Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

Many people have tried to reconcile the VMS "star" pages with star names (including me). In fact, I made a concerted effort to find what they were called in the 10th to 15th centuries (and how they were spelled) and carefully recorded these from manuscripts from a number of different countries.

The problem is, the star section "labels" are too repetitious (and in many cases too short) to correspond with medieval star names or other cosmological nomenclature, at least when seen from the perspective of simple substitution.

Sorry, JP, I think I led you badly astray. By the "stars" section I was referring to the "recipes" (text) at the back of the manuscript where all the paragraphs begin with stars functioning as bullets. I do not like to use the word "recipes" which I consider nonsensical. Contrary to popular belief, the VMS is not a cookbook.

In my opinion, the astronomical, astrological and cosmological sections of the VMS were originally written in Latin or one of the Romance languages such as Spanish or Occitan (in each case using the Latin alphabet),  and what we see there today is a translation into a native American language (now using the encoding glyphs of the stars section). They simply copied the original drawings and changed the corresponding text to the Indian language. The drawings were made first.

One of my reasons for believing it's all a translation is that the decoding mechanism seems to function on longer strings of text (for maneuvering around the wheels) and hence may not apply to short labels. 

A few years ago a neighbor of mine talked me into accompanying her to a Sunday service at a Protestant church. They had a large screen on which they put up the words of songs and of scriptures to a backdrop of pretty celestial scenes and landscapes including fields of flowers. The displayed text, of course, had nothing to do with those flowers.

I now view the botanical sections of the VMS in the same light. I no longer see the VMS as a catalog of local plants as I once did. The text alongside the plants is more likely than not to be text for teaching their religion against a backdrop of intriguing plant drawings and the text is probably not describing those plants at all.

This does not apply to the pharmaceutical section as native Americans are known to have been big on herbal medicine, so we are more likely to see real plants there.

The VMS predates the expansion of the Aztec empire which forced all conquered peoples to adopt their language. Thus, there's a chance that the VMS language (if from Mexico and not further north) became extinct even before the arrival of Spanish and may never be recovered.