09-01-2017, 06:16 PM
Very interesting... Very nice find.
The label says:"The image of Lady Necessity and of the Universal"... so the spindle is explicitly labelled as "the Universal".
I have some comments on the extent to which the spindle and the mention of Necessité "makes this for sure an illustration of Plato's Myth of Er": yes, this is what the illustration references for sure, but interestingly the accompanying text is not a translation nor a version of the myth of Er.
Placing the spheres (or circles or whorls in Plato's version) on the spindle is a very literal illustration of the myth of Er's text. In this case, the illustrator seems to display much better, more detailed knowledge of Plato than the author of the text.
In general in medieval texts what we find is usually not a copy of the unadulterated Greek original, but mostly exegeses, commentary and elaborations on a distortion of what the original may have been.
The author here discusses souls, how they descend into bodies to inhabit them, and what they become after death, and mentions the "platonists" theory but does not recount the myth, nor mention Er, nor mention a spindle, and while in the original story the souls pass before Necessity's throne, and the spindle is on Necessity's lap, neither of these are mentioned in the text and for some reason in this text the reference is to gods carrying out their tasks "between Necessity's legs".
These nuances may seem specious but I think it is an example of how the text may relate to the illustrations in medieval manuscripts and also in the Voynich: if the text/image relationship is like that of the Paris MS, then it is an indirect one, and the illustrations may in fact show things that are not mentioned in the text at all.
The label says:"The image of Lady Necessity and of the Universal"... so the spindle is explicitly labelled as "the Universal".
I have some comments on the extent to which the spindle and the mention of Necessité "makes this for sure an illustration of Plato's Myth of Er": yes, this is what the illustration references for sure, but interestingly the accompanying text is not a translation nor a version of the myth of Er.
Placing the spheres (or circles or whorls in Plato's version) on the spindle is a very literal illustration of the myth of Er's text. In this case, the illustrator seems to display much better, more detailed knowledge of Plato than the author of the text.
In general in medieval texts what we find is usually not a copy of the unadulterated Greek original, but mostly exegeses, commentary and elaborations on a distortion of what the original may have been.
The author here discusses souls, how they descend into bodies to inhabit them, and what they become after death, and mentions the "platonists" theory but does not recount the myth, nor mention Er, nor mention a spindle, and while in the original story the souls pass before Necessity's throne, and the spindle is on Necessity's lap, neither of these are mentioned in the text and for some reason in this text the reference is to gods carrying out their tasks "between Necessity's legs".
These nuances may seem specious but I think it is an example of how the text may relate to the illustrations in medieval manuscripts and also in the Voynich: if the text/image relationship is like that of the Paris MS, then it is an indirect one, and the illustrations may in fact show things that are not mentioned in the text at all.