Voynich f99r Deciphered: Italian Anagrams of a Spagyric Recipe

This paper presents a partial deciphering of the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408), focusing on folio f99r, lines 1-14 as a proof of concept. Even though the techniques have been found to work all throughout the manuscript, this paper is intended to focus only on the top section of images on the page. The text is shown to be written in Italian and encoded through a systematic anagrammatic cipher.

The decoding method involves three steps:

  1. conversion from the stroke‑based European Voynich Alphabet (EVA) to the visual‑glyph‑based American Voynich Alphabet (AVA)

  2. verification by comparing with the written page

  3. letter‑perfect anagramming of the resulting AVA strings into Italian words

The deciphered labels are not literal plant names but are instead a symbolic dictionary for the Spagyric (Paracelsian) process of separation. Each label represents a principle (Sulfur, Mercury, Salt), an operation (maceration, distillation, putrefaction), or an apparatus (stirring rod, carrier vessel). The page as a whole details separation, purification, recombination, and fixation/storage but that will be a future publication.

Radiocarbon dating places the manuscript between 1404 and 1438, making it an ur‑document of pre‑Paracelsian alchemical medicine by about one hundred years.

The findings demonstrate that the Voynich Manuscript is not a hoax or an unknown language but a genuine 15th‑century Italian pharmaceutical‑alchemical manual, encoded in an anagrammatic cipher. The method is repeatable and opens the way to translating the remaining sections of the manuscript.

Keywords: Voynich Manuscript; decipherment; anagram; Spagyric alchemy; Paracelsus; Italian cipher; pharmaceutical history; palaeography