Posted by: Koen G - 07-05-2016, 09:17 AM - Forum: Imagery
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I analyzed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the same way as I did the Philomela story.
This folio tells the myth of Callisto, as she is raped by Jupiter (Zeus), banished by the goddess Diana, and turned into a bear as a punishment by Jupiter's wife. Finally, Jupiter takes pity on her and puts her and her son in the heavens as the Ursae constellations.
The neutral-downfall-ascension theme is reflected in the layout of the page:
My analysis of every image on this folio can be read in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I have tried to explain what I can, but also indicate the things that are still unclear to me. Like the honest used car salesman I am, I will mention those again separately:
- The VM does never show a half transformed person. In this case, it skips the bear altogether: it goes straight from nymph to constellation/goddess.
- As soon as a male figure becomes a representation of an abstract entity (like a constellation) he is pictured with a female body.
--> These two oddities lead me to believe that the focus is on the end result of these stories. In the chapter of Philomela these were winds, and the birds associated with them. In this story, they are some of the most important constellations.
- The constellations' attributes are highly specialized and do not immediately derive from Greek myth. Ursa minor is holding a red ring, which might be a reference to Polaris, though I don't know how. Ursa major is holding a known object: it can be compared to a sundial, and was used to determine one's position on earth. Ursa major had a similar function in antiquity (and later periods that adhered to the ancients' practice), being the most important constellation in navigation.
This would also imply that the "pangolin" represents the constellation Draco, which arches in between the Ursae and has its belly bent over Little Bear's head, just like is shown here.
For the full analysis of the narrative and the iconography, please read my blogpost, where I discuss everything in detail.
I recently posted a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the blog of Stephen Bax in which I point out a regular pattern of words in the zodiac pages. Here is a slightly edited and extended version
I used Job's excellent voynichese tool to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for two prefixes that commonly appear in the manuscript: shed- and ched-
In the 12 zodiac pages, there are 15 matches, on 7 different pages: Shed- Libra, Leo, Sagittarius ched- Pisces, Taurus (dark), Cancer, Scorpio
All occurrences appear in the rings of text, not in the labels of the “nymphs”.
According to an ancient tradition (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), masculine (or diurnal) and feminine (or nocturnal) signs alternate in the zodiac. Other sources (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. II, 150 or the Pseudo-Ptolemy’s You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) only classify the signs as masculine and feminine (not diurnal and nocturnal).
All the 15 occurrences of the two prefixes give a consistent match on 7 different zodiac signs. A possible hypothesis is the existence of some kind of equivalence: Shed- masculine (diurnal) ched- feminine (nocturnal)
There is another possible interpretation, based on the classical association of the zodiac signs with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
Aries, Leo, Sagittarius correspond to Fire (hot and dry)
Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn correspond to Earth (cold and dry)
Gemini, Libra, Aquarius correspond to Air (hot and wet)
Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces correspond to Water (cold and wet)
So, the masculine signs are “hot” and the feminine signs are “cold”. Another possible interpretation is: Shed- hot ched- cold
Of course, it is well possible that this is just an irrelevant coincidence. It should also be noted that a possible inconsistency is a “nymph” labeled “ched” in Sagittarius (a masculine sign that should have “shed”, according to this theory). Apparently, the hypothetical regularity I observed is not respected in the labels of the nymphs. The above linked search on voynichese.com searches for the ched- prefix and only matches if the prefix is followed by one or more characters.
Other possible regularities:
oty You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to four of the six (or five, since Capricorn is missing) “dry” signs (Taurus, Leo, Virgo and Sagittarius). Again, two Pisces nymphs should be ignored.
choteey You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. exactly to the three Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces)
A table of the Galenic properties of the signs (hot - calidus, cold - frigidus, dry - siccus, wet - humidus) by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I just noticed something pose-related: the male "gemini" has his arms crossed. This makes it look less like embracing, and more like a double handshake.
Has this been noted before?
Several people here have studied many other zodiacs. Is this something that returns? It seems like a very deliberate and significant cultural pointer to me. You don't "just" let people "embrace" with a double handshake.
I'm focusing my efforts on the balneo section so I'm not going to look into this at the moment. Just wondering if someone has found parallels for this pose - not just in gemini images, but the pose in general. I have a suspicion it may provide a key for the image.
Since it's a man and a woman, I'd start by looking into marriage rituals.
Edit: or is he holding her one hand and giving her something with the other?
Hi everyone,
Following an expression of interest from ReneZ in the thread about Philomela/80r, I'm opening a thread about the poses in the Voynich manuscript.
I've slightly updated my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the subject.
In short, although there are hundreds of people depicted in the Voynich manuscript, the range of poses is very limited. The vast majority of them (haven't done a stat count but I'd say over 90%) are represented in one of seven basic poses.
Additionally, I haven't touched on the issue of models in my post, but I'd like to add here that there is an interesting book about the use of model-books of drawings in medieval art:
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I have gone through a few of the model-books mentioned in this publication's catalogue, but so far, none seems to comprise all seven poses.
In another thread, Marco mentioned that the item carried by one of the nymphs has been identified as a spindle. This made me explore the image, and I tried to match it to known stories involving spindles or spinning/weaving in general.
I think these nymphs tell the story of Philomela, as told by Ovid. It starts when Philomela is violated by the king, who then binds her hands behind her back using her long hair:
I've written a blog post about it, matching the entire sequence of figures to this story as told by Ovid. I would, of course, like to know what you think
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In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Stephen Bax he discusses a set of multispectral scans performed by Lazarus Project Imaging.
(27-04-2016, 06:42 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.An analysis of the text of the Voynich and a proposed partial solution by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The document in English can be downloaded from her website You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. A Russian language version of the document is available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Thanks for posting the link, David.
As I see it (I worked through the translation), the "method" consists of
taking the glyphs that look like traditional Latin abbreviations and expanding them into unabbreviated Latin, and then
assigning a variety of letter possibilities to the other glyphs.
I've long said that the abbreviation shapes are traditional Latin but that the meaning behind them may not be.
The problem with interpreting it as Latin is that the STRUCTURE of the VMS text does not follow traditional Latin structure even if the glyphs are shaped and placed in a similar way and even if the person deciphering it builds extra flexibility into it by allowing specific shapes (the ones in between that are not shaped like Latin abbreviations) to have a variety of meanings, as well...
Taking May's translation for Plant 1v as an example... It includes: hot skeletons brought together, sloping ground and gurgled kisses, vanity, beehives, condensing great burdens, songs, warnings... These subjects don't appear to relate to each other in any discernible way even if we assume the text has nothing to do with the plant drawing.
A lot of effort obviously went into this, but looking at May's translation, it comes out like many translations, with a dozen different chunks of subject matter unrelated to each other on the same page (even if you choose the alternative word that seems to work best in relation to the others) and there's no perceivable grammatical coherence, not even the note-style coherence that one sometimes sees in herbal manuscripts, for example (where they jot down characteristics, uses, recipes, etc., without a lot of verbs or joining words).
I'll look at it some more this evening when I have time to give the "Latin" a better read to see if there's anything in that jumble. Unfortunately, I have to run (as usual, I have deadlines).
This is something I find very intriguing, but I think we'll never know the answer. So this is a purely speculative thread.
Is there any part of the time line we know for sure?
And if we speculate, what are some likely ways the MS could have ended up in Prague? Which areas has it likely travelled through?
And how come that not even two centuries after its creation people didn't have any idea about its provenance?
Nick Pelling argues both in his blog (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and in his book (the curse of the Voynich) that the aiir/aiiv -groups in the vms might be "fake" medieval page references. I have never encountered any page references looking anything like the aiir/aiiv groups in any medieval texts. How did one provide page references in the 15:th century? Does anyone have examples to share of page references looking anything like these groups?
Thanks!
![[Image: order.jpg]](https://herculeaf.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/order.jpg)
![[Image: Roman_marriage_vows.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Roman_marriage_vows.jpg)
![[Image: 1.jpg?w=340&h=457&crop=1]](https://herculeaf.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/1.jpg?w=340&h=457&crop=1)
