09-11-2023, 12:53 AM
Hello VM scholars! Here is my little essay on the nature of the VM, prompted by a cursory glance through the Yale University edition of 2016. I realize that this is a bit of a different approach than most here, but I'd love to hear any thoughts.
The moment when I first felt that I understood what the VM really was occurred the first time I got a good look at the large central fold-out with the 9 mandalas. When I got a chance to closely inspect that, it became perfectly clear to me that there was simply no way that this explosion of profuse, mad detail represented meaningful information that was part of any tradition. This was clearly the free, exuberant play of fanciful imagination, and should be understood in the tradition of outsider art, fantasy fiction and the unbounded, propulsive forces of compulsive graphomania. The recipe of something like 90% Adolf Wolfi and Henry Darger and 10% JRR Tolkien and Leonardo DaVinci came at once to mind. In particular, the mandala in the upper left corner, with it’s weird protruding tubules and dizzying arrays of nested semi-circles outed the MS for me as belonging solidly in the tradition of visionary art.
Once this insight flooded over me, the other strange details of the illustrations and text started to become less mysterious. I’ll list what are to me the most salient points of the MS here, and detail them below.
1. This is an Herbal of plants that do not exist.
2. There is a strong impression of continuous creative flow throughout the MS.
3. The general quality of the illustrations is medium-low, like elaborate doodling.
4. The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning.
5. The text has certain characteristics suggesting it may be something more along the lines of a representation of text rather than meaningful writing.
This fatal urge to decipher clues has characterized most interpretations of the botanical section of the MS. Sure, you might manage to convince some people (even me) that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. represents Cannabis, but this approach stubbornly turns its back on what must be the most plain and glaring fact about the botanical illustrations – that they are a flaming heap of ludicrous nonsense. Even by the admittedly low standards of early 15th century botanical illustration, the plants of the VM are blatantly silly. Sprouts emerge from a common root, put out leaves, then grow back into each other (F5v, F23r, F40r). Bizarre tubers abound, resembling Ernst Hackel’s fantastic sea creatures more than any root. Most interestingly to me, shoots often emerge from stems in a profoundly un-botanical fashion that recalls the plumbing seen in the balneological section (F9r, F11r, F13r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and many others). While some illustrations can be found to resemble actual plants, there is simply no way that something like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can ever be decisively correlated to a known species. Whatever resemblances to actual plants that can be found in the herbal illustrations are readily explained by the fact that stereotyped depictions of generic plants must occasionally have some random resemblance to real plants. The compulsion to decrypt clues and the craving for an aha! moment have sent many investigators down rabbit holes and blinded them to the big-picture view of what they are looking at. The hasty, sketchy quality of the illustrations and the frankly sloppy application of color also hint that an attempt to represent reality is not going on here.
Instead of plunging into attempts to interpret, let’s stand back and ask the hardest possible question – why would someone create an Herbal of plants that do not exist? Even without answering it, this question eliminates most interpretations of the VM that have been produced to date. Voynich simply cannot be an encoded text relating to contemporary botanical, alchemical or astrological discourses. It must be some sort of fantasy produced by someone aware of these discourses but working outside of them. We are left with the other class of explanations including outsider art, fraud or even parody.
Whatever the nature of the writing may be, the nonsensical plants in the botanical section, and the sheer exuberant weirdness of the astrological and balenological sections indicate to me that the manuscript is not part of a wider tradition. While many problems are solved by zooming in and cracking a code or toiling to make a breakthrough discovery, there are other problems best resolved by stepping back and evaluating the general characteristics of the issue. The rewarding sense of satisfaction we derive from codebreaking and brilliant discoveries can delude us into seeing mysteries where none exist. While the VM is certainly mysterious and unique, that mystery may only be resolvable by the impossible dream of tracing the transient fantasies of one isolated and abnormal creative individual 600 years ago.
The moment when I first felt that I understood what the VM really was occurred the first time I got a good look at the large central fold-out with the 9 mandalas. When I got a chance to closely inspect that, it became perfectly clear to me that there was simply no way that this explosion of profuse, mad detail represented meaningful information that was part of any tradition. This was clearly the free, exuberant play of fanciful imagination, and should be understood in the tradition of outsider art, fantasy fiction and the unbounded, propulsive forces of compulsive graphomania. The recipe of something like 90% Adolf Wolfi and Henry Darger and 10% JRR Tolkien and Leonardo DaVinci came at once to mind. In particular, the mandala in the upper left corner, with it’s weird protruding tubules and dizzying arrays of nested semi-circles outed the MS for me as belonging solidly in the tradition of visionary art.
Once this insight flooded over me, the other strange details of the illustrations and text started to become less mysterious. I’ll list what are to me the most salient points of the MS here, and detail them below.
1. This is an Herbal of plants that do not exist.
2. There is a strong impression of continuous creative flow throughout the MS.
3. The general quality of the illustrations is medium-low, like elaborate doodling.
4. The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning.
5. The text has certain characteristics suggesting it may be something more along the lines of a representation of text rather than meaningful writing.
This is an Herbal of plants that do not exist.
When confronted with a mystery, there is a natural tendency to plunge right in and start hammering away at the nittyest of gritty details. With the VM, this is best represented by the first serious investigator William Newbold, who thought that secret microscopic marks within the letters themselves represented some sort of code waiting to be cracked. His resulting interpretations were almost as fanciful as the grotesqueries of the MS itself. Unfortunately for him, a consensus soon emerged that these marks were simply physical artifacts of the ancient ink drying on vellum. Newbold’s approach epitomizes in an almost parodic way the intense, contrived, scrupulously detailed efforts at “decipherment” that have characterized investigations of the VM ever since. I argue the opposite approach is necessary. We need to stand as far back from the MS as possible and try to gain a general impression of what sort of thing this is and what traditions it best fits into. Pausing to absorb this forest’s particular aroma and aura for a while before plunging in will save us from toiling down many a path that ends in a dead thicket of weeds and brambles.This fatal urge to decipher clues has characterized most interpretations of the botanical section of the MS. Sure, you might manage to convince some people (even me) that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. represents Cannabis, but this approach stubbornly turns its back on what must be the most plain and glaring fact about the botanical illustrations – that they are a flaming heap of ludicrous nonsense. Even by the admittedly low standards of early 15th century botanical illustration, the plants of the VM are blatantly silly. Sprouts emerge from a common root, put out leaves, then grow back into each other (F5v, F23r, F40r). Bizarre tubers abound, resembling Ernst Hackel’s fantastic sea creatures more than any root. Most interestingly to me, shoots often emerge from stems in a profoundly un-botanical fashion that recalls the plumbing seen in the balneological section (F9r, F11r, F13r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and many others). While some illustrations can be found to resemble actual plants, there is simply no way that something like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can ever be decisively correlated to a known species. Whatever resemblances to actual plants that can be found in the herbal illustrations are readily explained by the fact that stereotyped depictions of generic plants must occasionally have some random resemblance to real plants. The compulsion to decrypt clues and the craving for an aha! moment have sent many investigators down rabbit holes and blinded them to the big-picture view of what they are looking at. The hasty, sketchy quality of the illustrations and the frankly sloppy application of color also hint that an attempt to represent reality is not going on here.
Instead of plunging into attempts to interpret, let’s stand back and ask the hardest possible question – why would someone create an Herbal of plants that do not exist? Even without answering it, this question eliminates most interpretations of the VM that have been produced to date. Voynich simply cannot be an encoded text relating to contemporary botanical, alchemical or astrological discourses. It must be some sort of fantasy produced by someone aware of these discourses but working outside of them. We are left with the other class of explanations including outsider art, fraud or even parody.
There is a strong impression of continuous creative flow throughout the MS.
The psychological concept of “flow” was first articulated by Hungarian-America psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (whose patronymic might remind some of Voynichese). Psychologist Charlotte Doyle elegantly summarizes flow thus - The concept of flow, an experience of total engagement in an activity, was introduced into psychology by Csikszentmihalyi (1975) based primarily on first-hand accounts in a variety of domains. He found examples in physical activities such as rock climbing, sports (where it is also known as being in the zone), games such as chess, religious rituals, occupational activities such as surgery, and creating in the arts (creative flow). Csikszentmihalyi (1999) described the elements of the flow experience this way: The sense of having stepped out of the routines of everyday life into a different reality (See also Schutz, 1945), clear goals every step of the way, immediate feedback, effortless attention, action and awareness merged, balance between skill and challenge, time distortion, and spontaneity.
The concept of flow has a particular relevance to interpretations of the VM, particularly with reference to the unusual lack of corrections, erasures or re-working in the text or illustrations. Aside from the obvious weirdness of the illustrations and script, there is another peculiarity evident in the VM – the seamless, flowing uninterrupted creativity that seems to have created it. Whoever made this thing was having a jolly old time and really cranked it out. Even before I investigated the issues surrounding the text, this strong impression of creative flow made me very skeptical of suggestions that manuscript was enciphered. The pages just don’t have the labored, crabbed appearance of a text created though tedious encryption. Instead, the layout of the text and illustrations give the impression of a document produced under the impetus of free creative flow. In particular, the way the text and illustrations are intermingled argue against the sort of deliberate planning that one would expect in a coded text. The general quality of the illustrations is medium-low, like elaborate doodling.
Since attempts to interpret the content of the illustrations have generally led to mystification, it may be instructive to analyze their general quality instead. The lush, carefully planned illustrations of more famous contemporary manuscripts (such as books of hours) provide quite a contrast with the hasty drawings of the VM. While somewhat above the level of idle sketches or doodles, the VM illustrations nevertheless convey an impression of hurry, of ideas developing in progress, and a process of unfolding development rather than pre-planned exposition. This can be seen at a much higher level in the notebooks of Leonardo, or perhaps at a lower level in the works of schizophrenic artists like Adolf Wolfi, who intermingle text and free-flowing illustration. These characteristics suggest that the process that led to the creation of the VM was like that involved in the creation of artworks, rather than the planned process of exposition involved in the production of books on conventional topics. It also suggests that the book was created for private or personal reasons, rather than for presentation to the public or a group. The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning.
The VM bears a compelling similarity to a range of contemporary documents concerning botany, astrology and perhaps alchemy. Yet on a closer look, the illustrations differ significantly from those found in contemporary works. The plants in the herbal section do not resemble actual plants. While containing parts of the traditional zodiac, the great mass of elements in the astrological illustrations bear no relation to anything found in other books. Pictures of people in baths abound in alchemical texts, but never with the fantastical plumbing we are treated to in the VM. This same superficial similarity to familiar things, masking an underlying, but not too deeply hidden strangeness is also apparent in the alphabet and text. The VM text certainly looks like writing, but any would-be interpreters soon start picking up hints that something very weird is going on. Typically, this leads to the thought that the MS is written in code. This is not the only possibility though. What if the text, like the illustrations themselves, has a superficial resemblance to things found in other books, but is better categorized as fantasy? The text has certain characteristics suggesting it may be something more along the lines of a representation of text rather than meaningful writing.
Attempts at reading the text typically start by assuming a one-to-one correlation of the Voynich letters with the letters of a known alphabet. Certain characteristics of the text, though, soon make it clear that such attempts are hopelessly doomed. Good luck translating something like “axxona axon axxonna ax xona.” The VM is filled with such nonsense. Certain letters gravitate weirdly to the beginnings or ends of words. There are pages with certain letter combinations appearing again and again at the ends or beginnings of words. These aberrant characteristics of the text lead me to suggest that it may represent neither a natural language nor an encoded language, but a rather a representation of writing. The author may even have been illiterate and produced the writing in a compulsive or automatic fashion as they spoke aloud to themselves while narrating the imagined contents of the book. Whatever the nature of the writing may be, the nonsensical plants in the botanical section, and the sheer exuberant weirdness of the astrological and balenological sections indicate to me that the manuscript is not part of a wider tradition. While many problems are solved by zooming in and cracking a code or toiling to make a breakthrough discovery, there are other problems best resolved by stepping back and evaluating the general characteristics of the issue. The rewarding sense of satisfaction we derive from codebreaking and brilliant discoveries can delude us into seeing mysteries where none exist. While the VM is certainly mysterious and unique, that mystery may only be resolvable by the impossible dream of tracing the transient fantasies of one isolated and abnormal creative individual 600 years ago.
