22-06-2026, 09:34 PM
I’ve just mapped the rosettes pages as a Christo-natural philosophy cosmology with a hermetic frame story and an ultimate heresy at its centre. It’s highly symbolic and I use the Ars Negativa stemming from apophatic theology extensively to interpret symbols. It was a thing in this time period. I too have looked at Lull. Those “comic little figures” surrounding the rosette silhouette in the centre of 57v might be your key, by the way. I’ve identified them because I identified them in the rosette page corners. You don’t even have to squint to name them and they each correspond to one of Llul’s primary categories.
I don’t work on the text, just the images. Your instincts about the particular rosettes are sound. But let me say, this page is fiendishly clever and involves every poetry technique of what they called “allegory” back then from an author who uses apophatic theology as one more way to keep things hidden. Plausible deniability. Aggressive deniability while still leaving traces across the manuscript.
The idea that this brilliant author, so well-versed in allegory and so well-read in every aspect of the Bible and natural philosophy - which I will show - doesn’t have meaning within these hundreds of pages of text is impossible for me to swallow. But I do think the rosettes page has to be understood first. It provides the symbolic categories for whatever system the author is using.
And Llul is a strong possibility.
I don’t work on the text, just the images. Your instincts about the particular rosettes are sound. But let me say, this page is fiendishly clever and involves every poetry technique of what they called “allegory” back then from an author who uses apophatic theology as one more way to keep things hidden. Plausible deniability. Aggressive deniability while still leaving traces across the manuscript.
The idea that this brilliant author, so well-versed in allegory and so well-read in every aspect of the Bible and natural philosophy - which I will show - doesn’t have meaning within these hundreds of pages of text is impossible for me to swallow. But I do think the rosettes page has to be understood first. It provides the symbolic categories for whatever system the author is using.
And Llul is a strong possibility.