Voynich manuscript discussion: 2005 January 22 - NEW TOPIC

[Dan Cordell]

In this thread discussion on the Voynich manuscript may continue.

Please observe the forum rules while posting.

What is the strange astronomical Voynich manuscript? This manuscript was discussed on the 2002 August 26 APOD and the 2005 January 22 APOD respectively found here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020826.html , http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050122.html .

Any insight involving what the manuscript says, which culture wrote it, or even when it was written could be a breakthrough in this stalled historical field.

My hope is that the broad international collective experience and proven intelligence of the diverse APOD readership will be able to uncover some previously overlooked clue. Please feel free to post your thoughts!

- RJN

[InRhymedPuns]

8) Just by question...how do we know that is manuscript has significance and not just something a child drew?

[Helen]

Ref: Voynich MS

All posts reproduced here were extracted from a locked thread on the same subject. All links and references are re-posted in the order in which they were entered. For attribution to author please refer to thread.

To see the ms go to http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/ and search for "voynich".
Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Article in Wired magazine

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html?pg=1
Scientific American:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID ... 414B7F0000
Search the mail archives: http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voyni ... vmail.html
It's nice to see different issues at APOD, but this is one that can probably be dropped.
See: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com and: http://www.forteantimes.com for further about this document.
Since more than ten years, a new attempt is being done by independent
researchers.

Here is the main Voynich MS mailing list: http://www.voynich.net/ >
> And here is the most relevant web site: http://www.voynich.nu/
Posters' questions (followed by partial answer): Qs: "I thought btw that an ink analysis had been done already but I see no reference to it or to a carbon-dating analysis of the composition of either the vellum or the watercolors. Does anyone have info on this - spectrographic analysis would require minute quantities of these items - or on any description of the several pages now missing from the MS?" "PS- The coloring on the various illustrations is very sloppy, indeed. I wonder who did that amateur work and when the coloring was applied?" A: "From a quick grep of the archives carbon dating has not been attempted. There are two main problems for carbon dating:
1. At best the vellum could be dated. This doesn't help date the writing.
2. Carbon dating is difficult for anything between 1600-1950, as there isn't much difference in the decay levels"
One transcription program: "Let me try to explain the purpose of the substitute letter schemes. It's quite easy to write a program to count the most commonly occuring words in a piece of text:

Code:

perl -e '$/=" ";while(<>){$word s{$_}++} foreach(keys %words){push(@freq,sprintf("%06d %s",$words{$_},$_))} print join"\n",sort @freq'

But such a program will only take input from a text file. That means a file written with letters like the ones we have on our keyboards. Since the voynich manuscript isn't written with these letters, my program won't work on it directly. "
Question on program: "have you run your PERL code with any of the transcribed alphabets other than EVA? Several appear here:
http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html "

[Larry]

The alphabet looks like Tibetan:

http://www.tibetsoft.com/


The manuscript may be written entirely in ancient Tibetan.

[m.coates]

View the documentary "R. Crumb". In that we are shown work by his insane brother Charles. In this work are masses of what Crumb calls "graphomania" - lots and lots of totally unitelligible "writing" accompanying drawings. Could this be what we are looking at with the Voynich ms?

[makc]

To my surprize, I haven't found the way to move posts to existing topic. So, until this feature will be installed (which I will now argue admins to do), I will use this post as work-around.

Original RJN's thread - CLICK HERE

Perhaps not a ransacked Manuscript dating from the 15th century but perhaps a collection of his majesty Rudolph II's own hand spanning the most reclusive and insane, eccentric years of his life?? E.G., this manuscript was in his Library? Perhaps Rudolph's outlet for his fantasies of being the mighty scientist and discoverer he never was... exploiting a self-fabricated language to hide the lack of details in his thoughts and descriptions?? The diary of a mad, unmarried emperor?

"Rudolph was a clever and cultured man, greatly interested in chemistry, alchemy, astronomy and astrology; he was a patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, and was himself something of a scholar and an artist. He was the greatest collector of his age, his agents ransacking Europe to fill his museums with rare works of art. His education at the Spanish court and an hereditary tendency to insanity, however, made him haughty, suspicious %and consequently very unpopular, while even in his best days the temper of his mind was that of a recluse rather than of a ruler."

p.s. those 'naked chicks' look to be enjoying mass quantities of Hungarian wine perhaps.. did Rudolph II take of the drink?

As an amateur, I'm guessing that the diagram is an attempt to teach the hours of the day--not so much with numbers but just names. The star pictures (all 6-pointed, except for one 8-pointed) are mostly even totals of 10, 12, 14 with a few odd totals 11, 13 toward the bottom and are probably just decoration. It doesn't seem astronomical to me because the 12-hour lighted day wouldn't show stars all day long. The four little circles in the top part of the diagram suggest north, east, south and west and would perhaps suggest the orientation of the clock's starting point. That's my 2-cents worth!

At the time, this manuscipt seems to originate from, encrypting was a most common necessity and practise. The manuscript itself reminds me of some texts and drawings I saw in a french book about the templars. I assume, that there are people in France who might be capable of decrypting this book due to their knowledge of the templarian codes.
I hope to have been of help with this suggestion. Although I am afraid that it will be difficult to find someone willing to help, since even today the wisdom of the templars is considered a strickt secret. Perhaps it is not at all wanted that the content of this book becomes known in the public?
Good luck

I am no expert, and I am sure that anything I'd think of, the experts have already thought and looked into, but I must say that I am almost sure this has to be some antient astrology document, maybe even an old form of natal chart. after all, everything in it is in a number that is a multible of 12, thus leading me to think of the twelve signs. The signs are actually constellations, which would explain the stars around the circle (chart). The center design does not surprize me if that is what it is, since even in today's day in age, people like to decorate natal charts, especially designs in the middle. Natal charts can be done to prominent or ordinary people, countries, events, leaderships, even objects. One can draw the natal chart of his or her house if they want to. THis may be one of these things. Extra lines may be degrees, or so the movement of every constellation or sign through time to explain the differences emerging in the person or thing that the chart seeks to interpret.

It would not be strange to find astrology mixed in astronomy in such a book, since people in ancient times were very different from us. We tend to separate things and view things in a very exclusive point of view, not to mention skeptical. But in ancient times, people in general were very spiritual, and astrology was very much intertwined with astronomy.

Hi everyone,

Perhaps the single most difficult thing about the Voynich Manuscript (VMs) is you have to invest a great deal of time & effort just to be able to understand properly why most casual viewers just don't get it (in precisely the kind of superficial way many posts on this thread unfortunately exhibit).

Put simply, the evidence is there that the VMs was manufactured so as to appear simple, while actually being complex - more precisely, that its language ("Voynichese") is a tricky cipher system masquerading as a monoalphabetic cipher. And that's just the first hurdle of many which would-be code-breakers face here...

As far as the VMs diagram featured as the APOD, note that this has a twin diagram within the same quire (group of pages), but which has 8/16-fold symmetry, rather than 12/24-fold symmetry - and that these were almost certainly bound side-by-side originally. Further, there are a number of good reasons to infer that these (together with another nearby diagram) compare a 12-sign zodiacal (lunar) calendar with an 8-segment (solar) agricultural year (perhaps one based on the Ember Days, or one based on stregheria etc). But perhaps this margin is too small to contain all these good ideas...

Should you find this discussion interesting, there are many good VMs websites on the VMs (I'd particularly recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_Manuscript and Rene Zandbergen's http://www.voynich.nu/ as starting points), while Mary D'Imperio's "Elegant Enigma" remains the best book - all in all, there's plenty of meat to digest out there. But beware the scale: though this APOD thread is already long-ish (12 pages), it is dwarfed by the VMs-list mailing list archive (50+MB and rising), which has been running since 1992 and remains very active. See: http://www.voynich.net/subscribe.html - everyone welcome! Smile

Talking of dwarves, there's the Tolkien connection to bring up: it now seems likely that JRR was at least partially inspired in his alphabet design by a VMs photocopy owned by Francis Romeril Maddison at Oxford. But that's another story entirely...

Finally, one key problem (IMHO) with Gordon Rugg's "Cardan hoax" hypothesis (as mentioned several times in this thread) is that the VMs contains plenty of art historical evidence that consistently points to a mid-15th century date of creation - for example, Erwin Panofsky dated it to about 1470 - which is is a long time before Cardan. And if you then try to salvage the idea by requiring a late 16th century hoaxer to have deliberately forged a nonsensical mid-15th century ms, you leave me far, far behind. Anyone can claim it's a hoax (essentially, it's the cop-out answer), but the tricky follow-up question is: never mind by whom or why, just how was it produced? Invoking some kind of "random-number-generating" genie is both unsatisfactory and (frankly) unscientific. Oh well...

All quoted threads are killed. If I will find something like this in a separate thread, it will end up here. Oh yeah, me-to-Dan offtopic posts also were deleted (for we are not an exception to rules, are we ?) Well, the job is done.

EDIT: more threads are about to die:

From scanning several of the pages it is apparent that the Voynich manuscript contains coded information from several banned and blasphemous texts. Most notably von Juntz' Unausprechlichen Kulten, De Vermis Mysteris, and, most disturbing, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon. I strongly recommend that the book and all copies of it be destroyed before the stars are right.

that is a weird way to look at it i was thinking more along these lines.the manuscript it self seems to be written in a form of old english.if u notice the characters.i am not flueunt enough though to translate

Try adjusting to 14,567bce Lat. N28°, 9min, 37sec. Long. E14°, 23min, 42sec. Have Fun!

(not sure what the last thing has to do with it at all - but it mentioned "manuscript" magic word in its title, was locked, and simply trashing the forum anyway)

[makc]

Now, like I hadn't done enough, I 'd say, you gotta follow this link:
THIS LINK

[guest]

I have not gone through each and every page of this discussion, but has the subject of JRR Tolkiens 'Runes' from his Lord of the Rings trilogy entered into any of this? There is a very big similarity to both.

Just my 2 cents

[makc]

2Guest: http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... ight=#4160

[makc]

Not to sound completely geeky or anything, but I think that this is written in Elvish. I know how it sounds, but compare the two. They are remarkibly similar.

[ETX_90]

Throughout art history, the drawing of human characteristics (such as faces) changed dramatically. If you look at the face on the Voynich Manuscript, you'll see that it's very unrealistic. This may suggest that - if drawn by a professional - the manuscript could've been made at some time between the start of European Christianity and the Renaissance. This is basically about a period of 1,500 years. During that time, people drew things unrealistically. Getting more specific, something like this was probably drawn at some point after A.D. 1000. Before that time, languages such as the one that the manuscript is written in probably wouldn't look like that. This means that it could've been made during medieval times.

If that doesn't work, you could look at the actual face's appearance. It sort of looks Asian, but it could really be anything.

The first idea is probably more likely, because the maker of the manuscript could be crazy and could get confused between a British man and a Polynesian tribe member (no offense to either) .

[BMAONE23]

I was watching a show on Leonardo DaVinci the other day and was amazed to see a similarity between his writings as they were presented and this manuscript. It was said that he wrote backwards so no one could read his notes. Just an interesting thought. 8)

[Danail]

hello all! I am new here. Does some one know what exactly is the age of the manuscript and how its age is determined? Is it only by the letter that comes with the manuscript or it has been dated with radio izotopic method?

[FieryIce]

If I may suggest for deciphering the Voynich manuscript, to use a less conventional approach, such as for a science document, to be more specific DNA experimental histories or curriculum. The science of genetics has abbreviations such as DNA, it has formulas, equations, and the language of science is much different than the civilian written or spoken language of any time period, this could be what has been contributing to the difficulty in deciphering the manuscript.

For example the Dictionary definition:
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid; a nucleic acid that consists of two long chains of nucleotides twisted together into a double helix and joined by hydrogen bonds between complementary bases adenine and thymine or cytosine and guanine; it carries the cell's genetic information and hereditary characteristics via its nucleotides and their sequence and is capable of self-replication and RNA synthesis.

A nucleic acid that carries the genetic information in the cell and is capable of self-replication and synthesis of RNA. DNA consists of two long chains of nucleotides twisted into a double helix and joined by hydrogen bonds between the complementary bases adenine and thymine or cytosine and guanine. The sequence of nucleotides determines individual hereditary characteristics.

http://www.answers.com/topic/dna

There is a very interesting essay about “Discovering DNA” and more detailed breakdown for defining DNA such as “A+T, T+A, C+G and G+C” bases.

[FieryIce]

To illustrate this with an example:
check out Linus Pauling's handwritten manuscript notes titled, "Nucleic Acid. November 26, 1952".
Manuscript Notes and Typescripts

[craterchains]

The Voynich

Although there a few pages of what could be called star charts, there are far more about plants. Has anyone thought to consult forums of botanists?

A couple of the tuber / root pages look similar to the sectioned / segmented item in one of the Rovers images from Mars. The one everyone is mad that they ground it up.

The missing pages are highly suspect in that they are missing.
Possibly there are even more manuscripts.

One plant that may match up to a missing page is the Venus Flytrap.

Norval

[FieryIce]

Is this a cold case file?

[FieryIce]

There is an image in a book I picked up, Plants of the Gods (1979), that is reminiscent of the Voynich but when I searched out the actual manuscript online it is a herbalist manuscript from the late 11th century.

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
MS. Bodl. 130
Ps.-Apuleius, Dioscorides, Herbals (extracts); De virtutibus bestiarum in arte medicinae, in Latin and English
England, Bury St. Edmunds; 11th century, late



fol. 37r
Henbane
Henbane

[Stephen V. McDonald]

The book may be encrypted in an ancient manner. The alphabet was probably invented for the purpose of concealing the content from all but those who were intended to read it. But I believe that there is a key for decoding it.

See:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... er_big.gif

This is just from the picture of the Star with many stars around it, with red, white, blue and gold stars. There are twelve points on the star. Each point around the star has stars and a name. The face in the middle is perhaps supposed to be Abraham. These twelve points are the twelve tribes of Israel. God said to Abraham in Genisis 22:17 "I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven" That could be why each point of the central star has many stars within. If someone can determine the names of the twelve tribes in the word at each point of the star, this could provide a key to decoding the rest of the book into what ever language it was encrypted from, probably a latin or greek or some similar alphabet. Again, it was probably written in a lanquage that is known, but only the alphabet was replaced for encryption and the star I mentioned is a key, not an illustration. Even the drawings might mean something other than what they seem.
8)
It may also represent the Lamb upon His throne, surrounded by the twenty and four elders. The red representing His blood, the blue representing the royalty of the twelve Jewish tribes, the white with stars representing His own holiness granted to them that believe, and the great multitude of believers throughout the ages (stars). But again, the names of the twelve tribes may come into play, or perhaps names of the apostles instead.

It could also be twelve months, but then I would think that the stars would be in the blue field, not the white field, because, represnting time, the white and blue would then represent night and day.

It could have another meaning, but that star may still be the best chance of deciphering it's content. At least the number of letters in each word may provide a clue.

[ckam]

you know, a wordf from kabbalist might help if the one who wrote it was also kabbalist, so go ahead try.

[obscured by clouds]

Well whatever it is or was for, I still find it pretty cool.


All I can add to this discussion is this audio file that I had and found for this post, terence mckenna - VoynichManuscript.mp3

http://mckenna.psychedelic-library.org/ ... t%20rc.mp3

[mgeorge]

See http://www.edithsherwood.com/

[BMAONE23]

MGEORGE'S website link comes up as a "Malicious website" on my security filter

[makc]

I see "Leonardo da Vinci and the Voynich Manuscript" by "Edith Sherwood Ph. D." in firefox.

[BMAONE23]

Well, I guess my filter needs a little tweaking then.