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+--- Thread: The meaning of the rosettes folio, the Voynich MS and everything (/thread-2887.html)
RE: The meaning of the rosettes folio, the Voynich MS and everything - Barbrey - 02-07-2020
ReneZ, I have only been looking at the Voynich for a few weeks, especially the rosettes page, but came to a similar conclusion. The medicine bottles are purposely like churches, temples, mosques to show the medicines not only contain physical properties but spiritual ones as well.
The one thing we are not in agreement on (at least in your initial post) is that the top right corner is the earth. I believe the centre large circle is the earth. In the top right corner is the t/o map representing the inhabited earth, but I believe its positioning outside the circle tells us it is a detail that belongs inside it. I've been reading the Corpus Hermeticum and think the 9 rosettes page corresponds neatly to its description of cosmos creation and regeneration of soul and body, and for the VMS, with particular emphasis on the medicines in the centre. The hermeticum god is not the christian god (though has similarities) but incorporates and acts through all gods, which is why I believe the medicine bottles look also like religious buildings but with no finite characteristics that would point to one religion or another. These medicines incorporate the duality of the spiritual and the bodily, and I believe the VMS goes to great lengths to show how that can be accomplished.
Thus, everything on the rosettes page is included in the top right corner, from stars, the earth, the animal embryo, the spiral of regeneration (9) etc. Moreover, it looks like it is on fluffy wings, making those castles very possibly a representation of the kingdom of heaven with constituent governments.
This is all in the spirit of the hermeticum principles of what is outer is also reflected in the inner, what is above is also below. To my mind, then, the top row of rosettes is divine, and the bottom chthonic. (Plants, btw, were considered chthonic but bridging through earth to the divine, particularly stars, and vice versa).I
The divine includes the cosmos, top right, (which includes everything else), the heavens/stars/zodiac, top middle, and the creation through sun and moon stages of the soul, particularly of humans, top left.
Directly below the creation of the human soul, so middle left, is the eight pointed petal, which corresponds to another page of the 8 pointed petal. This is where the human soul meets the human body and populates the earth directly to its right.
Directly below, bottom left, is where humans are shrived of their sins in life. Their corpses continue to the right but their purified souls take a cloudy car across diagonally across to a waiting cosmos/kingdom of god and begins the spiritual process again before embodiment at middle left again.
Along the bottom row, then, we have sites of spiritual dissolution/rebirth for humans (bottom left), then the plant kingdom (7 pointed star) which also pours upward into the cental earth (and the stars affect the plants on earth), and also the site to the right (bottom right) of bodily regeneration, which in the hermeticum has the number 4. Notice the four pointed "petal". This is where the animals (middle right, symbolized by the central symbol of wing over earth over fish tale - flying, land and water animals) and the plants (bottom middle) regenerate. In the hermeticum, plants and animals have immortal souls too but in them it is called "life" as they are not dual natured like man. So they reincarnate! (As an aside, I think this is why we sometimes have animal or even human like roots in the herbals, and why the roots don't usually belong to the stems -the plants are rebirthing from the chthonic bodies of humans, animals, and other plants- and this might be significant in terms of the author's perception of medicinal ingredients).
Thus, stars in the heavens (through astrology and the sky itself) humans, plants and animals are shown directly inhabiting the earth, through direct connections to the centre, while the cosmos, soul, spi ritual and bodily rebirths are connected too but through these other mechanisms.
As above, so below.
I read the Corpus Hermeticum because Mary d'Imperio mentioned it as a possible influence. I therefore read the rosette page in terms of it. But really, I've only read it through once, and skimmed again a few parts of it, so my schema might be skewed with a few misunderstandings. But overall it seems to fit, and moreover fits with what both you and I see as the overall coherence of the entire VM manuscript, combining plants, astrology, anatomy (I think of the bathing women as personified stars, really, and the whole section as Acts and Operations of the hermeticum, showing how the divine and chthonic spec ifically meet in plant and body to produce spiritual and bodily health. Maybe even the elixir of life!
But one last thing - it didn't escape my notice tha t there is a rosette at the centre of the alphabet page - I think it is f 57. I think if my conception of the rosett e pa ge i s true, it is intrinsic to deciphering the script (though not the language perhaps). In the hermeticum it actually talks about the different speeches of humans. But the messenger says that all languages have the same base meanings, and through the Mind of god we can discover them.I
Humans themselves contain this Mind if they but study the words of god (in the hermeticum?) and pursue Arts and Sciences.
So I rather wondered if understand ing the rosette page through the hermeticum along with some knowledge of the various arts and sciences of the other pages, might be a key to transcription.
For instance, the o seems to me a hermetical sign of its numberless and invisible god (zero) and simultaneously all encompassing (circle). It would never come at the end of a line because God doesn't end, nor does he/she (the h god is hermaphrodite) regenerate. Whereas a 9 comes at the beginnings and ends and seems to me a symbol of regeneration. Currier said something interesting about the lines as functional units. The beginnings and endings of them don't quite fit with language patterns.
I guess I'm thinking that the characters are positional, corresponding to the four figures at the centre of this page, as well as the 4 repeats in circle two of the seeming alphabet. So they mean something different at start and endings of lines, or in two middle sections between them. But the symbols that will never be found at the end include unchanging, divine or eternal symbols like o, and the symbols found at the end will usually signify regeneration, because there is no final death for any living creatures i n the hermeticum. It is amazing how most of the final line symbols have tails that point backwards towards the beginning. It's possibly a style convention but somehow I don't think so.
How to transcribe to words? To my mind, if each letter has four meanings it also has process attached to it. Primarily God is a creator. So "o" in the first position might simply mean to create or to make, for instance, or it might be a divine signifier in the case of stars. I kept wondering why certain "o" combinations were not abbreviated, like " o" with the double "t" sign (I don't know eva). It only makes sense that they are already abbreviations or symbols, so letter to letter translations or substitutions would not make sense to me.I
i got overly enthusiastic with this post, I know. It was just so refreshing to see someone thinking along the same lines as myself, though perhaps many have done so before and I haven't found them yet. I am very new to this scene!
Re the Corpus Hermeticum dating. The CH was likely written in the 3rd century. It incorp orates a lot of different ideas of the time. Neo-Platonism comes cl osest to those ideas. So many of its precepts were well-known by the beginning of the 15th century. HOwever, as the CH manscript we read today, it doesn't appear to have been found and then translated until 1470 in Northern Italy. Whereas the VMS has been radiocarbon dated to a range of, iirc, 1404 to 1438. So that means the vellum was 30 years old when written upon, or the radiocarbon date is wrong, or the writers did not have th e CH as we know it today but based it upon the ideas from it that survived, or it was read in its original language before dissemination via Northern Italy. IF I'm right, of course. The most likely of these is that the radiocarbon is out by a few decades. I've never actually seen a radiocarbon date that didn't include a standard deviation or a plus/minus after it. When I took some archeology courses many years back, radiocarbon datin g was a great approximation tool but nobody celebrated until other dating techniques supported it. My two cents on that.
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