New Post: "I Do Listen to the Experts. Do YOU?"

[proto57]

@Rich 

This is not just an idea. I have legitimate reasons.

I'll give you a few excerpts.

Tepenece: around 1600

His medicines enjoyed great popularity and were called "sinapic waters" after him. However, he left Prague as early as 1600 and went to Jindřichův Hradec to take over the supervision of the Jesuit seminary there.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Marci: around 1608

Johannes Marcus Marci was the son of an estate manager. He attended the Jesuit college in Neuhaus from 1608.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The interesting thing is that Tepenece was the rector or teacher at the University of Hradec around 1600. Marci was a student at the University of Neuhaus around 1608.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.



It is the same university. Written once in Czech and once in German.

It is more than unlikely that someone at a small university would not know each other for a long period of time, months/years. Yes, everyone knows everything about everyone else.

A personal bond is a given. Letters no longer play a major role. The rest is the consequence of that. Charles University, Rudolf, and everyone who ever had the book in their hands.

Did Wilfried know that too?

I agree with you that there is some sense the Voynich "has something to do with" the various people and the activities they were involved with. This is actually a perfect example, which demonstrates the whole point of this thread: That I agree with many people... experts and amateurs...  when they note similarities between the Voynich and one or more of many real world stories, people, items, whatever.

So I don't dispute the possibility that your ideas are correct, but I only attach them to the Voynich for a different reason entirely. I hypothesise that the Voynich was inspired, and modeled after, what I call the "primer" used to construct the bulk of it, the 1904 book, "Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolf II", by Henry Carrington Bolton. You can read a copy of it for free, here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This was a favorite book of Wilfrid's, and he even said he knew it by heart. In the Beinecke archives is a list, in Voynich's handwriting, listing 19 names from this book, and they are in the order they appear in this book. Now others postulate, and are welcome too, that he was innocently looking into this book in order to try and find answers about his "ugly duckling". It is chicken... duck?... egg problem. Which came first, his reading the book, or the Voynich which has such similarities to that book? Of course that is up to the individual to decide, but it seems to me too coincidental that so many of the items mentioned in "Follies" have also been independently noted by others in the Voynich, or in its given history. Plants and animals from the New World, experimental sciences, Dee and Kelly, Tycho Brahe, alchemy, glossolalia, Jewish references, botany, herbal medicine, the microscope and telescope, zodiac, astronomy and astrology, Rudolf II of course, and much, much more. When I first sat down and began reading this book my jaw dropped. Drool ran out. Well, not really, but... It was like "that's in there", "that too", "oh my god, that too?", over and over.

To me it is far too much of a coincidence, when you look at all this together: Voynich's love of that book, his notes, what was observed in the Voynich by many matching this book's content, and the popularity of that book only 8 years before the announcement of the find of the Voynich. Of course I believe the Voynich was forged between about 1908 to 1910, so the timeline matches, too. No time machine necessary.

But here is the kicker, the "coup de grace": In that book is mentioned Jakub Hořčický, with a seemingly invented (the book has many errors, and seemingly fanciful inventions) brother Christian Hořčický. This Christian Hořčický is in the place of Jakub in history, in that he is the chief botanist and physician to Rudolf. And as you know, Jakub Hořčický was later named Jakub Horčický z Tepence, and whose name appears as though a signature on the front page of the Voynich. As I wrote in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.,

"I believe Wilfrid’s original intent was to make the Voynich look as though it was a work from the hand of the (probably invented) Christian Hořčický, a character who Bolton places as the owner of the (also imaginary?) “The City Pharmacy” in the Capitol of Bohemia. Perhaps Wilfrid’s intention was that it looked to have been owned or written by him, or written and/or owned by his son, Jakub Hořčický. The latter is real, and was actually the chief botanist and physician to Rudolf II."- and, as I said, "signed" the Voynich.

So yes, I think there is much to your points, and how they plausibly relate to the Voynich manuscript and its given history. But I think that this relationship is invented, and probably, to a large extent, inspired by the book "Follies...", as an outline, and then with a whole lot of other stuff thrown in.

Rich.