The Voynich Ninja

This thread is for specifically discussing the cardinal directions in the rosettes foldout. 

Among those people who believe the cardinal directions are indicated, there seems to be an agreement that they are on the diagonals, so in the corners (correct me if I'm wrong). Since there are four smaller items in the corners, it is possible that these indicate the directions. Two opposite items are suns, which probably indicate east and west, since this is where the sun rises and sets, and the sun does not appear in the north. These ideas have been around for a while (I've seen an older forum discussion between Diane and Searcher who agreed on the directions) and they seem sensible to me. So the following would - again, correct me if I'm wrong - not be extremely controversial:

[attachment=5610]

Both Searcher and Diane placed north at the top right though, which is where I disagree. There are forms of the sky in many if not all the rosettes, so the mere presence of a sky cannot be an indication of north. The spiral, too, would be a strange way of representing the north pole, since the heavens turn like a wheel, they don't spiral inward (unless you fancy a black hole or something).

A lobed shape in the sky (as seen in the bottom left rosette) to represent the celestial pole is more common than a spiral.


[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Men observing the stars, from Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus rerum, Italy (Mantua), c. 1300-1310, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., f. 108v[/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As far as I know, the emblem of this rosette is not yet understood, but it seems to point towards the general sphere of constellations/navigation. Inside is something like a constellation symbol, and the circle has eight subdivisions like a compass rose.[/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][attachment=5611][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Therefore I would say this is north, and continuing clockwise east, south and west.[/font]

(28-06-2021, 08:36 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Both Searcher and Diane placed north at the top right though, which is where I disagree. There are forms of the sky in many if not all the rosettes, so the mere presence of a sky cannot be an indication of north. The spiral, too, would be a strange way of representing the north pole, since the heavens turn like a wheel, they don't spiral inward (unless you fancy a black hole or something).

Unfortunately, I haven't seen manuscript depicting a circular movement in the form of a spiral, so I'll always be glad to any finds. I know that the rotation of the world was usually depicted then as a wheel with levers, echoing with the wheel of Fortune, and in astrological writings - as a series of eight concentric circles. But if the spiral shape is not a circular motion, then what? What can the spiral-shaped inscription among the depicted stars mean? You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that appear in the sky with the appearance of God and in several other episodes, but they are accompanied by many other details, moreover, this partl of the rosette is also not very similar to a whirlwind. The mentioned episodes from the Bible are rarely depicted in manuscripts, and I haven't seen images of the appearance of God on a chariot from a whirlwind in the form of a spiral. The only thing I stumbled upon was the mention of the "darkness coiling in sinuous folds" in the hermetic text "Poimandres":
4. E'en with these words His aspect changed, and straightway, in the twinkling of an eye, all things were opened to me, and I see a Vision limitless, all things turned into Light - sweet, joyous [Light]. And I became transported as I gazed.But in a little while Darkness came settling down on part [of it], awesome and gloomy, coiling in sinuous folds, so that methought it like unto a snake.
And then the Darkness changed into some sort of a Moist Nature, tossed about beyond all power of words, belching out smoke as from a fire, and groaning forth a wailing sound that beggars all description. ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(The vision of creation))
The Corpus Hermeticum, though, is a little late for the VMs parchment. As a possibility, the Creation was described similarly somewhere else. Anyway, perhaps the spiral rather concerns creation, not just circular motion.

Quote:As far as I know, the emblem of this rosette is not yet understood, but it seems to point towards the general sphere of constellations/navigation. Inside is something like a constellation symbol, and the circle has eight subdivisions like a compass rose.
Therefore I would say this is north, and continuing clockwise east, south and west.

As a contrargument I would say that it doesn't look like a usual compass, and the strokes-subdivisions can be just decorative or just iterate the eight outer rosettes. Anyway, if it is a compass, why should it mean that its placing is the North? Doesn't the needle show the direction?

I personally wouldn't say it is a compass. A quick glance at the wiki teaches that these remained rare for a long time, even though they were apparently known to some medieval Europeans before the VM was made:

Quote:Jacques de Vitry's mention of the compass being used at sea in 1218, which indicates a broader knowledge of the compass and its uses in Medieval Northern Europe:

An iron needle, after having been in contact with the loadstone, turns itself always toward the northern star, which, like the axis of the firmament, remains immovable, while the others follow their course so that it is very necessary to those who navigate the sea.

But also:

Quote:However, critics like Kreutz have suggested that it was later in 1410 that anyone really started steering by compass.

Notice how the first quote, though apparently witnessing a magnetic compass, still thinks of the immovable northern star as where the compass points to.
Everything considered, I think it is more likely that the "north" emblem contains a generic "constellation sign" within a circle that marks eight directions. A constellation in the concept of cardinal directions will always mean "find north".

For the curling sky, unfortunately the best I know is from the Apocalypse, as I mentioned in the other thread. The heavens rolled up like a scroll, so the presence of text in a spiral is even more appropriate. I say 'unfortunately' because I don't know what to do with this information, but purely visually it is the best explanation for this spiral I've seen so far.

I personally think it is:

ES
NW

though I base N and S on where I think E and W is.

And it is interesting that Searcher mentions the Hermeticum because that's where I derived this idea (and Searcher, we can't discount extant copies of the Poimandres before Ficino's translations; there were hundreds of different tracts around of different Hermetica, and even some suggestive passages that Roger Bacon had a copy - which is how I ended up reading Bacon!)

But the Hermeticum is based on Aristotle, other Greeks, gnosticism, Egyptian and Judaism, maybe even early Christianity, in its creation account, so all these ideas can be found elsewhere.

So bear with my vision of the Rosette page for a second.  The middle circle is the cosmos, including the heavens and earth, the seen and the unseen.  The outer circles are the spheres of the cosmos, but not planetary (which are included in the top sphere only).  They are details of the cosmos, particularly of earth, and some part of their indinvidual spheres can be found in the middle sphere.

So wipe out all the smaller spheres.  They are details only.  You're left with the Cosmos centre and the marginalia. And don't as yet include marginalia like the T-O earth, or the cloud, that is actually connected to the smaller spheres.

What do you have: a path leading off the page, a sun near it, a sun opposite the first spewing forth two different elements above a striated mound, and a symbol that could be a compass, or an alchemy symbol, but despite the equal arms on first sight appears to be a clock.

God/Invisible Prime Mover (the path leading to the unseen), Time/Aion/Eternity (the clock), Light (the risen sun), Darkness (the setting sun), but with air and fire spewing forth, the first two elements to emerge from Matter/Chaos/Nature (the striated mound)  by the Word of God. 

This is the beginning of the Hermetic creation myth.  

If you then turn the rosettes page sideways,  and look at the pathe, you see how air and fire rise to make the stars, and water and earth fall to make the Earth, the TO map.  This is the second part of the Hermetic creation myth.

And so on.

You might wonder why a setting sun instead of a moon was used to symbolize darkness and the answer is the moon didn't exist.  Neither did the sun, but in the corpus, it is used to symbolize God's actual presence.

That's why I believe in the E-S-W- N orientation.

Just a general question about the rosette side.
If I assume that it was drawn before it was bound. Should I then assume that the reverse is possibly connected to the front?

The page f86v3 has something to do with nutrition for me. Don't ask me how I know that, it's more of a guess. The sequence of the picture story.

Orientation of the text, folded and the sequence should then also be correct.

(30-06-2021, 04:53 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just a general question about the rosette side.
If I assume that it was drawn before it was bound. Should I then assume that the reverse is possibly connected to the front?

I think the Rosettes foldout is a part of the cosmological section, as much as f86v3. In occult cosmological context, the two rocks usually represent the Sun and the Moon, so the Moon here is likely the left rock, the Sun - the right one.

(30-06-2021, 04:53 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Don't ask me how I know that, it's more of a guess.

I hate to unleash my inner Diane, but... If it's a guess, then you don't know it. We will get nowhere if people keep assuming positions with zero evidence, since it will cause them to reject actual evidence when it shows up. Our job is not to "bet" on the correct answer, hoping to say "I knew it!" when it is proven.

The blessing of discussing the cardinal directions in isolation is that it can happen without excessive reliance on different theories. There are two suns, so we know that if the cardinal directions are relevant here, these must be east and west. I would argue that the emblem of the bottom left corner is another relatively theory-neutral indication of north. 

(Note: if you turn the page with what I believe is east up, like most medieval maps would have been, then the text of the north-emblem is oriented correctly. This is a relatively weak argument though, since the text of the foldout is oriented in many directions, so the page was likely turned around depending on the area of focus. Or put differently, text orientation could probably be used to prove anything here).

What I don't quite understand is how people see this thing as a clock, or any device with hands at the centre. Isn't the central point too far off-centre for that? If it were something like a clock, wouldn't we expect it to look like the edited version at the bottom?

[attachment=5614]

@Koen
You are certainly right.
As I said, "The guess is in the flow of the pictures and the story the book tells".
So it is quite certain that it is nutrition.
To understand this, one should also read the books and not just look at the pictures.

If something stands in the rain, it gets wet. It doesn't have to prove that, it usually does.

On the subject of Diane. At least she's not trying to hammer in a nail blindfolded.

Translated with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (free version)

Two things:

First off, cartographic "maps" didn't exist at the time. It is more proper to speak of diagrams, or charts. Each "map" was designed for a particular purpose or audience in mind. Certainly not for general reference and location, as we are used to. Cartography was lost after the collapse of the Romans and wasn't rediscovered until the middle Renaissance.
Portolan charts were for navigators and very specialised. They were designed to be used with a compass. They pointed north, because the compass did. This was new. Before this, people either assumed a religious place or where they lived to be the centre of the world, and hence the maps were orientated towards that direction.

Most of the Roman and later Arabic maps that influenced 10-14th century European maps had south as "up". 

But your assumption of religious influences are correct, then we would expect East to be "up" (ie, towards Jerusulem).

Secondly, the thing in the corner is unlikely to be a clock. They didn't have second hands until the 16th century. It's far more likely to be a floating magnetic compass, as a compass would have the needle floating and moving towards the north of the circle. Instead of drawing a straight line, the scribe has drawn a triangle to help the triangulation - no point drawing a straight line in a compass rose, you don't know which way it is pointing.

The ||| symbols around the circle correspond exactly to the 8 main directions: N, NE, E, ES, E, EW, W, NW.

That makes the top left East, which fits with the religious assumption.

(29-06-2021, 09:25 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I personally wouldn't say it is a compass. A quick glance at the wiki teaches that these remained rare for a long time, even though they were apparently known to some medieval Europeans before the VM was made:

I have seen a map of the period with a compass on it. I will have to look through the maps that I have copies of.