The Voynich Ninja

(18-10-2025, 06:28 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the key elements, and perhaps the most attractive, of the Voynich iconography are the hundreds of female figures in the codex. We see them in the zodiacal section and in Quire 13. I assume they are the same. What I mean is that the authors have given the same meaning to the female figures in both parts or sections. What I maintain is that these figures are allegorical representations of the zodiacal stars, a very common iconographic resource in medieval times, that is, replacing something concrete or an abstraction with a human figure.

   Anyone who has seen medieval astronomical or astrological manuscripts will have encountered personifications of the planets. Venus as a woman, Saturn as an old man, or Mars as an armed warrior. It's true that it's much harder to find personifications of stars. They do exist when it comes to constellations, but they're rarer when it comes to individual stars.

  However, there are examples such as this German manuscript from the second half of the 15th century (Ms M. 384, f21r)

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This is the Pleiades constellation and we can see the representation of each star as a female figure. We see how there is a star above each of their heads to make it clear that they are not women but stars. It's something similar to the zodiacal section of the Voynich, where each of the female figures holds a star.

I think this is where you and I differ: I believe when they are holding stars, they represent stars (and souls, because it was widely believed stars were souls, and that is why, I think, in the VMS, some of the nymphs have personal attributes that distinguish them). However, when they are not holding stars, they represent something else, and it could be a variety of things depending on their accoutrements and context. The entire universe was made of prima materia, according to natural philisophers, though in the heavens it was refined to immortal quintessence, whereas on earth the prima materia is muddied and must be refined to liberate the quintessence. 

So I see the nymphs as prima materia, not as rays of influence,though that is part of it tangentially,  but as actual substances that can change according to circumstances. I like this quote: 

“They have compared the "prima materia" to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself.”
(Wikipedia entry on Prima Materia)

And of the many synonyms used for it, we commonly find “Bride, Spouse, Mother, Eve”. I just think it fits the pregnant nymphs better than that they are solely stars.

Well, at least you don't see women bathing or female biological processes in Quire 13. That's progress.

Your interpretation seems a bit tied to some kind of Hermetic or esoteric philosophy. I don't rule out some of that, but my interpretation is more conventional with medieval knowledge of Aristotelian origin. The stars and planets, and the spheres that contain them, are made of a different substance than the four elements of the Earth. An incorruptible substance, but not exactly something with its own spirit.

In the Christian interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy, it is the angels who move the spheres. The stars are simply the means God uses to influence earthly things, such as plants, but also to influence and send signals to humanity, hence the widespread belief in astrology.

I see you're referring to female figures and saying that they're not just representations of stars because they're pregnant. Here lies a fundamental question of medieval iconography. Understanding the allegorical world of medieval imagery is not easy, but it doesn't require a doctoral degree either. There's always something metaphorical in the way things are represented. How does the medieval mentality represent the influence of stars on plants? It's precisely with figures of pregnant women to imply that they are the ones who make herbs sprout and grow.

(19-10-2025, 07:29 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, at least you don't see women bathing or female biological processes in Quire 13. That's progress.

Your interpretation seems a bit tied to some kind of Hermetic or esoteric philosophy. I don't rule out some of that, but my interpretation is more conventional with medieval knowledge of Aristotelian origin. The stars and planets, and the spheres that contain them, are made of a different substance than the four elements of the Earth. An incorruptible substance, but not exactly something with its own spirit.

In the Christian interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy, it is the angels who move the spheres. The stars are simply the means God uses to influence earthly things, such as plants, but also to influence and send signals to humanity, hence the widespread belief in astrology.

I see you're referring to female figures and saying that they're not just representations of stars because they're pregnant. Here lies a fundamental question of medieval iconography. Understanding the allegorical world of medieval imagery is not easy, but it doesn't require a doctoral degree either. There's always something metaphorical in the way things are represented. How does the medieval mentality represent the influence of stars on plants? It's precisely with figures of pregnant women to imply that they are the ones who make herbs sprout and grow.

You do know that Hermetic philosophy is based on Aristotle, among other Greek philosophers, right? I had a heck of a time disentangling the two before I realized it couldn’t be done. Themes I thought Hermetic were simply Greek natural philosophy, springing from Greek-ruled Alexandria in the early centuries AD. . I assure you, there is nothing esoteric about me or my beliefs. The same can’t be said about almost anyone in the medieval era, who I do my best to understand despite my scepticism. 

I also think your point about angels moving the spheres was one point of view, but there were others, in fact several, as more Greek philosophy became available to the scholars. Many of these ideas were hotly debated by the scholastics. Angels and their properties were one of the most contentious battlegrounds in the universities, especially when it came to Aristotle and his “unmoved” movers.

I agree with you about the possible Hermetic influence in the Voynich. I said before that I didn't rule it out. The only thing is that your interpretation seemed somewhat heretical to me, and I believe the codex could have been produced in a monastery. There are enough Christian symbols in the Voynich to suggest that the philosophy underlying it is a Christianized Aristotelianism.

Not long ago, I wrote about the Hermes mosaic in Siena Cathedral, proof that he was a Christianized figure in the 15th century. I also wrote in another post about John Gower, a friend of Chaucer, and his Liber de quindecim stellis, a work attributed to Hermes and which lists fifteen stars, fifteen stones, and fifteen herbs.

  I think we can more or less agree on the underlying thought behind the Voynich, but it's about interpreting the images well. I've already told you about my thoughts on pregnant female figures and their meaning. This is a fundamental aspect of the codex's iconography, and I'd like people to think more about it.

(20-10-2025, 05:49 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree with you about the possible Hermetic influence in the Voynich. I said before that I didn't rule it out. The only thing is that your interpretation seemed somewhat heretical to me, and I believe the codex could have been produced in a monastery. There are enough Christian symbols in the Voynich to suggest that the philosophy underlying it is a Christianized Aristotelianism.

Not long ago, I wrote about the Hermes mosaic in Siena Cathedral, proof that he was a Christianized figure in the 15th century. I also wrote in another post about John Gower, a friend of Chaucer, and his Liber de quindecim stellis, a work attributed to Hermes and which lists fifteen stars, fifteen stones, and fifteen herbs.

  I think we can more or less agree on the underlying thought behind the Voynich, but it's about interpreting the images well. I've already told you about my thoughts on pregnant female figures and their meaning. This is a fundamental aspect of the codex's iconography, and I'd like people to think more about it.

I agree it might have been, was likely to have been, produced in a monastery. That’s the thing, though, many alchemists were deeply religious, and the more famous of them were monks! Also, heresy was much more a problem for Christians than pagans. The Cathars, the Hussites, the Fraticelli and the Brethren, all Christian, just with differing points of view than the Catholic Church prevailing doctrine. I don’t think my interpretation is heretical per se except that many of the monks back then had heretical tendencies while still remaining devout Christians. The Christian symbolism in the Voynich is undeniable; what it’s trying to say is open to conjecture. 

Yes, to me a Christianized Aristotellianism sums it up well. Whether there is more Hermetic thought than just the Greek philosophy, I’ve been unable to isolate it, and that makes sense because the main body of mystical Hermeticism hadn’t officially reached the West yet. The Franciscan and Dominican orders were established in some part to bring Aristotle and the other Greek and Arabic natural philosophers in line with church doctrine, developing a tautology that left a lot of gaps for individual imagination. That’s what I see happening here, and yet the alchemical twinning of Jesus and and the Stone in metaphor was an actual trend in alchemy, at precisely the time period the VMS was produced, so it wasn’t just individual in expression.  

I love that you researched and published on Gower; I will have to read this post. This is a long thread, I have not read the whole thing. 

Yes, your thought on pregnant female figures is solid, but what it all comes down to is Mother Nature.  Both prima materia and plants/star symbolism could be seen as riffs on the same premise, because they stem from the same Greek philosophical ideas about the “scientific” creation of the world. 

It’s true that we agree on many, many ideas. Yours was one of the first threads I started reading on here, and not only was I agreeing with you about some things I had already researched but I also learned new things and new avenues of research into the possible symbolism of the images. I also agree that the script is possibly an attempt at a celestial script. For you, however, your analysis begins and ends with astrology and its impact on plants, whereas mine would include that but delve deeper into the alchemical, particularly in the balneological pages. 

I would love to hear your interpretation of the rosette images one day. I was struck when you called one image the “canopy of heaven” when I had been arguing elsewhere to deaf ears that that was what it was!  Your phrase “Christianized Aristotelianism” sums up exactly what I believe the rosette page to be.

Yes, Barbrey, I think we agree on some ideas, but there are others we don't. I already told you that I don't believe there's anything balneological or biological about the Voynich. That idea seems like a mirage to me, one that's easy to fall into. For me, it's all astrological. We see women bathing, but I think it's a way of representing that the stars bring water to the plants. Or perhaps the green color is an allegorical allusion to the plant world. The pipes and all the plumbing we see are a way of representing the channels through which the astral influence circulates.

  I'm pleased you said my thread was one of the first you started reading. You're alluding to my mention of the canopy of heaven. It's not my original idea. Others have seen it before, and I think it's a key image because we see it on the pages of the female figures and also on the Rosette page. In the first case, we clearly see the figures descending from the canopy, an allusion to them coming from heaven.

You ask me for my interpretation of the Rosette Page. For me, and I've said this before, it's a representation of the medieval universe. This universe was a kind of onion composed of several layers, superimposed spheres. Since this can't be represented, I believe what the authors did was spread the spheres over the surface of the parchment. There's a sphere where the castle is, representing the Earth, and then eight spheres, seven of the medieval planets, including the sun and the moon, and the central sphere is that of the fixed stars.

I am sorry, I could not read all of the 158 pages. But most of it could be based on this tables, that predicted nearly everything around 1400-1500. 

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


Interestingly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has a very similar top down row. Symbols for A-G for the days of the week.

I see you're new to the forum. Of course, you don't need to read all 158 pages of this thread, but if you take the time to read some of them, you'll be better informed and won't just write things randomly. I can say the same if you read what other veterans of this forum have written, things from which you can learn a lot.

  I also see that you have started a thread with your own theory in which you relate the Voynich Manuscript to the Portuguese explorations of Africa in the 15th century. It sounds exciting, but I'm afraid the Voynich manuscript is rather dull. However, I'm sure that using this mysterious codex as a starting point, you could write a successful historical novel.