No text, but a visual code

[Hermes777]

If there was an order in the script it would have been discovered long ago. There are only some rules, but there is no order in the succession of words or groups of glyphs. This may be because each herb has its own astronomical configuration, as seems to be deduced from the last section of the book, where each paragraph is marked by a star.

The impression you get from looking at the script is that you can delete groups of glyphs and even entire lines and it won't change a thing. I think it is because they are chains of astronomical symbols that do nothing more than move in a circle to reproduce celestial movements. But you can cut the chain where you want or add more glyphs if you want.

The mystery of it is that the words (vords) are highly structured and formed under tight restraints (rules) but there is little or no syntax at the higher level. The vords are tight like algebraic formulae and are gathered into lines, paragraphs and pages which have little internal grammar: rather they just seem to be lists of such formulae. That is, we have unstructured lists of highly structured units (vords). And yet the distribution of vords is not random: there is some system. The organising principle seems to be internal to the vords; certain glyphs and syllables adhere across word spaces or belong to certain environments. All of this is very unlike natural languages. 

But if vords are just formulae (of coordinates or whatever) then why are they not arranged systematically, say in columns and rows, charts, tables? Instead, they are arranged to look like words in a running text as if a natural language. Why? And how is one to read these lists of formulae? And what of labels? 

It is easy to make a case that vords constitute an artificial, systematic lexicon made by some means of procedural generation (volvelles, grille etc?) but it is much harder to explain how they are deployed, grouped, distributed and arranged. Ok, vords are astrological coordinates. But how do they work? How does one use these coordinates? There are no ready answers to this, and very few plausible explanations, but that is really the challenge. We can explain vords, perhaps, but not the higher levels of the text.