03-08-2020, 01:09 AM
I have been looking at the Voynich for a month or so now and it has drawn me into reading about a lot of esoteric subjects. I've become particularly swayed by the idea that it incorporates not just medieval astrological material but also medieval magical material in the form of magic circles and incantantations to accompany its medicines or cures. Which was incredibly common so it's not new but was new to me. For instance, 57v is very like magic spheres of the time, which drew on the powers ofholy and planetary names to summon spirits or demons. Moreover the sign of the cross was often used to separate holy names, as we see on the last page. I have observed many other similarities but it poses background rather than the topic of this post.
In the course of the above reading, I came across a sort of magic eightball sphere called the sphere of life and death that physicians would use to divine through onomancy whether a patient would live or die. The usual practice was to take numbers associated with the patient's name, the moon on which he or she got sick, and the weekday number on which he or she got sick. Add up and divide by 30 and if thd remainder number fell below a centre line in the table given, the patient would die, if above, the patient would live.
This sphere was so ubiquitous in medical manuscripts of the time it left me wondering why the VMS, if it was a pharmaceutical/medical manual, which I believe it was, didn't have one.
So then I actually looked at the number and letter matches on the sphere for determining the number for a person's name. And the VM began to make a vague sort of sense if it were written in numerical cipher, often with two characters representing one number and translating back to one letter of the Latin alphabet.
There are problems with this method because the sphere numerical systems can differ slightly from one publisned sphere to another. We also can't at this point be positive what VM character/s represent what number though working backward should work with time and patience. And lastly, not all numbers are represented on the sphere, and moreover one number might stand for more than one letter.
But it was this last problem that got me somewhat excited because it helps make sense of some anomalies I noticed in the Voynich patterns. For instance, the letter that looks like a was often folliwed by what JK calls minims. They did not seem to work properly as numbers. But in the sphere of life, where a is represented by iii or 3, the number 3 also represents 3 other letters - most commonly b, f and z (or v\u).
So was the VM character a the number 3 and therefore also an a, and the minims were possibly subsets of 3 to indicate another variable of 3 - a was a, ai was b, aii was f and aiii was z?
There were two other groupings like this. The number 15 stood for e, i, n and sometimes k. And the number 6 stood for h, y and one or two more I can't remember - don't have it in front of me.
I had already been looking at the vM c groups as possibly numbers, particularly c as 2 or 5. If 5, then the c-c with a colophon on top could be 15, representing e, a different colophon i and a different one n. Something like that anyway!
As for the 6 group, I wondered if this was where the ligatured characters came in.
That's about as far as I've gotten! But the sphere was a standard, often ubiquitous, feature in many of these manuscripts - it wouldn't be totally fanciful if it was being used as a cipher key with some adjustments.
Before I go any further working on this, has anyone you guys know of already looked at this? And do you think it a waste of time or impossible? You can look up the sphere and info about it just by googling The Sphere of Life and Death.
In the course of the above reading, I came across a sort of magic eightball sphere called the sphere of life and death that physicians would use to divine through onomancy whether a patient would live or die. The usual practice was to take numbers associated with the patient's name, the moon on which he or she got sick, and the weekday number on which he or she got sick. Add up and divide by 30 and if thd remainder number fell below a centre line in the table given, the patient would die, if above, the patient would live.
This sphere was so ubiquitous in medical manuscripts of the time it left me wondering why the VMS, if it was a pharmaceutical/medical manual, which I believe it was, didn't have one.
So then I actually looked at the number and letter matches on the sphere for determining the number for a person's name. And the VM began to make a vague sort of sense if it were written in numerical cipher, often with two characters representing one number and translating back to one letter of the Latin alphabet.
There are problems with this method because the sphere numerical systems can differ slightly from one publisned sphere to another. We also can't at this point be positive what VM character/s represent what number though working backward should work with time and patience. And lastly, not all numbers are represented on the sphere, and moreover one number might stand for more than one letter.
But it was this last problem that got me somewhat excited because it helps make sense of some anomalies I noticed in the Voynich patterns. For instance, the letter that looks like a was often folliwed by what JK calls minims. They did not seem to work properly as numbers. But in the sphere of life, where a is represented by iii or 3, the number 3 also represents 3 other letters - most commonly b, f and z (or v\u).
So was the VM character a the number 3 and therefore also an a, and the minims were possibly subsets of 3 to indicate another variable of 3 - a was a, ai was b, aii was f and aiii was z?
There were two other groupings like this. The number 15 stood for e, i, n and sometimes k. And the number 6 stood for h, y and one or two more I can't remember - don't have it in front of me.
I had already been looking at the vM c groups as possibly numbers, particularly c as 2 or 5. If 5, then the c-c with a colophon on top could be 15, representing e, a different colophon i and a different one n. Something like that anyway!
As for the 6 group, I wondered if this was where the ligatured characters came in.
That's about as far as I've gotten! But the sphere was a standard, often ubiquitous, feature in many of these manuscripts - it wouldn't be totally fanciful if it was being used as a cipher key with some adjustments.
Before I go any further working on this, has anyone you guys know of already looked at this? And do you think it a waste of time or impossible? You can look up the sphere and info about it just by googling The Sphere of Life and Death.
![[Image: Sphere-of-Life-and-Death-Harley-3719-fol...ibrary.png]](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francis_Marchese/publication/258244654/figure/fig4/AS:297518408716288@1447945324137/Sphere-of-Life-and-Death-Harley-3719-fol-175v-British-Library.png)