Voynich Manuscript partially decoded

Since Leonardo was homosexual, he would not have had much of an interest it seems to me in gynecology and various ailments of the female plumbing system, let alone draw figures of naked pregnant females at the age of 8-10 years old...we all know what happend to him in April-May of 1476 with Jacopo Saltarelli...'nuff said about the young blond male prostitutes of Firenze in the Spring!

The artist of little MS 408 (whoever did the actual line drawings - most are neat) may not be the same person who did the colouring in (inks - many are sloppy hurried attempts at filling in spaces) clearly displays the work / handwriting of an adult or team of adults using the same script (the writing is TOOOOO uniform on a page for example to be that of a child, even a Leonardo. and one can see at least 4 or 5 different handwriting styles being employed in the Voynich A and Voynich B section as compared say to the Recipe Section which is more uniform)-- surely none of these script handwriting/scribal-styles could possbly be the work of a child not even a Wunderkind and it clearly slopes as a right handed person would write not a left handed person - if you look at the even beginnings of the lines they are all LEFT-BIAS not RIGHT BIAS and they were written AFTER the drawings were done (notice how the script wraps around the plants &tc.)

The book as a whole does betray a northern (e.g. Brescian) Italian provenance but is probably a generation or two earlier than Leonardo's period (Leonardo was thought to have lived between 15 April 1452 to around May 2nd 1519) - the person who put these (5) sections together lived earlier probably before 1420 to judge from the 'general archaic style' of the female figures (faces, positions) unless he / she was deliberatley using an archaic drawing technique but he/she knew at least some Chinese to judge from the red Chinese characters for 'spring' and for 'heaven' on page one which look like markers--and the computer models show Zipf's laws working fairly consistentt with 15th century Manchu as a Base Language - which would probably have to rule out Leonardo if this one day did indeed prove to be the case...


At the moment NO ONE knows the base language or how many there were.

Most doctor-alchemists would have known Latin with a smattering of Greek and maybe a little Hebrew and Arabic as well as their own native tongue e.g. northern Italian. Maybe the Italian v. Latin can account for the 2 dialects (Voynich A and B) that the computer seems to recognise?

The physical size of the pages of this collection of booklets (and the red chinese character marker tabs) looks like it belonged to a peripatetic gynocologist who could have dangled the book at the hip and might even have been a woman (oh the shock and awe ! shades of Hildegaard von Bingen !) and the MS may have well be shown to have had some ties to the Gioconda family (so admitedly it is not that far outside of the later Leonardo DaVinci circle when he knew the Giocondas to paint dear young Mona c. 1503).

Apparently one of La Gioconda's (female) ancestors was famous for making poisons and all kinds of skin potions and hair dyes using abbreviated recipe formulae which kind of describes the recipe section at the back of the book with all the stars, some white, some filled in .

I would shudder to imagine that the recipe item paragraphs at the back of this strange coded book marked with clear white stars might have been 'pro-pregnancy' recipes whereas the ones with filled in stars were 'prophylactic' recikpes i.e. formulae to make and put to best use abortive poisons to eject the foetus--maybe with some astrological underpinnings for the best time to make any specific poison work the fastest and strongest ('to cause spontaneous abortion make an infusion of lead and BellaDonna mixed with the leaves of the strychnine tree when Saturn is at least 12 degrees rising in the western sky on the 13th or the 19th or the 27th day of the month when Mercury is conjunct with Mars in Scorpio...') Ouch !

Or it could have something to do with the timing of intercourse in order to produce a 'boy' (at certain exact times of the day-night-month) or to produce a 'girl' (at other times of the day-night-month) - there seems to be Astrological and metallic/chemical correspondences all throughout this MS408 and I doubt whether even a 10 year old Leonardo would have the required advanced knowledge of astrology or spagyrics &tc. at that age...

At any rate, there are not enough convincing arguments to link the VMS with Leonardo--especially a baby Leonoardo !

I must admit, the picutures do not resemble the supposed translated words. I am more interested to see if this method is able to translate the large blocks of text into something comprehensible.

reply to post by Sigismundus


The crocus flower was first introduced to Europe in 1560's. "The first crocus seen in the Netherlands, where Crocus species are not native, were from corms brought back from Constantinople by the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, in the 1560s." en.wikipedia.org... But the flower is native to Middle East, Asia, China and North Africa and I have no knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci ever traveling to those areas to make such drawings. Most of the flowers and plants translated are from Russia China and Middle East.

Originally posted by Solomons
I thought alot of people agreed that roger bacon wrote it? In any case i always thought it was simply nonsense and was not encrypted at all. The NSA have a pdf/book on their site from 1978 that goes into detail about it. In any case good find!

I read something along those lines.

oh well back to the drawing board.

I'll wait until the revised edition comes out and for it to go on sale.

reply to post by Supernatural


Not really. Personally, I think it's an alchemical text. These things were usually penned down in weird cyphers known only to the writers both to protect "trade secrets" and to keep the church from using it as damning evidence of occult practice.

I don't buy at all that it was a work of Leonado da Vinci because the book is too full of metaphysical meanderings. He was an artist not a doctor or herbologist, and his medical interest was in anatomy, NOT curing diseases and astrology and the occult hierarchy of the realms of the heavens! There's no anatomy in the voynich! It's occult - the whole thing is herbology, astrology, and metapysics, going by the drawings, which I am fairly familiar with that type, being a student of the occult for years.

Besides all THAT, DaVinci could draw a heck of a lot better than that.

Nope, not buying it.

[edit on 3-12-2009 by hadriana]

I'm not so sure, I still think it was the work of a lunatic who went mad while working as a monk. It would be the worlds most elaborate hoax to have gone this long without being deciphered.

I don't think that the code will ever be truly broken. Even if parts of it can be deciphered, it doesn't mean the whole thing ever will.

Originally posted by patmac
Appears to be an ancient shopping list of some kind. Interesting.

Reasonable guess, now answer a question, who during the book's period would shop for those ingredients?

Q 2. To keep such a journal you need to afford the paper. If you were afraid of the "establishment" but still had need to keep a journal would you try to hide the content?

Last Q. If you were copying from an even earlier journal and was not good at drawing would you add notes for the plants to ID them?

lovely to know theres things behind what was thought to be just a bunch of rubbish.

Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq

(1520 or 1521-October 28, 1592; Latin: Augerius Gislenius Busbequius; sometimes Augier Ghislain de Busbecq) was a Flemish writer, herbalist and diplomat in the employ of three generations of Austrian monarchs. He served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Istambul and wrote a book about his time there, the Turkish Letters.

He was an avid collector, acquiring valuable manuscripts, rare coins and curios of various kinds. Among the best known of his discoveries was a 6th century copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, a compendium of medicinal herbs. The emperor purchased it after Busbecq's recommendation; the manuscript is now known as the Vienna Dioscorides. His passion for herbalism led him to send Turkish tulip bulbs to his friend Charles de l'Écluse, who acclimatized them to life in the Low Countries. Less than a century later tulip mania was sweeping the United Provinces and ruining its financial markets. Busbecq has also been credited with introducing the lilac to Europe (though this is debated)[4] as well as the Angora goat.[1]

He returned from Turkey in 1562 and became a counsellor in the court of Emperor Ferdinand in Vienna and tutor to his grandchildren, the sons of future Emperor Maximilian II. Busbecq ended his career as the guardian of Elisabeth of Austria, Maximilian's daughter and widow of French king Charles IX. He continued to serve the Austrian monarchy, observing the development of the French Wars of Religion on behalf of Rudolf II. Finally, in 1592 and nearing the end of his life, he chose to leave his residence in Mantes outside of Paris for his native West Flanders, but was assaulted and robbed by members of the Catholic League near Rouen. He died a few days later. His body is buried in a chapel at Saint-Germain-sous-Cailly, and his heart was embalmed and sent to the family tomb in Bousbecque.

I would say this guy is a good choice for the Voynich Manuscript he is in the right area involed in the same things as the book en.wikipedia.org...and later robbed and killed by the Catholic League. Seems to me he had journals or objects the church thought he shouldn't have and his penalty was death.


[edit on 3-12-2009 by JBA2848]

Well She doesn't actually declare da Vinci as the manuscripts author, only points out the similarities between his handwriting and illustrating style and the manuscript's style. If it is da Vinci, he was way too young to have developed his mature style that we are familiar with. I challenge anyone to compare their childhood writing with their adulthood writing and see how similar (or not) they are. Mine looks nothing like it did when I was 8-10 years old. Although she doesn't say what inspired a young da Vinci to produce such a manuscript, it could have been his attempt to simply copy a herbal remedy book, applying the trend of the day, anagrams, to the text, while tracing pictures he may not understood completely.

I have to give M. Edith Sherwood credit, for applying a little common sense practicality to such a mysterious subject.

Is it possible she meant a "7-10 year old young da vinci" as in, NOT THE Da Vinci, but another prodigy? A different person? Thats how i read it. but maybe im wrong.

I myself, have been copying Medieval Manuscripts since the age of 8. I became a Master Calligrapher at an early age as well, and have actually made a nice supplemental income copying Manuscripts by hand for Rare Book Dealers/Buyers who want a "working copy". However, I am not artistically inclined in the least and can attest that although the Illumination that many people see in some exceptional Manuscripts (like the Book of Kells, or many Books of Hours, or Illuminated Scriptures) is not representative of the Illumination found in most Medieval Manuscripts. They are the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. Even with 30 years of experience under my belt, I can do impressive Drop Caps, Borders, and Drolleries, but when it comes to Minium, or Portrait Miniatures, my representations are crude at best, and very representative of what is found in the VMS (and any more common, rather than exceptional, Medieval Manuscript).

Crude Minium is by no means indicative of being done by a child or someone with child-like ability.

For anyone in doubt, merely compare the VMS to any one of thousands of Medieval Grimoires that were common during that time...The Picatrix (Ghayat al Hikam), Liber Iuratus (both of which were 13th Century) or even later works such as The Goetia, and The Lemegeton (17th and 18th Century). Every aspect of Illumination found in the VMS is consistent with the quality of Medieval Grimoires scribed by learned, educated, and skilled men.

I haven't spent the time to put the VMS through a full Paleographic analysis as many others have already done such. However, I can assert that the text was scribed by someone quite proficient in Calligraphy (which is one reason both Dee and Kelly can be safely ruled out as authors of the VMS, because neither of them had any discernible skill in Calligraphy and their handwriting was negligible and almost unreadable). The author of the VMS most definitely had skill coming from formal tutelage. Even just the use of a unique script shows an intimate knowledge of scripts, something which was not very common during the 15th century, even amongst the rare few who were literate (most monks that copied manuscripts were neither knowledgeable of the languages they were copying, let alone able to read them, causing many textual errors to persist in later copies of works). Again, this points to someone highly educated and older, not the work of a child, even a child-prodigy.

However, I think the author that asserts a child Da Vinci being responsible for the authorship of the VMS is not far from the mark. Their correlations between Classic Greek Literature, Tarot Cards and knowledge of both Italian and Latin puts this right into the circle of George Gemistus Plethon, Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa and Cosimo de Medici in the 15th century. In particular, this could denote Marsilio Ficino as a possible source of this work (and I'm willing to put my money on that...and if it wasn't Ficino, it was someone in his Neo-Platonic Academy. Just as they were responsible for the recovery of many texts from antiquity which brought about the Renaissance, they very well could be responsible for the VMS!).

I must say that this thread has inspired me to compile much of my research into the VMS over the past 18 years into a digestible format, along with giving me some new avenues which beckon to be further explored.

Hi JBA

I don't think anyone really knows in the VMS MS408 whether a Crocus is a Crocus (the drawings in the VMS may have been made from very bad copies originally copied from rough woodcuts from the 13th/14th century or earlier, or the artist(s) of the VMS may have been using pressed samples which distort the look of anyh plant, naturally.

The author-artist may also have been deliberately 'mixing plants up' on a single plant-image (the roots of one looks at times to be attached to the stems and or flowers of another plant altogether, for whatever reason) and/or maybe using the illustrations as a mneumonic device or a personal and/or secondary coding system &tc.)

And also I think in view of the number of imported species held by the European nobility in their Herbaria (making use of trade route / pilgrimage road systems) since at least the 10th century AD in Europe it would be virtually impossible to know when any single plant species was 'introduced' into Europe 'formally' (who's to say?) or informally (e.g. a pilgrim coming back from say the Holy Land or some other shrine with plant samples or seeds discovered abroad as a cure for whatever ailment was on his mind at the time), so we have to be very very very careful about dating the VMS from the weird drawings which purport to represent living (i.e. real, not imaginary) plant samples.

To me, the so called Black Death in 1342-1345 must have caused a lot of survivors to hit the pilgrim trade routes far and wide to find new exotic plants for infusions and elixirs as a cure (for that and other diseases of the time) and it seems there was a big increase in the number of peripatetitc herbalist doctors (and even proto-gynegologists !) after the Plague struck so fiercely and had wiped out so much of the infrastructure of Europe and elsewhere.

But as for dating the VMS from the illustrations - these could be used for indirect-circumstantial supportive evidence only I suppose since who knows when plants were 'actually' introduced where (there are a number of new world plants carved into the Scottish Rosslyn Chapel from c. 1445 long before Columbus, which shows the Knights Templar had knowledge of the New World species long before 1492.

We also can recall that in the past on these threadlet discussion groups some persons have 'positively' dated the VMS post 1492 (believing in the Columbus New World 1492 Myth) since there seems to representwhat they claim to be a 'Sunflower' on one page (f. 33-Verso) said to have been introduced from the 'new world' post Columbus but the 'flower' (or 'infloresence' type plant) in question looks more like a rare species of Jerusalem Artichoke (check out the root system and the nodes !) and not a 'new world' Sunflower at all--

Long story short, ref: the lowly Crocus (or rare crocus like thingy in the drawing in question) we simply cannot use it as primary evidence to date this MS.

Clear as mud?

reply to post by observe50


...and that could be the very reason it has "never been deciphered". Your statement rings true to me, taking into account the antibacterial properties of ginger & garlic alone are amazing.

reply to post by Bluebelle
Maybe a mysterious person came up to Da Vinci and said in an equallly mysterious manner: 'Someday, young man, you will be very famous' and gave him some $$

Wow, I totally forgot about that manuscript. Me and some co-workers had downloaded a bunch of pages from the yale website and were convinced we could crack it. Needless to say we lost interest after about an hour. Good find

awesome I love puzzles

The pictures reminded me of the movie PERFUME. About a periodic serial killer that made perfume out of women.

Now I got something to do in my spare time. Thanks!

S&F

Originally posted by fraterormus
Although Dee was the greatest mathematician of his age (and still the greatest mathematician England has ever had),

What? Comparing John Dee's efforts to that of Isaac Newton, the inventor of calculus and physics and I'd have to disagree. Newton is by far the greatest mathematician England has produced.

It is rumored however that the Voynich manuscript was in John Dee's possession at one time. If so it is amazing that it escaped the fire.

Hey Folks,
I just got done looking at the first page of writing in the manuscripst and as personal opinion it looks like the first page of writing is in a format that is very familiar. If i were to compare it to something in todays world id say it looks like a page with important quotes or sayings with the authors name at the end of each one check it out and tell me what you think. Link