The Voynich Ninja

There's no guarantee the tendril in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is intended as a face, but it does appear deliberate. Profiles of men with beards were common in medieval manuscripts but it's not usual to find them integrated with a plant in this specific way—usually they show up in roots or leaves.


I haven't found a match, and looking for it is low on my list of priorities because there isn't necessarily an examplar, but this one comes closer than some, even if the nose is too sharp. Since the VMS drawing is a hybrid of face and plant, there may not be a direct match, but I thought it might be worth starting a thread in case interesting parallels exist:

Many coins survive of this type:



Another one is in my forum avatar. They were from the Greek city of Pantikapaion, and the Pan head on the coin was a pun for the "Pan" in the city name. (Pan-pun-Pan, no pun intended).



The origin of the coin doesn't really matter since we are dealing with an apparently abundant type of currency, and coins change hands. Especially gold ones.

I consider this one of the strongest visual parallels for anything in the VM, since the Pan figure has the appropriate plant type, including berries, in his hair. The wild, untamed Pans (or Silenos) were always associated with vines, whether they be grape vines or ivy vines. These were considered different versions of the same plant, something which still lives on in the ambiguity of the English word vine.

First I thought the profile referred to a Bacchus type, but this is less likely. Dionysus usually had a straight nose appropriate to a god, while the VM figure clearly shows Silenos' or Pan's drunkard's nose. The profile is one of a face marked by years of debauchery. 

This is Dionysus:


The detail of the VM profile is of such refinement that we can see how the Pan profile comes much closer, even though Dionysus also wears the vine crown.

These figures were extremely popular and of course they survived in other forms of art like statues and mosaics. But the Pan coins are the closest I've found so far.

The problem is, as so often, that the Voynich apparently knows what it's doing with these Greco-Roman figures. To work a Pan/Silenos/old Bacchus face into a vine is clever and appropriate. It's not random.

Also, the face is much more refined than that of other Voynich figures, and it's the only one to appear in full profile. It was copied.

If you like the "squint and see" games that used to be popular, take a look at thisYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on page f76r..

Not exactly a fair comparison David. The profile is huge and its outline is actually drawn, with apparent purpose. And actual continuous lines of ink

The Pan coin is a very good example, as the figure has a rounded nose, horizontally extended beard, and a connection to plants, and coins were easily seen even if they weren't in the possession of the viewer. It would be hard to beat it.

I've often wondered if the man-with-beard in the VMS tendril might be a self-portrait (or possibly an imaginary portrait of Galen, Pliny, or one of the other classical authors or orators). I wasn't aware that a steganographic profile had been suggested in the layout of the text itself.

Sorry Koen, no comparision was intended! I was just bringing people's attention to a similar phenomen that had been discussed in the past.
I'm always suspicious of these facial claims, it is very easy to project pareidolia onto the manuscript. This is-it isn't-it discussions are completely out of character for medieval discussions and it's simply too easy for us to project our own ideas onto vague abstracts.
I've never come across an outline of a face like the one in the vine. I'm not saying it's not a face, but it could be random, or a snake, or whatever we want it to be. There's no way of knowing unless we firmly project our own prejudice upon it.
Even the famous You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was hidden underneath text and not within it (surprising how many times this argument was badly deployed in the past when discussing the hidden faces of the VM).

The difference with usual cases of pareidolia is that here you get very specific facial features, combined with the appropriate floral components in the appropriate place. Only in the VM the part with the berries is longer because it needs to span the text. In the below image I just chopped out the middle section.

The layout is always the same: old drunkard's profile on the left side, berries on top, vine on the right.

[attachment=1583]

I've also just noticed that quite a number of these Pantikapaion coins have been countermarked with an eight-pointed star (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ). When a coin is countermarked, is has "some additional mark or symbol punched into it at some point during its career as a circulating coin." This is usually done for political reasons, for example when there is a new ruler, or when a currency is accepted as valid in a new country.



What this implies is that the life span of these coins was extended and/or they had a relatively wide area of circulation.

I feel completely disoriented, it's not Koen who proposed this comparison first?

This way of publishing without quoting his predecessors is distressing, one no longer knows who says what.

(15-08-2017, 03:36 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I feel completely disoriented, it's not Koen who proposed this comparison first?

This way of publishing without quoting his predecessors is distressing, one no longer knows who says what.

Koen posted about this in detail more than a year ago You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I'm not aware of any predecessors who have written about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. head in depth prior to Koen.

The previous thread is a more general thread about the plant that includes quite a bit of discussion of the fruits (in addition to the head), so I wanted to start a thread specifically for looking at heads, to see if there's anything we might have missed or which might add some insights to the idea. it doesn't have to be limited to the head in the tendril, if there are other similar heads (or hidden heads) like this one in other parts of the manuscript (implied rather than overt).

I was happy that DavidJackson mentioned the steganographic head (although it seems vaguer to me than the tendril head) because it opens up the possibility of other heads that might be implied in other ways and it wasn't one that I had seen before.

JKP,
I think Ruby Novacna felt confused because you made no mention of Koen Gh in your opening post. As my old philosophy teacher used to say, "it goes without saying, but it goes even better with saying".
It is possible to link to a specific post rather than a whole thread; this can be done by using the link to the post #number that appears in the upper right corner of each post, like this:
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