20-09-2019, 12:58 AM
(30-08-2019, 11:34 AM)Gavin Güldenpfennig Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The latest video was very interesting. I think, you could be right with your theory, that the star constellations are shown in the balneological section. If you're right, it is also possible, that the plant drawings have direct connections to the stars.
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But you're maybe wrong with the tropical VMS origin. During the Roman Empire, the Southern Cross was also visible from southern Spain and Crete for example. So it could even fit my theory, but not only that. As far as I could say, the water-gives-life-mythology seems to have some parallels with the story of the Celtic goddess Sirona. And look to Lascaux. Astronomy was also a very known field of Science even by the descendants of the Celts and the Pre-Indo-Europeans.
I'm probably just out of the loop, but I wasn't able to find a link to raven's most recent (and very intriguing!) video; I had to follow a link from the now-deleted video, go to his YouTube profile, and find the new video Gavin is referring to there. So in case anyone else is having the same problem, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
@raven, I recommend you have a native English speaker proofread your text and dialogue. I understand your points very clearly, but your word usage is odd at times, and may be a barrier to your ideas being taken seriously. I love to write, and friends and family always bring me their essays to look over. I wish to volunteer my services to you for this in the future. Also, while we're on the subject, I do a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and have some voice acting experience. I would be happy to narrate your videos in English. I am willing to help you with both of these things free of charge, because I think your idea deserves more exposure. I've entertained a lot of half-baked Voynich theories, and this one stands out from the crowd.
The biggest problem with the VMS is, to date, is its poverty of context. Philosopher Jacques LaCan and his poststructuralists would consider the VMS a true masterpiece. LaCan argued that a work's internal connections — the way its sub-parts fit together with and refer to each other — is a far more important determiner of artistic merit than the work's external connections to other pieces of culture. This is the "elegant" part of the enigma that Mary D'Imperio refers to. The "enigma" part refers to the fact that despite this complicated system of self-reference and internal consistency in both text and pictures (which raven's theory also sheds a lot of light on), no one has been reliably able to link any piece of content in the VMS to any external context. Raven's theory gives me some serious hope that this book might be able to be linked to other people and things at the time of its composition.
The cliffhanger at the end, where raven holds back from naming the culture he thinks is responsible for creating the VMS's content, was frustrating but understandable. After watching the video, I pulled up a world map and highlighted the band of latitudes between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south, and thinking about cultures within that zone in the middle ages. I must say, I lost a bit of that "we're hot on the trail!" feeling looking at the possibilities this left us with. I drew a line with my finger going through Ethiopia, Saba in the southern Arabian penninsula, the estuaries of the Tigris and Euphrates where the Mandaeans settled, the southern coast of Persia, and finally into Gujarat and the Punjab. I plan on doing some reading about the indigenous pre-Abrahamic cosmologies and creation myths of all of these places, as I could believe any of these places were the origin of the story the VMS tells, and possibly the homeland of the author.
I thought to extend this line of possibilities all the way through Bengal and down through Penninsular Southeast Asia, Borneo, Java, the Nusa Tenggara archipelago. I thought about Australian Aborigines and their Dreamtime myths before my credibility was stretched too thin and broke, and I ended the line of possibilities in central India at one end, and Ethiopia on the other. Also, I'm just not seeing any New World civilizations being an influence on this book in the early 1400s.
One thing that threw me off was the initial references to Shamanism, which had me thinking about the nomadic herders of the Central Eurasian steppe. I have to say I always considered a more northernly belt of possible candidates for the source culture of the VMS, starting in the Balkan peninsula, then east in the direction of the Silk Road, through Asia minor, the Caucasus, northern Syria, Persia, Altay and the area around Barnaúl, and ending in Xinjiang where the Tocharians used to live. (No, I'm not going to get either the Basques or the Ainu involved in this. I haven't gone that far off the deep end! However, I will point out that my belt of candidate places does include the homelands of the genetically and culturally mysterious Kalash people, and the linguistically mysterious Burushaski people.)