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In this illustration of the You are not allowed to view links.
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The female figures are clearly seen descending from the sky. This iconographic reading is fundamental to understanding the Voynich.
(12-03-2025, 01:25 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In this illustration of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. we do not see the pine cone but rather the wavy line that means the same thing, the sphere of the fixed stars, which is reinforced by the tent roof that symbolizes the limits of the medieval universe.
The female figures are clearly seen descending from the sky. This iconographic reading is fundamental to understanding the Voynich.
I agree with you about the pinecone being similar to how this feature is presented, mostly because of the finals in both cases.
However, I don't understand your view that we are dealing with sky here. Help me understand it so I can try to see what you are seeing. Is the lowest one still in the sky, or have they reached earth? What about the one stepping in from the middle above that one? Seems to be outside the realm of the greater universe, as this is below what you say the boundary is, so where is she coming from?
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The iconography of Quire 13 is so enormously complex that it has never been well interpreted. Images have a meaning and you have to know how to see it, leaving aside the pure whim of the author that can lead to error. In the image I posted from f84v, we see the pinecone again, which, as I said, is a representation of the sphere of the fixed stars, the final sphere of the medieval universe. From it emerge effluvia, emanations that materialize in the female figures.
Of course, if you don't believe that the pinecone represents the sky and you believe that the female figures are women or female spirits, we will never understand each other. I'm in no hurry. I trust that one day it will be understood.
The emanations that come out of the sky represent the virtue or influence of the stars, that is why we see female figures. Why female figures? I've said this several times, but it bears repeating because this forum is in English, and English doesn't have grammatical gender, so it might not be easy to understand.
If I go to the restroom in a restaurant and see the figures of the sun and the moon on the doors, I immediately know which one is the men's, but a native English speaker might be unsure.
The Voynich employs this convention common in the Middle Ages. We see the Sun with a male face and the Moon with a female one. The fixed stars in languages derived from Latin is a feminine name, that's why the influence of stars is represented by female figures. This seems simple, but over the years I've found it harder to understand than I thought.
It's hard not to think that behind that strange script and all that complex imagery lies a belief, a way of seeing the world, a philosophy, if you will. All this work wasn't done for pure entertainment, but to convey an idea. I believe the key idea being conveyed is the astral influence on plants. This is what we can deduce from the imagery, where there is practically nothing but herbs and stars.
The VM script, as I see it, is just a consequence of that idea. The authors represented it with all those images and then created a kind of ad hoc language. A language that isn't really a language, but a simple notation of astronomical symbols.
It's spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the time when most plants bloom. In the Voynich, almost all the herbs we see have flowers. It doesn't matter whether they are real or imagined. The fact is that the authors painted them in bloom. The authors also wanted to highlight the spring zodiac signs. They duplicated both Aries and Taurus, something they didn't do with the rest of the signs.
I think this relationship between the spring zodiac signs and the vast majority of flowering herbs in the Voynich is the greatest indication that all parts of the book are related, that there is a single meaning, a coherent message.
Wouldn't the vast majority of flowering plants be depicted in bloom in any herbal manuscript?
That said, the VM does have a higher than average percentage of flowering plants. It's plants without any flower or fruit are quite rare. But this has more to do with selection or composition than with time of year.
Well, that's your opinion, which is certainly not mine.
It can't be a coincidence that the spring zodiac signs are the only ones to be duplicated and are also almost the only ones in which the female figures have been drawn inside tubes. In fact, only in Pisces do we see these female figures in tubes. And there can be no other reason than February/March is when flowering begins in the northern hemisphere. We see these tubes in Quire 13, in some images where female figures, personifications of the stars, descend from the sky. They are the same tubes from the pages of the Rosettes, a representation of the medieval universe.
All this imagery is a representation of the astral influence on plants. In fact, the Voynich section with roots and leaves can be considered a collection of the beneficial virtues of herbs once they have received these influences. I believe it is a widespread tradition to gather magical herbs on the night of San Juan, the summer solstice, because it is during spring that they have absorbed astral influences.
In the Voynich there is an image (f68v1) that, at a glance, shows an immediate relationship between the starry sky and flowering herbs.
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In the codex there are many images that are susceptible to different interpretations, but in this one there shouldn't be many people who don't see a flower with its petals open and surrounded by stars.
That the author thought of a flower seems obvious, especially if we take into account that a large number of Voynich flowers have blue petals, which is a rarity.
That all parts of the Voynich are related and correspond to each other can also be seen in the so-called pharmacological section and the Rosettes page. Some of the luxurious containers we see in the central circle of the Rosettes surrounded by stars can be seen almost identical on the pharmacological pages next to roots and herbs. There is a clear symbolic message in these illustrations. The presence of these vessels on both sides means that the essences or therapeutic virtues created by the stars end up in the components of the plants.
Luxurious vessels like those in the Voynich can be seen, around the same time, in paintings or miniatures depicting the Epiphany in the hands of the Three Wise Men. Besides gold, they contained incense and myrrh, precious essences.