Cipher Mysteries

Many historians and palaeographers have concluded that the interleaved '+' signs added to the Voynich Manuscript's back page indicate that the containing text is some kind of spell, incantation, chant, charm, curse, pious utterance, etc. Well, it's completely true that '+' was used in all of the preceding forms to indicate that the (non-silent) reader should physically trace out the sign of the cross at ...

I've waited a decade to find anything good on the Rohonc Codex (and don't get me started on Wikipedia yet again), so it is with great delight that I read Benedek Lang's April 2010 Cryptologia article "Why Don't We Decipher an Outdated Cipher System? The Codex of Rohonc" that he kindly mentioned in a comment on this site a few days ago. Despite ...

A recurring motif running through my own Voynich research is trying to grasp what happened to the manuscript over time. If you examine it carefully, you'll find plenty of good reasons to think that its original ('alpha') state was significantly different to its final ('omega') state. My strong hunch is that if we were able to reconstruct how the manuscript looked in its original state, we would take a very ...

As a Voynich Manuscript marginalia cognoscente, I'm always alert for new angles on the various incidental marks apparently added by its later owners. So, when Tim Tattrie left a comment about the "chicken scratch" marginalia on my recent Voynich-frontiers-circa-2010 post, I thought it was probably time to revisit them here. Tim's query was whether anyone had pursued the initials scribbled ...

For a decade, I've wondered whether any of the Voynich Manuscript's circular drawings depict astronomical instruments - for before satnav there was celnav ("celestial navigation"). Here's a brief guide to three key instrument types from the VMs' timeframe, and my current thoughts on the enigmatic circular diagram on f57v... * * * * * * * A key navigational problem of the 15th ...

Here's the latest on the Savoy palaeography post from a couple of days back: firstly, I donned my image analysis hat and went hunting for any sign of the missing "l"-loop. Enhancing f116v right to the edge, you can certainly just about make out a loop above the "t" of "michiton" (highlighted below), which would be consistent ...

Because of the lack of satisfactory evidence to work with, there are two basic Voynich research methodologies: concrete (which focus on those miserably few things we know about the VMs); and speculative (which try to determine which of the quadrillion possible explanations for the VMs are most inherently plausible). In line with the first of the two, I've spent a long time hacking away ...

As should be pretty clear from my posts over the years, I'm a big fan of René Zandbergen: he's one of the very few Voynich researchers that have managed to keep a consistently clear head over the years, and it is his generally even-handed approach that casts a pleasantly affable shadow over voynich.nu, the website he put together many ...

Even when I've shown the VMs' marginalia to some very clever, very experienced historians / palaeographers, you can see that there's a easy stopping point tempting them: that because they are unreadable, they must necessarily be cryptographically unreadable. But the two types of mark are manifestly not the same: they have quite different types of unreadability. That is, one seems intentionally unreadable, the other ...

Following on from yesterday's post on Elmar's marginalia PDF, I've once again been looking really closely at the Voynich marginalia. I'm using the modern kind of fuzzily-overlapping codicology / palaeography / linguistic methodology that sometimes gets mentioned online (but which may be more to do with university administrators' desire to collapse three history lecturing posts into one) to try to model the ...