How the Voynich Manuscript is to be read

Margin stars: top of page (left) and foot with unstarred paragraphs (right)

Open the Voynich Manuscript at its last page and read toward the first. Within each line, read right to left.

• The starred quire runs f116v, then f116r back to f103r. The rest of the book follows in the same backward order: the container pages, herbal, rosettes, bathing, zodiac, astronomical, herbal, f1r.
• Within a line, take the glyphs from the right end. Letter sums do not depend on order, so a cell is the same either way; the positional part — the φ coordinate — does change, and it is the φ part that carries the reading.
• Lines within an entry run top to bottom. This is the one part not settled: read bottom to top as well and entry 6 gives 192 instead of 203.

Why. The zodiac quire in binding order runs the Sun's year forward, Pisces to Sagittarius. Read back to front it runs the order of the ages, ending on Pisces — where the equinox stood in 1420. Precession runs against the year, so a record of precession runs against the book.

A figure is a degree of the Sun's path. Twelve signs of thirty figures is 360 — one whole turn.

Pisces holds 29, not 30 — the transcribers' note says the outer ring has "19 (NOT 20)", and the count from the full-size image confirms it. Gemini's thirtieth figure is drawn but carries no label. Capricorn and Aquarius are lost with folio 74.

Read at either scale the drawing holds: one figure is a day of the year, or 71.6 years of precession, and one sign is one dlog ray of GF(257).

Gemini: the unnamed thirtieth nymph, clothed and holding a star, at the 08:30 position

The book dates itself. Do not bring a date to it.

Prague, 50.1° N, in the frame of date: obliquity 23.5146°, the longest day 10φ hours exactly, the sunrise point swinging 51.54° to 128.46°. Both tests are worked on The Sky.

The text of a passage is the path of the Sun for that passage.

Measured, not assumed. Over the ten surviving signs:

Long-day signs carry more a i r n m l h c; short-day signs more e d y k o. A longer word is a longer course of the Sun, and the lettering itself is the measure. The lost Capricorn would run 5.21 letters to a label and Aquarius 5.58.

Of 299 figures, 294 hold a star. The marks that break the pattern are the data — the full table is on The 299.

• Five hold no star. Gemini 13, Cancer 10, Cancer 18, Virgo 22, Sagittarius 18
• Four are crowned. Cancer 27, Leo 24, Libra 7, Scorpio 14
• Stars on a string fall away across the book, and so do barrels and clothing.
• Eclipses Prague could see land on figures whose star is marked and no other.
• The openings are gone round. Twenty-four holes and sewn rifts stand on eighteen leaves; the pen and the brush go round every one and none cuts a letter. On f82r a star is drawn on a hole's rim. The list is on Evidence.
• The last page's figures stand once more. f116v has an animal over a woman with a ring of loops round her head, beside a seam, a hole and a slit; f80v has an animal over a woman with a band of loops, the one such pair in the bathing pages.
• f49v carries a column, one glyph to a line, its first run numbered 1 to 5. It is on The Text.

A proposed decipherment of the Voynich Manuscript has to clear what is already measured. These are on Evidence with their sources; in short:

• Letter entropy 2.12–2.35 bits, against 3.04–3.60 for ten candidate languages.
• 2.7 to 4.4 standard deviations from every one of those languages, when they sit 0.6 to 2.7 from each other.
• No a followed by u anywhere, against 4,279 a followed by two strokes.
• Stroke runs closed by the hook stop at four, like a scribe's j, ij, iij, iiij.
• And it must fail where the field failed: no additive glyph values make the entries equal the verses of Genesis.

1. Whether lines inside an entry run down only (203) or up as well (192).
2. Whether the rings of a zodiac page are read outward, inward, or by the clock. Every result here takes the transcribers' list order and has not been tested against another.
3. Why three of the five starless figures do not fall on a new Moon.
4. The two lost signs — folio 74 carried Capricorn and Aquarius, so mid-December to early February has no figure.
5. The centre words — mars, aberil, may, yony, iollet, augst, octebre, novebre — are month names in a Romance hand. Whose hand, and whether they were added later, is not settled here.
6. What the openings stand for. Read as the Sun's image they give days of the year, and as tilts they are counted in the 210-gon's steps; both are on The Sky.