No text, but a visual code

[Barbrey]

I agree with you about the possible Hermetic influence in the Voynich. I said before that I didn't rule it out. The only thing is that your interpretation seemed somewhat heretical to me, and I believe the codex could have been produced in a monastery. There are enough Christian symbols in the Voynich to suggest that the philosophy underlying it is a Christianized Aristotelianism.

Not long ago, I wrote about the Hermes mosaic in Siena Cathedral, proof that he was a Christianized figure in the 15th century. I also wrote in another post about John Gower, a friend of Chaucer, and his Liber de quindecim stellis, a work attributed to Hermes and which lists fifteen stars, fifteen stones, and fifteen herbs.

  I think we can more or less agree on the underlying thought behind the Voynich, but it's about interpreting the images well. I've already told you about my thoughts on pregnant female figures and their meaning. This is a fundamental aspect of the codex's iconography, and I'd like people to think more about it.

I agree it might have been, was likely to have been, produced in a monastery. That’s the thing, though, many alchemists were deeply religious, and the more famous of them were monks! Also, heresy was much more a problem for Christians than pagans. The Cathars, the Hussites, the Fraticelli and the Brethren, all Christian, just with differing points of view than the Catholic Church prevailing doctrine. I don’t think my interpretation is heretical per se except that many of the monks back then had heretical tendencies while still remaining devout Christians. The Christian symbolism in the Voynich is undeniable; what it’s trying to say is open to conjecture. 

Yes, to me a Christianized Aristotellianism sums it up well. Whether there is more Hermetic thought than just the Greek philosophy, I’ve been unable to isolate it, and that makes sense because the main body of mystical Hermeticism hadn’t officially reached the West yet. The Franciscan and Dominican orders were established in some part to bring Aristotle and the other Greek and Arabic natural philosophers in line with church doctrine, developing a tautology that left a lot of gaps for individual imagination. That’s what I see happening here, and yet the alchemical twinning of Jesus and and the Stone in metaphor was an actual trend in alchemy, at precisely the time period the VMS was produced, so it wasn’t just individual in expression.  

I love that you researched and published on Gower; I will have to read this post. This is a long thread, I have not read the whole thing. 

Yes, your thought on pregnant female figures is solid, but what it all comes down to is Mother Nature.  Both prima materia and plants/star symbolism could be seen as riffs on the same premise, because they stem from the same Greek philosophical ideas about the “scientific” creation of the world. 

It’s true that we agree on many, many ideas. Yours was one of the first threads I started reading on here, and not only was I agreeing with you about some things I had already researched but I also learned new things and new avenues of research into the possible symbolism of the images. I also agree that the script is possibly an attempt at a celestial script. For you, however, your analysis begins and ends with astrology and its impact on plants, whereas mine would include that but delve deeper into the alchemical, particularly in the balneological pages. 

I would love to hear your interpretation of the rosette images one day. I was struck when you called one image the “canopy of heaven” when I had been arguing elsewhere to deaf ears that that was what it was!  Your phrase “Christianized Aristotelianism” sums up exactly what I believe the rosette page to be.