The Voynich Ninja

The general layout of the drawing for Kircher's volcano (c. 1670s) is similar to this hermetic illustration from 1682, even though the subject matter and drawing style is quite different. One wonders if the illustrator of the hermetic text used Kircher illustrations as inspiration. After the invention of the printing press, and the wide dissemination of books, it becomes harder to figure out who-saw-what than in the days when manuscripts were scarce and handwritten:

 

Sorry I haven't been about to talk about the images. Had some family stuff going on. Really glad to see some good posts on the subject though, I'm going to have a really good look through them. Vviews did you mange to figure what I was on about without Imgur? 

Basically it was the big fold out (not sure on correct term!) and this image You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 


and then this, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


I'm not sure I like that comparison but it did start me on similar train of thought. I will try add images and some notes to my blog from now on so you can view them too!

(09-03-2018, 10:07 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In any case, as you note in your OP, there have been suggestions before that there is a volcano depicted in the 9 rosette foldout page. I remember that after reading Ellie Velinska's post, I had tried to find medieval depictions of volcanoes, and came up empty handed.  
This was really surprising to me: I would have thought that such a spectacular phenomenon as volcanic eruptions would have been something worth depicting, especially considering the well known etna, stromboli, etc... but I was never able to find a single medieval image of them.
If we are going to consider the possibility of a volcano in the Voynich, it would be very helpful to have a contemporary (15thC) image of one to compare it to. Does anyone know of any?

Edinburgh University Ms. 176 is a copy of the De Balneis Puteolanis. Kauffmann, "The Baths of Pozzuoli" dates the manuscript to the middle of the XV Century. The University site dates it to 1413.

At f3v, the manuscript includes an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that is very different from all the others I have seen. It appears to be a view from a beach near Pozzuoli, looking South, with Naples on the left and the Vesuvius volcano in the background. It is an amazing anticipation of a landscape that has been painted thousands of times through the centuries (I attach a late example for comparison). I have no idea if this illustration is a creation of the illustrator of this manuscript or if it derives from some other tradition: I am rather sure that nothing similar can be found in earlier copies of the De Balneis.

A fascinating image, Marco. The figures in the background make it feel almost anachronistic. As if two balneis guys intruded into a different genre and started bathing there.

The perspective is indeed very interesting. Imagine that without boats and environment except the mountains / vulcano in the background. - There are still the "umbrellas" in the VMS.

(05-05-2018, 11:42 AM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The perspective is indeed very interesting. Imagine that without boats and environment except the mountains / vulcano in the background. - There are still the "umbrellas" in the VMS.

I guess there was some loss with the last server crash.

I had previously answered this to the effect of Yes! In that the umbrellas had recently shown themselves to me to be volcanoes, and i took the above to indicate same, although rereading it now i am not so sure that is what was meant.

Then i posted some Kircher volcano and underground transfer of water and posited whether he could have seen some of this in the manuscript, to which the replies were to the effect that it was 1638 that Kircher went to Etna & Stromboli, and lowered himself into Vesuvius and was sent the manuscrpt after the publishing of Mundus Subterraneus in 1664, to which I replied, ah too bad the timing didn't work out.

But, what about the 1637 letter from Barschius, which evidently had facsimiles sent along? What if he had mentioned something about water flowing from strangely topped mountains through red lined tubes into green pools, ie f78r, or included a facsimile? Might that have sparked him on his journey?





That is the tube drawing i spoke of.

Just a thought. Quite a bit of Kircher's work seems analogous with the manuscript, including maps, and various other subjects, like Noah's Ark, although in most cases from what i can see, the manuscript actually does a better job of explanation in most cases. (i.e. at its simplest, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says mountain runoff goes underground, gets heated, comes back up again as springs, sometimes under the water, whereas Kircher's ideas get complicated with internal oceans and such).

I now think the tubes that look like Gatling guns are indications of volcanic activity.



The central rosette to me is now Sicily, while still containing a multitude of ethereal ideas within the cloud band.
Sicily is basically central to the Mediterranean, and so makes sense in that way. 

Also, there are finials on the towers and that to me means volcanoes. Check. The largest volcano in Europe is on the island, plus several others.

I think the tubes are mud volcanoes. The reason for this was that i took the NW rosette to indicate Ceuta because of the five design like the Portugese shield, and Portugal had taken Ceuta in 1415. Then i found mud volcanoes nearby Ceuta. Then JKP noted the entire rosette resembled a volcano, and there are some in the middle Atlas mountains.

So that morphed the circle into a larger area, and the tubes were now the promontory on which Ceuta is located.

Now, i have seen a further morph of that rosette into an even larger circle, with Tunisia promontory as the tubes.

In effect it looks a lot like this, or at least the top quarter. Note this is oriented with west up.



I actually think all the morphs are valid, that they are parts of putting together a proper map in your head. 

Draw a circle. This circle gets you all of northwestern Africa, including Tunisia. The center is the Sahara, with mountains surrounding.



Draw two circles at the top center, about a third the diameter of the original each, not quite touching, which extend outward by about 10 percent, this gets the semicircular area that includes the Ceuta promontory, plus the second one contains the rest of the atlas mountains up to the Tunisia promontory. Note the bend in Libya is represented by the bendy bridge below the pipes.

The first of the two secondary circles gets you a one that contains Morocco plus the other half is some of Algeria, with the Atlas volcanoes at the center.



Draw two more circles onto the top of that first smaller circle, extending ninety percent this time, still not touching, and in between, draw a bridge about halfway and you have the Gibraltar Strait and the two promontories. Note that this lower promontory points north, whereas the Tunisia one in the other morph points northeast if you consider the page to be aligned west up. But if you compare it to the writing, then it would be up, or north. So it morphs depending on what you are looking at.



Then mark off the two eastern tips of each promontory, top and bottom, and you get Gibraltar and Ceuta, the Pillars of Hercules.



Incidentally i think these are represented in quire 13 as the clashing mountains, at the bottom of this pic.



Note that the largest circle is basically centered on the prime meridian and the tropic of cancer. I realize the prime meridian was set much later but i am just saying that today you can draw these circles and have a pretty good idea of where to draw the rest of the world. It is also the central between the two smaller circle additions making up the shoreline and mountains.

 

The meridian pretty much passes through the area of Andorra, which i think is represented by the N rosette, and the NE rosette, well, it is pretty morph-y too but basically encompasses the rest of Europe, with the volcano standing in for the boot of Italy, which is basically a long line of volcanoes, including the one drawn, which i think is Vesuvius. Note this pic cuts off the coast of Tunisia with its map legend. It points at Sicily and there are two active volcanoes shown straight in line with Etna.



The smaller circle with the Tunisia promontory beside the Gibraltar one is the one that points at the Balearic islands, represented by the tower in the hole bridge. Note the puzzle piece cutouts on either side of the middle island, the bridge has convex points, but still seems somewhat analogous, like if you stick the two other islands in those cutouts, that is about what you would see.




The other third level circle is opposite Spain of course, which is denoted by the shoreline adjacent to that bridge, so it can morph from one circle to another depending on what you are aligning it with.

That is as far as i'll go for now. But i would say that internal fires, along with water, are definitely indicated, and they are those of the Earth.

Another volcano reference, if the finial connection hold true, then there should be a volcano in the Northern rosette, since it has a finial.



It is in the middle of the canopy, pointing down, from the perspective of its position as N rosette in original presentation. I figured this is because it is hard to draw it in 3d. But now i realize it can act as a pointer, like the hand of a clock.

So, i had this rosette pegged as Andorra, i knew it was mountainous, but when i looked it up, no volcanoes. 

But then i realized there was another morph to the rosette. It isnt a morph of convenience though, there are a few factors that suggest this rosette would cover far more ground than Andorra, but also include it.

1. Most of the rosettes i have identified have this morphing Alice in Wonderland kind of quality of getting bigger and smaller while moving around, but each morph always seems to reference the other, or be analogous in some way, beyond just being random circles drawn in close proximity.

2. If the castle bridge is France, the rosette is not going to be some tiny country like Andorra, it would encompass most of Spain. At the same time Andorra should be there too, it existed at the time of the manuscript.

3. This larger area idea is also indicated by the Tarifa area i previously identified as being the drawn part that looks like the promontory on which Gibraltar is located (but is hidden by the tower in the hole bridge). That would make the large area a circle with Madrid as its center, encompassing pretty much all of Spain and Portugal.



4. But that wouldnt include Barcelona.  It and the rest of northern Spain would be in a triangle off to the side. So, the rosette has another morph that has Andorra as its center with a radius of Barcelona. You could see that the rosette would actually be facing west, not north. Also, this cicle is snug next to the Balearic islands, which are represented by the tower in the hole bridge. That is why when it morphs to become most of Spain, the bridge covers Gibraltar. When it morphs into Andorra Barcelona, it takes that bridge with it, turns, and puts the islands where they belong and at about the right scale. At some point i will get a drawing app going to show how these morphs appear to work with each other. I think it would make a freaky video.

5. So, now look at where the finial points. It would be pointing at a place east of Andorra, in Spain, near the border with France. What do you know, there is a volcano field there.





6. In fact it is pointing to a bigger volcano in the bigger morph too, except it would be pointing SE, not E . Like i said there is turning involved with the morphs. Again, i will draw them in their various rotations at some point to see if any further info can be gleaned from doing so. 




Once again the finials point out volcanoes i never knew were there.

The rosettes seem to portray elements of a portolan map when the NW rosette is rotated to the be the SW position. 

I was trying to reconcile that with the TO map north, west east suns, and south position as identified by Diane. Then i was thinking about the the source of the Nile. 



Beside it is the psalter map. I dont know whether the vms creator could have seen it but they say it is a copy of another which was a copy of a matthew paris, perhaps some other copy or progenitor they saw could have included similar elements. Look at both the rivers coming from the tube at the top, which appears to be Arabia, and the origin of the Nile to the right, the one where the rivers spread out and come back together again. 

Other than looking like the imagery in the psalter map, i see in the vms a mountain throwing off sediment, attached to lines of mountain rivers, with a tube in the middle of it, then the bridge toward the rosette. This tells me that it is mountain runoff from a volcano which provides mineralization to make a lush garden of eden, which is what i think that rosette shows. But i thought it was supposed to be in Mesopotamia or Armenia so it didnt fit to me. 

But then i was looking at a map by Albertinus de Virga of Venice.

1409 Portolan



1411 to 1415 Mappa Mundi. Look at the big circle at the south tip of Africa. It is the Garden of Eden. I assume also the source of the Nile. 



1911 map of the Nile. Note that it originates from a lot of places. 



Source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, Lake Tana. From wiki,

The base of the island is scoriaceous lava in cubes, which are exposed all around the shore and washed by the waves, and identified as vesicular olivine basalt. On the top is a thin layer of red soil derived from the decay of the basalts.



So, there you have it, another ancient volcano.

The source of the White Nile, Lake Victoria, although it is fed by other rivers so it gets complicated.



Right bottom mountain peak is Kilimanjaro, a dormant volcano. The East African rift envelopes Lake Victoria. 

Lake Victoria last dried out about 17,300 years ago, and it refilled 14,700 years ago[20] as the African humid period began.[21]

Anyway i now have a means of reconciling those ideas. You cant get more south than that emblem is located. 


    

The source pointing to where the delta would be seems kind of poetic. A way to show what is not shown on the portolan version.

I have a blog about some of this, about 90% written. I just need to add the summary and to find one of my detail compilation pics that I put together specially for it. Sigh. I don't know where I'll ever find the time to post all the info I have. It's getting discouraging.