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+--- Thread: Images as misdirection? (/thread-5232.html)
Images as misdirection? - funkylibrarian - 13-01-2026
I've searched through the forum and elsewhere on line, and I haven't seen any exploration of an idea that's been running through my mind. Mind you, I'm not a scholar and haven't submerged myself in the existing scholarship.
Most discussions relate to whether the manuscript is a hoax or has meaning encoded in the text, but what if only part of the manuscript is something of a hoax? The 15th century was a time of religious persecution and forced conversions, and it could have been dangerous for folks to have, say, a Jewish text in their possession (such as with Crypto-Judaism). In order to protect the content of an unauthorized manuscript, two strategies might have been taken:
- Encode the text so that outsiders would not be able to read its contents
- Adorn the encoded text with spurious and misleading images to serve as something of a misdirection; if someone was caught with a dangerous religious manuscript, outsiders might assume it was a simply a commonplace alchemy text of herbs, recipes, and incantations
A few other possible clues could support the theory that the manuscript is a secret religious (particularly Jewish) text:
- The parchment was carefully prepared, as might happen for a community's sacred manuscript: "prepared with so much care that the skin side is largely indistinguishable from the flesh side." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- The manuscript was heavily used: "Medievalist Lisa Fagan Davis describes the parchment as soft - a texture found in books that have been heavily thumbed.' This indicates the manuscript was handled or paged through a great deal." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- The VM word count is "35,000 to 38,000 words and around 170,000 characters," and could be even longer as it is hypothesized that several pages of the VM are missing; this number is within a magnitude of the Torah, with 79,000 - 80,000 words and ~304,805 letters, especially if abbreviations or shorthand might be used
- Some analyses show the VM text has an affiliation with Hebrew (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Curious to hear what others might think!
RE: Images as misdirection? - rikforto - 19-01-2026
RE: Images as misdirection? - Jorge_Stolfi - 19-01-2026