Fakery?

[Linda]

Again, good points. Let us consider the following. Who would be in the market for a recipe or prescription consisting of plants which do not exist? One could argue that even though the called for plant was drawn incorrectly, it might be good enough for field foraging. I disagree, even back then awareness of confusing mushrooms and toadstools would put a reasonable person off of rolling the dice with alkaloid plants. Also, the maps appear to be star maps. My guess is that from childhood, most had sufficient dark skys and local lore to identify the zodiac from childhood. Not much market for that, but perhaps a market for astrological fortune telling. Since we cant read the VM, its anyone's guess. 
So far on the surface of it, the manuscript appears to be something a trickster fabricated in order to get into the deep pocket of a well heeled customer. I am not surprised. In those times, were not alchemists retained by those who wished to get even richer? Greed is infinite. Put another way, a fool and their money are soon parted. 

The VM would rise to entirely new heights if there were a single discernable thing about it that actually had value. Its not in the drawings, nor text. There is nothing that researchers can point to and say, there is some truth! There is nothing instructive. The nymphs are unexciting, the symbolism, if any is obtuse.

At this juncture, I am imclined to support the idea that in those times, having a book, any book, was a valuable prize. It made little difference if the owner was literate or not. A book meant, intelligence, accomplishment and amdegree of wealth. The owner of the VM, could pull it out and spin any clever yarn they fancied. Who could say differently.

But what I am saying is that what i think might have been sold was not unreadable nor fanciful, and did not contain plants that don't exist. Only the crib sheets were unreadable and fantastic  (the vms) and they kept that for themselves, only to fall into other hands upon the death of the last one to have the knowledge to read it.  So you haven't grokked my meaning, so to speak. 

I am saying the vms was a personal family template for creating works that could be sold, more than once, with the idea being that if anyone found the crib sheets (the vms, or its pieces, as the case may be, since I don't think it was bound while in use) no one would know what they meant, or know that information had been taken from previous works, or what any of it was, just as we find ourselves now. I figure no one ever made a portalan chart without having first seen one before, except perhaps those who took the ship notes and made the first one. However the herbal parts could be from first hand knowledge, I don't know, I am just saying that I think they hid their main notes under encryption and mnemonic images, so no one else could make use of them, or know where it came from, so no one could accuse them of any wrongdoing, since it was probably sneaky to have made the portolan notes, at the very least.

I don't really think people bought unreadable books just to showcase them unless they were super rich and the price was but a drop in the bucket for them and they fancied it somehow as a curiosity.  I don't think many people made fakes in those days either, at least not often. A quick look at the history of forgery shows most fakes to be written in readable languages and the fake part is generally the fact that the story didn't happen in real life or to the person selected as the narrator, not unreadable unknowable things that seem never to have existed. Today, sure, anything goes, for a buck. If it were shown to be a fake, my first guess would be that it was made on very old vellum in relation to the date made. As a kid I once tried to make a book filled with nothing but the word 'blah' ...repeated. I dunno why. But it gets reeeeally boring. Couldn't get past a few pages worth. I can't imagine writing hundreds of pages of meaningless stuff, in my best penmanship, especially if i had to turn a dial to find out which meaningless stuff i was going to write next, and not getting bored to tears. I have to think there is meaning in it.

The single discernable thing of value I see is a contiguous following of shorelines, rivers, and the largest lakes of the old ecumene, and i mean the places that were shown on mappa mundi for thousands of years prior. I don't see anything to do with China, for example, although it was known and already drawn on maps by that time, or about to be. It covers everything from Sagres Point to Gujurat, the North Sea to the Nile, along with alternate routes and some philosophical aspects with regard to all being connected. I think quire 20 is also involved due to it being in the same hand as quire 13, and back in the day when I first played with Voynichese.com I found far more similar words between them than between quire 20 and any of the plant diagrams, so I don't really think there are recipes at all in that quire, but more like historical notes, or ship notes regarding the the most popular ports of call. To me the symbolism of the nymphs is not obtuse, they are literal nymphs, not immortal, but extremely long lived, embodying not only the waters they are associated with, but also the populations of humans over time which have gathered to these various waters to the point where most never travel far from them and live out their lives in that general area. In that way they stand for regions, for cultures, for history.

This is not to mention all of the plant diagrams, which in their realistic unencrypted states would likely be very valuable as well, especially if the text was informative of their usage. Certainly moreso than today's web versions which basically spew out the same Wikipedia stump texts or continue to tell people things are poisonous because they were once confused with another plant hundreds of years ago...don't get me started on that!

The zodiac, you are referring to the centers of the circles, but what meaning do you think all the nymphs have in the other tiers? It sounds like you have thrown more than half the manuscript away in your mind, tagging it as uninteresting and valueless. Whereas I see that section as saying that the world is not 6000 years old, but hundreds of times older, enough for the sun to circle around (at least part of, since some is missing) the zodiac. It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. I think these are ages, not months, the months were written in later. Notice things like how the nymphs are clothed and inside wells or whatever (they hang around near water, right?) but then as we go back in time, into the previous ages, they are naked and nomadic. Notice that in Pisces everyone is naked but no one is nomadic, and in the center, the wells (or whatever you think they might be) are all knocked over but everyone still stays put. Doesn't this speak to some decline in civilization? The zodiac part is all the more interesting for not being horoscope related, (i agree that is boring) but related more to our view of it over millenia, at least that is how I see it.

With regard to the star diagrams, I am still trying to understand those, they remind me of those shown in Dati's La Sfera copies, (as do some of Quire 13's graphics with some of the geographical diagrams) some you can discern, others make their own versions of what they thought was depicted, and the full meaning was lost, or new meaning added (or new nonsense as the case may be). I would like to think they copied faithfully but perhaps the version they copied was one where the meaning was already lost. I don't know. Here are some examples of different copies. You can find more to compare here:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.