I was looking for a pattern in the LAAFU effects. To do this, I arranged with an AI all the glyphs in a grid and removed the spaces without changing the order of the glyphs in a line. This produced some lovely images! 

Letters were highlighted if they accounted for more than 40 per cent of the characters in a column.

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
                       
                   
                   
   

I haven't had a chance to read this recent (August 2026) article by Liudmila Rozanova and Alexander Temerev at all closely yet, but it looks interesting:

"A Glyph Is Not a Letter, a Token Is Not a Word, a Space Is Not a Space: What the Units of Voynichese Are Not"
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

 - Patrick

I am facing some accusations that the arguments supporting my hypothesis regarding the origin of the Voynich Manuscript are unscientific. This concerns Dr. Hartlieb's alleged involvement in the creation of the Voynich Manuscript. I present here some devastating counterarguments.

  (1) Some researchers consider Dr. Hartlieb too young to be connected to the Voynich Manuscript. I hold a different opinion and provide a rationale. Dr. Hartlieb was born in 1400, not 1410; otherwise, he could not possibly have participated in the Hussite Wars in 1419.

  (2) Dr. Hartlieb was the only person at the time who possessed the full spectrum of knowledge covered in the Voynich Manuscript. His works and materials contain drawings and diagrams resembling the manuscript's graphic content. Hartlieb's *Medico-Astrological Calendar* features various scripts and cipher systems incorporating up to 70% of the symbols found in the Voynich Manuscript, including the inscription "Michitonese".

  (3) Dr. Hartlieb did not write the Voynich Manuscript himself; instead, he commissioned five scribes to produce up to ten different versions based on his drafts, allowing them the freedom to generate words and drawings within certain parameters. This is evidenced by certain duplicated pages that differ in handwriting and detail (f70v1, f71r, f71v, f72r1). Therefore, there is no need to compare the handwriting of Dr. Hartlieb with that of the individuals who wrote the manuscript. The presence of duplicated pages and diagrams also indicates that the Voynich Manuscript is assembled from several surviving fragments belonging to different versions of the manuscript.

  (4) Regarding the depiction of the castle in the manuscript, researchers note that the fortress's general layout - four towers connected by walls, a moat or river, and a central building (*Herrenhaus*) - mirrors the original structure of Blutenburg Castle from that era with remarkable accuracy. This has led to the hypothesis that Hartlieb sketched Blutenburg Castle in his draft, while the scribes added the characteristic crenellations to the walls.

As the title suggests, I'm not convinced by our current understanding of the VMS provenance timeline. I've had this feeling for a while now, but hadn't dared to share it.

I'm sure that at this point in the history of the VMS, certain events and letters are discussed as "facts", however I remain unconvinced. How is it that a 15th century manuscript divides so many medieval history experts to such a degree?

My main argument can be split into three points. I hope, despite the "well-established" provenance of the VMS, it will cast a doubt on you, too.

1. None of the alleged previous owners of the VMS mentioned any of the peculiar aspects of the VMS. Baresch, Marci, Kircher talked about an unreadable manuscript with herbal and cosmological diagrams. But everybody failed to mention the hundreds of naked nymphs, though. One would think that this distinguishing feature of of the MS would be the first thing to mention in any correspondence. After all, no other MS exists with so many weird naked ladies. Why didn't anybody write: "Hey, help me decipher this manuscript with... 300 b*tt naked ladies from the 15th century". Let's face it, the VMS is not "only" a herbal. There are thousands of herbals. Not one has this many nymphs. Also, nobody mentioned the tubes and bathing scenes either. If I would describe the VMS to someone, especially an expert, there is no way I would leave those details out. Would you?
   
2. Voynich himself noted the (faded) signature of Jacobus Tepenecz on the front page of the VMS. Yet nobody in the entire known history of the VMS mentioned anything about Tepenecz. For Baresch, Marci, Kircher and others, it would have been obvious that there is a famous signature on the front page. These were not laymen. These were experts. Yet nobody, for some reason, mentions that the personal herbalist of the mighty Holy Roman Emperor himself, Rudolf II, visibly signed the manuscript on the front page.
   
3. Kircher's letter to Moretus in 1639 says that: "I can let you know that the other sheet which appeared to be written in the same unknown script is printed in the Illyrian language in the script commonly called St Jerome's". But Voynichese is nothing like Illyrian (Glagolitic) language. It is totally different, they don't even have the same characters. Either Kircher/Moretus are totally misunderstanding basic linguistic features, of which they are allegedly era-defining experts, or... they are talking about another MS. Not the Voynich MS.
   

   
Rosette 1 perfectly matches diagram f67r1. They have the same number of rays = 12.

Rosette has 3 14 rays in total. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. also has two different types of rays, but there are only 28 of them, whereas on the Rosetta 2 there are only half. In terms of shape, it is very similar to the f70r2. There’s even a sun in the center, but here’s the problem — this rosette is two rays short of 16; that’s exactly how many rays the f70r2 has

I couldn’t figure out how many rays Rosetta 2 has. If it has 8, then it could correspond to f68v2 and the same f70r2 (it’s similar in shape). If it has 9, then there’s a candidate f70r1 (but there’s no similarity in shape) and f68v3 (9 spirals, but that’s not it at all).

In total, possible matches: Rosette 1 - f67r1, Rosette 2 - f68v2, Rosette 3 - f70r2.

...And that’s it. It’s not enough to call Rosetta’s scheme a cosmological one.


What do you think?

While studying Giovanni Fontana’s cipher, I somehow noticed a similarity in the principle of symbol formation to the Voynichese.
   
   
   
   
Roughly speaking, the entire Fontana alphabet is built around O and I. Therefore, the lines written in this cipher look rather “monotonous”:
   
The Voynichese script, as is well known, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. — C and I — and most of the symbols (except, perhaps, the gallows) can be reduced to these two.

Maybe this is telling us something?

Hi, new to the forum and hoping to discuss the supposed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 


Going by the article, this might have been an early attempt at translation conducted by Johannes Marcus Marci. Now I know that this key cannot provide any actual translation of the manuscript. All the same I was curious as to why specifically this key was chosen. After all, someone (Marci according to the handwriting analysis) must have had a hunch that this was the way to go. They made sure to write it down on the very first folio. If they were just toying around why not scribble on some piece of paper instead of the actual vellum? 

So I matched the table above to EVA transliteration and applied the key to the full "text" of the manuscript. The result can be seen in the attached file (split for file size). There are a couple of legit words that in there, but nothing that really stands out as a likely starting point for Marci's substitution attempt. If he believed an simple substitution was behind it (and not having the luxury of conducting computer powered brute force attempts), I would expect that he would pick some word standing by themselves or serving as a label to some image and go from there. "Rex" (latin for "king") shows up a couple of times, but usually in the middle of text blocks and not matching any part of the text you might expect to say "king". 

Of course we do not know what Marci would have thought the original language of the manuscript to be. 

• Does anyone know a good method to double check if there are more meaningful words in this substitution in any appropriate language?
  

• Are there any theories as to their meaning?
  

Attached Files

  EVA_marci_1.txt (Size: 124.55 KB / Downloads: 44)
  EVA_marci_2.txt (Size: 186.25 KB / Downloads: 24)

I have repeatedly noticed that one plant in Botany is similar to another, and now I have decided to check all the plants for similarities. Here are the features I have discovered:
   
f19r-f32v
   
f9v-f23r
   
f51v-f54v-f94r
   
f17r-f90v2
(there was an image here)
f17v-f37r-f96v
   
f18r-f87r
   
f3v-f24r-f96r

Below, if anything, is my clumsy attempt to depict the general features of the plants mentioned.
As for Herbal B, you can identify not just similarities, but entire families of similar plants. More on this in the next post.

Hello! I’m Vladimir Aristippus Robespierre from Moscow, Russia. Last year, I published a report in which I explained the meaning of some drawings from the Voynich Manuscript. Since then, I have come to understand additional details and identified a historical context that closely aligns with my reading of the drawings: the author of the Voynich Manuscript held views highly consistent with Neoplatonism, a perspective that featured prominently in late medieval natural philosophy. This report details those new observations and updates a few points from my previous analysis based on further findings.

By examining the illustrations not in isolation, but within the context of the entire manuscript, I trace recurring visual motifs and color codes, which I refer to as “Voynich lore”. This holistic approach allows me to identify structural parallels and clarify the meaning behind many of these elements.

This report is also a natural continuation of my Reddit post ‘The word “tolor” means “fertilization”’, which became “Top Post All Time” on the Voynich subreddit just two days after publication. Here, I show that every single piece of parchment containing the character sequence “tolor”, which appears only three times in the entire manuscript, describes the exact same process: how the soul comes into this world after a man has fertilized a woman. Though each series of illustrations features different imagery, such as plants, nymphs, and stars, they employ a shared set of visual codes.

The largest fold-out diagram fRos serves as the conceptual core of the manuscript. It maps the interaction between the human soul, the sensory apparatus of the body, and the sensible world, a composition resonant with Neoplatonic concepts. The layout consists of a central rosette representing the brain, peripheral rosettes corresponding to the five senses and speech, along with reproduction and the sensible world. The grouping of the five Aristotelian senses and speech together follows the model of Ramon Llull, an influential medieval philosopher whose widely circulated works the creator of the diagram was very likely familiar with.

The present study demonstrates that the Voynich Manuscript is not a collection of scattered illustrations but a holistic system united by the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition. The key result of this work is the revelation of the internal logic of the manuscript. If the pages are considered in isolation, one can put forward a multitude of different hypotheses, but when the drawings come together into a coherent whole, their mutual consistency becomes so complete that the probability of an erroneous interpretation yielding such systemic coherence approaches zero.

Knowledge of the actual meaning of the illustrations immediately eliminates dead-end research directions. Once it becomes clear that the plants are stylized diagrams, the stars denote souls, and the nymphs are not bathing women, there is no longer any need to search for real herbs, astronomical constellations, or balneological recipes. Grasping the theme of the pages narrows the space of interpretations and directs research in a productive course.

You can download my new report here:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Hello, thanks to @Pierre Dumont Himself, i was made aware of a few extremely interesting manuscripts from King Alfonso X's Scriptorium with regards to the zodiac. I wish to understand exactly what was being depicted in these and how it may relate to the VMS. 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

All 3 of these manuscripts contain a section, seemingly about the constellations, including -but not limited to- the zodiac. In this section each constellation/zodiac sign is placed in the middle of a set of concentric circles, surrounded by the degrees associated with the constellation. This seems incredibly relevant to the VMS, and to date is the only work I've seen that comes close to the VMS style in any respect.  
       
   

But seperately, I came across a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from ReneZ in the zodiac 101 thread, linking these to Cod. Pal. germ. 832. This manuscript contains a work that until now I didn't quite understand: each zodiac sign followed by many squares, each containing a depiction of something. 

Including cpg832, I have come across 3 sources containing this work: 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (and other prints like in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) - Venice, Italy
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1491-1501AD, Regensburg, Germany S)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (~1500AD, Torgau / Wittenberg, Germany E)

       
       

Interestingly, the origin of this work is linked to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Venice, who was a printer from augsburg, but was first active as a printer in Venice (1476-1486) and then later returned to Augsburg.  This work clearly migrated north to southern germany and was copied, and then further north to be copied in eastern germany by the turn of the 16th century. 

Now, the works from Alfonso's Scriptorium were apparently copied from aramaic and arabic works, with Lapidario (h-I-15) apparently being sourced from an arabic book owned by a jew in Toledo. This was translated into spanish -and had extra content added to it- over a undetermined amount of time (years?, decades?). 

The question is this: do these works have a common origin in some way? Are they representing the same content about the degrees of each sign, or were these concepts developed entirely seperately?  

If there are more examples of either of these works (including text only!), perhaps it will become possible to link certain aspects of them the VMS annotations. 

P.S What should I name this category of work for the spreadsheet? "Zodiac Degrees"?