The Voynich Ninja

(08-08-2017, 12:55 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It occurred to me that the circular leaves resemble coins. I checked for Muenze, Nickel and Geld- in Pritzel; there is quite a number of occurrences, but I failed to locate a good match at a glance. "Muenze" is primarily associated with mint, and the plant does not look like mint at all.

In one English book the name "weasel-snout" is recorded for galeobdolon luteum, but this looks like galeobdolon neither.

Muenze is English coin (and the place where coins are made), Minze is English mint (the plant)

(08-08-2017, 03:41 PM)Oocephalus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Since Pritzel has been mentioned (and I was the one who originally pointed to that book here in the forum), I should mention that I've now looked at Marzell's five-volume "Wörterbuch der deutschen Pflanzennamen", which Helmut Winkler recommended in another thread. Unfortunately, the preface of that book states that Pritzel's book is full of mistakes, and cannot be used as a reliable reference. This may be because it was edited posthumously, and the editor (Jessen) may have mixed up some notes. So I wouldn't trust anything in Pritzel's book unless it is confirmed by another source. Fortunately, the university library here has Marzell's book, I'll look if I can find anything relevant next time I'm there.

Good to know that. So actually with using Pritzel we can be misled by false negatives.

I have found and downloaded another book since then, which includes not only with German but with a few other languages, English included. I forgot its name though and can't find where I put it on my PC   It post-dates Pritzel.

Returning to the coins, I think that maybe the more general word "money" should be also tried, since back then money actually equalled coins.

(08-08-2017, 12:54 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Apologies as this may be veering into OT territory,  but regarding the strangeness/plausibility of composites, let's not forget the oak&ivy situation in other manuscripts which has been discussed on the forum. 
This sort of thing did happen, although it may not be a frequent phenomenon.

But that's not the same "composite" as some people are proposing. I've read many comments online from people who think the VMS plants are composed of roots and leaves from one plant and flowers from another and I don't see a lot of evidence for this idea. What I see is plants that are naturalistic with parts that might be somewhat exaggerated (perhaps to show the part of the plant that is used), or plants that are naturalistic, with some artistic license for mnemonics, not different plants pasted together to form a composite plant.

The oak ivy is a composite drawing (two plants on one page) but it's not a composite plant... it's two plants, not one—the ivy twines around the oak (or other kind of branch) in most drawings, including the VMS. Nothing wrong with composite drawings, each plant can be perceived separately from the other.



The problem arises when people see one part they recognize (like the leaf on the "water lily") and then ignore the other parts, or assume the rest of the drawing is "wrong", and come up with strange explanations about composite plants or imaginary plants INSTEAD of looking for a plant that fits the drawing or has an appropriate mnemonic component. I haven't had time to write them all up, but I can almost always find a plant that fits all parts of the drawing, not just some of them, where several people have said no such plant exists.


Some IDs are more speculative than others, of course, because some are drawn in a less expert or more fanciful way than others (for example, in 34v it's hard to identify the round things... are they leaves with hairs or spikes? are they 3D berries with a primitive attempt at hatching?), but there's nothing speculative about suggesting You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., especially You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view./Nymphoides/Menyanthes, for the "water lily" f2v, instead of the usual identifications of Nuphar or Nymphaea which do NOT match the whole plant. It's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that plant 2v is a very good drawing of one of the Menyanthacaea species. They are not rare—the various species grow all over the world—but they are smaller and less familiar than the bigger water lilies, and thus easily overlooked if one ignores the flower and jumps to conclusions about it being Nuphar or Nymphaea based only on the leaf.

Technically the VM "oak+vine" share one base stem/root system though.

When I first saw 34v, late in 2007, I thought it might be Venus flytrap [image credit Mcadoo], but there are several problems with this ID... the leaf stalks are wrong, the roots are wrong, the fuzzy base of the stalk is not nearly so prominent on Venus flytrap, the stalks for the flowers are wrong, and I couldn't think of any Venus flytrap relevance for the "mating" roots. Also, Venus flytrap is a New World plant. I wasn't discounting New World plants, but so many things were "not right", that I put Venus flytrap aside to look for other possibilities.


Asparagus as long branches, flowers, a fuzzy stem stalk, and roots that are long, thickly matted and stringy. The berries are green in spring and red in September. There are male and female plants growing in close proximity.

Now look at the image of asparagus below as it would look around June or July before all the berries have ripened. If you were only an average artist, and knew that the only useful part of the ferny form of this plant was the seeds inside the berries, how would you draw it? would you bother with all the fuzzy leaves that are hard to draw that would obscure the part of the plant that is used (the seeds inside the berries)? You could easily recognize the plant based on the flowers, the berries, the stem base, and the root mnemonic (indicating a dioecious plant):





I'm not insisting that 34v is asparagus but I think it's a possibility, and morphologically and mnemonically it's more defendable than Venus flytrap or some of the other IDs I've seen on people's blogs, so I wanted to get the idea out for consideration because many people are not familiar with asparagus berries, or the dioecious nature of the plant, and thus might overlook it.

JKP: I agree that the circular things can be fruits, which would mean that the leaves have been omitted. In this case, the image is not a botanical representation but rather highlights certain parts. According to the aptly titled You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. however, the berries are very poisonous. 

Just browsing the wiki, it seems that asparagus was a highly demanded import product in antiquity, but fell out of taste in the middle ages. There's also still the problem of the flowers.

Lavandula stoechas still offers the closest resemblance to the flower, in my opinion. Apparently, stoechas/sticados was considered a separate plant from lavandula before modern times. But that still doesn't explain the leaves/fruits...

(08-08-2017, 08:19 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP: I agree that the circular things can be fruits, which would mean that the leaves have been omitted. In this case, the image is not a botanical representation but rather highlights certain parts. According to the aptly titled You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. however, the berries are very poisonous. 

Just browsing the wiki, it seems that asparagus was a highly demanded import product in antiquity, but fell out of taste in the middle ages. There's also still the problem of the flowers.

Lavandula stoechas still offers the closest resemblance to the flower, in my opinion. Apparently, stoechas/sticados was considered a separate plant from lavandula before modern times. But that still doesn't explain the leaves/fruits...

A very high proportion of medieval "medicinal" plants were poisonous (mandrake is a good example, but there were many others, like Ricinus, foxglove, henbane, hemlock, possibly nightshade, monkshood, strychnine, yew, Nymphaea tuberosa, some of the milkweeds). Poisons were also used for arrow tips.

But it's not the meat of the asparagus berry that was used, it's the seeds inside the berry, so the berry was harvested and the seeds used when they ripened. In fact, there might even be an additional reason for the ferny leaves not being included in the drawing. To harvest the berries, you clip off the leafy parts so more energy goes into the berry (and the seeds), then, when they are ripe, you split them with a fingernail to get out the seeds.

The flowers on the male asparagus plant are bigger and fancier than the delicate bell-like flowers on the female plant.

I spent a lot of years thinking about these plants...

Are they food plants?
Are they seed plants?
Are they ornamental plants (I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no)?
Are they poisonous plants? In particular, since this is a book with a lot of women, are they abortifacient, aphrodisiac, and birth control plants?
Are they garnish plants (not likely)?
Are they local plants?
Are they imported plants?


They are clearly not the usual forms of garden vegetables, other than those which were valued for medicinal properties (plants like rhubarb, mustard, and beets are examples of plants that are eaten but which are also included in medieval compendia as medicinal plants).

After considering all of these possibilities (and others) for a very long time, I had to let go of the intriguing idea that they might be poisonous or female-related plants. 


I think they are probably medicinal plants, like so many other herbal compendiums (with a sigh, I had to let go of many of my magical-plant and midwife-related plant ideas). The VMS includes viola, vallarsia, tragapogon, possibly hedera helix, possibly cuscuta, knapweed, possibly pulmonaria, possibly teasel... all of which are conventional medicinal plants and don't really fit (if taken together as a group) into any of the other categories.

If 34v is asparagus (I'm still not insisting on this, I just think it should be high on the list), then it too fits into the medicinal-plant category.

I agree that the flowers do not match well to asparagus.

Flowers like the VMS 34v flowers, with a scaly calyx, roundels of "petals", and a slightly convex inner section are almost all from the aster family. I grabbed some examples, and put ones that match less well (Lavender and Asparagus, as examples) in the bottom right corner. Flowers like lavender and stachys have little "florets" that come out between the scaly sections and I don't see that in plant 34v:



The flowers are most similar to plants in the aster family but I'm hesitant to propose a composite solution unless all other possibilities have been exhausted first.

The problem with composite hypotheses is that there's no way to prove them (or to know how to apply them across a number of drawings). If one accepts the possibility of composites, then one can propose almost any plant attached to any other plant unless some very specific patterns can be found on a large enough sample to confirm it, otherwise it's a bit of a dead-end unless the text can be deciphered and is found to relate to the plants (and there's no guarantee that will happen).

JKP, 
Perhaps I missed something, but how is it that the seeds are the only useful part of the asparagus? 
What do you posit they were useful for? Some kind of apocalypse seed vault?  I would say that getting food or even poison from the plant would be more useful, but again, maybe I missed something. 
From what I could find online growing asparagus from seeds is the longest and most difficult way.