The Voynich Ninja

Helmut, do you have an example of a ram with this pattern?

I do think the feet are supposed to represent hooves. They look a lot like the way hooves were sometimes drawn in Roman mosaics. So I wouldn't discount the ram theory right away, but I'm not convinced yet about scales for wool.

(29-03-2016, 03:49 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just for the record and as I have said before, I was and am of the opinion that the animal is an ordinary sheep or ram, the head has horns and the 'scales' are curls, you can see these curls on medieval  images of sheep again and again. Not to mention that the instrument the nymph above the animal is holding seems to be a spindle with a whorl and full of wool.

Somehow I had missed your comments about this.
I haven't found many images of sheep with full curls: it seems a lot of of them tend to be shown with waves rather than curls, but I did find this one:


(Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º, Folio 23r)

The "horns" could be ears, which is also true if this is a hedgehog. 

The ram/lamb a very interesting idea, because that would add to the possibility that the nymph below him, holding a ring, is St Agnes (Iconographic attributes of Agnes are the lamb and the ring, references to her spiritual marriage to Christ).

Helmut,
I don't know whether you've had much to do with living sheep, but their spines are not so flexible as would be needed to curl up into a ball like this, and I've never see any do so, not living or dead.

When sheep sleep - as I'm sure any medieval person would know - they lie on their side with their legs straight out (as a horse does), or they hunker down and stretch their necks out, resting on the ground or on another animal.

In my opinion, too, the placement and shape of the 'horns' aren't those of a sheep.  Of course in all these cases, one can argue that such differences are due to some fault in the draughtsman, whether ignorance of sheep or inability to draw horns, but I can't say that there is much objective evidence in the manuscript to justify positing the draughtsman/men incompetent.

Perhaps there are pictures of sheep lying curled cat-like, but as I say a sheep can't do that, and I haven't happened across any medieval images which picture them so. Perhaps others have?

This is about the closest I've seen, and as you see, the body is still upright.
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If it's a ram, the only explanation I see for its position is that it's charging and about to ram something. But the rest of the image makes such an interpretation extremely unlikely. The curls on sheep in medieval manuscripts and the scales on this creature don't look alike to me at all.

What does its curled up position mean though? That it's dead? Has it been noted that this position is very similar to the red pond creature?

Below I put together this one, the red creature, and below the same red creature from JKP's manipulated image, which I mirrored and rotated for better comparison. Seeing it like this, I would guess that this peculiar pose means the same thing. Maybe the red creature is supposed to be dead as well?

While the animal itself is ambiguous enough to be interpreted in a variety of ways, there is more to the illustration than just the animal itself. There are also nebuly lines in the VMs illustration - not once, but twice - just for those who would argue that a single example was the result of happenstance.

Therefore, the best match to the VMs representation is the German ram and nebuly line illustration presented early on in this discussion by MarcoP.

And look at the tail of the VMs animal. What is suggested there is much more like a sheep and much less like a pangolin.

Such interpretations are always going to be subjective. But they are going to be much less so when two elements need to correspond in tandem.

The tail looks as much like a badly drawn pangolin tail as like a badly drawn sheep tail. And I'm yet to see a convincing parallel for the scales on a medieval sheep drawing.

Looking at pangolin pictures, I'd say it's either one of those, or, as suggested, some kind of lizard. This would certainly account for the curling behavior (in the presence of lions no less, cfr the pond creatures):

Well, as I said, such interpretation is subjective. In my view a pangolin tail is much thicker at the base and much longer in proportion to the overall body length. The pangolin tail continues the scale pattern and the few little lines in the VMs illustration barely exist, let alone produce the proper pattern.

However, you miss the larger comparison between the VMs and MarcoP's example.
MarcoP's example is ram + nebuly line.
VMs example is ambiguous animal + what?
Do you want to say that these are not nebuly lines?
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So, to me, the best representative match is the one where both elements, the animal and the lines, compare most favorably. The examples need to correspond in both elements, not just with one.

All interpretations have pros and cons, and many of the arguments (pro/con) presented are also doubtful.
Saying that the animal has scales can be put in doubt by the fact that they appear to be backwards.
This is not all that certain.
Also, it is useful to keep in mind that the screen filling pictures of the anmimal shown here are blown up and the animal is 2 cm long in the MS (not counting the tail).

The comparison picture of the possibly dead animal, shown above by Koen, always reminded me of the emblem of the Knights of the Golden Fleece, and even though this order started after the probable creation of the MS, the theme is of course much older.



Also, the golden fleece is often shown with a skin texure that is not wool:



(This is just an arbitrary example - one of the first that Google search turns up).

So..... how about a dead ram on a celestial sacrifice table?

(29-03-2016, 04:33 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(29-03-2016, 03:49 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just for the record and as I have said before, I was and am of the opinion that the animal is an ordinary sheep or ram, the head has horns and the 'scales' are curls, you can see these curls on medieval  images of sheep again and again. Not to mention that the instrument the nymph above the animal is holding seems to be a spindle with a whorl and full of wool.

Somehow I had missed your comments about this.
I haven't found many images of sheep with full curls: it seems a lot of of them tend to be shown with waves rather than curls, but I did find this one:


(Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º, Folio 23r)

The "horns" could be ears, which is also true if this is a hedgehog. 

The ram/lamb a very interesting idea, because that would add to the possibility that the nymph below him, holding a ring, is St Agnes (Iconographic attributes of Agnes are the lamb and the ring, references to her spiritual marriage to Christ).

Waves is  better than curls, it is what I meant  Comes from thinking in German and writing English

Sale - Looking at the tail again, I think it actually has the same "split fish tail" design as some of the pond creatures (like the green one on the far left near the "mermaid"). Either way, you'll see that both of the Voynich "Aries" have a different tail, different fur pattern and different horns.

The line is a nebuly line in that its shape is nebuly, i.e. cloudy. That doesn't mean it has anything to do with heraldry . Just like this woman has little to do with Nazism:



The first school where I worked was a complex of buildings constructed throughout the 19th century. One day, I went exploring in one of the corridors where nobody ever came, and discovered some swastika tiles on the floor, when entering an even more abandoned storage room. Of course, since I knew the history of the building, I knew exactly what happened here: they had forgotten to replace this common decorative motive after it had changed meaning during some unfortunate events in the next century. I had to know the decade-to-decade history of the symbol and this building to be able to tell exactly what it meant here. It meant "we think this pattern looks pretty on tiles" and not "we hate Jews".

The nebuly line is one of the first patterns children can draw. It's present in many cultures and has different significations. (Diane discusses a wavy pattern elsewhere in the manuscript in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) Without knowing the exact culture and time the Voynich sources came from, we can't say what this line meant. Either way, I see it as a weak argument that this creature "has" to be a sheep. I'd rather look for ram's horns, which are absent.

Rene - ah, you pique my interest. The ram-with-coins is a very handsome example that would explain the scaly pattern well. The problem is though, as I think you realize, that this way of depicting the Fleece is probably too recent to account for anything we see here. Without having studied it in too much detail, I guess this depiction could go back on classical images like this one:



Note that these have no scale pattern but do show prominent ram's horns. (Sale - did you notice the nebuly line in Athena's collar? Heraldry?)
Of course I must add that a better candidate for the Golden Fleece is found in one of the plant mnemonics, which I briefly discuss in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Even though the picture is badly faded, it shows clear ram's horns and the vertical flow of the fleece.