The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Most elements of the drawings are clearly just decoration.  Even if the hairdos and poses of the Zodiac nymphs are encoding some part of the contents, their "European" appearance is certainly not determined by the encoding.   Those are not portraits of specific people.  The Artist could have used winged monkeys, trees, fishes, Inuits in winter clothing with Bantu spears, ... The choice or European-looking ladies with light hair was a decision by the Artist (with or without input from the Author) determined only by the intention of making those diagrams "look nice".

If you would be kind enough to share your source on the artist's intentions, I will be happy to concede the point. I was not aware anything of this nature was in the public record.

The Zodiac diagrams themselves are rather unusual for European astrology, because each sign i divided into 30 degrees of arc, 360 in total -- instead of 30/31 days, 365 in total.  That conception was not unknown in Europe; but what is (AFAIK) quite unusual is the division of two signs into halves of 15 degrees.  On the other hand, both of those features are familiar in Chinese astrology.

All the best, --stolfi

The 360 degree division of the ecliptic was the standard way to do Astronomy in Greece two centuries before the birth of Christ, and proved so influential it is still the main way astronomy is conducted in the modern world. The Zodiac was perfectly commensurate with this, with each sign being assigned, definitionally, 30 degrees well before it came to Europe. One need not leave the Alps in the 1420s to account for a 360 part division of the ecliptic or its connection to the Zodiac, if that is indeed what we are looking at. I'll grant the split zodiacs need an explanation, but the unified ones do under the Chinese Origin Theory.

By contrast, the 360 degree division was not adopted in China until later, about two centuries after the Voynich was supposed to be written. What was current was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. An arc did not have 360 degrees in China in 1420.

So, 360 is the European number in this context and 365 (albeit, with a fraction) is the Chinese one. It's not impossible the artist was trying to communicate his thoughts on the distance between solar terms in European degrees, but it boils down to putting a lot of weight on the number 15 knowing this is not the number Chinese sources at the time would have chosen to describe the distance between solar terms.

It bears mentioning that both interpretations may be off track. Pisces only has 29 nymphs and there are other small irregularities. That they are not consistently presented with 15 is strange if they are meant to represent Western degrees dividing the space between Chinese solar terms and the same is true with 30 if they are meant to represent degrees of a Zodiac sign. It may be evidence of changing plans, a shift in thought, a botched presentation, or even that it was a rush job forgery (of any antiquity).