The Voynich Ninja

(29-07-2017, 08:08 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco: As suggested before, the cannon might indicate the four cardinal directions or winds - those are basically the same in certain contexts. If it is tilted to the side in either direction, this places the travelling soul/star on the north-south axis.

Just as well as it might indicate a thousand different things. I suggested that it looks like a Greek-fire siphon. Anton suggested that it "may be interpreted as a Christian cross". I would say that if it can be seen as a cannon / Greek-fire siphon, a Christian cross and a wind rose it can be almost anything.

At the current state of our knowledge, specific interpretations have the same probability of being right as the specific translations discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Koen wrote:

Quote:I'm strongly inclined to consider the possibility of a connection to Egypt. I wasn't even going to propose it since it's too exotic for many, but most significant details have been mentioned already by others:

* Dead figure looks like a mummy (JKP). 

* Belief in star-related / cosmic resurrection (Anton). It must be noted as well that the color green was significant in this respect. As the color of new vegetation, it symbolized resurrection. That is why Osiris often has a green skin (especially i the Greco-Roman period as well). It also explains images like this:

Considering, that the rosette could mean wind rose or compass rose, we get North - at the top, South - at the bottom, West - to the left and East - to the right. In renaissance, the East was often noted with the cross, the North - with the fleur-de-lis. 
"Old compass roses also often used a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at Levante (E), indicating the direction of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from the point of view of the Mediterranean sea." (Wikipedia)
So, the star to the right in Christian context could mean the Star of Bethlehem.
"You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: Now after Jesus was born in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, "Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.""
But, as we see, the image doesn't represent a birth, rather - death and rebirth. As was noted, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in all times meant spring, grow and renovation, therefore it doesn't metter, whether green is a shroud or water.
[attachment=1549]

From Egypt or not, but green water (of baptism) also appeared in some Cristian pictures and texts. Moreover, sometimes You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with the same implication - renewal.
There are many discussion about Christ - Osiris (Horus) associations, but really true that Osiris's star is an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., too.
As for the nymph with the "blowing cross" to the left (West), I think, in the whole it can represent the west wind (Favonius, Zephyrus), which gives moist and rains.

Quote:ZEPHYRUS GOD OF SPRING
Callimachus, Hymn 2 to Apollo 81 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"Thine [Apollon's] altars wear flowers in spring, even all the pied flowers which the Horai (Horae, Seasons) lead forth when Zephyros (Zephyrus) breathes dew."
Virgil, Georgics 2. 323 ff (trans. Fairclough) (Roman bucolic C1st B.C.) :
"Spring it is that clothes the glades and forests with leaves . . . and the meadows ungirdle to Zephyrus's (the West Wind's) balmy breeze; the tender moisture avails for all."
Virgil, Georgics 3. 322 ff : 
"At the Zephyrus' call, joyous summer sends both sheep and goats to the glades and pastures."
Seneca, Phaedra 11 (trans. Miller) (Roman tragedy C1st A.D.) :
"Where meadows lie which Zephyrus soothes with his dew-laden breath and calls forth the herbage of the spring."
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 2. 133 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
"The swallow dear to Zephyros in spring-time, harbinger of roses and flowery dew, prattling bird that sings a sweet song under the tiles."
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 41. 45 ff :
"The bight of Libya [the city of Beroe in Lebanon, now Beirut] is fanned by the dewy whistle of Zephryos (the West Wind) as he rides with shrill-sounding heel over the western channels, where is a flowery land, where nurseries bloom hard by the sea, and the fragrant forest pervaded by humming winds sings from its leafy trees."

The west wind is often related to equinox. "Between 40° and 60°S, semiannual and annual variations in zonal and meridional wind are of similar magnitude, resulting in a west-wind maximum near the vernal equinox and a secondary maximum near the autumnal equinox." 
It is hard to identify images exactly with Christian or Egyptian culture, it likely looks like some cosmopolitan view on the theme of rebirth of renovation. I always keep in my mind Hermetical or alchemical ideas, which were popular in those times along with high interest to knowledges of Egypt in general, but, perhaps, it is another natural philosophy.

This detail is from Matfré Ermengau , Breviari d'amor et Lettre à sa soeur ; Chansonnier occitan, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., XIV Century. The Breviari d'amor are often mentioned as an interesting parallel for the VMS.
Scenes in which the soul leaves the body of a dying person under the form of a naked child (or mini-person / animula) are quite common in Chrsitian art. Here what is interesting is that the devil is taking the soul with a rope. If one mirrors the image, this could be a parallel for our scene, with the cannon-nymph playing the role of the devil. In this case, the cannon would be some kind of hoover or pump collecting the hypothetical soul/star that would be moving towards it.
Of course, this is horribly far-fetched, I just found the devil's rope interesting. But one has to remember that stars with tails are one of the most common visual motifs in the VMS. One should really find a general explanation for this visual feature.

Searcher: there is certainly something universalist about the VM in general. As if the symbolism is limited to the bare (literally) minimum. Perhaps it needed to be acceptable for people of various backgrounds. However, I am nearly certain that at least one of the sources used for this section was Greco-Egyptian in origin.

About the orientation of the compass, keep in mind that the imperative of north=up has not always existed everywhere. This BBC article provides a good overview: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Given such a long history of human map-making, it is perhaps surprising that it is only within the last few hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top. In fact, for much of human history, north almost never appeared at the top, according to Jerry Brotton, a map historian from Queen Mary University, London and author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps. “North was rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from,” he says. “West is also very unlikely to be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears.”

The Portolan charts, which might be relevant to the VM, were not meant to have one way up. they were taken in hand and turned around and even viewed from the back (through the translucent vellum). According to the article, even Columbus (who postdates the VM ) thought of east as up.


Marco: stars with tails are common indeed, but blue stars are relatively rare. So are two stars being connected by a line.

Koen:

Quote:About the orientation of the compass, keep in mind that the imperative of north=up has not always existed everywhere. This BBC article provides a good overview: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. “North was rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from,” he says. “West is also very unlikely to be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears.”

Yes, almost never, before 16th century. 
But, if it is the case, the star to the right could be occidental star (stella occidens). In alchemy, it is Sal Ammoniac. In astrology, it (setting star) relates to death, in opposition to the rising star (stella oriens) - birth).

Ruby N has suggested on her blog that oKor = οναρ (in Greek) = dream as interpretations for the labels on f82r.

So I looked up instances of oKor and found it on ten large plant pages, on the "Pleiades" folio as a label, on the pool page with nymphs down the left side, on rosette 1 outer ring, rosette 5, several small-plant pages, and the starred-text pages.


**Note that it is also found on the drawing that looks like a T-O map on the rosettes page (and on rosette 5), in the position that one would expect to find Africa/south if this were a conventional T-O map.


When suggesting an interpretation for a VMS token, I think it's important to look at other instances of the word to see if the interpretation makes sense in other contexts and also to see if it can be interpreted in additional languages.

For example, since oKor has a tail on the last glyph (which can and frequently would be expanded in Greek, Latin, German, English, and Romance languages), it can also be interpreted as onore (honor). Or if the second "o" is interpreted as "a" as Ruby has done, then one could get omare (cabinets or I will or I pray or quite a number of other interpretations, depending on the language). If you swap the o and the a, you can get many more valid words in several different languages



Ruby also noted that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

I am not convinced that this is true. A huge number of Vwords begin with oK and end with dy, which mans that oK might be a prefix and, if so, the root of the second word might instead be aira or aica, which does not match the "root" of the first label ("or").

oK occurs almost 6,000 times, usually at the beginnings of words and dy occurs almost 2,000 times, almost always at the ends of words. They behave like prefixes and suffixes, so one has to give an explanation if one claims that oKor and oKairady have the same root. It is unlikely that oK is a root if it occurs almost 6,000 times at the beginnings of words.


By the way, I am not trying to single out Ruby for criticism, I'm using her suggested translations as examples. My comments apply to all researchers who pick out a word here or there without discussing how they occur in the rest of the document, to see if their interpretation (and language of choice) is valid in other contexts or in the context of the VMS word structure overall.


The interpretation of "dream" in the context of 82r might be valid, but then how does one explain the same word in the Africa position on the rosette T-O map? When one sees a seeming contradiction like this, one has to dig deeper to see if there's any reason for it and whether there's an explanation, otherwise there's no way to know if the translation is correct.

I agree with JKP's observations, and I could add to his critics, but I also think that any attempt to match labels and images should be appreciated. I have first read about the VMS in Stephen Bax' 2014 paper and I still believe that matching the illustrations and the text could greatly contribute to our understanding of the ms.
Of course, the problem of understanding why the same label applies to different objects (a subject also discussed by Anton about otol otol You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) is a difficult one: a mystery, as Anton writes.

Still the majority of discussions identify these figures with, say, the Assyrian princess Semiramis and Siris, goddess of beer, without even caring to note that the figures are labeled. I am certainly not exempt from this attitude. If we are ever going to read the ms, taking notice of the existence of labels seems to me like an important step.

I'm certainly not against analyzing labels.

I'm all for it, in fact.

What I'd like to see is analysis of labels in relation to the whole manuscript, not just to the small image next to it that we don't fully understand.

I used Ruby's label interpretation as an example because it DOES show up elsewhere in the VMS, in the T-O map, in the position for Africa/south... I'm not saying it is definitely a T-O map, even though it looks very much like one, or that it definitely means Africa or south (or something related), but we should NOT be trying to evaluate the label on the pool page BY ITSELF when it matches Vwords elsewhere, especially those associated with other images.


Maybe they're related. Maybe they're not. But I don't think it's helpful to look at labels through a little soda straw, one word at a time, without considering how that Vord occurs elsewhere.

There's no evidence (so far) to indicate that oKa is a root word and very little support for the idea that the word, as a whole, might mean "dream". It's only one of many possibilities and listing the possibilities is a better strategy than jumping on the first thing that seems to work and then ignoring the rest.

Coming back to the subject of this thread, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Walter Burkert provides some interesting references in footnote 48 p.360.

I checked Plutarch's “De genio Socratis” (actually a Greek work, which I think was translated into Latin only later than the XV Century). The referenced paragraph (22) can be read You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
It describes a complex vision in which the heavens are described as a sea, the celestial equator as a current and the zodiac as a channel.

This heavenly vision is described with the following words:

Quote:As the Styx [the Milky Way?] draws near the souls cry out in terror, for many slip off and are carried away by Hades; others, whose cessation of birth falls out at the proper moment, swim up from below and are rescued by the Moon, the foul and unclean excepted. These the Moon, with lightning and a terrible roar, forbids to approach, and bewailing their lot they fall away and are borne downward again to another birth, as you see.
...
in the stars that are apparently extinguished, you must understand that you see the souls that sink entirely into the body; in the stars that are lighted again, as it were, and reappear from below, you must understand that you see the souls that float back from the body after death, shaking off a sort of dimness and darkness as one might shake off mud; while the stars that move about on high are the daemons of men said to "possess understanding."
...
the daemons whose motion was straight and ordered had souls which good nurture and training had made submissive to the rein, and whose irrational part was not unduly hard-mouthed and restive; whereas those which were constantly deviating in all directions from a straight course in an uneven and confused motion, as though jerked about on a tether, were contending with a character refractory and unruly from lack of training

The stars are identified with the souls waiting reincarnation. The movement of these stars is described as directed by reins or tethers.
This kind of belief might be related with the Egyptian ideas discussed by Koen (I can't tell at the moment). It would be interesting to find evidence of similar beliefs in other cultures and see if there are accounts that can more easily be matched with what we are discussing here. In particular, it would be nice to see if the “cannon” can be explained in a more satisfactory way and if anything can be said about the possible meaning of the corresponding orol.dain label.

This is another of the passages mentioned by Burkert (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Quote:The stars which are described as fixed in the heavens, are not, as the vulgar suppose, attached each of them to different individuals, the brighter to the rich, those that are less so to the poor, and the dim to the aged, shining according to the lot of the individual, and separately assigned to mortals; for they have neither come into existence, nor do they perish in connexion with particular persons, nor does a falling star indicate that any one is dead. We are not so closely connected with the heavens as that the shining of the stars is affected by our death. When they are supposed to shoot or fall, they throw out, by the force of their fire, as if from an excess of nutriment, the superabundance of the humour which they have absorbed, as we observe to take place from the oil in our lamps, when they are burning.

He is discussing popular beliefs, in particular the idea that each person has a corresponding star, and when one dies his star falls from the sky. Possibly, the concept of a "shooting star" might be something that one can visualize with a cannon or fire-siphon, but the Latin text does not seem to use any term directly alluding to shooting (it says "decidere" - to fall).