The Voynich Ninja

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.is a full page image of a leafy plant with slender stem. Large brown vertical roots are prominent, and to the right of these is a green line (possibly indicating a grassy or mossy bank) upon which sits an animal most often described as a "dragon". The dragon appears to be "nibbling" upon the extremity of one of the leaves.

One of the most popular suggestions for this plant is that it describes a mandrake - I have in the pastYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to my own satisfaction.

I would like to suggest a new similarity for consideration: this page depicts a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which is also known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

From Wikipedia, which puts it succintly:

Quote:The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Latin: Agnus scythicus or Planta Tartarica Barometz) is a legendary zoophyte of Central Asia, once believed to grow sheep as its fruit.[2] The sheep were connected to the plant by an umbilical cord and grazed the land around the plant. When all accessible foliage was gone, both the plant and sheep died.

Underlying the myth is a real plant, Cibotium barometz, a fern of the genus Cibotium. It was known under various other names including the Scythian lamb, the borometz, barometz and borametz, the latter three being different spellings of the local word for lamb.[3] The "lamb" is produced by removing the leaves from a short length of the fern's woolly rhizome. When the rhizome is inverted, it fancifully resembles a woolly lamb with the legs being formed by the severed petiole bases.

It is important to distinguish between the early Renaissance myths and earlier descriptions of the Borametz. The myth has been traced back to 5th century Hebrew texts.

It was known in 14th century Europe, and I quote here from the Book of Sir John Mandeville:

Quote:In the Land of Cathay towards the high Indes;
There grows there a manner of fruit; and when they are ripe men cut them off, and men find within a little beast, in flesh, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both the fruit and beast and that is a great marvel. Of that fruit I have eaten, all thought it were marvellous, but that I know well, that God is marvellous in his works.

It is a parody of an Old Testament parable, the Lamb of God as an edible vegetable.

Two centuries later we find a chapter in Histoire admirable des Plantes (1605) by Claude Duret which devotes a whole chapter to the Borametz. Duret confirms Mandeville's story and adds a link to a fifth century Hebrew text. It is shaped like a lamb and is attached to the mother plant by its navel. It is able to graze upon all within reach of its tether, and dies when it runs out of food.

Richard Mabey comments upon further myths of this animal/plant hybrid, commenting that "it has no real horns, but that the long hairs of its head entwine into two long vertical pigtails" (The cabaret of plants, 2016).

Now, if we You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at the animal, we see a dark wiggly line run out from the plant, along the top of the green substance, and up to the animal's midriff.

The animal is clearly linked to the main plant - it is either nibbling the very end of the stalk, or, it is being "born" from the plant as if it were a fruit.

There is also a clear attempt by the illustrator to depict a ground upon which the animal is standing - the animal is at ground level, with the roots underneath the ground.

Later depictions of the Borometz depict it as sitting astride a stalk. But these are more Renaissance era images. Earlier images I have found don't have this stalk imagery.


^ Where newborn lambs are born from pods. Credit: Lee, H. 1887. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: a Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant.

In short, I would suggest that there are clear indications that this is an animal/plant hybrid depiction, which is a grown Borametz grazing.

Hi David,

I think it is pipperidge, also known as bearberry.

And I think the animal is a bear, not a dragon or other mythical beast.

Thank you.

Don of Tallaahassee

Interesting Don, it could well be a bear.
Although the plant has no berries depicted, and a bearberry is a dwarf shrub

My initial impression of this illustration is that they are fruit bats, aka flying foxes, especially the one in the lower right. They roost in trees and sleep wrapped in their wings. When they awake, it might appear like a pod opening and a furry animal emerging.

Second guess, based on example from lower left. That one looks a lot like a sheep. It's wool from a plant. Therefore it's cotton, or something very similar, which has a husk with the fibers on the inside.

You see how that can lead to all kinds of potential misinterpretation?

True R., except that the illustration I added is identified by its illustrator as a Borametz opening.
The seeds of the plant in question are woolly in nature, which led to this association.

(03-08-2016, 09:02 AM)david Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interesting Don, it could well be a bear.
Although the plant has no berries depicted, and a bearberry is a dwarf shrub

Maybe the tiny bear ate the berries.

That would explain the berry-eating-grin on its face.

Thank you.

Don of Tallahassee

While rhizomes of that fern were indeed sold as specimens of the Barometz, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. concludes that the myth originated from embellished descriptions of the cotton plant. As R. Sale noted, the image (originally from Mandeville's travels) does indeed seem to support this. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant seems to be more similar to a version found in Jewish sources, in which the animal is tied to the root of the plant by a vine-like stem. However, in those versions, the stem is attached to the animal's navel, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

To be more serious, I offer the following observations.
 
It looks like some of my proposed herb image attributions can be checked for appropriateness if the following possibilities can be accepted:
 
1.  The image has some relationship with the text.

2.  The relationship to the image is shown on the same page as the text that is related to it.

3.  The image was drawn in such a way as to reveal its information in some way to the reader while disguising it from those not in on the secret of how to understand that relationship. (There are subterfuges in the Voynich Manuscript - can you believe it?)

4.  There seem to be parts of the images that are not normally in other images of plants from the Fifteenth Century. These include animals, faces and other cryptic things. There are other images, such as snakes/worms in the roots, for which a relationship can be directly traced to other images of or before the Fifteenth Century. This relationship usually is of the mnemonic or rebus type. 

5.  The unexplained other parts probably also apply in some way to whatever is being written about in the text or to the plant images.

6.  There seems to be no other normal explanation for these other images in relation to the plant images on the pages.

7.  There are snakes/worms in the roots of one of the plant images in the VMS.

8.  It might mean the image on the VMS page is of bistort, as it does in many other period (or before) herbals.

9.  If that image of snakes/worms is germane to the image on the page, maybe other unexplained side images on plant image pages can also be used to help identify the plants on those pages.

10. If true, it might mean that the other additional image parts might also actually be directly related to the main image and text on their pages.

11.  Using my proposed deconstruction scheme, the code group tables, the universally used phonetic sound alphabet and the code attributions/abbreviations, I have come up with a series of plant image identifications that are represented on the pages as I have been showing.

12.  Almost all of the page image leaves  seem to have very close resemblances to leaves on plant images from other sources. There are, on some plants imaged in the VMS, other points of similarity with those from other sources.

13.  The other plant parts such as roots and flowers seem often to be imaginary or deliberately composed as other than real depictions. I think these are part of the subterfuges found throughout the VMS. The leaves seem to be the most constant identifying feature.

14.  If each plant image page seems to have a Code I attribution that is shown on the page (usually in a word in the top line or the left side of the page or up against the plant image), it might be possible that the other image parts are also directly related to the Code I attribution, either as rebuses or mnemonics or other word play.

15.  The herb identified for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is pipperidge, also known as bearberry. The code for pipperidge is sounded as prg in VMS glyphs. It is found as the first three glyphs in the 1st paragraph, 1st line, 5th word. The code seems logical to me, as do most of the other codes. The word is prominently positioned on the page. It would be an easy word for a reader to notice when looking for the page image identity. The word, pipperidge, is appropriate to the Fifteenth Century in England. The leaves drawn on the page resemble those of pipperidge/bearberry.

16.  The image of a bear on the page would serve as an easy mnemonic reminder of the bearberry/pipperidge attribution. The leaves shown on the page are not easily differentiated from other, similar leaves, thus an additional aid to memory/recognition was deemed necessary.

The same sort of thing goes on throughout the identifications I think I have made.

That's why I think it is pipperidge/bearberry.

I think there is a code attribution and a mnemonic device that both seem to agree with the image on the page. The leaves are similar. 

And the code attribution is positioned right in the middle of the top line on the page for easy recognition. (I've noticed there only seems to be one use of the image's Code I code on each of the plant image pages).

Thank you.
 
Don of Tallahassee
 

Don - are you suggesting that the hypothetical cleartext language of the VMS is Middle English?