The Voynich Ninja

As best I know, Rich Santacoloma was the first person to realise that the top of folio 77r shows a system of Elements.  Without having seen his work, I came to a similar opinion two years later, but where Rich supposed the manuscript a product of Latin European culture, and so expected that the  fifth element must be ether,  I consider the intention had been to represent a system which considered the world to consist of 5 elements (ether is not part of the world's materials in the Greek system).
The reason for the elements emerging from unformed "wood"  as anyone who reads Greek will understand, though I believe I first brought it to the notice of Voynicheros -  is that "hyle" or "wood" was  the Greeks' term for unformed matter.

From inner Asia, and  India, to the far east, a five-element system is the norm.

For me, there was still an outstanding problem:elements are normally found listed, or depicted, in a rote sequence - sometimes by reference to the directions, or some perceived place in a hierarchy of powers, or by position in a sequence between formation and dissolution etc.etc.

The order of elements in f.77r was not in keeping with any such rote order that I could find (and believe me, I hunted it).. but a couple of days ago I found one one text which offers an exact match for their order.(details of that text in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).


From right to left the five run: Smoke, Fire, Wind,  Water, Darkness.  The same text refers to "the two Ascendants ", assigning those to "fire and lust, which are dryness and moisture" and calling them "the father and mother of all these things."  In folio 77r, the female is associated with the drying heat, and the male with fertile moisture, but in that case, the Coptic text would naturally set the male before the female, regardless of left-to-right considerations.  That order doesn't imply "respectively" as an English text would do.

 I still have no way to explain why there should be six 'labels' needed for five elements, since the 'ascenders' seem to have separate 'labels' above their heads.
I realise this doesn't help with the vital question of Voynich grammar, but I hope it might help in some other way.

Diane: I think these elements make sense for what is coming out of the pipes, and the fact that there is a male and female figure seems to correspond well with this system. I also believe there is a preference for reading images right to left in the manuscript, so that's a plus too. 

But I'm not sure if I understand the properties associated with each figure. So male=fire=dryness and female=lust=moisture? Or am I getting this all wrong? And why do you say "In folio 77r, the female is associated with the drying heat, and the male with fertile moisture"? 

The man is blowing into the pipe, which could be seen as drying heat. And the woman has much more water coming out of her end, and she's standing on a watery base that looks like a river with irrigation channels branching out of it -> fertile water. 

So I'd say that read from right to left the image quite matches the description?

My interpretation where the pipe has nothing coming out of it would be ether.  Also this could be a process of the philosophers stone and gold being the end product.

(01-11-2016, 10:54 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As best I know, Rich Santacoloma was the first person to realise that the top of folio 77r shows a system of Elements. 

...

We don't know that this is a system of elements.

The diagram looks like elements to me too, especially since I was familiar with quite a few 5-element systems before I ever saw the VMS, but even now I don't assume that it is elements. I've even considered that what is poofing out of the artery-like tubes may represent yellow and black bile, phlegm, and blood, and that the empty one might still represent ether or spirit (or something else).

The one that most nearly looks like fire is near the male, and the one that most nearly looks like water (the bluest one) is near the female, and this could support the idea that these are elements, but even so... I don't want to jump to conclusions.


The mismatch in the number of labels is not an insignificant detail. I'm sure there's a reason for it. Either there's an extra label that perhaps summarizes or groups the others or... there's an extra label as a form of misdirection, or there's an extra label because they are not meant to be read as labels in quite the way we expect. We have to be careful not to assume the spaces are real—they might not be.

Another possibility is that both ends are labelled and they omitted or forgot the label for the second element from the left.

If these are the five elements, what is coming out of each pipe (from left to right)? This could be a very useful crib if we knew exactly what each element is.

(02-11-2016, 12:53 PM)Witch Mountain Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If these are the five elements, what is coming out of each pipe (from left to right)? This could be a very useful crib if we knew exactly what each element is.

I'm sure there will be differing opinions on this, but to me it looks like the far left one is air, then water, then ether/spirit, then fire, then earth.

That line-up would also fall in line with the way many medieval scholars understood the elements. They believed that air and water were related (water evaporates into air) and fire and earth were related.


But... if they are bodily fluids, then the red one would be blood, the far-right possibly black bile, the far left one phlegm, and the second-from-left possibly yellow bile, the four "elements" that supposedly made up the human body. They believed that disease indicated these were out of balance. They also believed that a person's personality was based on which of these was dominant (sanguine, choleric, etc.).

Dear all,
Yes, sorry. I forgot to say that I'd analysed this folio in some detail a while ago, and in the original post explained why it was an image of the elements, and of a five-element system, rather than the European "4" elements.

After writing it up, I received a comment saying that Rich Santacoloma had earlier said it was a diagram of the elements, and though I found his argument for the European system poorly supported by comparative imagery or documentary evidence, and still think it mistaken, in general he did twig to the diagram's being a diagram of the elements - so I credited him retrospectively.

The key to understanding any image in the Vms is to be able to explain not just *what* you think is pictured, but *why* it takes the particular form it does, and that usually means turning to linguistic, historical, documentary and even archaeological evidence in some cases, if it isn't to be a facile comparison, but a proper analysis of the image to understand the intention of the original maker.

In this case, the key lies first in the conception of the raw matter of creation.  Where we speak of "building blocks" we find that the Greek term (hyle) was the same as that used for a bough of a tree or 'wood' in that general sense.  Then the detailed description of how the elements 'emerge' from that wood can be understood variously according to the sources used.  Isidore, for example imbues each with an almost anthropomorphic character, but the diagram understands the term a little differently, and that is also in accord with the way the picture is constucted. (I covered this in the original post where I analysed this diagram).

But then - as a I say - I had a problem, because first, this is a five-element system and secondly the set order for the five elements didn't precisely agree with any of the sources I'd found.  So it remained a question-mark.  The culture or community from which the diagram came was plainly influenced by Greek language and/or culture, but there was another factor at work.

And in finding that Manichaean text (or more exactly an Egyptian Coptic text summarising Manichaean doctrine), I finally found a precise match.

Witchmountain says:

Quote:If these are the five elements, what is coming out of each pipe (from left to right)?

It actually reads right to left:
Smoke, Fire, Wind, Water, Darkness.

The text from which I have that order is quoted at the end of a recent post of mine (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) , but the original analysis - using Isidore as basic reference - was published while I was working on that section, in 2012.  It's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

The sources (Isidore and Mani) aren't incompatible, each being rooted in Greek ideas - but  I won't argue the case here.

(03-11-2016, 03:07 AM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Witchmountain says:

Quote:If these are the five elements, what is coming out of each pipe (from left to right)?

It actually reads right to left:
Smoke, Fire, Wind, Water, Darkness.

Yes, there are several different systems for describing basic "elements" (some that haven't even been mentioned yet) but which ones they are should probably be investigated in relation to other representations in the VMS. There's a fair degree of consistency in the way the plants are presented, in the way the nymphs are presented and in the way the pools are presented. There are differences, of course, but in general, one can recognize a VMS drawing when placed alongside others.

If the illustrator maintained this consistency on this page, then perhaps depictions of "elements" (regardless of which system was used) are referenced elsewhere.


So what other clues are there?

The "zoomer" (that's what I call a flying loge) under the female most closely resembles the output from the pipe second from the left which, to me, is the one that most closely resembles water (darker blue waves and spray or steam). Water is traditionally associated with females in many cultures.

The zoomer under the male most closely resembles the output of the pipe on the right, which has less blue and is less "thick" than the second-to-left. Male is usually associated with fire, earth, hard things, etc. I'll reserve judgment on what it represents since it doesn't look like smoke to me (if any are smoke, the far left one looks most like smoke to me) and it doesn't quite look like earth either (or like black or yellow bile). I'm not sure what it is. I would almost want to label it steam since it looks vapory with a trace of blue.

The male zoomer also resembles the textures flowing downward on  the lower left, under the darker blue wavy shapes that look like water.

And, of course, there are parallels to most of these on other pages that could be discussed pretty extensively.


If the whole page were intended to be alchemical rather than biological, I would suspect the various pipes of representing heat, water, vapor, and other common products and processes associated with distillation. The "loge" second from the bottom on the left even resembles a handcrafted brass funnel.


It's interesting to note that the total number of "pipes" on the upper diagram is seven (the number associated with the solar system at the time). Red could be sun, water could be moon, mercury could be the center one, which is often associated with ether or spirit, Terra is ground/earth, man and woman are Mars and Venus, and the two remaining are Jupiter and Saturn. It's a stretch, the correspondence of biological-looking structures with the solar system is not a natural association (and the sequence is wrong) but until the diagram is better understood, I like keeping alternatives on the table.

Thank you dearest -JKP- and Diane.
If these are the 4/5 elements, or the bodily fluids, I hope it will be easy to solve