Secrets of the Voynich Manuscript

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my wife bought me a replica of the Voynich Manuscript last Christmas :) I "read" it nearly every day. it even has the letter included

After seeing some of the images from the “bathing section” I kind of think they might be referring to human anatomy or organs. The one with the woman in the “bathing machine” ( 13:52 ) looks quite like ovaries, at 13:56 it looks like maybe intestines, and at 14:41 it could be a stomach. The green coloration may be due to it supposed to be bile or stomach acid. This would also correspond with it being health focused or atleast about the natural world. But that’s just my theory. Great video as always!

I have a theory: The “bathing” section is actually an explanation of a plant’s anatomy and reproduction. Especially reproductive anatomy. The writer imagined women (or female parts) contained within the plants that gave birth to seeds inside chambers, surrounded by life-fluid (green, because it’s plants), and the seeds were carried out by tubes. So the entire text is about plants and herbs. The astrology bits are like you said, based on what to take when.

my first special interest was “weird history”— i remember being obsessed with the manuscript. this was when i first understood “information decay” & how much is simply lost to the sands of time. now i’m hoping to become a paleoarcheologist. i love the ancient world

In some ways, the theory that the Voynich Manuscript was written in a "universal" language makes the story kind of sad, because if the theory is true, then that means the project failed in its goal, as the book is now anything but universally readable. On the other hand, it made the book way more famous than it would have been if it was always readable.

Your videos make me feel peaceful, like reading a good creepy book when you're a child in a quiet corner of the library, surrounded by that old book smell.

It really makes you think about how difficult it would be to decipher an extraterrestrial language.

It would be so funny if this was just a sketchbook where some guy doodled and practiced calligraphy

Decoding this book is basically an annual tradition at this point, every year someone claims to have finally decoded and foud the true™ meaning of the mysterious text.

Alchemists actually did deal with plants as part of their processes. Many solvents and reagents start out as plant extracts that are heated, refined, and purified in various ways. Plants were also known to be the sources of various useful elements, like how sulphur is found in garlic. Alchemy dealt with whatever matter early scientists wanted to experiment with, and included everything from vegetation to minerals to meat to bodily waste. Phosphorus was discovered through one alchemist's obsession with urine, which by the way has its own (at the time) well known symbol in alchemical formulae. Urine, I mean.

It’s fascinating. Imagine a regional dialect, transcribed phonetically, then coded. Twice. That sounds entirely plausible. Especially if the authors were in a persecuted group with many reasons to hide their knowledge. I thought of Hildegard, I’m glad you brought her up. Wondrous stuff🙌

Getting a PDF of this manuscript, along with the Codex Seraphinianus (a codex that was intentionally written as nonsense language), were huge inspirations for the early 2010 reforms I made to my own conlang. Maybe it's just because I've been creating this conlang for 21 years and because it's one of my special interests, but it surprises me how so many people don't consider that it was a conlang made by and for its elusive owner. Not all conlangs are made to be read by others, but exist purely for their creators.

I've played around with developing alphabets for my short stories and I would also consider de possibility of the author creating the language for himself or close associates. The text and drawings are meant to look alien, but there could be an equivalent of everything in real life that only those involved knew about. Some sort of equivalent tables. the weird blue flowers could be equivalent to sun flowers, the weird hybrid herbs could mean the combination of some existing equivalent herbs. You know, to protect trade secrets. I imagine someone has come up with this hypotesis in the last 600 years, but you gotta give credit to the authors for developing such a tough to crack manuscript.

Alchemists had an entire discipline devoted to plants. Largely consisting of information on making elixers and ashes, there's an extensive literature on this

I'd be willing to bet that the Voynich Manuscript is actually a book of poetry and tales, written by someone who was inspired by scenes of art and flora they had witnessed throughout their life. It looks less like scientific diagrams and more like sketches from one's imagination, loosely inspired by other art and nature of that time period. I suspect it is moreso a book full of ideas, rather than records.

A while ago I came across a video series where some guy did some actual linguistics on the script, starting from the names of some plants and astronomical things, and hypothesised that it in was an offshoot of the Syriac alphabet (a fairly obscure alphabet in itself), used to write a language that would have been a cousin of Romani, spoken in the Middle East around the 1200s or so. Despite the fact that this would require the existence of a completely unknown people group, the argument was surprisingly compelling, and all the more tantalising for the fact that the video maker didn't know any Romani speakers to try decoding the text. The project was left in limbo after video number 3, and now the whole series has been removed from his channel, although part one used to be at /watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ and can still be found on the Wayback Machine. Weird but cool, I thought.

I have a complete colour reproduction of the Voynich Manuscript, it's called "The Voynich Manuscript" published by Beinecke Book & Manuscript Library, and is edited by Raymond Clemens. It cost about 100 GBP, and is wonderful. Its a complete, 1:1 size colour reproduction with many fold outs for the more complex diagrams. I've spent many hours engrossed in it.

Like others have mentioned, the “baths” look an awful lot like internal organs. I also find it interesting that all the people depicted are women. To me, it looks like a depiction of a woman’s body (with the tiny people being a fanciful way of depicting her organs functioning). Could the knowledge in the book have something to do with midwifery? Both herbs and star charts are obviously relevant to managing fertility. If the book is an encyclopedia of gynecological knowledge, the indecipherable text could be a way to disguise that fact from disapproving eyes?

Another possibility is that it was made with the intention of selling it to some noble or other rich person who dabbled in Alchemy. The fact that the book was in an as yet unknown language would have made it seem more mysterious and alluring. The creator would then approach some wanna-be alchemist and sell it to them and be gone before the rube figured out he'd been conned.