Neoplatonism in the Voynich Manuscript: The Soul’s Descent and the Sensible World
Hello! I’m Vladimir Aristippus Robespierre from Moscow, Russia. Last year, I published a report in which I explained the meaning of some drawings from the Voynich Manuscript. Since then, I have come to understand additional details and identified a historical context that closely aligns with my reading of the drawings: the author of the Voynich Manuscript held views highly consistent with Neoplatonism, a perspective that featured prominently in late medieval natural philosophy. This report details those new observations and updates a few points from my previous analysis based on further findings.
By examining the illustrations not in isolation, but within the context of the entire manuscript, I trace recurring visual motifs and color codes, which I refer to as “Voynich lore”. This holistic approach allows me to identify structural parallels and clarify the meaning behind many of these elements.
This report is also a natural continuation of my Reddit post ‘The word “tolor” means “fertilization”’, which became “Top Post All Time” on the Voynich subreddit just two days after publication. Here, I show that every single piece of parchment containing the character sequence “tolor”, which appears only three times in the entire manuscript, describes the exact same process: how the soul comes into this world after a man has fertilized a woman. Though each series of illustrations features different imagery, such as plants, nymphs, and stars, they employ a shared set of visual codes.
The largest fold-out diagram fRos serves as the conceptual core of the manuscript. It maps the interaction between the human soul, the sensory apparatus of the body, and the sensible world, a composition resonant with Neoplatonic concepts. The layout consists of a central rosette representing the brain, peripheral rosettes corresponding to the five senses and speech, along with reproduction and the sensible world. The grouping of the five Aristotelian senses and speech together follows the model of Ramon Llull, an influential medieval philosopher whose widely circulated works the creator of the diagram was very likely familiar with.
The present study demonstrates that the Voynich Manuscript is not a collection of scattered illustrations but a holistic system united by the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition. The key result of this work is the revelation of the internal logic of the manuscript. If the pages are considered in isolation, one can put forward a multitude of different hypotheses, but when the drawings come together into a coherent whole, their mutual consistency becomes so complete that the probability of an erroneous interpretation yielding such systemic coherence approaches zero.
Knowledge of the actual meaning of the illustrations immediately eliminates dead-end research directions. Once it becomes clear that the plants are stylized diagrams, the stars denote souls, and the nymphs are not bathing women, there is no longer any need to search for real herbs, astronomical constellations, or balneological recipes. Grasping the theme of the pages narrows the space of interpretations and directs research in a productive course.
You can download my new report here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DZmwkin9lNp2epGLC8wKgAW5XElwVNk1/view
Happy to answer any questions.