The Voynich Ninja

I'm not sure about her decoding method yet the imagery makes sense to the use of a microscope.  To me You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does represent a woman's fertility organs.  I'm going to see if my numerology can make sense of it

Moved to Imagery.

Hi Stellar,

I can't comment on your numerology - I'll leave that to folks who understand that kind of stuff.

Regarding the image - my first impression was that it represents the shoulder joints in human anatomy.
[attachment=810]
However, many people independently see in it the ovaries and the Fallopian tubes. If the wisdom of the crowd is correct - this points to some problems with the 15th century origin of the drawings (the parchment still can be 15th century made).

The Fallopian tubes were not described in writing until the beginning of the 17th century by students of Gabriel Falopio who published his lectures. We can conclude that he was teaching about the tubes in the first half of the 16th century (when he lived). There is a possibility he was not the first one to teach about the tubes (since they always have been there), but so far there is no evidence about it. Even Leonardo da Vinci did not draw the Fallopian tubes. My impression is that the knowledge about them went mainstream in the 16th century.

The idea that these are the ovaries and the Fallopian tubes and sperm (first observed at the end of 17th century) is the only thing in the VMs that keeps my mind open about the possibility of the VMs being a forgery.

Few people independently recognized the figure in the middle as representation of Cassiopeia being tied (I think Koen had a thread about that). I agree with them - it seems like a possibility.
What does Casiopea have to do with the women's reproductive organs? I have no idea.
[attachment=811]

All these are subjective interpretations. At the end, the picture may have nothing to do with shoulder bones, or ovaries, or sperm, or Cassiopeia. Who knows! It is an interesting picture and I haven't made my mind about it.

I do believe Cassiopeia is referenced in the image, though she might only be a secondary meaning. You chose some nice parallels that show that her throne was often drawn as not much more than a box, just like in the VM image. 

That does leave the "tubes" to be explained. The fact that they look organic does evoke the association with human organs. However, this needn't be the case, like your example of the bone structure shows.

Here is another possibility: look at the way rivers etc are drawn on this map: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(click image to visit larger version)

(20-10-2016, 07:09 AM)stellar Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure about her decoding method yet the imagery makes sense to the use of a microscope.  To me You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does represent a woman's fertility organs.  I'm going to see if my numerology can make sense of it

the text translation from this image is like in image bellow,

(20-10-2016, 06:54 PM)EllieV Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Stellar,

I can't comment on your numerology - I'll leave that to folks who understand that kind of stuff.

Regarding the image - my first impression was that it represents the shoulder joints in human anatomy.

However, many people independently see in it the ovaries and the Fallopian tubes. If the wisdom of the crowd is correct - this points to some problems with the 15th century origin of the drawings (the parchment still can be 15th century made).

The Fallopian tubes were not described in writing until the beginning of the 17th century by students of Gabriel Falopio who published his lectures. We can conclude that he was teaching about the tubes in the first half of the 16th century (when he lived). There is a possibility he was not the first one to teach about the tubes (since they always have been there), but so far there is no evidence about it. Even Leonardo da Vinci did not draw the Fallopian tubes. My impression is that the knowledge about them went mainstream in the 16th century.

The idea that these are the ovaries and the Fallopian tubes and sperm (first observed at the end of 17th century) is the only thing in the VMs that keeps my mind open about the possibility of the VMs being a forgery.

Few people independently recognized the figure in the middle as representation of Cassiopeia being tied (I think Koen had a thread about that). I agree with them - it seems like a possibility.
What does Casiopea have to do with the women's reproductive organs? I have no idea.


All these are subjective interpretations. At the end, the picture may have nothing to do with shoulder bones, or ovaries, or sperm, or Cassiopeia. Who knows! It is an interesting picture and I haven't made my mind about it.

Elliev,
I think all woman would agree the depiction is of a woman's reproductive system.  The woman in the center within You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. would be the a representation of the uterus.  And her facial expression looks stressed while staring to the right where her infertility exists.  Also at the bottom in this picture of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it looks like 3 sperms are entering the vagina.  Furthermore, the right ovary is missing a tube!

(24-10-2016, 07:37 PM)stellar Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Elliev,
I think all woman would agree the depiction is of a woman's reproductive system. 

I know men who agree with that too. Since I am a woman - obviously some women are not so sure about it.

Stellar, it seems like a lot of work and wasted time for someone to write out whole words and laboriously work out the sums for each word so they add up to a specific number when they could simply write that number as a single character. In fact, if it were only one number, it could easily be hidden in the drawing as a symbol that only the author would know about.

Plus, cabbalistic numbers were not intended to be used for narrative text. They were computed to look for relationships between things/people/ideas, the idea being that God (and scribes who understood his message) had created a "connectedness" between things with similar numeric values.

For comparison, here are some depictions of the womb, found them on stanford.edu site, sorry I don't know the exact source of all of these!!

Muscio, Gynaecia. Bibliotheque Royale de Belgique, ms. 3701, f.27r. 9th century.:


Leonardo Da Vinci:


From Vesalius, Tabulae Sex. 1538 (female on the left):


16th C, Pseudo Albertus Magnus:


ETA: the point I forgot to make here is that as you can see in these drawings, by the 16th C there was an idea that the female reproductive system contained two halves.
However, the meaning given to this division was totally different from what we now know (where both ovaries carry out the same job, and one ovary might function and not the other, as is implied by Stellar's interpretation).
They thought that if sperm entered the right side, the child would be a boy, and the left side would be a girl. There were theories that there might be a third cell in the middle which would lead to the birth of hermaphrodites. Even Gabriele Fallopio (16th C), to whom we owe the name of the tubes, actually misrepresented them and failed to understand their exact role.
Well into the 17th century, after dissections became standard, although the parts had been identified it was not yet fully understood what function each part actually served. The idea of one ovary being fertile and the other not is very modern.
So what I am trying to say is that we should not project our current scientific knowledge onto illustrations that were made centuries before any of this was understood.

Thanks VViews,

Here is a nice article on the matter. According to it, before 16th century the tubes were called semen-conveying ducts - similar to male's. That clears the tubes for me - since they were aware of it - just got their functions wrong. The problem that still remains is the possible "sperm" that was only observed late 17th century - they believed at the time it contains a whole human being that just grows in size during pregnancy.
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