Voynich Net Forum

Hi, let me speculate about page 84v (9 rosettes page). I’m not a historian or linguist but natural scientist and IT-consutant so look at this post as a contribution of a rank amateur.
However, I am passionate about history and if the history is mysterious, the better. My speculation here is only about the matter of the images and not the Voynich language or crypto-code used. I hope I didn’t include to many pictures into my posting. They should directly illustrate what I think they depict. Enjoy reading!

In the middle the heaven, over the skies of heavenly Jerusalem the canopy of stars, the firmament, on the walls the names of the 12 tribes of Israel or of the 12 precious stones in the wall of the town which is adorned like a bride for the bridegroom. And the 7 names of angels which guard the 7 parishes or the parishes themselves or 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit. The town has 4 gates which are guarded by angels. Here these aren’t in any good use for the earth. Stars are thrown through them on the earth and other plague (fire and hail?). And tubes in all directions to send out the sound of trumpets.

We start with the pic to the right of this heavenly Jerusalem.
Fire and hail all around on the earth. A lot seems to be destroyed.

In the next pic (up counterclockwise) a mount spites blood and bile.
A flood carries all this over the seas and poisons them. A castle on a hill, a château nearby (the writers homeland?) and a town with strange towers (earthly Jerusalem?) seem to be on the safe site.
In the next pic (left above) a star is thrown on earth through one of the heavens gates. Isn’t it a blazing torch in the middle? The star blazes like a torch and is in touch with all the water coming from the springs in the mountains, I suppose for nothing good. Drops of bitterness (wormwood?) fall down on earth.
In the next pic (right above) sun in the left corner shines on earth but only one part in the middle is bright, the rest is covered in twilight. Did the sun lose its strength? Something comes from the speaking tubes to the right. Was here a bird depicted and erased (is a guess)? Isn’t the word over the tubes ararat or urarut? - mountain ever connected with eagles (Prometheus, Urartu). Or means it simply Woe! Woe! Woe!

Next pic down one another star hit on earth, still shining, in the middle, again, something longish but not a torch. More a key to open something. And between the arms of the star not smaller stars, rather deploying swarms of insects. I would not be surprised if a word like Abaddon or Apollyon is one among those surrounding the scenery.

Next pic a voice come down through a tube and from four corners of a hill something like cannons spit fire, smoke and sulphur on the lands around the hill. A really interesting item is in the corner, looks like a clock face with two hands, not exactly centred (just man’s work, nothing perfect).
We go to the last two at the bottom. In the corner a sun-face, around the sun an arch at which end from clouds rain falls down?, in the circle two legs, pillars come out from their tops and other pillars are placed below a book. Are people gathered at the foot of the mountain-big legs? In the middle an open book with a text and a map or drawing. A volcano is outside the circle.
The pic next left belongs to the one with the sun and rainbow (same story). Seven thunder are sent to the earth from heaven but what they say shpuldn’t be written down and must be kept secret behind the wall of silence.

So far my short interpretation - now I have to find a book describing all these dramatic events! A small joke… yes, in my opinion here the apocalypse is depicted, incipient with Rev 8,6. It’s a cosmic view on it, very modern, astonishing for 16th century.

I’m probably not the first connecting these VMS page to Revelation of John but I didn’t find a similar description so perhaps it’s worth to post it.

Thanks for reading and regards from Germany

Hi ProxyS: Welcome to the forum.

"I’m probably not the first connecting these VMS page to Revelation of John but I didn’t find a similar description so perhaps it’s worth to post it."

I don't recall specifically the Revelation of John. I think it has been speculated that these pages and others might relate do various religions. Like many things, I can't personally count your ideas out, or in either. The Voynich images are just so enigmatic that many interpretations are possible.

But as you say, it is an hypothesis. Maybe it will lead to other connections to the Bible, or the Revelation of John, in some way. I mean, ideas by themselves (with no motivation nor context) are hard to validate, but if there are multiple reasons to support the idea, then you can be onto something.

Rich.

Hi Rich,

thanks a lot for your welcome email.

Yes, everything I write is an hypothesis and speculation but do we have any evidence in this matter? Let me speculate a little bit further…

I will stay with this mysterious page 84v but turn the attention to the singular words here. In particular to the words in the central image what I supposed to be a picture of heavenly Jerusalem with 12 and farther 7 names on the walls.

The second word (from the left) in the block of 7 is written more articulative than the others. It seems to have been retouched (corrected?), the two first characters seem to be bolder than in other words on this page. Curiously, the same word is among the 12 names in the section at the other side of the circle. The difference is that o is connected to the following character in the first place while it is not in the second. And this could be the cause for the retouching: to make clear these are two different words, not to allow any confounding.
I learned Hebrew can be written in shortcut form where the vowels are abandoned. People reading such a text know which vowels they should fit into to make reasonable words out of it. Assuming our author abandoned some characters of the original words in his encryption, then sometimes two different words would result in the same encrypted word. But here on the page 84v these words are singular and on a prominent place. If we had here 12 prophets or apostles or something else out of 12 und 7 angels or 7 parishes or whatever 7 might be, so they must be distinguished because a prophet is a prophet and an angel is an angel and not a prophet.

However, the assumption of abandoned characters (vowels or others) would make it pointless to try to find the original language of VMS by counting the vowels and consonants in the encrypted words and comparing the occurrence frequency with those of real existing languages what some people try to do. Could be we don’t have any vowels or other characters at all in the Voynich like in the shortcut Hebrew. What is the estimation on that?

o2o8,

this 2 above should look more like a mirrored S but this would approximately mean Good Evening in Voynichi -> ErevTov. I have followed my idea from yesterday (to let vowels out and read from right to left), this was adopted by Hebrews from Phoenicians I read. Then I tried to find 2 short meaningful words which would result in the same Voynich word and which would be connected to a possible heavenly Jerusalem. Two which I have found relatively swift are YUDAH and YADAH. Sure, the first is the tribe of Israel, the second is a kind how you should ´prise´ Yahwe on several occasions. Should this small correction made by the author in a word surrounding the city in the middle bring us on the right path? There are exactly 7 different ways how you should prise Yahwe. The mapping here was rather straight forward:
Always read from right to left! Second from the bottom would be then our YADAH. Two others end with DAH: TOWDAH (2nd from top), TEHILL(D)AH (3rd). The others from the top are: BO ZAMAR (1st, let’s go and make music; the two first characters are connected so it’s only one sound B), YAHALAL (4th, the very often used 89 at the beginning of a word is then mostly YAH, following
o which sometimes looks like a->W so o89 is then YAHWE), BARAKH (5th, again the two first characters are connected so it’s only one sound B) and the last YARE SHABACH (fearful shout) or simply YAHSHABACH (Yahwe testimony), B in the last syllable in combination with AH, ACH is different written as in the first position.

When you get rid of all vowels you will buy some ambiguity. In my opinion already the author struggled a bit with this as seen in what I consider as a correction.

The 12 other names must be then tribes of Israel. This would perfectly fit into the idea that they are written onto the wall of heavenly Jerusalem. Ok, what I have found is that some of the names are not directly what you can find in Wikipedia but some paraphrase. An example is tribe Ruben, here the name isn’t directly Ruben but the sentence `Yahwe, behold a son!´ but this can be transferred to Ruben. I will write here more in the coming days.

Regards from Mainz

Continued…

We don’t know how Ashkenazi or Sephardim pronounced some Hebrew words 500 years ago. Could be they spoke e. g. a d or a t in the last syllable (DAH or TAH) where we will find solely (AH) in some modern Hebrew words. This could be the cause for some discrepancies we can find in the words.

We already have enough characters or syllables to decode sentences. In my first post I speculated about the word or sentence coming out from the tubes in the image with the powerless sun. It seems I was completely wrong there but if I follow my approach and use the characters from words which I believe are the 7 ways how Yahwe should be praised one possibility is the absolute shocking sentence:
SHOAHTAMETOAH (devastation completes/finishes the erroneous wandering). In German there is the word Irrfahrt which I think comes closer to the word Toah than wandering. It’s a misguided wandering, not agreeable to God.

just an inquiry in-between - what would be a reasonable criterion for the claim VMS is decrypted and readable?

In my opinion a creation of an alphabet (new EVA) and complete decryption of 1-2 pages with meaningful sentences connected reasonable to the described images must suffice.

Nobody can seriously expect the decryption of the whole book by hand before it’s considered as decrypted. Also, it would be a tedious and unnecessary job which can be done better by a computer. It must even not be a sophisticated software applied. For the approach here you would need a good Hebrew dictionary which say you if you have a valid Hebrew word or not once you filled vowels randomly between the consonants identified on the basis of 20-25 decrypted characters, syllables. Then the program would offer you 5-10 meaningful choices for a sentence and a Hebrew native speaker could identify if one of the choices is reasonable connected to the context or the picture on this page.

This I would call a practicable way.

Sure, the code could apply to only one page and the code could change from page to page (don’t believe this) or from section to section (more probably) or not at all. But this can be audited in a relatively short time.

Tribes of Israel - we start with these 4 and use the characters decrypted in the 7 Ways of Praise. From the top we have:
TZVISHEL or TZVISHEH (who are deer, gazelle) -> tribe Naftali
SHIMONYI (descendants of Shimon) -> tribe Simon
ELBERIYUDAH (the El-Berith Jews) -> tribe Benjamin
these are Jews from Shechem which covenanted partly to God Baal (the covenants)
YABALON (these are people who settle along the seas; yabal – stream, watercourse) -> tribe Sebulon

Two connected c with a curl above are then pronounced BL or BAL, BEL etc
or LB, LAB etc. if the curl is more to the left.

Here are more.
From the top:
ASHERR -> tribe Asher
GADURAYBER/YADURAYBER
(people from the region beyond (eber, spelling ayber) Jordan -> Gadur -> Jadur) -> tribe Gad
people who settled east of Jordan were not always considered as genuine Israelites, here they are welcome
YUDAH -> tribe Juda

This character at the beginning of a word is then a composition of G and D or Y and D then here GAD/YAD.

8a is an important word, can be other combinations with preceding or following consonants, but very often it means EMOR or AMAR (to speak, to say). You will find it at many places in the text here because in the Revelation much had been said. God speaks, angels, trumpets, thunders, eagle speak. Two names of tribes contain this word.
MEEMORDANI (descendants of those who speak as judges, dayan means judge) -> tribe Dan
YAHTORAHEMOR (the speakers of Yahwes Thora, people performing service in the temple) -> tribe Levi

New characters are at the beginning of a word. In my opinion M so ME (who) but this has to be verified by other context. And the combination which is used at the end of a word or sentence (DAN).

just swift checked if this approach can be applied to other pages…
Here is obviously a picture of the earth. Not sun! I have seen some videos claiming this is a picture of the sun. But in my opinion moon orbits around the earth and not the sun
See the first word to the right. One word for earth in Hebrew is yabbesheth. The character in the middle is new and would then be pronounced BASH or BESH. The Y at the beginning and TH at the end we had already. I am wondering if they pronounced the modern TH at the end more like a Y: YABBESHEY.