, etc and created an unsolvable puzzle around them, then dressed it up as the densest collection of secret knowledge in his possession. So if, as occasionally happened, royalty wished to cart him off as a war trophy, the first thing they'd pick up would be "what I did on my summer vacation, backwards and enciphered in three different languages, with some jibberish in the middle, by Leonardo Da Vinci" instead of "how to make weapons of mass destruction for people who own a mirror and have an eye for detail".

originally posted by: jough626
a reply to: Hawke
I would love to see anything you have deciphered. You sir, would be the first person ever to have successfully deciphered ANY of it.

I will get the boxfile. i just need to visit the dusty attic of my old home. However, i kept a sketchpad of all those beautiful mystical things that has intrigued me over the years so as to remind me of my obsession driven projects when i'm on my rocking chair solving Sudoku ) Here are a few snaps of some random pages with one of them a coarse instruction of the Sforza family crypting system, if anyone would like a go - until i raid that old attic.

Now remember, these decrypt into old Italian/Roman - but get so close to modern Italian you can make out the difference - at least now we have Google translate )









Good luck!


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originally posted by: Bybyots
a reply to: Hawke
Do you mean as in "Catarina Sforza" the 15th century herbalist?
Thanks for your awesome posts,

Your most welcome... It is truly a pleasure to be here )

As far as i remember, the Sforza family of the 15th century was one in four of Venice's families involved in glass arts, windows, artifact (you know hookahs - 'shishah' in Arabic, ashtrays, and higher artworks of glass figurines and panels for castles, churches and the like) - out of different grade silica from around the world. At the time, introducing COLOR to glass within manufacture was a well guarded secret. These families were almost at war in competing (Churches were a big deal and big money back then) - which explains the encrypted messages at the time (A prequel to the telegram and fax if you like, carried by a swift kid etc...

The secrets in the manuscript, at least the glass/botanical part, which makes up the majority, is what species to use in what color and how to extract color from them, where to find them etc. The manuscript, as i have mentioned before, outlined what at the time were considered 'cutting-edge' in scientific, architectural, astronomical, and engineering findings (This is the Renaissance remember?) -of course to the best of the author's possibility - Plumbing and water delivery systems from the new hospital (the first in Europe if i remember correctly), designs of Medici gardens, maps to the Capitals of major European cities, and many more...

I have not heard of a Catarina Sforza. But now that you bring my attention to it, they might have evolved some branch of the family to handle the botany they needed for their trade? it makes sense considering how important the glass tinting procedure was to them back then.

Cheers )


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Always loved this manuscript. My personal take on it is that it's an Alchemical manuscript with the pictures coded as well as the language. I believe the cipher was one of a personal/familial/societal coding lost to the ages. I believe the key was probably well known by, and the book easily readable by, anyone intended to be able to access the information.

I'm not saying it's not decipherable in the modern era, but that the key is probably so specific to those who knew it that rediscovering it now would basically amount to dumb luck.

I love hearing others opinions and seeing the links to other research done in this thread, this is just my $0.02 from the very little actual digging I've done on the manuscript on my own and my experience and exposure to other Alchemical works.

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts, and I hope to see more.

a reply to: Hawke

Nice!

I am very curious about the other 95%. I hope to learn something here.

You had me at glass & botany.

a reply to: Hawke


I think the premise you try to hang your hypothesis on is too simplistic and flawed in that if the only requirement was to pass on technical information then the enormous amount of time involved in the production of the manuscript seems counter intuitive, there are far easier ways to render basic information.

The work does owe something to Venice as Byzantine source material seems to have been involved, the female figures seen can be sourced back there in conjunction with cosmological charts, and given the date the Sforza connection is valid enough.

The work could well have been composed to celebrate the founding of the short lived Golden Ambrosian Republic, i know the castle at Milan were this was centred and the tradition of the conflict between the Guelfi and Ghibellini factions, or Elves and Goblins, they have some very splendid paintings there depicting the conflict.



It's possible that during the short lived harmony there would have been an initiative to compile a studied volume on natural philosophies from the sources in the otherwise carefully guarded libraries of the nobles of the two factions, that this gathering of knowledge would be beneficial to all and hence the production of the Voynich compendium in a shared cypher known only to participating contributors.

The castles you consider in the cosmological section are more akin to dream castles, concerned naturally with cosmological and spiritual establishment, i know that castle also.



In conclusion then i would consider this a work created not only by Elves, but also by Goblins, a rare collaboration of 1447.

perhaps its adapted from the book of killdare.
Brigid of kildare.

Brigid also founded a school of art, including metal work and illumination, over which Conleth presided. The Kildare scriptorium produced the Book of Kildare, which elicited high praise from Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), but which has disappeared since the Reformation. According to Giraldus, nothing that he had ever seen was at all comparable to the book, every page of which was gorgeously illuminated, and he concludes by saying that the interlaced work and the harmony of the colours left the impression that "all this is the work of angelic, and not human skill".[3]

Also with regard to the 'bathing-nymphs'..

Around 480, Brigid founded a monastery at Cell Dara (Kildare), "Church of the Oak", on the site of an older pagan shrine to the Celtic goddess Brigid, served by a group of young women who tended an eternal flame. The site chosen was under a large oak tree on the ridge of Drum Criadh.[12

And Monastery of st.Brigid

The eight virgins or twenty, depending on the source, under the tutelage of St. Brigid , also seem to have pagan origins. This tradition finds its parallel in the Roman temples of Jupiter and Vesta where virgin priestesses (vestal virgins) tended eternal flames. They may also have been involved in fertility and agricultural rites (Pomeroy, 210). Pomeroy also sees fit to emphasize that virginity is not synonymous with sterility. People would often consult nuns and monks to cure barrenness and impotence. Both male and female saints became known as protectors of pregnant women (Bitel, 178).

there is always this thing with the celts n 'divine light,heavenly flame,burning swords','eternal flames' e.t.c

in one of king Arthur's legends there is mention of cauldrons that swallow men so n'ways ...strange plants may have existed a while not so long ago.

Aside,the story of kildare goes deeper into irish roots/mythologies -->celldara-->Aengus-->Tuatha Dé Danann(pleadians??)

Now you know why the elves in Hobbit movieS 'Glow'.

i know of a certain lady of light(burning torch) in a robe, a book in hand,a crown of 7 horns,high high on a pedestal in the Americas... u might also know her.

originally posted by: Kantzveldt
a reply to: Hawke
I think the premise you try to hang your hypothesis on is too simplistic and flawed in that if the only requirement was to pass on technical information then the enormous amount of time involved in the production of the manuscript seems counter intuitive, there are far easier ways to render basic information.

I am not hanging my findings on anything. I stated very clearly that i would only offer what i believe to be the case. You can decide for yourself what you think would be the case )
I DID mention before that the author was very well aware that attempting to smuggle such secrets would endanger his own and his family's lives - that double fold you put here are simply cities. Major cities at the time. I believe most from Europe. He does mangle the details and purposely distort them, just as he does with the plumbing and water delivery systems, so that if caught, people would label him as a 'madman with scribbles' - that he still gets even today...

So, he was not just trying to 'render basic information' like you say. We always love a good mystery and try to give it far more than its worth. But once solved, well, throw it in an attic or old shelf - and that is exactly what happened to me.
After so many pages (i have given you the key up there, so go decrypt a few pages and decide for yourself?) i slowly get a heavy feeling thinking that this man, whoever he is, was betraying the trust of his own people - however after a few pages, the descriptions get heavier and heavier.

However 'magical' it is, that magic is gone once you solve the mystery. The cold truth is this guy was a lowly cheat and betrayed the family that took him in, taught him, raised him and his kids - and for what? The Ottomans? The blood-sucking, organ eating people who have warred and massacred in the name of religion? (kind of reminds us of the same groupies following Turkey to do the same in this very day and age, no?)

So there you have it... You can daydream or cook alchemy, pseudo-astronomy, philosophy, nymphs, ogres, dwarves, ring lords, romance, aliens, mirror-flipping prismatic masonry or whatever to your heart's content. There are as much meaningful illustrations in there as are non-meaningful, for DISTRACTION - which brings to mind the botany from 'extra-terrestrial' worlds... Two things i am sure of: A mystery is much more magical and engaging (and profitable) as long as it stays as mystery, and that the simple truth is this is a book was authored by a low-life skunk looking for a high job within the house of the enemy...

Also, you say 'enormous amount of time'. I urge you to consider that back then, such a guy would have drafted a page of those on vellum in the same time it would take you to write one on Word. Yes, think of it... The manuscript is not necessarily very neat or show pre-script margins like the ones we say in celebrated ancient bibles or other books (which REALLY took time, made by monks etc). The colors are not even mixed evenly. In fact, it almost feels like he did it out of sight behind some ox cart or so... Back then they would not take as much time as we would now, all those skills gone to keyboards, processors, wi-fi, ctrl+c, ctrl+v... And PRINT document!

Cheers mate )

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Hi Everyone,

Checking in. I'm still on point. Just the name Sforza in connection with all of this has opened up a whole huge new vat of research-joy for me.

I'm trying to burrow in starting with Catarina Sforza and Italian books of ricettari and have been at it since yesterday. Might be a sec before I have anything add, but I wanted to say "hello" and "Happy Weekend"!

Ciao,