Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

The best suggestions I've seen for the first letter of that word are l, k, and b.

Note the line above the "cz". That is a macron, an abbreviation symbol (like an apostrophe). It means letters are missing. The last letter, the one that looks like a "z" might also be an abbreviation symbol (rotated m) which usually means "m", "em", and occasionally "um".

Thus, if the first letter were "l" (as one possibility), then the various possible expansions could be lucem, lucum, lucrum, lucrem, lucorem, lucitem, etc., constructions of that nature. The macron (apostrophe symbol) can stand for more than one letter and sometimes numerous letters were left out. The rotated m symbol also often included a vowel before the m as part of the symbolic representation.

Thanks JP. I was hoping you or someone would comment on that word because I feel it could be important for the decoding effort and there was nothing I could say about it with any degree of confidence.



But that was yesterday. Today is another day. And today I see a dot (•) after the letter you think might be a "l","k", or "b" and that draws my attention to the following image:



I see a darkened backstroke (\) as part of the "x" and can imagine attaching it to the bottom of the "P" which would give us a figure resembling the first character of that marginalia. I also see a macron above the "p" and I see that the Christus divine name is followed by the "on" divine name.

As I now recall, we debated that word months ago, and back then I pointed out that it appears just to the left of a feur-de-lis shield and that we also find a fleur-de-lis shield on the title page of a related herbal, close to the depiction of a rare flower. As it turns out, that rare flower is unambiguously referenced in the extraneous writings of one of the decoders, in the line that precedes the following snippet:



There, in the last line, we find our macron. As you know, the "vpō" converts into "upon" which simultaneously gives us a) the Latin "u" which follows the first character and b) the divine name "on".

Although there appears to be some doubt about precisely what we find under the marginalia's macron (apparently, it's not even certain whether those characters are VMS glyphs or Latin letters!), it seems that for whatever they are, chances are good that they represent the Latin letters "on" or perhaps the three letters "pon".

I'm going to have to return to this matter at some point in the future and will keep you updated on what I find.