I think many people, myself included, have been frustrated by the amount of repetition in the VM. There is historical precedence for repetitive phrases like 'Holy Holy Holy', etc, but I haven't personally seen examples of historical works that utilize repetition to the extent of Voynich.

Even under the self citation theory, you have to ask: why would they choose to copy the same word consecutively multiple times?

It's obvious that the scribes behind the Voynich manuscript valued aesthetics of the text, regardless of the broader questions around its semantic meaning. As I have been analyzing the VM, I am increasingly starting to suspect that scribes are intentionally choosing to render words in repetitive forms, even when other options may exist.

What if the answer is simply that the scribes viewed the repetition as a positive aesthetic quality?

I'm reminded of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the medieval minims phrase that appears to be multiple lines of I characters, but actually spells out a complex phrase.

With Voynich, the repetition doesn't necessarily even need to come from ambiguity of characters possibly taking multiple forms (although that could be the case). Maybe others have already suggested this, but it would explain how both extreme atypical repetition and semantic meaning could coexist.

I watched the recently posted "Voynich Talk" YouTube video.  I agree about the Seasons of Life on f85r2 ; the small plant could be youth and the cane could be old age.  I don't know about the other two being a scholarly introduction and a medical person but they could be.  They could be making observations on the Seasons of Life.

I think the Seasons of Life theme needs to be continued.  The Zodiac is clearly about birth; the beginning of a person's life on Earth.  A person's zodiac sign is based on when they were born.  You know I believe the focus should be on the birth part and not on constellations.

I think you need to go even another step.  There is no birth without a pregnancy.

The Voynich Manuscript is a Christian document.  It is about both physical life on Earth and about spiritual life beyond Earth.

I still believe that the goal in the creation of the Voynich Manuscript was to take medical and spiritual information from Latin (probably multiple sources) and make it available to young men who did not know Latin.

Hey,

has anyone else seen the current theory floating around Tiktok right now? I feel like I'm going crazy looking at all of it... completely unfounded.

For those of you who haven't seen it, a bunch of new agers are saying that the plants in the VMS (specifically 20r) are grown from period blood and moon water.... based on a video a woman made filming a plant that supposedly grew from her period blood. I won't link specifics for my own sake, but a simple search for the VMS on TikTok reveals a slew of videos that people are making on this. There's also some claims that the VMS was written by a female coven. It's obviously extreme pseudoscience, but I was wondering what y'all thought.

OK so recently there have been a few discoveries concerning authors of "Fastnachtspiele", a kind of south German pre-Lent carnival play/song tradition in the late 15th, early 16th centuries:

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These discoveries, as it turns out, might be relevant to the history of the VMS, so I thought this deserves its own thread. Several authors of Fastnachtspiele use "pox"-related swearwords. There is a list already here, thanks to @You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :

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The main authors are, in chronological order of writing pox-swearwords:

• Hans Rosenplüt (1400-1460),
  
• Hans Folz (1435-1513),
  
• Hans Sachs (1494-1576).
  

• pox leichnam
  
• pox haut
  
• pox trost
  
• pox lung
  
• pox grint
  

Quote:Gb fällt durch Vorlagentreue auf, ein eigenständiger Dialekt kann nicht isoliert werden.

Quote:Simon vermutet aufgrund der Textauswahl, dass Gb Folz nahestand.

• Pox-swearwords appear abundantly in Hans Folz works.
  
• Folz published about bathing, astronomy, astrology, and appeared in at least one occultism manuscript.
  
• He published an illustrated engineering book.
  
• One of his close friends/relatives seems to write in a curious EVA-like way.
  
• Folz often had access to, and used cheap parchment, for sketching out his Fastnachtspiele plays and songs.
  
• Folz loved to write funny and satyric material, making fun of nobles and the clergy. Quite the trickster, one might come to think.
  

In my opinion, the differences between Herbal A and Herbal B represent one of the most significant challenges in understanding the VM. Each contains words that are very common in one, but completely absent in the other. These changes go beyond simple word selection, as for example the bigram 'ed' is almost non-existent in Herbal A.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Herbal A and B are not really different languages, and the differences can be explained by scribes encoding or spelling a group of common words in different ways.

For the last few days, I have been attempting to discover one of these 'transformation rules' that would repair the severed word distributions between the two different Herbals, and I think I have found a few that have compelling evidence.


I should also be clear -- these results are ONLY between Early Herbal A and Herbal B, the Later Herbal A / Pharma sections are not included. Some other work I've done, has led me to believe that Herbal B and other 'Currier B' sections contain significant differences comparable to those between Herbal A and B, so including them muddies the analysis. A natural follow-up is to see if similar transformations exist between Herbal A / Herbal B and other sections.


The rules:

1. interior (ie non-initial) ch -> ed, followed by y (qokchy becomes qokedy, otchy becomes otedy, etc)
   
2. interior (ie non-initial) ch -> chd, followed by y ( qotchy becomes qotchdy, qokchy becomes qokchdy)
   

• chedy can connect to chey by inserting d; it need not come from chchy.
  
• shedy can connect to shey.
  
• cheedy and sheedy can connect to cheey and sheey through d-insertion.
  

• dchy 23 → dchdy 4; no dedy.
  
• opchy 6 → opchdy 3; no opedy.
  
• qopchy 5 → qopchdy 3; no qopedy.
  
• olchy 2 → olchdy 2
  

• chokchy 13
  
• chotchy 12
  
• chochy 5
  
• ychy 4,shokchy 4; dchokchy 3.
  
• shtchy, shytchy, chopchy, torchy, chykchy, otorchy, {ct}chy and dpchy: 2 each.
  

• chokchy 13 → chekedy 5, or chekchdy 1.
  
• chotchy 12 → chetedy 1, or chetchdy 1.
  
• chochy 5 → cheedy 2.
  
• shochy 1 → sheedy 8.
  
• chopchy 2 → chepchdy 1.
  
• shopchy 1 → shepchdy 1.
  
• chofchy 1 → chefchdy 1.
  

• choky 19 → cheky 22.
  
• chokaiin 7 → chekaiin 5.
  
• chokey 3 → chekey 3.
  
• chotaiin 6 → chetaiin 1.
  
• shoky 2 → sheky 5.
  

It's my first post and English is not my mother tongue. Some thoughts about entropy and the visual aspects of Voynichese, if I understand it correctly. Without delving deep into statistics or using technical language.


Much has been written about low entropy of the glyphs, but it seems to me that it is usually considered in isolation from the visual compatibility of that glyphs or the visual aesthetics of the script (call it what you will; it is largely subjective, dependent on human feelings and individual preferences – and harder to define, yet its existence cannot be denied). In my view, this yields in an incomplete picture of the puzzle, because these two issues are inextricably linked.

   

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My first thought when floating over the symbols and pictures was: I´ve seen similar things before. In books and museums regarding to Outsider Art or known as art of people with mental diseases. In Heidelberg / Germany is a very well known museum with art produced by mental disordererd people collected since  the 1920s. 
Many of those artists were not accepted as artist because they were mentioned as lunatics, crazy ones etc. 

But if you take a closer look at certain cases (Heinrich Grebing, Franz-Karl Buehler, Josef Forster et al) you´ll find cryptographed information and drawings of another reality. So what if the Voynich was created by a person with mental illness? I wouldn´t wonder if something like that has happened - and it would make sense because those persons work very detailed and have no limitations in their fantasy. Even if it´s just a thought of mine, you can visit the PRinzhorn Sammlung online You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as well as you can read a lot of books and articles about it all over the world.

Back in 2015, there was a viral picture of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which divided viewers on its supposed colors: was it blue and black, or white and gold?



The confusion is explained by our expectation. Do we expect warm lighting or bright outdoor light? 

Well, somehow this manuscript dress reminded me of it. And indeed, it's got all four colors. (If we may count "dirty dark gold" as black).


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Following some observations from the thread:
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In that thread we found in Augsburg, Cod. II.1.2° 109 a nice mermaid really fitting the strange "woman eaten by a fish" in Voynich Manuscript
   

But what about the other strange creatures in f79v?
   

That Augsburg manuscript convinced me that you can find some Voynich related stuff in bestiaries and I started browsing some German ones. I think I have something, sorry if it was already discussed

Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. Germ. 300
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Have a look. A pool with a mermaid and a lot of monsters, just like in the Voynich Manuscript. And these monsters really give some Voynich vibes when compared to Voynich creatures, at least for me.

The section in Cod. Pal. Germ. 300 is called "Von dem merwundern" - "About sea wonders"

I believe such a scene may be the inspiration for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. bottom.

Now a little twist. Probably neither Cod. II.1.2° 109 nor Cod. Pal. Germ. 300 were direct inspirations for Voynich. The first one doesn't have "sea wonders" picture and the second one is too different.

So I would propose an existence of some unknown German bestiary, probably no longer existing nowadays. Let's call it Bestiary X.
Bestiary X would have a "sea wonders" picture but more in a Voynich style and with a mermaid in Cod. II.1.2° 109 style.

I asked Gemini AI to try to imagine the possible illustration.
Here is the result, compared to Voynich
   
   

How do you think? Do you find "sea wonders" connection plausible?

Body:

Hi everyone. Since the title is quite short, let me expand on it right here: I want to share a thought experiment about whether the author of the Voynich Manuscript could have been a "Ramanujan-style" anomaly.

Let me start by introducing someone I find more and more absurd the more I think about him: Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was an Indian mathematician, born in 1887 and died in 1920, only 32 years old. He had almost no formal higher education in mathematics and taught himself from a book of formulas. Later he wrote to the British mathematician Hardy and enclosed a pile of formulas. Hardy first thought he was a madman, but the more he looked, the more shocked he became.

Ramanujan left behind nearly 4,000 mathematical formulas, propositions, and results. Many had no derivation at all—just answers. He said a goddess told him in his dreams. At the time, many mathematicians couldn't understand them, and some even thought they were nonsense. But later? Most were proven correct, a few were wrong, and many remain unproven to this day. Even more absurdly, his work later showed up in modular forms, black hole entropy, string theory, and other fields. Hardy reportedly rated him 100 and himself 25.

I've always felt Ramanujan was not a genius in the ordinary sense. Several things about him are too anomalous:

No process: often no derivation, just the answer;

Pure intuition: as if he could directly "see" the result in his head;

Sustained output: not one lucky hit, but thousands of results;

High accuracy: most were later confirmed to be correct;

Ahead of his time: many results were only understood decades or centuries later;

Mysterious origin: he said a goddess came to him in dreams; no one can explain how he did it.

So some people say Ramanujan's existence shows that the upper limit of humanity is not a fixed ceiling, but a hole that is occasionally punched through by some anomaly.

Then I thought of the Voynich Manuscript. It is a medieval book, carbon-dated to around 1404–1438. It is full of an unknown script, with illustrations of plants, astronomy, human figures, and so on. For centuries, no one has been able to decipher it. It is not simple gibberish, because its statistical features resemble those of natural language—word frequency, information entropy, and so on look like language. Who wrote it, what the script is, and why it was written remain a complete mystery.

So I had a thought experiment: If Ramanujan could write down large numbers of formulas that no one understood at the time and that were later verified, could the author of the Voynich Manuscript also have been some kind of “Ramanujan-style” anomaly?

Not Ramanujan in the mathematical sense, but rather: someone who had a system in his head that we still cannot decode, or who could directly “see” some kind of structure and wrote it down in an unknown script. We can't understand it, just as people at the time couldn't understand Ramanujan.

If we put Ramanujan and the Voynich Manuscript author side by side, the shared ingredients might be:

No process: Ramanujan had no derivations; the manuscript has no process we can read;

Pure intuition: Ramanujan said a goddess came to him in dreams; the manuscript author may also have drawn on some kind of intuition or mystical system we don't understand;

Sustained output: Ramanujan left nearly 4,000 results; the manuscript is also many pages of sustained writing;

High accuracy / ahead of its time: Ramanujan has been verified; if there is real knowledge behind the manuscript, it might also be correct and ahead of its time—we just can't verify it;

Mysterious origin: Ramanujan's source is mysterious; the manuscript's author, script, and purpose are all unknown.

Of course, the biggest difference is: Ramanujan's work can be verified. A mathematical formula is either right or wrong, and later generations can prove it. The Voynich Manuscript cannot be verified. We haven't even found its encoding rules, so we have no idea whether there is real knowledge in it at all.

So I'm not saying the manuscript is definitely real knowledge, nor that its author was definitely a second Ramanujan. I just think Ramanujan's existence suggests there may have been more than one of these “glitch accounts” in human history. Some left behind verifiable mathematics; others left behind a black box we still can't open.

Could the Voynich Manuscript be that kind of black box? If there really is knowledge behind it, could its author also be a Ramanujan-style figure? Only instead of leaving verifiable formulas, he left a system we haven't been able to crack for centuries.

I'm only 16, so this is just a speculation. I know there are probably many counterarguments, but I still wanted to put it out there as an idea.