The Voynich Ninja

Panofsky changed his view about the date of the manuscript quite significantly following the "sunflower" speculation.  It's a good thing to be able to be flexible about views and change your mind (even if current evidence shows he did so in the wrong direction), but his views shouldn't be taken as gospel, which is the sense I'm getting from this thread every time his name is invoked.

We should also be clear on exactly what he did say.  When you say "Panofsky said they represented astral spirits", or as you said earlier in this thread that "he made it clear" they are astral spirits, is this from the questionnaire he answered?  If it is, then he caveated his view in his response to the questionnaire ("So far as can be made out before the manuscript has been decoded") and at least in the selection I've seen on Rene's site, there is no explicit mention of the nymphs being the spirits "which were frequently believed to transmit the occult powers of the stars to the earth".  Did he elaborate elsewhere?

Lastly, I'm not sure what outcome you are expecting when berating people for not paying sufficient attention to Panofsky.  Many people may agree that there is a lot about the stars in the text, including their connections to herbs and medicine, as was believed at the time of the manuscript's creation.  I think that's quite a reasonable assumption.  But what are you expecting from this?  It does not lead to the conclusion that there is no text in the manuscript, nor does there seem to be an indication in Panofsky's answers that he thought this was the case.  I've lost count of the times you've cited Panofsky and others in this thread in a way that gives the impression that they are aligned with your views, but I have not seen anything they've said that i) was expressed with the certainty you attribute to them and ii) supported your theory that there is no text.

If you want to advance that theory, it would help if you posited identifications for the glyphs with astronomical symbols/concepts and show us how a whole page or even a paragraph could have recorded astronomical information.  Saying that e is the moon, ee/eee is the Moon in sequential days, is one thing; explaining what this means in the context of the full word, line, or paragraph is another and would constitute progress in this theory from page 1 of the thread.  If you go through a paragraph replacing the glyphs with the kind of astronomical concept that you see them representing, are you left with something that reasonably represents someone's record of the movements of celestial bodies?   Does it resemble known contemporary calendars or records?  If not, why not?  Why, when you emphasize that understanding 14th century people's mindset is vital to unlocking the code, is the Voynich so unique for its time?  Why do we not see any other astronomical works that have absolutely no natural language in them?  As JKP said earlier in this thread, "Wouldn't there have to be some information in between these codes for it to make any sense?"   Is there scope for a combination theory where there is natural language, but some of the oddly-behaving glyphs may behave oddly because they are astronomical short-hand?  

Tackling these questions - and no doubt others - around your theory could help it develop.  You mentioned a while ago when someone pointed out that your posts were repetitive that you may repeat things so that newcomers can see it.  After slogging through parts of this thread to look for references, this seems to me to be incredibly counter-productive for your aim.  Having 89 pages and counting of a thread with so many posts that are often repeating your older points - like around Panofsky, or about other Voynich researchers not having the right mindset - makes it really hard for the newcomers to find where the developments of your theory are and how it's progressed.

You and Koen (sorry Koen I didn't understand what you meant) are right that Panofsky changed his mind about the Voynich at several points. Panoksky's views are of great importance because he formulated them 20 years apart. And this is the bottom line for me: his reading of the VM iconography did not change.
  
I have read his interpretation of female figures as astral spirits in Mary D' Imperio, but René's page also says the same thing in other words. I don't think there is confusion in this. In any case, he never said that there was a biological or balneological section in the VM. Panofksy is not the gospel, but he is someone who knew what he was talking about.

Of course Panofsky never said that there was no text in the script. I say this and it is my theory, but to be able to say it the iconographic interpretation of Panofksy is vital because it puts before the eyes that in the codex there is nothing more than herbs and stars.

I think that throughout these years I have shown how the glyphs respond to astronomical symbols and only to this. As you say, I would like to be more specific and try to make sense of a line or a paragraph, but I haven't been able to do so at the moment. More and more I think that everything is a game with certain rules but very flexible. That's why there seem to be two languages

Without a correct iconographic reading I do not think that the Voynich can be resolved. I lean on Panofsky as someone with a great reputation in this regard, but I also follow my own common sense, that instinct of knowledge that we all have.

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For example, if I see these tubes on the page of the Rosettes, immediately another page of the codex comes to me with which to relate that kind of cannons.

This page for example, although there are others

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There are other images of the Rosettes that can be related to others of the VM

For example:

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All these cells remind us of these others, which leave no doubt that they are describing the authors' vision of the universe.

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(20-06-2022, 12:48 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Tomorrow is the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. There is no day of the year that is more related to the magic of medicinal herbs. It seems reasonable to think that in a codex full of herbs that seem magical and astronomical-astrological diagrams the summer solstice must be somewhere.

Sorry I missed this post, but I would like to share my idea. I was fascinated by the picture on F. 14v  and my first assumption was that it represents woodland fern with fiddles that look like seeds. But then, again, they do not look like seeds, nor like blossoms. The root is strange, too. What strikes me is the images that appear in numbers: 2 times 1 leaf, 2 x three roots, 3 times 3 blossoms.  Is that magical? Not by itself, however assuming that the image is an allusion to fern, the magic is obvious and clearly associated with the summer solstice.

According to Slovenian legend (and tradition practiced up to the past century), the fern has a magical property. Whoever has the fern seeds with him on the night of the summer solstice, can understand the animals talk and see the grass plants grow. This is an allusion to magical thinking. 
I always thought of this as a folklore, until I came across the explanation of Dante's use of symbolic language, particularly the mention of 3 x 3. The humanistic poets used the symbolic language to avoid the inquisition, but they left the clues that can be deciphered by certain people who try to understand the inconsistencies. What is the inconsistency of the fern seeds - they do not exist. The fern propagates by the underground spores, like forbidden literature and ideas. 
In Slovenian, the fern is called PRAPROT which sounds like PRA-POT - the ancient path. For the Slavic humanists, prapot would be the path of Slavic (and before that Venetic - which was a prapot of Germanic, Latin and Slavic languages). 
The summer solstice, as the longest day, is an allusion to a mystical religious experience, a state of mind open to the large part of subconscious material which is the source of creativity and imagination.
This brings me to Peterson's discovery of the fake picture with different roots and an extra leaf added. I would like to know his take on this.

I don't think time should be wasted trying to identify the Voynich plants. The authors probably drew some realistically although many more were invented. I don't think herb identification was his concern.

The fundamental idea that they wanted to convey, as we can deduce from the imagery of the book, is that medicinal herbs owe their therapeutic virtues to celestial influences.

It is natural magic that for them meant the same as science for us. The way to express that magic is the Voynich script.

I think we all know that there are pairs of glyphs that are similar in shape and function. For example, t and k or the benches. A valid vord can be formed if one substitutes t for k or vice versa.

It is as if they are reflected in a mirror. That's why I think it's useful to think of these pairs of glyphs as belonging to two hemispheres. In the case of t and k, according to my theory, t would mean the sun in the meridian of the northern hemisphere and k the same position in the southern hemisphere.

Both are exchanging their position throughout the script, which moves reproducing the movement of the sky. It is the same with p and f, the nodal points or the head and tail of the dragon

(25-07-2022, 09:04 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Both are exchanging their position throughout the script, which moves reproducing the movement of the sky. It is the same with p and f, the nodal points or the head and tail of the dragon

This kind of statement would be better understood presented as an illustrative diagram for one of the pages.

What you ask me I don't know how to do yet. What I can do is show that my theory complies with the most elementary rules of the Voynich script.

For example, if we see the gallows as the beginning of paragraphs, it is because they are either meridians or nodal points, that is, starting points of the computation, just as they were in medieval astronomical tables. An important observation is that we can see t and k in all the lines because they express daily movements, while p and f hardly move, so we find it almost only in the first line of the paragraphs.
  
The moon is one of the most repetitive components of the script. What we see are glyphs expressing the different lunar phases and their movement: c, s, the benches and the benched gallows.

The q is an arrow that expresses the movement of celestial objects, that's why we don't find it in the labels.

In my opinion, the biggest mistake made with the Voynich script is substituting something else for the glyphs we see, be it letters, phonemes, or whatever.

The shape and function of the glyphs are closely related. By replacing them with something else, this connection is no longer perceived.