Cipher Mysteries

If you have ever found yourself asking “Where can I found out about XYZ’s moderately-loopy-but-eerily-hard-to-disprove Voynich Manuscript theory?“, then you’ve come to the right place. Here’s very probably the longest list of such theories on the Internet…

• Tim Ackerson is quite sure that the VMs was written in Early Welsh / Old Cornish from the 7th to 8th century AD.
• Zbigniew Banasik claimed that the VMs is written in the Manchu language (summary and links by Jorge Stolfi).
• Robert S. Brumbaugh came to various conclusions about the VMs (many of which hinged on his interpretations of the short number columns on f49r), such as that it was a 16th century cipher, or (later) a 16th century fake of a 15th century cipher. Either way, Brumbaugh thought the alphabet was a lossy number cipher, with each glyph basically standing in for an Arabic numeral. See D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma”, section 5.4.
• Dan Burisch claims that the VMs was written down in enciphered Hebrew by Roger Bacon, and that it describes some kind of alien technology from the future for creating DNA with sound. [See this Cipher Mysteries blog entry.]
• Jim Child, an Indo-European linguist who has been studying the VMS since the late 1970s, sees Voynichese as a pronounceable early German language.
• Jim Comegys believes that the VMs was a medical book written in Nahuatl (the language of the Aztec) possibly by Francisco Hernandez, and has written a book describing his claim.
• Erich von Däniken covers the Voynich Manuscript in his (2009) book “History Is Wrong”, linking it with the Book of Enoch and a whole load of other things.
• Karel Dudek tries to argue that the VMs was created by Georg Handsch of Limuz.
• Steve Ekwall posted two webpages on the Voynich as revealed to him by an “Excitant Spirit” in October 2000. Most of it is covered by his main web-page, but there is an additional “Folding KEY 101″ page here. Note: some broken links.
• Joseph Martin Feely constructed what he believed to be a partial decipherment of page f78r, but his claimed “clews” and his mangled Latin failed to convince any cryptologist. See Mary D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma” [section 5.2] for more, and a fuller account in Kennedy & Churchill pp.109-115.
• James Finn (“Big Jim”)‘s theory that the VMs is written in Hebrew, and warns of a coming end-time.
• William Friedmann proposed that the manuscript is written in an artificial language, not unlike Dalgarno’s Real Character. [see D'Imperio's "An Elegant Enigma", sections 6.5, 6.6, 9.3]
• Jacques Guy on the enduring life of his Chinese Hypothesis.
• Beatrice Gwynn from Dublin thinks it’s a sixteenth-century hygiene manual, written in left-right mirrored Middle High German. [Kennedy & Churchill, p.242]
• Wayne Herschel is certain that the star disk on page f68r3 of the Voynich Manuscript is a hidden record of a golden plate with secret writing given to Judas by Jesus Christ.
• George Hoschel Jr thinks that the VMs is a strange kind of recipe book in “Old Latin” (where f80v says “SAVED CRUMBLED DRIED TO HOOPOE KIDNEY”, etc)
• Volkhard Huth concludes that the VMs came from around Germany, and dates it to around 1480-1500.
• Miguel Lahunkun (a notorious Internet poster) claimed to have decrypted the VMs in a Google Groups post.
• Erhard Landmann posted up his theories on the VMs in German here [pdf], and in French here [pdf], and in English here [pdf].
• Leo Levitov‘s Cathar Theory (as summarized & criticized by Dennis Stallings).
• Jody Maat believes that the VMs is readable as a (vaguely polyglot) Old Dutch.
• Claude Martin‘s assertion that the VMs is not only number-encoded (rather like Brumbaugh), but also meaningless.
• Adam D. Morris suspects that the VMs might have something to do with Hieronymus Reusner‘s Pandora (a version of the ‘Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit’).
• William Romaine Newbold sensationally claimed that the VMs was written by Roger Bacon in a multi-layered micrographic cipher, and described using telescopes to view galaxies.
• Ursula Papke has a kind of NLP-like transcendental interpretation of the Voynich glyphs, wherein each glyph gets decomposed into constituent strokes, and the kind of “stroke harmonies” that implicitly make up individual words are interpreted to tell a kind of rising/falling/looping narrative.
• Chris Parry‘s assertion that the VMs is a-pretend-foreign-language-fake.
• Nick Pelling‘s theory that Antonio Averlino was the author of the VMs [book site]
• Rolando Hernandez Rivero posted that the Voynich Manuscript was written in “Old Spanish” (but with bits of Latin and English thrown in).
• Richard Rogers claims that the VMs is an ultra-terse Renaissance drawing language, to describe (presumably) heretical symbols without actually drawing them.
• Gordon Rugg‘s hoax-is-a-possibility theory, which makes use of a modified Cardan Grille to simulate some (but not all) of the oddly-structured nature of the Voynichese text.
• Richard SantaColoma claims that the VMs was probably written by Cornelius Drebbel, or perhaps was a stage prop constructed by Francis (not Roger) Bacon.
• Dirk Schröder has his own Kabbalistic / numerological take on the VMs [in German], which probably won’t prove very convincing to you unless you are already certain of the power of numerology.
• Edith Sherwood believes the VMs was created by a very young Leonardo da Vinci (even though he was left-handed)
• John Stojko‘s vowel-less Ukrainian theory: “Letter to God’s Eye“
• Dr Leonell Strong believed that he had deciphered the two pages of the VMs he had reasonable reproductions of, using a base alphabet local to a section of ciphertext but with an offset cycling through the set [0]135797531474. More recently taken up by long term Voynich researcher Glen Claston, but still doubted by more traditional cryptologists (such as Jim Gillogly). Mentioned in Mary D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma” [section 5.3].
• Mark Sullivan thinks that the number column on page f66r holds the key to deciphering the VMs (and that the underlying language is Latin).
• Mandy Tonks asserts that not only was the VMS faked, but that Wilfrid Voynich also hoaxed the Marci letter that he claimed to have found with it.
• Wilfrid Voynich was convinced – apparently even before he read the Marci letter – that it was Roger Bacon who had created the object we now call “The Voynich Manuscript” (but which Voynich himself called “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”).

And finally, Voynich theorists who wish to remain (at least partially) anonymous…

• An anonymous Greek individual has proposed a Jewish Arabic Voynich theory, which claims to map Voynich letters to Hebrew equivalents, to produce an Arabic text.
• “Michael the friend of D” (who is apparently from the Ukraine) suggests that text may be hidden across multiple lines (or if not, Trithemius-style in alternate words).
• Despairing of finding a book publisher, an anonymous German industrial technician has put his/her “De Aqua” Voynich theory up on YouTube.
• Here’s a Spanish “fountain of youth” Voynich theory (also on YouTube), focusing on possible links with Juan Ponce de León.