The Voynich Ninja

(30-04-2026, 12:11 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.they must be halves of Zodiac signs

That argument is meant to say only that each of the diagrams with 15 labels must represent one half of whatever each of the other 30-label diagrams represents.  I though that you had disputed this point earlier.

And, again, my claim is that each of the 15-label diagrams represents the interval between two solar terms, and each of the 30-label diagrams represents two consecutive such intervals.  Not a Zodiac sign or half-sign.

By the way, this claim (call it ZST = "Zodiac diagrams are about the Chinese solar terms" theory) would be consistent with the COT and would strongly confirm it, but it is not essential to it.  Even if the COT is true (and you know that I am totally convinced it is, for the SBJ≈SPS evidence), those diagrams could in fact be about the Western Zodiac signs, without any connection to the Chinese solar terms.  

But I am still waiting for a plausible explanation of all four puzzles under the EOT...

(30-04-2026, 11:42 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Pisces has 29 nymphs, 30 labels (29 in the main diagram,  1 in the central medallion), and 31 stars (29 in the main diagram and 2 in the central medallion).  That diagram is the only one that has stars and labels in the central medallion.

I already discussed my theory for why there are 29 nymphs and 31 stars in that diagram. It does not depend on COT vs EOT, or the sign, or the month.  It only assumes that the Author wanted that diagram to have 30 "things", like all the others; but the Scribe drew only 29 "things" by mistake, then mis-counted the stars as 28 and over-corrected by drawing the two in the center, then properly counted the labels as 29 and corrected by adding the label in the center.

February has only 28 days 3/4 of the time, and 29 days 1/4 of the time.  So, even if we assume that the month was meant to be February not Mars, and we disregard the label and two starts in the center,  the count of "things" on that diagram is closer to the equal number (30) seen in all the other diagrams, than to the mean or majority number of days of February in the Western calendar.  

Okay, I see. 

Counting the label in the middle as the last "thing" is something that I agree is plausible. I do have some concerns regarding the order of mistakes, though. 

The middle circle of the pisces diagram is substantially larger than the other diagrams, seemingly in order to fit the stars in the middle. If the stars were drawn after mistakenly drawing the nymphs, that implies that the inner circle would have been anomolously larger and emptier than the others had no mistake occured. If we are assuming there to be a mistake, it seems more likely to me that the inner stars were drawn first. Then the author accidentally drew 1 nymph too many, and so one of the middle stars did not receive a label.

(30-04-2026, 11:42 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, "Mars" as the month name for Pisces would be correct if the month names were written after 1582; since, after the Gregorian reform, Pisces spanned from about February 18 to about March 19.  That is, 19 days of March and only 11 or so of February.  But that would definitely have  been independent of why the diagram was labeled Pisces, and would have no relevance for the COT vs EOT question.

So, in summary, that is my explanation for that anomaly: the first diagram is about the interval of the year from Lìchūn to Jīngzhé (~30.437 days), and the Author assigned it to Pisces because it was the sign that best matched that interval of the year (with ~16 days of overlap, against ~14 for Aquarius).  Then somebody else, after 1582, wrote the name "Mars" because it best matched the sign (with ~19 days of overlap).

So to make sure that I understand, you are saying that the diagram was made for the 30 day period of Lìchūn -> Jīngzhé, which corresponded mainly with february (or at least began in february). The original author then understandably drew the zodiac sign that aligned with february: pisces. Then, later on someone wrongly interpreted it as march. 

Honestly, I have strong doubts that the month names are from a period after 1582. The prevalence of month names that match/almost match the VMS are found most commonly in the late 13th century to the mid-late 15th century. Especially octembre and yong (jong, joing, jung) only seem to be found in that period. Matches dry up significantly in the 16th century, and by the 17th century most names have become standardised. That does not exclude the possibility of a very rare dialect or uneducated person after 1582, but it becomes increasingly unlikely the later you go, in my opinion. But none of this is relevant to this theory unless the month names were added at the same time as the diagrams, by the same author.

(30-04-2026, 12:11 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Without a coherent, Chinese picture of what a solar term is and how it came to be divided into 15, all arguments based on those divisions are sitting on a bad foundation.

There's been so much back and forth that I don't know who is arguing what anymore, but this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (have to use automatic translation in my browser) shows the Han dynasty Tàichū calendar, with months being split into 2, and each half-month period being represented by three 5-day periods.

(30-04-2026, 12:11 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And I know that until very recently you were very firm that that content looked like degrees:

Yes but I have retracted that -- in part.  

The interval between consecutive solar terms has always been 1/24 of the year or of the the Ecliptic.  That would be 15 Babylonian degrees (plus or minus small shifts due to the Earth's orbit being slightly elliptical).  But I do not have any evidence that the Chinese ever explicitly divided each of those intervals into 15 equal intervals.  I simply haven't looked at any Chinese astronomy, astrology, or calendar book; much less one that mentions solar terms or has circular diagrams for anything.

But the VMS diagrams do show 360 "things" in the year -- not 365, not 365.25; and the small diagrams have 15 things, while the large ones have 30 things. Never 31.  

So those "things" are not days.  What are they?

(30-04-2026, 03:37 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But I am still waiting for a plausible explanation of all four puzzles under the EOT...

You can reverse the burden of proof all you want, the degree is still the main problem with your reading of the Zodiac section. It's unfortunate that you'd rather downplay its significance, try and force a more favorable framing, and assert the primacy of your interpretations than simply deal with that fact, wherever it may lead. I invite other people to draw their conclusions about why you don't want to deal with the problems the 360 degree divisions raise directly

(30-04-2026, 05:23 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(30-04-2026, 03:37 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But I am still waiting for a plausible explanation of all four puzzles under the EOT...

You can reverse the burden of proof all you want

Well, that is how the game is played, right?

Recapping: there is no satisfactory explanation for the five puzzles under the EOT. They are just "unexplained", "weird", "peculiar".  

Not even for Puzzle 3: "why 15/30 things per diagram = 360 for the year rather than 365".  That is, the "degrees" are a problem for the EOT too: I have still to see any depiction of a Zodiac with one diagram for each sign, divided into 30 parts, with a distinct name for each part.

In contrast, under the COT I can explain four of the five puzzles (minus Puzzle 3) with a single assumption, the ZST: that each 15-thing diagram is about the interval between two solar terms, and each 30-thing diagram is about two of those terms.

Quote:the degree is still the main problem with your reading of the Zodiac section. It's unfortunate that you'd rather downplay its significance

Indeed, I cannot explain Puzzle 3.  But not because that division is incompatible with the COT or the ZST. Only because I know nothing of Chinese astronomy or astrology, and practically nothing about Chinese calendars.

You say that the ZST must be wrong, because, if each half-diagram was a solar term interval, then each "thing" would have been equal to one Babylonian degree -- "and the Chinese never used Babylonian degrees".   

However, you don't know that!   Your sources only say that Chinese astronomers did not use the Babylonian degree, but a "Chinese degree" equal to 1/365 or 1/365.25 of the circle, to specify the positions of stars and the motion of planets.  But, again, for all I know the solar terms were not used in Chinese astronomy, except as a conceptual tool to synchronize the main calendar with the seasons.  

So the solar term intervals may well have been divided into 15 parts, which would make them equal to Babylonian degrees. 

In fact, I predict that, if and when someone cares to look, they will easily find an important ancient Chinese book that will be obviously the source of the VMS Zodiac section.  Probably not with naked ladies, tubs and stars. Maybe not even with circular diagrams.  But with 24 pages, each about one solar term interval. Where each interval is divided into exactly 15 parts with distinct names.  Probably with some additional text on each page that will match in size and structure the circular text on the corresponding VMS Zodiac page. And which will naturally start with the interval between Lìchūn and Yǔshuǐ...

By the way, the ZST also offers a solution for a Puzzle 6: why did the Author decide to write the Zodiac section?

To explain that, the EOT would have to say something like this: "The Author developed a nonstandard way of looking at the Zodiac, which is based on dividing each sign into 30 degrees instead of 30/31 days, with a distinct name for each degree, and starting with Pisces instead of Aquarius or Aries, and matching Pisces with March instead of February.  He was so fond of that view that he decided to put it on vellum.  But encrypted, so that the Sacred Names of the Three Hundred Sixty Degrees would remain a secret between him and the community of five dirty lesbian nuns who actually penned the book under his supervision."

On the other hand, the ZST and COT say that the Author thought that the Chinese notion of solar terms was another chunk of Chinese knowledge that was worth bringing to Europe, and thus he transcribed a classical booklet about the topic that was recommended to him by the locals.  As he did with the Shennong Bencaojing.  

All the best,--stolfi

Reading back over some of the recent back and forth, you may not fully appreciate what a solar term was legally and culturally, and why we have a pretty good idea how they were defined, not just abstractly, but like how.

The calendar is a few things, but first and foremost it sets when the Emperor is going to do certain rituals to align Heaven and Earth. The foreign dynasties were never exactly welcomed, but even they pretty quickly adopted these practices in order to assure the Han people that they were going to maintain the relationship between Heaven and Earth. Like any durable premodern state religion, this also has practical dimensions. The obvious one is that it means all Imperial correspondences are correctly dated and the bureaucracy is standardized. The agricultural calendar is important for the state function of storing grain against famine, and while important guidance for any crop, vital in rice growing areas because local officials coordinated the flooding and draining of rice paddies. So it is definitely a metaphysical thing, but the calendar is also a practical timekeeping device based on the Heavens and a literal tool for ordering the relationship with the literal Earth.

The consequence of this is that for most purposes a solar term is whatever the government with Mandate of Heaven says it is. This logic goes both ways; publishing a competing set of solar terms is to declare yourself to be the rightful interpreter of Heaven and make a bid for the Mandate. This is one of the first things a rebel dynasty issued---often with nearly the same calendar, but the new Emperor's name slapped on it. Private astronomy is not unheard of, but it was a very delicate thing to undertake and you certainly weren't going to imply that the Emperor was doing important rituals in the wrong month unless you were ready to back that with an army and a candidate to do them right. Exactly how touch private astronomy was waxed and waned a bit, but there was no era where you could safely put down a plain revision to the calendar. In the context of the VMS, the Ming were especially jealous of their rights to do this kind of astronomy under the Mandate, so a 1420s date looks very strange for this kind of speculation.

An astrologer in particular has no business checking the work of the Astronomical Bureau. First of all, it's just hard to do that kind of astronomy without building the huge gnomons and water clocks that the state was using. But more importantly no one wants an astrologer who is recommending dates that go against the plain will of Heaven. If the Emperor's solar terms were wrong, the dynasty would fail; the calendar is obviously aligned with Heaven. And if your astrologer didn't have access to an official calendar, there were no auspicious dates---metaphysically because those come from the Emperor's relationship with Heaven, but more pragmatically because of the ongoing war and looming famine. The fact that it would be one of the most serious capital offenses to circulate a competing definition of solar terms really breaks the plausibility of all this for me.

Bear in mind as well that the problem of observing the solar terms was very nearly solved. You need a very big gnomon, sophisticated math, and trained astronomers to bring those two things together, but they got to the Gregorian estimate of the tropical year 300 years before Europeans did, so they were finding these moments to a high degree of accuracy. You can increase the accuracy further, but the practical error was already tiny. The problem is that about when you observe Dahan, your officials expect to be getting the calendar with the Dahan that is a full tropical year away. Further, the observation method and and computations are totally thrown off if there are cloudy days around the term, and that's a real problem for some of them. What was needed was a way to reliably predict the solar terms because legitimacy came from the calendrical, not astronomical, function. As a modern who can Google You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and see that the mean-time solar terms can accumulate over 4 days of error in the fall, this seems to me like an absurd compromise, but I can also solve the Keplerian problem for time with relative ease, especially if I'm allowed to use my computer. The solution required a 20 year project of translation, education, and international cooperation to get The Astronomical Bureau to that point in 1645, and it was based on science that was only a few decades old in Europe. I don't see how bringing in stellar astronomy makes it any easier to solve the problem that you have to work these dates out in advance for a calendar, especially since stellar astronomy was orders of magnitude less exact.

Chinese history is long, the archives enormous, and much has been lost. But I think you're underestimating how official solar terms were. If the authorities had wanted to divide the pentads further, they would have circulated that fact widely. If someone else had done it, it would be a capital offense that would have been stamped out, raising questions about who under Heaven was passing it to some travelling white guy. I have obvious theory of knowledge objections to speculating that maybe one day you'll have evidence---that's not how knowing things works!---but I also don't think you appreciate how extraordinary the document you're imagining would be.

(30-04-2026, 04:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the VMS diagrams do show 360 "things" in the year -- not 365, not 365.25; and the small diagrams have 15 things, while the large ones have 30 things. Never 31.  

So those "things" are not days.  What are they?

I saw you guys talking about this, and it sparked me to research something I was thinking about with regard to that section, and I came across a number that seemed pretty coincidental.

A Platonic Year, also known as the Great Year, is a complete cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, estimated at approximately 25,772 to 25,920 years.

but then it said at some point in time another faction had a similar theory and their number was 36,000 years. But I don't know the specifics of who or when.

I just looked it up again and this time it said:

Key Facts About the Platonic Year: Duration: While modern astronomy estimates the precession cycle at roughly 25,800 years, Plato referenced a "Great Year" that ancient traditions sometimes approximated at 36,000 years

So could each 'thing' be a century, rather than a day? If the tubs are thought to be architecture, and the clothes as culture, it is notable that there is none of this portrayed past the Gemini rondel, the rest is all portrayed as nomadic, without further accoutrements, humans in their natural state. It would explain starting with Pisces as it was then and still is the current age.

Without getting too much off the Chinese Theory: For and Against, I don't see much reason to think it's about the precession of the equinoxes, but I could see it. For my part, I continue to think paranatellonta might well explain what we're seeing and something either downstream of or in a sister tradition to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are good candidates for the source. But, yeah, there are a lot of definitions of years

I had hoped to link the Chinese aspect but it appears there is no link, there had been no adjustments for precession in the current age, although it appears there were before that.
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No Corrections since End of Han dynasty
But the Chinese had lost this knowledge of the precession of the Equinoxes and have not adjusted the Zodiac signs since the end of the Han dynasty (250 BC to AD 220)

I am quite sure Etiel is misinformed here. Star charts continued to be updated after the Han and at the time he was writing Chinese astronomers had been reading Ptolemy, Kepler, and Newton for more than a century. I just checked the source of this quote, and in that book Eitel also says the Chinese Zodiac is a collection of asterisms, which is wildly incorrect, but at least explains why he thought the signs had failed to account for precession. Now, I do believe he was interviewing astrologers and trying to relay their beliefs in good faith, and if you read the quote with that in mind, I do buy that 1800s astrologers and most people you talked to in China did not have the faintest idea what precession was. (I also don't think, in that context, the quote backs Hean-Tatt's extremely heterodox argument, but that's neither here nor there)