The Seasons of Life on f85r2

[pjburkshire]

I watched the recently posted "Voynich Talk" YouTube video.  I agree about the Seasons of Life on f85r2 ; the small plant could be youth and the cane could be old age.  I don't know about the other two being a scholarly introduction and a medical person but they could be.  They could be making observations on the Seasons of Life.

I think the Seasons of Life theme needs to be continued.  The Zodiac is clearly about birth; the beginning of a person's life on Earth.  A person's zodiac sign is based on when they were born.  You know I believe the focus should be on the birth part and not on constellations.

I think you need to go even another step.  There is no birth without a pregnancy.

The Voynich Manuscript is a Christian document.  It is about both physical life on Earth and about spiritual life beyond Earth.

I still believe that the goal in the creation of the Voynich Manuscript was to take medical and spiritual information from Latin (probably multiple sources) and make it available to young men who did not know Latin.

[ololololo]

I still believe that the goal in the creation of the Voynich Manuscript was to take medical and spiritual information from Latin (probably multiple sources) and make it available to young men who did not know Latin

So, what language do they need to know?

[DG97EEB]

Poor souls.. they didn't know Latin, but thank God they knew Voynich....

[RadioFM]

I think the Seasons of Life theme needs to be continued.  (...)  You know I believe the focus should be on the birth part and not on constellations.

Then go ahead and try to crack some keywords. No one's stopping you from crib-dragging...

[JustAnotherTheory]

I agree with @You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that it could represent the cycle of life. The only issue, is, almost none of the manuscripts, to our best knowledge, from 1410-1430 (more or less the carbon dating of the parchment), even remotely resemble the illustrations in the VMS. We have some ideas, like some exceedingly rare italian engineering manuscripts, and some ridiculously unknown herbals, as well as obscure copies of nature manuscripts, but none of these seem to be much more than a hint to the origin of 0.1% of the illustrations.

Not to mention the writing, which if it is a cipher, we are in trouble, because it seems to be unbreakable. The earliest "serious" attempt at cryptography came about 40 years after the carbon dating of the parchment, and it might well be the way the VMS text was encoded, except nobody found any meaningful way of confirming this.

Not you, not me, not professional cryptographers.

So yeah, if it was a "cycle of life", then the person/people responsible for this were either geniuses beyond our understanding, or there is a gap in history that we have all missed, or this is the work of (1 to 5) madman/madmen, or... there is some foul play involved.

There is an abundance of theories in all four aforementioned cases. Welcome to the study of the VMS

[DG97EEB]

But that's not true.. We have clear parallels with La Sfera, De Balneis, Lauber (or your Dutch antecedent), plenty of Herbals and evidence that herbs were routinely adapted, Taccola/Kyeser, Laufenberg etc.. so we can say with some certainty where the inspiration came from. The challenge now is simply to find the place where all those things existed .. as Koen says in his video, Strasbourg/Constance/Basel are interesting, and if you connect down as far as Bellinzona you get quite stunning Swallowtail Merlon walls, and then in the middle is Vaduz where I found that Aberil example..And we have countless examples of Geheimschrift in Germany... Plus if you wanted to argue it, a tonne of convents like Unterlinden. So it doesn't seem that complicated to me... 

I think Padua still has a place, and Milan might, but to these eyes it's a german Manuscript with Italian influences..

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I watched the recently posted "Voynich Talk" YouTube video .. about the Seasons of Life on f85r2

That video presented some manuscripts that did indeed look like they could be "precedents" for the f85r2 illustration -- or, more likely, "cousins" of the book that the VMS Scribe used as "inspiration" for that figure.

But I remember that someone posted on this forum at least one printed German book that also had a very similar series of 4 drawings associated to the four Seasons, possibly too as a metaphor for the four main stages of life.  So this metaphor seems to have been a common "meme" in that general area, known and reproduced over several centuries.

In the "old lady" figure of that printed book, she was standing next to a lighted fireplace, and the "rosary" looked more like a light iron chain.  I though that it could be a chain that would be used to tie and drag a bundle of dry branches for firewood.  

And I thought that the "staff" looked like a light hatchet with a long handle, as a woman might use for that purpose.  

In several of the illustrations from other manuscripts the woman is holding the "staff" by the vertical part, not by the supposed "handle"; and she is not leaning on it.

The metaphor would then be that in the "autumn of life" one must gather and save resources for the coming winter.  

I think that this interpretation of the "rosary" actually makes more sense.  Why would a rosary be associated with the autumn of life, specifically? 

All the best, --stolfi

[Hasnain Raza Rajpar al-Sindi]

I watched the recently posted "Voynich Talk" YouTube video .. about the Seasons of Life on f85r2

That video presented some manuscripts that did indeed look like they could be "precedents" for the f85r2 illustration -- or, more likely, "cousins" of the book that the VMS Scribe used as "inspiration" for that figure.

But I remember that someone posted on this forum at least one printed German book that also had a very similar series of 4 drawings associated to the four Seasons, possibly too as a metaphor for the four main stages of life.  So this metaphor seems to have been a common "meme" in that general area, known and reproduced over several centuries.

In the "old lady" figure of that printed book, she was standing next to a lighted fireplace, and the "rosary" looked more like a light iron chain.  I though that it could be a chain that would be used to tie and drag a bundle of dry branches for firewood.  

And I thought that the "staff" looked like a light hatchet with a long handle, as a woman might use for that purpose.  

In several of the illustrations from other manuscripts the woman is holding the "staff" by the vertical part, not by the supposed "handle"; and she is not leaning on it.

The metaphor would then be that in the "autumn of life" one must gather and save resources for the coming winter.  

I think that this interpretation of the "rosary" actually makes more sense.  Why would a rosary be associated with the autumn of life, specifically? 

All the best, --stolfi

I don't have much insights about the European aspects of the rosary.

However, in Islamicate culture, the circulation of the beads of the rosary represents the turning of life and time.

For example, the Muslim Indian poet, Bedil Dehlvi says in one of his Persian poems:

Ṣuḥbat-i dil bā nafs maʿkūs būd
Subḥa injā rišta-gardānīd-o bas.

The heart’s converse with the self was turned upside down;
Here, the rosary did nothing but turn its thread.

Commentators have traditionally thought he means to compare the world and succession of moments in existence to beads circulating around the thread of time.

Just a hunch.

[R. Sale]

"The place where all those things existed" was in the mind of the VMs artist. The VMs illustrations, when interpreted on the basis of 15th century information, show a surprising diversity of sources. A diversity that might only be attained through travel to various cities and study at various libraries.

The difficulty with VMs interpretation is twofold. The interpretive identity of specific elements depicted by the VMs artist can be based on obscure historical information and might be something unknown to the investigator. No one can recognize something they do not know.

The VMs artist didn't plan that far ahead. S/he figured that contemporary people would know the historical facts, so s/he chose obfuscation. Obfuscation: ambiguity, trickery, disguise, deception, duplicity, even a code shift, not to mention heraldic canting. Funny thing is - from the sleeves and hats to the Parisian cosmic structure, to the Order of the Golden Fleece, to Colette of Corbie - there is evidence contemporary with the C-14 results. There are also interpretations based on earlier history, religion, and literature.

[Stefan Wirtz_2]

I made a reply when this matter came up last December, here:
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The "4 seasons" of Hausbuch can be seen there.
And showed that at least two gestures ("the discussing guy", "the flower-holding woman") are in a long tradition of understanding the 4 humours / 4 temperaments and was pictured as an example 300 years before.

VMS is not necessarily following Laufenberg, Laufenberg himself is following a much older tradition -- which is distributed over whole Europe and not limited to Strasbourg and such.

At last I doubted the urine flask: as I realized now, VMS "bottle" is closed with some kind of cap, while most shown references are open vessels.
At that time, I remarked the meaning of bottles with the temperaments; and the option for birds...