Classical astrology in the text of the Voynich zodiac?

[-JKP-]

I recently posted a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the blog of Stephen Bax in which I point out a regular pattern of words in the zodiac pages. Here is a slightly edited and extended version 

I used Job's excellent voynichese tool to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for two prefixes that commonly appear in the manuscript: shed- and ched-

In the 12 zodiac pages, there are 15 matches, on 7 different pages:
shed- Libra, Leo, Sagittarius
ched- Pisces, Taurus (dark), Cancer, Scorpio

All occurrences appear in the rings of text, not in the labels of the “nymphs”.
According to an ancient tradition (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), masculine (or diurnal) and feminine (or nocturnal) signs alternate in the zodiac. Other sources (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. II, 150 or the Pseudo-Ptolemy’s You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) only classify the signs as masculine and feminine (not diurnal and nocturnal).



All the 15 occurrences of the two prefixes give a consistent match on 7 different zodiac signs. A possible hypothesis is the existence of some kind of equivalence:
shed- masculine (diurnal)
ched- feminine (nocturnal)

There is another possible interpretation, based on the classical association of the zodiac signs with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
Aries, Leo, Sagittarius correspond to Fire (hot and dry)
Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn correspond to Earth (cold and dry)
Gemini, Libra, Aquarius correspond to Air (hot and wet)
Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces correspond to Water (cold and wet)

So, the masculine signs are “hot” and the feminine signs are “cold”. Another possible interpretation is:
shed- hot
ched- cold

Of course, it is well possible that this is just an irrelevant coincidence. It should also be noted that a possible inconsistency is a “nymph” labeled “ched” in Sagittarius (a masculine sign that should have “shed”, according to this theory). Apparently, the hypothetical regularity I observed is not respected in the labels of the nymphs. The above linked search on voynichese.com searches for the ched- prefix and only matches if the prefix is followed by one or more characters.

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Good work, Marco, and finally maybe people can see, in the way you've visually presented it, that the syllables don't have to be words, they can be concepts (how long have I been saying that?).

Also, I am happy to see some support for what Wladimir has been saying for a long time also, that syllables can have meaning in their own right (look back at his charts) and there are regular patterns to the use of those syllables throughout the manuscript (particularly in the labels).


Good work, good way to illustrate it, and such a refreshing departure from the widespread obsession with 1-to-1 substitution codes.


(By the way, you scooped me. I've been working on this for a while, but I wasn't yet finished writing it up because I was working on the zodiac imagery at the same time. So good for you. Beat me to it.   )

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Since the cat is out of the bag now, I guess I can drop the hint that this works in the small plants section too (I was working on writing up that one as well, sigh).






Check out the ones that are mostly roots and look at the prefixes. You'll find the same kinds of patterns. By the way, this is also why I've been saying for a long time that labels don't necessarily have to be nouns (in the conventional sense). It was actually the small plant section (specifically the roots) that led me to the revelation about the zodiac labels.



And by the way, some of those syllables are mnemonic in their own right. Wow, I'm going to give away a lot of secrets now... I've been playing my cards close to the vest, as they say in poker, hoping to come up with a big-chunk decryption of the main text before someone else figured this out.... okay, here you go...

if you read the small plant section syllables backwards (the first part), they even look a bit like what they are (e.g., if you spell rotta/rota/rot (which is "root" in a number of languages)) backwards you will see that it matches the first syllable of many of the labels in the root section of the small plants. Wladimir was zeroing in on the same idea, as well, he was thinking stem, root, etc., but I don't know if he noticed (he can tell us if he did) that the root ones actually have syllables that look like "root" and since "root" is also a concept (base, root, beginning, foundation), it can potentially also be used in other sections (and, in fact, it is).