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• Water, earth and air

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Zauriek > 02-02-2026, 05:55 AM

  This is referring to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. drawings and the f85v, hope this is the right thread to post about them.
  

  (31-01-2026, 11:25 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  In that ms found by @Juan_Sali, on the folio 60v bottom part, there is this picture showing star configurations of zodiac symbols. There are interesting coincidences to point up.
     
  The most solid is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. one, but it has 3 variants depending on the angle. Does it represents 3 of them or just 1? no idea.
  Could the faces represent the moon or a planet in a zodiac position? Or Maybe they just represent the stars of the constellation? 
  With some luck this could be a potential clue, no? (in the remote and isolated case the titles represent zodiac names...)
  
  also, is that circular 3 area diagram, intended to be on all arrangements but never got draw? because they seem be in a circle too.
  

  (25-02-2018, 03:11 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  If true and correlated with the symbolism what it could mean? (why would it be drawn with a zodiac star constellation?)
  Is just an idea.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  R. Sale > 02-02-2026, 11:21 PM

  The figures with the lines and circles, and the VMs small faces are in another thread.
  
  The enumerated cosmic diagrams show how closely the two illustrations correspond in structure, though they differ significantly in appearance. The VMs artist did alright with the nebuly line on the right side, but in the lower left, the undulations are too sparse, so three extra undulations were squeezed into the upper left - in order to make the necessary 43.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Zauriek > 04-02-2026, 08:52 AM

  (02-02-2026, 11:21 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The figures with the lines and circles, and the VMs small faces are in another thread.

  Thanks. Moved the question to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 
  
  

  (02-02-2026, 11:21 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The enumerated cosmic diagrams show how closely the two illustrations correspond in structure, though they differ significantly in appearance. The VMs artist did alright with the nebuly line on the right side, but in the lower left, the undulations are too sparse, so three extra undulations were squeezed into the upper left - in order to make the necessary 43.

  
  But what about the center circle; It has to be a good match for its meaning, can this parallel be certain? It just looks very similar in design. Is it posible to find another circle with 3 areas with the same ratio? It has to be it, right? your finding is amazing to me

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Zauriek > 04-02-2026, 09:42 AM

  (21-01-2026, 09:34 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nebuly for clouds; wavy for water; rayonny for fire.

  The Four Elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire)
  by Dirc van Delft (Dutch, active 1365-1404)
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  was assuming the nebulae pattern in the vms was the air element... was that wrong?

• RE: Water, earth and air

  R. Sale > 04-02-2026, 07:20 PM

  Nice illustration. The depiction is elemental based on the four classical elements. So, clouds or air are pretty much the same thing. Very similar designs were also used in religious illustrations, with more emphasis on the cloudy interpretation.
  
  The VMs cosmos investigation is more than a decade old and originating in the central *inverted* T-O representation of the VMs Earth, in comparison with BNF Fr. 565 <as above> and also Harley 334 which has a couple cosmic representations, similar to the BNF - except for the cosmic boundary. Of course, when compared with the VMs, the differences in appearance are obvious. The switch from a pictorial representation to a linguistic presentation necessitates visual differences. The comparison is based on structure and the 43 undulations.
  
  The provenance of the two historical texts points to Paris. [BNF, Paris, c. 1410; Harley, Paris, 2nd Q. 15th] Both dates fit fairly well within the averaged C-14 parchment dating of the VMs (1404-1438). Otherwise, the unique structural simplicity [There are no planets.] sets these examples apart from other cosmic representations of the era.
  
  BNF was made for Jean, Duke of Berry, (d. 1416), then went to his daughter, Marie, Duchess of Auvergne (d. 1434). Harley - unknown.
  
  Additionally, Harley has the mermaid and her four companions and that's another tale.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Linda > 14-03-2026, 05:18 PM

  (19-01-2026, 09:48 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (19-01-2026, 06:27 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (19-01-2026, 05:03 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.VMS' f68 "earth"

  Which page are you referring to? Perhaps f67v2, the small circle in the SW corner?

  
  No, I really do mean f 68v left, this one here:
  
  
  
  I think the most here agree meanwhile that the center TO circle is a representation of "earth" or "world".
  
  
  But this here, f 67v:
  
  
  
  
  May also be a TO vignette, maybe with a known preference for green water, the rest is blue air and red soil or so.

  
  I really like to group the TO maps together, it forms a comprehensive coverage of the understanding that was had at the time about the Earth.
  
  I see the colourful one with the faces as being a south up Isadore style TO map, I do not see soil sky and water though, what you say is green water, i see as Asia, but upgraded to divide Asia into north and south, by showing what appears to be representations of the people who live in each quadrant. The inclusion of what seems to be representative of south Asian people is the main upgrade to knowledge of the world over the Oresme version, which would have this area at the back of a 3d representation. It also seems to posit that humans originated out of Africa and finally settled the entire world (as it was known then, front and back of the one side, in the Oresme version).
  
  I see the cosmos one as an Oresme TO, where the top right is the habitable known world, down to the equator, which was thought to be the extent of habitable area, with water covering the lower half. The right top half is unknown, hence the ambiguous pattern.  The upgrade here is the cosmos part of that diagram to accentuate the revolving nature of sky vs earth, albeit in a complicated manner.
  
  I see the rosettes TO as an Inverted Isadore TO to indicate the sections discussed in correlation with certain Rosettes. You can see a path from the middle of Europe, and another from the north western part of Asia. What I find interesting about that is that if you consider these to be a Volga Baltic North Sea Atlantic to Mediterranean to Marmora to Black Sea to Volga, you get a path around the world that includes both Europe and Asia. If you include the Rhine, you can also get to the Alps, and with a little work, to the Po, Adriatic, and Mediterranean again, or to the Danube and Black Sea. I do think the Rhine is denoted by the river delta looking thing that connects up with the pathway from northwestern Asia. I think the delta on the other side which connects up to the Castle inside the connection to the next rosette on the other side denotes where the Black Sea is on the rosettes map. So this is showing triple connections to Asia. 
  
  
  
  I see the plain one drawn in the middle of the one with the birds and rocks (which I consider to be a four corners of the earth geological treatise on sedimentary and metamorphic rock) as an Oresme version again, this time upgraded for magnetic north. Although fluctuations existed at the time, there was a time within the carbon dating where the magnetic north pole was similar to where it is now or in the recent past.
  
   
  As you can see here the angle of the magnetic declination is similarly drawn. The globe drawing from this angle of the earth is what is represented, the habitable part is Europe Africa and Asia to the equator, you can only see to about western India, so the rest of Asia east of there is on the back side. This seems more than coincidental insofar as what I see in quire 13 which is the inclusion of Gujurat only, with an empire ring to show there is more.
  
  
  If you move it over to the right, that is the habitable part, it ends at India.
  
  
  
  I see all of it as the newest information insofar as the Earth is concerned, far before many of these concepts were outlined in history as we know it.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Linda > 14-03-2026, 06:40 PM

  (19-01-2026, 05:03 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As (the) one who sees the wording of VMS' f68 "earth" as equivalents of Asia, Africa, Europe (which can be found in a overwhelming number of TO signets and thereby have the highest possibility, but of course no certainty), 
  I like to emphasize that VMS rosette here shares to same way of viewing the world like "Oresme" ("" because I have in mind that the drawings are not Oresmes own work).

  I see similarities in both re the words. I hadn't considered seeing the rosettes TO as being an Oresme version but it could work in either way since the portion that would be Europe in the Isadore version would be the habitable portion in Oresme. However the Asia section would be the water portion, I guess that could sort of work since I am describing connections by water, but the loss of the Asia reference in favour of an ounder the equator ocean would take away a lot of context in my interpretation so I think of it as an Isadore TO that connects it's Don or Volga to the outside ocean which connects it again with the Mediterranean part of the T.
  
  

  Quote:But I have no segemented "T-O" in my memory were "Air, Land, Sea" ever came as written words, and not like drawn terrain, water waves and something air-like (ribbons, stars, pea-soup, whatever). Such versions may exist.
  So both roundels may have the inversion of "world" in common, but not surely the intention of segments.

  
  I don't think of Oresme as air land Sea, more of a habitable, unknown, and another unknown based on some weird beliefs about the equator and water and a lack of knowledge regarding undiscovered portions of earth and the true shapes of others.
  
  I do know what you mean though, there is often elemental earth at the center of the planetary diagram
  
  
  
  

  Quote:On the other hand, there are many cloudband-using variants of showing the world:
  
  (14th Ct.)
  
  
  (ca. 1227-1234)
  
  
  When using "Asia, Africa, Europe" fillings, it was quite usual to write much more into the Asia segment, just 1 example here:
  
  
  
  Such texts could have been explanations, as well as simply naming several asian locations, much more than african or european.

  
  I find it interesting that what could be read as 'aral' is in the Asia section of the rosettes TO, can also be seen in the wordy one to some degree, although perhaps more as 'arol' with a character added to it. The others seem to have partial alignments also.
  
  

  Quote:So I cannot carry on the idea of "Oresme" influence into VMS f68, even though Elli Velinska made a great find with that.
  It may prove an common european understanding of the world here, at best.

  
  Interesting that you see Oresme in the rosettes and not in the cosmos. I still see it as Oresme in the cosmos and geological, and Isadore in the colourful one and in the Rosettes.
  
  To be clear I see Oresme as being the same understanding as the Isadore, but placed on the globe in a more today's understanding, rather than an island earth ecumene.
  
  Like this from the top version, but turned so the left corner is the top, so there is room for the missing back side.
  
  
  
  Or turn this one a bit and look at it so that Spain is to the right of center. 
  
  
  
  But Strabo told us of a globe by Crates of Mallus that preceded Strabo's own Mapa mundi so really Oresme is a downgrade on that one by flooding out anything below the equator.
  
  
  
  The Terrestrial Sphere of Crates of Mallus (c. 150 BCE), showing the region of the antipodes in the southern half of the western hemisphere and the torrid zone.
  
  I like how the colourful one places the faces as pointing upwards in the south and downward in the north, ie facing toward the heavens in both directions, ie it is partially showing the spherical nature of the world on a flat representation.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Linda > 14-03-2026, 07:10 PM

  (21-01-2026, 05:51 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (21-01-2026, 02:59 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So would you say Jorge that ladies at the Zodiac wheel don't have any meaning? And it doesn't matter if they are dressed or naked, in standing barrels, laying barrels or without any barrels.

  
  Yes. I think I have finally figured out the barrels.  The very first nymph that the Scribe tried to draw -- f70v1 (Aries 1), inner band, 12:00 -- came out so ugly that he had to cover the bottom half with a tub, and draw bands on the tub to disguise the legs and feet. 
  
  Then he drew tubs on the other ones to pretend that it was the plan all along.  He still drew them naked at first, but after a few he went back and drew dresses over them.  Maybe he got a pang of prurience, maybe he thought they would look nicer that way.   But near the end of f71v (Taurus 1) he got tired of the dresses or lost his inhibition.  On f72r1 (Taurus 2), after completing the inner ring with tubs and no dresses, he felt that he could draw the lower parts as well.  His next try (outer at 12:00) was still awful. but as he proceeded clockwise he figured out how to draw a less awful version.  And basically kept repeating it through the rest of Zodiac, and then on into Bio.
  
  

  Quote:That it doesn't carry any symbolism and was just randomly copied from some treatise about bathing?

  
  As I mentioned above, there are still two main theories about the theme of the Bio section: either the description of a hot water spa with supposedly medicinal virtues, or a treaty of anatomy describing organs and the real or imaginary flows of fluids between them. I can't make up my mind between the two; although I think the latter is more likely.
  
  In the first case, some of the pictures are indeed meant to describe baths, and the nymphs in them are indeed bathing ladies; but several of them seem to have been (badly) copied from the Balneis Puteolanum; especially f75r, that depicts a natural water slide in a cave that ends in a pool. Maybe there are other obvious copies.  The rest of the pictures would show the organs of the body that benefit from the baths, and the vital flows that are helped by them.
  
  In the second case, the pools, tubs, waterfalls, and nymphs would be just decoration, possibly decoys to protect against any sort of "holy inquisition" (not THE one, of course; nor THAT OTHER one with two, not, three, not, four, four main weapons).  The illustrations of organs and tubes would be meaningful contents, but stripped of all frills and decoration.  Like this, but without the nymphs:
  
  
  All the best, --stolfi

  
  I noted a previous posting of yours about the knocked down tubs further in the zodiac being a confusion of legs and ever since then I don't trust the decorative aspects of that section. None of the clothing ever made sense to me anyway so to read that it may not have been originally intended is completely acceptable to me. But I still see it as a platonic year. I saw the tubs as architecture in this quire, that made sense to me in comparison to the nomadic stance of the later naked nymphs. The months of the Zodiac would be eras instead, millenia instead of 30 days.
  
  Insofar as quire 13, I believe the decoration all relates to geography and hydrology, obfuscated by similarities to balnealogical works. Tubes, waterfalls, and rainbows are all rivers, tubs are the ends of tubes, ie river deltas, estuaries, ports of call, the places people gathered and where they built architecture and infrastructure once they were no longer nomadic. Pools are seas or lakes. Nymphs are very large, are not anywhere near human sized, and represent regions, and the quire itself is out if order, in order it describes the entire ecumene basically contiguously. I also believe that quire 20 is related and may include more historical information.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Linda > 14-03-2026, 07:20 PM

  (21-01-2026, 10:24 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (21-01-2026, 09:34 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the "overnight" transformation to the statement in your Post #29  is simply amazing.

  It is amazing what a Wkipedia page can do, isn't it?
  
  

  Quote:Can we all use the same terminology???

  
  Hmm, not sure I want to go along with that.  My point is precisely that,by the 1400s, the "nebuly line" of heraldry and the "wolkenband" of manuscript illuminations were two distinct things, even though they may have had a common origin in the distant past.  Artists who drew wolkenbands did not think of heraldry, and people who specified nebuly lines in blazons did not think of wolkenbands or boundaries between Earth and Heaven.
  
  By the way, is it known when the term "nebuly line" was first used?  Not the line itself, but the name?

  
  
  Nebuly (or nebulé) is an adjective, often used in heraldry to describe a wavy line representing clouds, originating in the mid-16th century. It derives from the Middle French nebulé and ultimately from the Latin nebula, meaning "mist" or "cloud," combined with the French adjective suffix -é (from Latin -atus).
  
  
  Oxford English Dictionary
  +2
  Key Details:
  Meaning: Edged in a deeply wavy line to represent clouds, used in heraldry and architecture.
  Earliest Use: The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest evidence to around 1530.
  Related Forms: Similar to the French nebulé and related to the Latin nebulosus (cloudy, misty).
  Heraldry Usage: Describes a heraldic line bounding an ordinary or subordinary.
  Architecture Usage: Refers to a molding with an undulating lower edge, often found on Romanesque corbel-tables.
  
  Oxford English Dictionary
  +5
  nebuly, adj. meanings, etymology and more
  What is the etymology of the adjective nebuly? nebuly is a borrowing from Latin, combined with an English element; modelled on a F...
  
  Oxford English Dictionary
  
  I like to think of most of them as mist, or moisture, ie clouds.

• RE: Water, earth and air

  Linda > 14-03-2026, 07:40 PM

  (21-01-2026, 10:18 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Although it may be hard to believe, there is no Bio section in the Voynich Manuscript. It's a misinterpretation.
  
  That sinuous lines with swollen knobs you're referring to also signifies the sphere of the fixed stars, the limit of the medieval universe.
  
  I have argued many times, and will continue to argue, that those hundreds of female figures are a personification of the fixed stars.

  
  I agree on no bio, I do not agree on fixed stars in either case (knobs nor nymphs)
  
  To me they represent populations of people who have congregated in regions over time, most heavily where fresh water was abundently available, hence, i call them nymphs. 
  
  Insofar as fixed stars, I believe they are important to these populations, but as they are already seemingly represented as stars in the manuscript, I don't see the need for the knobs or nymphs to also represent them. You could possibly convince me the nymphs were representations of the plants the fixed stars were supposed to be influencing (if i understand your theory correctly), since nowhere else does this influence seem to be outlined that i have been able to detect. I would include populations of other lifeforms in my own analogy, ie agriculture, farming. However I do not see the influence of the stars involved in my own understanding, merely that the stars are useful for navigation between regions, or denoting time differences between places or events.
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