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+--- Thread: Interesting Vwords - chok (/thread-2031.html)
Interesting Vwords - chok - -JKP- - 31-07-2017
chok might be a plant-section Vord, except there aren't enough instances to be sure.
- It first appears on the last line of f1r, between two other mostly-plant vords.
- It then appears on 3 big-plant folios—the first two times in the company of other plant vords, the third time oddly sandwiched within four general-purpose (common) vords.
- Then, like the previously posted vord, it shows up in a spoke of the "Pleiades" folio.
The latter point is something I noticed quite a long ago and it made me curious...
To people in the middle ages, everything was interconnected. The stars and planets governed parts of the body, the shape of a plant expressed what kind of illnesses it cured, the stars governed the qualities of the plants. Body/stars/medicine/shapes/influence... they simply weren't separable from one another.
It is assumed by many that star shapes in the VMS are always stars, but I'm not certain that is always so. It's possible, for example, that some of the little stars in the rosette pages are plants/bushes, rather than stars.
When I saw that quite a few primarily-plant vords turn up on star pages like the "Pleiades" page, I wondered, could these pages be something a little different? perhaps an aerial plan for a section of an herb garden for plants that are governed by a certain constellation? Planting guides, rather than pictures of the heavens? Zodiac-based gardens did exist.
Another possibility (I'm always trying to think of alternative interpretations) is that these specific plants have words in common with celestial bodies (there are many plants with words like Saturn, star, Venus, etc., as part of the plant name) and perhaps that is why they show up on both plant and star pages. But then one might expect them on the zodiac pages, as well, and that doesn't always happen.