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RE: No text, but a visual code - Barbrey - 18-10-2025
(10 hours ago)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the key elements, and perhaps the most attractive, of the Voynich iconography are the hundreds of female figures in the codex. We see them in the zodiacal section and in Quire 13. I assume they are the same. What I mean is that the authors have given the same meaning to the female figures in both parts or sections. What I maintain is that these figures are allegorical representations of the zodiacal stars, a very common iconographic resource in medieval times, that is, replacing something concrete or an abstraction with a human figure.
Anyone who has seen medieval astronomical or astrological manuscripts will have encountered personifications of the planets. Venus as a woman, Saturn as an old man, or Mars as an armed warrior. It's true that it's much harder to find personifications of stars. They do exist when it comes to constellations, but they're rarer when it comes to individual stars.
However, there are examples such as this German manuscript from the second half of the 15th century (Ms M. 384, f21r)
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This is the Pleiades constellation and we can see the representation of each star as a female figure. We see how there is a star above each of their heads to make it clear that they are not women but stars. It's something similar to the zodiacal section of the Voynich, where each of the female figures holds a star.
I think this is where you and I differ: I believe when they are holding stars, they represent stars (and souls, because it was widely believed stars were souls, and that is why, I think, in the VMS, some of the nymphs have personal attributes that distinguish them). However, when they are not holding stars, they represent something else, and it could be a variety of things depending on their accoutrements and context. The entire universe was made of prima materia, according to natural philisophers, though in the heavens it was refined to immortal quintessence, whereas on earth the prima materia is muddied and must be refined to liberate the quintessence.
So I see the nymphs as prima materia, not as rays of influence,though that is part of it tangentially, but as actual substances that can change according to circumstances. I like this quote:
“They have compared the "prima materia" to everything, to male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass; it contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals; there is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself.”
(Wikipedia entry on Prima Materia)
And of the many synonyms used for it, we commonly find “Bride, Spouse, Mother, Eve”. I just think it fits the pregnant nymphs better than that they are solely stars.