No text, but a visual code

[HermesRevived]

One way to identify the zodiac signs before the invention of their symbols was through numbers. I have seen it this way in medieval astronomical tables where they are identified from 1 to 12 starting with Aries.

Another way, which I believe is relevant for Voynich, is through the number of hours of light per day. This is quite common in contemporary VM Volvelles. Let's look at this diagram from Nicholas of Lynn:

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Although it is easy to get lost among so many numbers, we can clearly see two crosses to mark the solstices and next to them the numbers 8 and four in their ancient form. As the sphere is divided into quadrants, in summer the two quadrants of the day add up to 16 hours of light and the two quadrants of the night add up to 8 hours. These figures correspond to the latitude of the place where the Volvelle was made.

On the summer solstice we see the numbers 8 and old four on Gemini and Cancer and on the winter solstice the same numbers on Sagittarius and Capricorn. I believe that the glyphs that we see in the VM script, the one that has the shape of 8 and the one that has the shape of an old four, are exactly those numbers and represent the solstices or positions close to them.

That's excellent Antonio. Many thanks. That is a very useful answer to my question. 

It's remarkable, isn't it, that there has been almost no attempt to consider the Voynich text as an astrological notation? In attempting to work out the values of the glyphs, and the formulae, I can find almost nothing helpful from previous studies. It's all linguistic theories, or cryptology, or hoax theories. So we will just have to work it out ourselves. (I fear, though, that it requires a very good grasp of Ptolemaic astrology - better than mine.) I am confident, though, that it can be done and that your ideas regarding the specifics of the notation are on the right path.