VMs: Map + astrological + legs + cipher hypothesis...?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Here's a fairly bizarre (but actually quite sensible) hypothesis which 
might link together many of the parts of the VMS into a single 
cryptographic entity: hopefully it can be tested...

If the 9-rosette map page is an encrypted diagram of the "folding key" 
encoding/decoding apparatus, where did the author hide the 8 rotation keys 
that would go on it? It's possible that they're encrypted in extremely 
subtle ways on the same page, but maybe we can do better...

Each hidden rotation key (basically, a rotatable monoalphabetic cipher) 
would need to contain roughly 30 characters (for an alphabet plus a few 
additional symbols, like "&"): and might well look like a volvelle... all 
of which sounds an awful lot like the astrological section. In fact, 
exactly eight of the astrological volvelles contain 30 symbols (the other 
two are split into two), which is interesting...

But wait - having done everything else, I don't believe our author is so 
stupid as to simply make these keys simply visible to us (at the front or 
end of every astrological label)... he's going to make us work a little 
harder to find them, damn him.

So, my further hypothesis is that the leg positions of the nymphs (or arm 
positions) indicate where in the attached label the key is located 
(probably front or back of the string... though this wlll take a bit of 
working out just yet). This would explain why the labels are so short, why 
the nymphs are posed, and how the volvelles link up with the map page.

Interesting? :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....


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