For six centuries, the Voynich Manuscript has defeated every codebreaker, linguist, cryptographer, and computer scientist who dared attempt to read it. Written in an unknown script, filled with illustrations of plants that don’t exist, astronomical charts that don’t match the known sky, and nude figures bathing in liquid of uncertain purpose — it has been called the world’s most mysterious book. Now, a research team using a custom-trained large language model claims to have decoded significant portions of it. What the text says has left them deeply unsettled.
The team — based at a private AI research institute and declining to be named pending peer review — spent 14 months training their model on every known ancient language, proto-language, cipher system, and undeciphered script including Linear A, Proto-Sinaitic, and the Rongorongo of Easter Island. They then applied the model to high-resolution scans of the manuscript’s 240 surviving pages. The initial results were dismissed as noise. Then, on the 312th training iteration, the model produced its first coherent sequence — and the researchers had to read it three times before accepting what it said.
A Language Unlike Any Known Human Tongue
The language in which the Voynich Manuscript is written is not, according to the AI’s analysis, derived from any known language family. It does not share the morphological roots of Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, or any other documented linguistic lineage. Instead, the model identifies it as a constructed language — one built from mathematical principles rather than evolved speech.
Specifically, the model found that the script’s character frequency distribution follows a base-12 mathematical pattern rather than the statistical distribution found in natural human languages. Base-12 — also known as duodecimal — is not used in any known human language, but is considered by some mathematicians to be a more efficient counting system than the base-10 we use today. Its appearance in a 15th century manuscript is, to put it mildly, anomalous.
“We kept checking our work,” the team’s spokesperson said in a recorded statement shared with independent researchers. “We assumed the model was finding pattern where none existed — hallucinating structure into noise, as LLMs do. But every verification test we ran confirmed the base-12 grammar. This language was designed. It wasn’t spoken, it was engineered.”
What the Text Actually Says
The decoded portions — approximately 30% of the total manuscript, with the remaining text still resisting analysis — cover several distinct subjects. The most coherent sections, which the team describes as the manuscript’s “astronomical passages,” describe a cyclical catastrophe that strikes Earth approximately every 12,960 years — a figure that corresponds precisely to half of the 25,920-year precession cycle of Earth’s axis.
According to the decoded text, this event involves a “great darkening” caused by a “body of fire that travels in a long arc” — which researchers have tentatively interpreted as a large comet or asteroid on an orbital cycle that brings it near Earth every 12,960 years. The most recent such event, the text implies, was the catastrophe that ended the last Ice Age approximately 12,900 years ago — a date that aligns with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, first proposed in 2007 and still contested among scientists.
The decoded text describes this event in terms that are clinical and precise, not mythological: temperature drops, atmospheric disruption, sea level rise, extinction of large animals. It reads less like a prophecy and more like a historical record — written by someone who had witnessed a previous cycle and wanted to document it for those who would survive the next one.
The Section That Has Researchers Most Disturbed
The most controversial decoded passage is what the team calls “the biological section” — corresponding to the manuscript’s well-known illustrations of small humanoid figures in pools of liquid. The decoded text accompanying these illustrations describes what can only be read as a programme of deliberate genetic intervention — the modification of human biological material to improve survival rates during and after the catastrophic event.
“The text uses terminology that maps onto concepts like selective breeding, accelerated adaptation, and something the model translates loosely as ‘correction of the blood line,'” the researchers noted. “We want to be extremely careful about how we characterise this. We are not claiming the manuscript describes alien genetic engineering. We are saying the text describes deliberate, systematic biological intervention in the human population — and that whoever wrote this had knowledge of biology that is difficult to explain for the 15th century.”
The pools of liquid, in this reading, are not baths — they are incubation chambers. The humanoid figures are not bathers — they are subjects.
The Warning
The final decoded section of the manuscript is the shortest — just 18 lines — and the team describes it as a direct address to whoever eventually deciphered the document. Translated, it reads approximately as follows:
“To those who receive these words when the sky returns to its position of beginning: the interval is short. The cycle turns again. The modified lines survive. You are among them. Prepare. Do not build on the low ground. Do not trust the coastal record. The body of fire is older than your memory of it. We were here. We are not here now.”
The phrase “when the sky returns to its position of beginning” has been interpreted as a reference to the precession cycle — specifically to the point in Earth’s axial precession at which the sky appears as it did when the text was first written. Astronomers calculate that this “return to beginning” will occur in approximately 2040.
The Sceptics and the Questions They Raise
This is not the first time a researcher has claimed to have decoded the Voynich Manuscript. Previous claimed translations have ranged from a manual of women’s health in a lost dialect to an elaborate 16th century hoax with no meaning whatsoever. Linguist Dr. Ella Marchetti of UCL calls the new claim “pattern-matching dressed up as decryption” and notes that LLMs are well-known for generating convincing-sounding outputs that are statistically plausible but semantically meaningless.
The team’s decision to withhold their names and institutional affiliation pending peer review has also drawn criticism, with some researchers suggesting the announcement is premature and self-promotional. Without access to the full dataset and training methodology, independent verification is impossible.
But the decoded text has struck a nerve, not least because its content is too specific to be dismissed as random generation. The base-12 grammar structure, the Younger Dryas date, the precession cycle alignment, the 2040 astronomical target — these are not the kind of details an LLM hallucinates unprompted. Something systematic is happening in this data. What that something is remains, for now, the greatest open question in the history of cryptography.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote the Voynich Manuscript?
The manuscript dates to the early 15th century based on radiocarbon dating of the vellum. Its author remains unknown. It was purchased by antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, from which it takes its name. It is currently held at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.
Has the AI decryption been independently verified?
Not yet. The research team is seeking peer review and has declined to release full methodology pending publication. Independent verification using their approach will be possible once the paper is published.
What is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis?
It is the theory, first proposed in 2007 and still under scientific debate, that a comet or asteroid impacted Earth approximately 12,900 years ago, triggering rapid climate change that ended the last Ice Age and contributed to the extinction of megafauna like the woolly mammoth and sabre-tooth cat.
Is the Voynich Manuscript a warning from a civilisation that survived the last global catastrophe? And what do we do with the fact that the next cycle window opens in 2040? Let us know your thoughts in the comments — and follow Infinity Explorers for updates as this story develops.
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