The Voynich Ninja

Morten St George,

To answer your question, as far as I remember, the only other hole in the manuscript is the one on f34r&v. (ETA: there is another one on f116r&v)

Now back to the plants:

"At the time I acquired a license for it, he described it as freshwater plant from the Morichal district of Venezuela. The bud, however, was in the photograph. I did not put it there.  So I plan to leave the photo on my site until someone can convince me that the bud is not there."

The fact is that these single cell organisms cannot grow buds. 
The Ophrydium versatile in the photo is visibly on a surface that is covered in moss and other vegetation. What you see (and interpret as a bud) is there, but it is not a part of the protozoan.
It cannot be a bud, because these protozoans can't make buds or flowers, as I have explained in my previous post.
It can't even be a "baby" Ophrydium versatile, because that is not how these protozoans reproduce: they reproduce by binary fission,  dividing themselves into two individuals of identical size.
So whether or not there is a green fleck or strand near the blob, it cannot be a "bud", or even belong to the same species.
That is just fact.

you said:
"The most critical elements, I feel, are the following:" before presenting the tapir and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. examples.
After we debunked both, you then flip to say:
"Note that the tapir and the plant (or protozoa) are not essential."
...   


You say:
The naked women in green, plant infested water in combination with depictions of more than a hundred tropical plants will suffice. "
There are swamps all over the world: if we accept your idea that the women are in a swamp, that alone does not lead to the conclusion that this swamp is located in Venezuela.
Nowhere on your website do you provide other identifications of specific amazonian plants, not even a single one.
If you are going to claim that all these plants are tropical, please provide the identifications to back up that claim.

(27-01-2018, 03:15 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Morten St George,

To answer your question, as far as I remember, the only other hole in the manuscript is the one on f34r&v. (ETA: there is another one on f116r&v)

Now back to the plants:

"At the time I acquired a license for it, he described it as freshwater plant from the Morichal district of Venezuela. The bud, however, was in the photograph. I did not put it there.  So I plan to leave the photo on my site until someone can convince me that the bud is not there."

The fact is that these single cell organisms cannot grow buds. 
The Ophrydium versatile in the photo is visibly on a surface that is covered in moss and other vegetation. What you see (and interpret as a bud) is there, but it is not a part of the protozoan.
It cannot be a bud, because these protozoans can't make buds or flowers, as I have explained in my previous post.
It can't even be a "baby" Ophrydium versatile, because that is not how these protozoans reproduce: they reproduce by binary fission,  dividing themselves into two individuals of identical size.
So whether or not there is a green fleck or strand near the blob, it cannot be a "bud", or even belong to the same species.
That is just fact.

you said:
"The most critical elements, I feel, are the following:" before presenting the tapir and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. examples.
After we debunked both, you then flip to say:
"Note that the tapir and the plant (or protozoa) are not essential."
...   


You say:
The naked women in green, plant infested water in combination with depictions of more than a hundred tropical plants will suffice. "
There are swamps all over the world: if we accept your idea that the women are in a swamp, that alone does not lead to the conclusion that this swamp is located in Venezuela.
Nowhere on your website do you provide other identifications of specific amazonian plants, not even a single one.
If you are going to claim that all these plants are tropical, please provide the identifications to back up that claim.

That "hole" on page 34 looks like nothing more than a slit. I think Yale would have cut away the entire tapir section if not for a desire to retain the quire number on the bottom right! 

Regarding the plant, it seems that the photographer, not wishing to associate himself with my aliens, has changed his mind about what he photographed. He asked on his Facebook page what else it could be and someone, who probably was not a botanist or biologist, suggested your protozoa. That is hardly a reliable source!

Nonetheless, I have inserted the following paragraph into my web page

"Very recently, however, it was brought to my attention that this green, jelly-like blob could be an animal and not a plant at all. I agree. But then this confirms that the Voynich artists are depicting real things, leaving the Amazon rainforest as pretty much the only place on Earth that could have produced real plants and flowers of such enormous diversity as we see depicted in the Voynich manuscript."

I found an article online that begins as follows:

"This Chapter is based on three published works: (1) a paper by Hugh O Neall (1944) that identifies two New World plants (sunflower and chili peppers) in the Voynich manuscript; (2) a paper of Tucker and Talbert (2013) which identified 39 plants in the Voynich as indigenous to the New World; (3) a paper by Tucker and Janick (2016) which extended the list to 59 species."

You can find the full article here:

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You are welcome to point me to articles supporting your contention that the VMS depicts plants growing in the Netherlands, or even to plants growing in northern Italy as your colleagues contend.

(26-01-2018, 07:26 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:From You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Internally, Herball provides more evidence as it says things that we would never expect to find in a botany book, like
"Nostradami Salo-mensis Gallo-prouincie,"
And a Herball epigram begins with a reference to the Atlas Mountains,
"Define quae vastis pomeria montibus Atlas"

Why would you not expect to find poetry referencing the orchards of the Atlas mountains in a botanical book?
The verse goes:
DEsine, quae vastis pomaria montibus Atlas

Clauserat (Hesperij munera rara soli)
Auratis folijs auratos desine ramos
Mirari, & ramis pendula poma suis.

It's a bit of poetry upon the fertile end of Europe.

As for the first bit about Nostradamus, if you read the whole quotation (I couldn't be bothered to read the whole thing, here's the last paragraph which is the bit you're talking about):

Quote:qui cum decipi velit, decipiatur: in cuius fallacias per apposite finxit et cecinit olim hos versiculos eruditissimus col­lega D Jacobus Paradisus nobilis Gandauensis alludens adnomen tanti versutissimi herois Nostra­dami Salonensis Gallo-prouinciae,

Nostra-damus, cum verba damus, quia fallere nostrum;
Et cum verba damus, nil nisi Nostra-damus.

The author is referring to a play on words by D Jacobus laughing at Nostradamus. The play on words is difficult for me to translate, but uses the name of Nostra-Damus to warn against accepting words at face value.

Nostra­dami Salonensis Gallo-prouinciae is simply "Nostradamus S. the French speaker".

You say that

Quote:which turns out to be a term (along with its Berber name "Fez") used to link works written in the French, German, Latin and English languages.

Nah.

I'd also suggest you look up the Greek myth of Atlas and his connection to the African mountain range before trying to interpret Shakespeare.

Koen, fascinating about Ophrydium versatile.

You write:

'Nostradami Salonensis Gallo-prouinciae is simply "Nostradamus S. the French speaker".'

I read this as saying Nostradamus, native of Salon.  Salon was a town in the southern French province of Provence where Nostradamus lived. Although the letters u and n were often confused in handwriting, I'm pretty sure the u in prouinciae is a v and not an n.

Going back more than three decades, and long before I had ever heard of the VMS, I've been searching for the source of 161 lines of ancient text that were incorporated into the prophecies of Nostradamus. I do not believe it is a coincidence that, in the VMS, 161 "recipes" are marked by stars with red coloring.

(27-01-2018, 07:08 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not believe it is a coincidence that, in the VMS, 161 "recipes" are marked by stars with red coloring.

Sorry, but your count is wrong.
Again I refer you to the Counting Things section, and this post in particular:
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Out of a total of 324 stars in quire 20, there are 163 stars to which red paint has been applied.
Of these, 17 are fully red, and 146 only have red paint in the center.
These totals are not my opinion, they have been cross checked by forum members.
Considering that f109-110 are missing, it is likely that there were originally even more red stars.
So no, the 161 number doesn't match with anything in the Voynich Manuscript.

Without going into the counting side of things....

Quote:I read this as saying Nostradamus, native of Salon. 

Yeah, that's sort is how surnames worked in those days, especially for the English.

Morten, not only are your conclusions far-fetched, but many of them are based on incorrect observations, as VViews is friendly enough to point out. How can you come up with an entire theory if you don't even know what you're looking at?

Also, here's your tapir cutout from the other side, with the foldout opened:
[attachment=1913]

(27-01-2018, 09:06 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Without going into the counting side of things....

Quote:I read this as saying Nostradamus, native of Salon. 

Yeah, that's sort is how surnames worked in those days, especially for the English.

On counting, I believe I said, or should have said, that there were 161 passages or recipes that are marked with stars having some red coloring. That has not changed. The miniature red-star does not delineate a passage or recipe; it merely attaches itself to another red star that does that. Another red star is up at the top of the page and serves only to indicate a continuation of red star text. It does not itself delineate a new passage or recipe. I continue to maintain that the number 161 is correct for red star passages.

I am starting to lose interest in this forum. There is nothing that can done with people who are not rational. There is zero chance that the VMS was made by monks in northern Italy. On what page do you find a drawing of a monk? On what page do you find an illustration on religious themes or of the elegance of illustrations known to have been by medieval monks? You can see them on Google Images. Do a search for "medieval manuscripts." Do you see anything there that looks like what we see in the VMS?

I forgot to mention that a translation of a large portion of the 161 recipes, in both French and English, can be found on my web page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  Think of it what you will.

Wait, so portraits of the authors have to be included in every genuine manuscript?

Morten St George,

nobody is arguing for any specific origin in this thread.
We are simply pointing out that your observations about various elements of the manuscript are erroneous.

Koen Gh's last image shows beyond doubt that the hole in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is not shaped like a tapir. Seriously, just look at it.

As for the star count, even if you discount the smaller star, that still leaves 162 red stars, not 161. And keep in mind that there are two folios missing, so I reiterate that there were probably even more red stars originally, since there are between 5-10 red stars on every other page of Q20.

What we are carrying out in this thread is the closest thing you will get to a proper peer review of your writings on the Voynich.
Nobody has discussed your conclusions about origins here, because before we even get to those, we are providing you with a fact-check of the observations which your theory is founded upon.
As it turns out, several of these are simply incorrect.

OK, so you replied to me with a response to somebody else, but no matter.
Let us check the link you put to me, namely the Shakespeare correspondence to Nostradamus (and I still can't quite understand how we get from there to the Voynich, but hey).

You say, in your very first example:

Quote:Nostradamus:
L'oiseau royal sur la cité solaire,
Sept moys deuant fera nocturne augure:
Mur d'Orient, cherra tonnerre esclaire,
Sept iours aux portes les ennemis à l'heure [1, V-81].
The royal bird over the city of the Sun, Seven months beforehand shall make nocturnal augury, The wall of the Orient shall fall, thunder illuminated, Seven days to the ports the enemies to the hour [168 hours?]. Note the Frenchification of the Latin "portis" (dative case), which can mean either gates or seaports. Later we will encounter a clarification: "port," seaport, in unambiguous context.
Shakespeare:
Ham. Not a whit, we defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow [2, Ham.].
Shakespeare:
And with my hand at midnight held your head;
And, like the watchful minutes to the hour [2, Jn.].
Theophilus de Garencières, who made the first English translation of the Nostradamus prophecies in 1672, tells us "By the Royal Bird is meant an Eagle" [3], but Shakespeare considers other possibilities, here the sparrow. However, it is the word fall that seals the correlation. Note that Nostradamus uses fall in the sense of the fall of an empire and Shakespeare uses it to refer to the descent of a bird, but nevertheless the terms equate for the purpose at hand.

I'm sorry, but you can't pick two random examples out of the Shakespearean corpus and use them to justify a link to Nostradamus - it's ridiculous. They aren't even from the same play. And they don't even correspond in the least to the Nostradamus prediction you quote. 

BTW, the sparrow quotation is actually a reference to the Bible, King James version.

Sorry, it's all too ridiculous for me, I'm out.