While looking at images from the Dendera zodiac - made in Egypt under Roman rule - I noticed that the way they use stars shows some similarity to Voynich stars:
The similarities are:
- Stars have a colored circle inside.
- A star can be paired with a person.
- A star can serve a more general (decorative?) purpose.
Looking at these stars some more in depth, I found out that apparently this design was originally based on starfishes (sea stars) found in the Red Sea. Looking at an example like the one below, one understands why this is believed:
This design is older and was generally used in Egyptian art, but in the Greco-Roman period they more closely resemble Voynich stars.
There are some differences as well though. The most obvious one is that the Egyptian stars have five points, while Voynich stars sport from six to nine appendages. I only did a quick check, but it seems that seven and eight are standard, nine is less frequent and six is exceptional.
What does this mean?
There are a number of possibilities:
The Voynich stars represent a different tradition altogether.
The Voynich stars started out as five-pointed stars but were copied carelessly, which would explain the variation.
The Voynich stars started out as five-pointed stars but were altered consciously by later copyists because the five-pointed star had taken on a specific, different meaning.
The number of points on the star has a significance, and the possible values for this meaning ranged from six to nine.
So my questions are:
Did anyone study the variation in the number of points on the stars more in depth?
What comments does anyone have about the four figures sitting at the top of VMs Pisces? If someone could post an image, that would be great. Feel free to wander in the rest of this illustration. I have my opinions, but don't want to sway the initial response.
My Boole/Voynich book following the lives of the 2 Boole and Hinton dynasties is due out on the 29th Jun after years of work, published by by Atrium/Cork University Press under the title 'The Booles and the Hintons' (£25 hardback, 450 pages). It includes a revising chapter on the Voynich Manuscript based on the 2004 book - so nothing really new there. (although I re-iterate the partial hoax theory of the Marci letter - for what it's worth). What may be of interest, however, is new information on Wilfrid and Ethel and their lives together based on family archives and a full translation of Taratuta's biography of Ethel. Their characters are investigated in detail.
The book deals with the lives of the Hinton dynasty too as well as the Booles from George Boole onwards so a lot of it is VMS irrelevant. It is undoubtedly a hybrid offering: part academic biography, part travel and part diaries of mine and part comment. Enough variety to offend any 'purists' who stray within its covers.I think the result is ok however; we shall see what the world thinks when the reviews come in. I'd be interested to hear any comments if anyone reads read some/all/any of it. I hope it entertains at least.
The publishers have issued a 'widget' blurb of the 1st 29 pages to give chapter descriptions and some flavour, (but nothing specifically on the Voyniches). If you would like to download this it should be possible at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
as announced in the Ideas of a newbie thread I have a short list of questions I would like to know the answers to (if they're available). I saw the Questions subforum is meant for questions to experts and allow for 1 question per topic. That seems a bit too much and my questions will not need expert level experience, I guess.
1 - It has been written on Wikipedia "The basins and tubes in the "biological" section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., yet bear little obvious resemblance to the alchemical equipment of the period." but this is without citation. Does anyone have a reliable source to include that solves the question "bear little resemblance to alchemical equipment" for the tubes in the Biological section of the VMS?
2 - I have been looking around to find an answer to this (maybe René Zandbergen knows); what is the thickness (on average) of the vellum? I have found a link to the Carbon Dating page of Zandbergen that says "some folios are thicker than others", but how thick is vellum in general and the VMS vellum in particular?
3 - related to this; the paint of all the plants and other coloured drawings is pressing through the vellum which makes the VMS look pretty ugly. That doesn't seem normal for manuscripts of the 15th century or is it? Has that to do with the type of paint used, the vellum (thickness?), both or something else?
having read and skimmed almost half of all the posts here, on a level that I couldn't aspire to reach, I want to share my rough ideas in a nutshell and see:
- if they are presented before (probably they are, but on René Zandbergen's website and also reading here until now, I haven't seen them)
- if so, could you point me to the authors of them
- if not, feel free to "steal" them and use them as a basis for further research
- if my ideas are really so wildly crazy or not
As I said in my introduction: I am not a researcher, in the sense that I have studied the VMS, have experience in any of the fields needed to understand/decypher it or have a lot of time to dive into this (although I would like to). I am a scientist, but not in any of the fields needed to contribute on the level I am seeing here.
A rough outline of my ideas:
The purpose
From an analytical point of view, this section should be at the end as a conclusion from the bottom-up approach of decent scientific analysis, but I want to share it upfront:
- my idea about this mysterious manuscript is that it is written by a number of authors (see below) to represent experiences using different psychoactive herbs (herbal), representing the "visions" seen in those trips (astronomical, nymphs/biological) and the "final" (in the current order) section describes the use of them to get the best "trip" (recipes)
- the text is written in code (see below) to prevent others (outside of the "circle of friends/authors") from knowing its meaning and especially to keep the power of the Church away, in case the document would be found
- the manuscript was part of a group of people/friends/secret "society" (but on a much less organised scale) who had their tripping experiences together and wanted to share their knowledge only between them, like a private message
-> a group of people who would be considered "witches" or other pejorative names for people just experimenting with psychoactive plants the divine Nature is giving us
The authors
I don't believe the manuscript is produced by 1 author
- the text is very neatly written; smooth, elegant, shows experience
- the drawings are not of a very high quality tbh (I don't know how skilled people were in the 15th century, but they seem rather poorly done)
- the paint is horrible. It looks as if the beautiful text with the reasonable images is "screwed up" by someone painting over it without taking much care [has been noted of course, but I haven't seen it as part of a larger context/meaning]
-> I suspect at least 2, but rather 3 (or even more, taking "Currier A and B" as two "hands") authors
I suspect the authors to be friends/close people who share something between them
- René Zandbergen states on his last page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - Meaningful or not - question 1 three options:
1 - Generally meaningful
2 - Meaningful only to him
3 - Meaningless
I want to add a 4th option: 4 - Meaningful only to a select group of people, not generally meaningful and not generally meaningless (to those outside yes, to those in the know not)
- the work, money and effort put in this document do not support option 3; why would someone spend years of his (or her, but I suspect the author(s) to be male) life (and people in the 15th century generally reached ages of 40/50 and not 70/80 as was more common towards the 17th-18th century) on a document that was meaningless, only with the HOPE of selling it?
- there is no documentation of the manuscript between ~1440-1460 (last age of C14 analysis + writing time) until the acquisition by Rudolf II 140-160 years later. Buyers of a document that was supposed to sell for a high price (because of the mystery of it) would record it, especially in the higher nobility ranks of the time. A document unknown for 140 years and then "suddenly" sold to Rudolf for 600 ducats doesn't make sense.
- first option is excluded; it would have been cracked already because of the thousands of (professional) eyes that have looked at it, especially using computers and all the languages around in the world today
- second option is not likely; the document only readable for the writer doesn't fit the difference in style between the text and drawings, but especially not the (bad) paint, not the time it takes to note his/her observations; too much effort, too little gain
The text/cypher
I have two hypotheses about the cypher:
1 - it is a cypher of real languages, but not -as I see everywhere!- 1 language, yet a combination of various languages/dialects/dead languages, spoken by the "circle"/group of people involved in this
Example - with a good friend of mine I had the idea to create some "secret" language that only him and me could understand. Both pretty polyglots (4-6 languages at least on a basic level) it would form "sentences" like "Je want muchas Häuser in nossos levens, shukran" - I want a lot of houses in our lives, thank you; having French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Arabic in 1 sentence. Repetitions of the same language in 1 sentence would make it even harder and the order of languages changed per sentence. Adding dialects (that were much more common in the Middle Ages) would complicate it even more; switching between Picardian and French and Aragonese and Spanish for instance. The right combination of language, producing the really obvious and strange "perfect Gaussian distribution" as analysed by Stolfi (I think it was) length of the words, could have been chosen on purpose.
What if the "circle" of authors were all (traveling) polyglots who picked up a variety of different languages/dialects, even from different language groups (Germanic, Roman, Slavic, Greek/Latin, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew) and combined them together in their way of speaking. Then codified/cyphered this to any non-involved ear strange combination of languages would be already quite un-understandable without the coding, but with it would be nearly impossible...
2 - the cypher/text is of a specific form where some characters ("letters") are indicative of page names within the manuscript of the form "4abtraarbw" referring to: 4th page/folio, a = first paragraph and b = second "word token". The rest ("traarbw") is fake "gibberish" put in to codify the Voynichese language.
Idea - even a combination of those two possibilities could be the case, where one would say "look for the second word on the 4th page in the first paragraph and translate it into "Latin" or "French" or any other indicator of the language". That indicator doesn't need to be the full word of the language written out, it can be just 1 character ("t" in this example stands for Turkish or Finnish or whatever other language mastered by the people involved)
The script/"language"
It has been noted by various authors, especially René Zandbergen, that the author could be "not knowing what he writes and therefore doesn't make -huge- mistakes and no -real- corrections are made"
What has been described as "corrections" are usually retouches (as Stolfi calls them) on the ink; the dry pen is overwritten with fresh ink but following the same pattern; not correcting, just redoing the ink on the text and images because there wasn't enough ink in the pen and the text was too vague.
The smoothness of the text, constant lines (yet without a ruler) and consistency in the characters doesn't show:
- a delusional state [as has been proposed by some]
- "gibberish" -> the exact opposite is equally true; the writer did know exactly what he/she was writing
The "perfect" script
We don't have the "drafts", so it can be very well possible the writer(s) did make mistakes, but started over on a new vellum writing it correctly.
Even if the drawings are made before the text is written [and it certainly looks like that], it is possible to draw again and write correct script that time.
The age
Before I knew about the C14 dating, I, as an amateur, thought of an age around the 15th century because of the dressing style and hair of the people/nymphs drawn. I am not convinced that C14 dating is not falsified (can always be), but the two pieces of the puzzle seem to match.
The origin
As stated many times a Central-European location would make most sense. I agree with that and think the writer(s)/drawer(s) are more northern European. All (or most of them, I cannot claim to have seen all) nymphs have blonde hair. That doesn't point to an Italian, Spanish, purely Slavic or even (southern) French origin. "German" (a country that didn't exist in those ages), Dutch or Flemish origin would make more sense, maybe even Swedish/Danish.
As I suspect the authors to be travelers it could be the MS was written by a northern European but based on travels more south (Italian castle, mediterranean herbals) and in a different location than the birth place of the author(s) (e.g. Central-Europe).
Origin is European
It has been noted by some it could be Chinese/Asian but I don't see that; the people look European and especially the Chinese zodiac is different from the European one and that is used (although not starting with the common Aries sign).
The "Den Musdel" (or something like that) "widow" script is added later/by someone else than the main writer(s) (Currier A/B)
The text looks different, out of place and maybe added by some of the "circle" I suspect it belonged to that wasn't the main writer.
The author(s) must have been wealthy/knowledgeable
This has been stated in the documentary René Zandbergen participated in and I've seen it elsewhere. Because materials were expensive and labour cheap it has been suggested the author(s) was at least pretty wealthy.
- the vellum and or ink could have been stolen/inherited
- the writer(s) could have come from a richer family but were later considered "outcasts" and still could use the wealth of their famili(es) to produce an extensive manuscript
- the author(s) didn't need to be so "knowledgeable" in that age (where only a few universities were around, mainly in Italy); copies/interpretations from earlier works (which also could have been stolen/inherited/borrowed) but then "fantasised" into the current state ("unrecognisable" plants etc.)
Arguments against all this:
- I cannot be the first one with these ideas; I am a complete amateur [cannot stress that enough] and much more experienced minds have looked at it for years. - I don't have any evidence to back-up these ideas in the text itself. I haven't studied it, I haven't compared it to other medieval texts, have done nothing substantial to be able to claim my ideas are merely more than... ideas - the images of the plants are not recognisable as known plants immediately. It could also be a pro-argument as the plants drawn were only (necessarily) known to the group of people involved, but to support my thesis the document was written about the use of psychoactive plants and mushrooms (I think 1 has been vaguely recognised, seen it somewhere) it's rather weak. - I don't know if the idea of a "look on page 4, first paragraph, 2nd word (3rd letter)" cypher idea was tested or even was probable to have existed in the 15th century. It seems not too hard (only to us, not understanding the language) so it could have been around, but I have no evidence to back this up. The Cardan grille was "invented" later (which is also a very easy decryption method), at least officially.
The possibility of a hoax
Although it doesn't look like it because of the work that's in it, it still could be. There are too many hoaxes around, especially in the world today, so it's always possible. The involvement of certain people suggest the possibility it was a hoax. Won't elaborate on that for the moment.
The possibility of the key already known
This is another possibility that seems likely. The Vatican has many secret files, not accessible to anyone and the 600 years of history could easily have meant that the manuscript has already been decoded (probably with a cypher that has been kept secret/destroyed on purpose) but that the language and meaning are kept secret by those "circles" or "societies". It could even have been descendants of the writers themselves.
Some time ago I raised the issue of the hidden notes in the Voynich manuscript. I think, not all of them were correctly identified by me, as well, some of them are quite doubtful. But, at the same time, a part of my finds are still topical, on my view. Moreover, they could clarify some points.
I tried to make these notes visible again and hope for, at least, little success in this, but, even, if you don't see them, I need a consultation in astrological/astronomical terminology.
Every one of us knows such terms in Geometry as "straight line" and "cut line", in Latin – "linea recta" and "linea secta" (or, sometimes, "absecta"). Unfortunately, I know nothing about their meaning in astrology/astronomy, i. e. what point particularly they reflect. Could such data show something important in the VMs?
From the "Joannis Kepleri astronomi opera omnia" (v. 6):
Kepler opera omnia - absecta.png (Size: 306.44 KB / Downloads: 1042)
Actually, the matter is about the fragment of the Rosettes folio, the low right corner. I see there notes "Absecta" and "Recta", as well, two depictions of the "bird-glyph". Also, I suspect there are two other notes which I’m not able to interpret exactly. The first one may be: “Siste mot”, or “siste sol”, or “Abs mot”, or “Abs sol”, or “Stati mot”; the second is most problematic, it is too illegible, but I think, it still presents. The one of likely variants for it is the word “You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.” (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), as the most possible in this case, on my opinion.
I’d like to pay attention that the words “Absecta” and “Recta” are written with the same ligature Ct, all the notes are written in the same direction with moderate deviation.
There is three points between “absecta” and “recta”, which form right angle.
Of course, these data won’t help anyway without numerical information, so I still think that the rays of the “Sun” contain numbers 154 and 6.
Absecta-recta mini-tile.jpg (Size: 485.97 KB / Downloads: 1110)
I’ll be glad to know an opinion of astronomers and astrologers.
I came across the minatura de Toxos-Outos from the Archivo histórico nacional in Madrid. It dates from around 1250 (not sure of the exact date), and represents King Alfonso X, Queen Violante and their son the Infante Fernando de la Cerda.
I was mainly intrigued by the facial similarities between this minature and the VM nymphs.
Note the simple strong penmark for the face which does not show the closest cheek (admittedly many of the nymphs have no chin, but bear in the mind the small size of the image - larger ones often do), the sharp nose with eye and strong eyebrows. The same method is used to draw the face of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the VM. Note also the simple hands without thumbs and long joined fingers. The inclined head which nonetheless displays the full face to the viewer in a somewhat distorted manner (there is no attempt at perspective here).
Obviously I'm not connecting the two illustrators. However, I have seen other examples in the same fashion from other northern Spanish (mainly Galician) artefacts of the 13th century. This one by another unknown Galician artist from the same time period, for example:
Showing Diego Gelmírez teaching at university.
I haven't seen this style elsewhere in Europe, can anyone draw my attention to a similar artistic style? When looking at other works from elsewhere in Spain for the same period, I see a very different style of illustration - clearly defined head, usually facing directly towards viewer, etc.
I find it interesting that this type of imagery appears around the time of Alfonso X, and I think there's certainly the beginnings of a case here to suggest that the VM scribe may have seen these images.
On f20r, we see a plant with eleven branches branching out from the top of the root. The longest two of these branches have clusters of blue "flowers" at the ends. Interestingly, the leaves on the two branches containing flowers have a alternating pattern of red and green leaf coloration, while the leaves on the other branches are uniformly green.
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I wonder if anyone has ever seen a connection between the presence/absence of flowers and the coloration of the leaves (or any other property of the leaves for that matter, since the coloration may be "symbolic" somehow) in any other botanical illustrations, or if there is any phenomenon like this in the botanical world, even if the plants exhibiting such behavior do not resemble the plant on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in any other way.
![[Image: 29531-egypt-L.jpg]](https://photos.smugmug.com/Features/Africa/Egypt-Dendera-temple/i-PxhDB7H/1/L/29531-egypt-L.jpg)
![[Image: 320px-Fromia_monilis_%28Seastar%29.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Fromia_monilis_%28Seastar%29.jpg/320px-Fromia_monilis_%28Seastar%29.jpg)
![[Image: 220px-gelmires_converted.jpg?w=640]](https://albertosolana.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/220px-gelmires_converted.jpg?w=640)
