Starship Asterisk*

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

on Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:27 pm Emperor's Secret Agent wrote: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?

on Sat Jan 22, 2005 2:56 pm madmod wrote: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!

on Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:28 pm Markus C. Kuehne wrote: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

on Sun Jan 23, 2005 3:08 am towdah wrote: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.

on Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:04 pm nickpelling wrote: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...

on Mon Jan 31, 2005 11:02 pm Golem100 wrote: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.

on Tue Feb 01, 2005 1:02 am thirdday609 wrote: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

on Tue Feb 01, 2005 3:07 pm kamakazijoe wrote:Try adjusting to 14,567bce Lat. N28°, 9min, 37sec. Long. E14°, 23min, 42sec. Have Fun!

on Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:55 am sybu wrote: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.