The Voynich Ninja

(13-05-2016, 02:26 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was looking at Italian pictures mostly, and thought it was a key, but 


(segretezza overo taciturnita)

only now (researching British literature), i realize it is indeed a ring !

Thank you, David: both images are very interesting (but I have nothing to add about St.Edward).

Cesare Ripa writes that the object is a small key having the shape of a ring ("picciole chiavi antiche fatte a guisa di anello"). 
Here there's a rather long discussion of these ring-shaped keys:
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Ripa also mentions rings used as seals, again with reference to secrecy. 

As we do now, also the ancients used to seal letters with rings worn on the fingers, so that communications were not seen or made public.

"Usavasi ancora dagli Antichi sigillar, come ora, le lettere con anelli, che si portano in dito, acciò che non si vedano, o palesino i negozi"

ok Marco, but I must upgrade my Italian for that link....

ps. please make sure you read my blog page with very interesting & important information on the images,
because i think out of the 4 images on page f85r2, there are 2 of them with a definitive match !
The other 2 must be possible as well, and are just a matter of good research.
Quite interesting to see that i now found better matches in images & text in the UK than in any other country...

(14-05-2016, 01:36 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Quite interesting to see that i now found better matches in images & text in the UK than in any other country...

There were strong ties between St. Gall and England (e.g., Bury St. Edmonds, London, and others). I discovered this relationship through paleographic research.

St. Gall was named after an Irish monk, thus tying Switzerland to monasteries in the islands from its inception.

St. Gall and its English associates shared writing styles, news, and possibly brewery knowledge. Bury St. Edmonds was a place of pilgrimage, an important town in Saxon history, and St. Gall was apparently, at times, staffed by English monks (I'm still trying to trace this detail).

St. Gall developed a remarkable library and probably shared manuscripts with fellow monks in England.

Quote: As we do now, also the ancients used to seal letters with rings worn on the fingers, so that communications were not seen or made public.

"Usavasi ancora dagli Antichi sigillar, come ora, le lettere con anelli, che si portano in dito, acciò che non si vedano, o palesino i negozi"

They're talking about wax seals that used to be made into the shape of a ring. You would fold your letter over, and pour wax to prevent it being opened. Then you would press your ring (or whatever seal you possessed, quite often it would be a stamp) to make an impression in the wax. The received thus knew, from the condition of the wax seal, if the letter had been tampered with.
Another version was to append a wax seal to the end of an official document to certify its veracity - legal notices and the like (letters patent, legal instructions open to all to view with the wax seal serving as an indication that the Authority had issued the instructions).
I doubt very much that this is what we are seeing in the VM.

The ring on the guy's finger has always reminded me of a seal ring (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Even though that would mean he is either wearing the seal turned to the inside, or his hand is twisted around in a weird way.

Quote:Koen GH:
The ring on the guy's finger has always reminded me of a seal ring (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Even though that would mean he is either wearing the seal turned to the inside, or his hand is twisted around in a weird way.

I agree. Even my late father had such a ring + the wax to do so.

But i see nobody jumping up and down, because of my discovery about the ms & ring & fleur-de-lis. This could mean one or two things:

1) reading my blog page is skipped by many
2) the discovery is not considered to be important

To me this is important because i spend a lot of time here.

To all,
for what it's worth in terms of general interest, I consider the 'ring' to be a debased version of the ankh or the situla, forms which devolve in vernacular (popular) art from the Hellenistic period to the 1st-2ndC AD, until they closely resemble each other.

I have examples, which illustrate this, including one from the early Ptolemaic (Greek) era - the period to which I assign the oldest stratum of the VMS imagery, and from about the 1stC AD, which marks another and major stage in the Voynich imagery's evolution.

For what it's worth.

If the object is read as having been originally a situla, then it would represent Sirius in the older way, though if an ankh, the star's identity is less obvious. 


I read all the 'ladies' as meant for stars, btw, and their emblemata as intended to tell the reader which star is which, though this doesn't mean their significance is easily retrieved: their first enunciation is much  older than the rise of the Arabs (7thC AD) and certainly older than the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (9th-10thC; survived until the 13th)

In the way the emblems now present - though carefully copied - I'd say they took their form no later than 1stC BC - 1stC AD. (not as old as Euclid, perhaps, but certainly older than Claudius Ptolemy).

(14-05-2016, 09:42 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote: As we do now, also the ancients used to seal letters with rings worn on the fingers, so that communications were not seen or made public.

"Usavasi ancora dagli Antichi sigillar, come ora, le lettere con anelli, che si portano in dito, acciò che non si vedano, o palesino i negozi"

They're talking about wax seals that used to be made into the shape of a ring. You would fold your letter over, and pour wax to prevent it being opened. Then you would press your ring (or whatever seal you possessed, quite often it would be a stamp) to make an impression in the wax. The received thus knew, from the condition of the wax seal, if the letter had been tampered with.
Another version was to append a wax seal to the end of an official document to certify its veracity - legal notices and the like (letters patent, legal instructions open to all to view with the wax seal serving as an indication that the Authority had issued the instructions).
I doubt very much that this is what we are seeing in the VM.

Hello Davidjackson,
I agree that Ripa's text is about wax seals.
Could you please expand your last sentence? Of course, I agree that everything is doubtful when discussing these mysterious images, but your statement suggests that you have a specific opinion on the subject. Are there other explanations for the ring that you find more convincing?

(15-05-2016, 02:01 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But i see nobody jumping up and down, because of my discovery about the ms & ring & fleur-de-lis. This could mean one or two things:

1) reading my blog page is skipped by many
2) the discovery is not considered to be important

To me this is important because i spend a lot of time here.

Hello Davidsch,
the connection between mushrooms, deer, globes, rings and fleur-de-lys is not obvious. Maybe you could start a new thread on the subject and try to condense your explanation of the f85r2 diagram, with a short identification of each figure and of the overall meaning of the illustration?

Hello David,

what you experience is completely normal, and I have seen this in Voynich MS discussion boards for more than 20 years now.
'No comment' can mean several other things:
3) It is not really understood
4) It's interesting but one doesn't know how to comment on it
5) People have something else on their minds right now

I was struck by the illustration of the dear (or whatever animal it is) with a very Voynich Aries/Taurus
like pose.
But I hadn't gotten round to commenting on it.

In addition to Rene's points, I've also noticed something from my own experience. When I post to the forum, I like to refer to my blogpost because that's where I've taken all the effort to write everything and it feels stupid to copy it to the forum. But apparently people on a forum want to be able to see the information in-topic without having to refer to an external site - just a matter of convenience. 

Also, it's right that when you offer several points, it may be worth putting them in a separate thread. I also like the visual resemblance between the deer you found and the VM goats, but since this is the "rings" thread, that gets kind of lost.

About the rings, I'm not sure whether they really have to represent the same object all the time. For example, the red one looks quite different than the others and is likely to represent something else altogether.

Diane - an ankh looks like a possibility, especially because they become more ring-like when we enter the Roman period. The "stick" gets shorter, to the extent that later copyists might, by accident or intention, re-envision it as a gemmed ring.

Just an example from the temple at Dendera, from around the turn of the millennium. An ankh is held by the man on the left and the boy in the middle being breastfed by Cleopatra.



Now it gets confusing because there's also the Shen ring, which looks like an Ankh without the stick and is, among others, associated with Isis, who, in Greco-Roman tradition, is associated with the situla. 

This would probably be a lot easier if we could read the text