Morten St. George > 19-09-2019, 03:21 AM
(17-09-2019, 05:02 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.pox leber is bock's leber, die Leber eines Bockes, the liver of a billygoat or a roebuck, the '...cks' is pronouncd the same way as '...x', it is the same genitive 's' as in English, it it the same sound as in ENG box, a small case or pox, the sickness.
Hi Winkler. I'm afraid you have me confused. Are you claiming that it's a "sickness" of the liver or that the goats themselves are sick? I think you should take up this matter with JP who, I presume, thinks the goat's liver is something that you eat.
Yesterday, I saw on YouTube the latest and greatest of the VMS movies, entitled The Voynich Manuscript: A History, which I believe was released just this month:
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Beware that the movie tends to agree with JP: it's goat's liver and not goat's sickness; however, rather than edible liver, the world's scientific community now thinks that the goat's liver was used to make patches for wounds. So the VMS is no longer to be considered a herbal book, nor a book about astrology and cosmology, but merely a book about medieval medicine.
The film displayed the animal depicted on page You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and although they did not directly say so, it was presumable that there is universal scientific agreement on it being a goat. For my part, beyond the fact that it has four legs, I see little resemblance with goats. For one thing, the ears look wrong:
That's the VMS image on the left, followed by wiki deer ears and wiki goat ears. The deer ears seem to give the better match. Moreover, the black lower legs look a lot like the black lower legs of marsh deer. Marsh deer are relevant here because the animal is depicted directly above a naked marsh girl from the swamp section of the VMS.
Even the "pox leber" itself is questionable.
When I want to correct something I've written, I sometimes just X it out. Notice that the ink of the X looks darker than the rest of the ink and hence the X could very well be overwriting another letter, making it a cross-out X rather than a real X.
On "leber", I see the belated dot of an "i" above the "r". To which of the two vowels does it apply? Only the top of the first "e" points to it on extension so that has to be our "i". This gives us "liber" instead of "leber". And it just so happens that "liber" was a fundamental word of Latin and all Romance languages. As a noun, it meant "book", and as an adjective it meant "free".
Granted that the bulk of the VMS depicts plants, "liber" might make more sense than "leber" because plants do not have livers. I'll repeat that: plants do not have livers.
Beyond the pictures of Wilfred Voynich's wife and his female assistant (I was wondering what they looked like), the movie mostly covered the same old stuff that everyone knows with the notable exception of the following citation of Wilfred's words:
"When the time comes, I will prove to the world that the Black Magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of Twentieth century sciences."
With you guys endlessly disparaging the VMS on goat's liver and the like, it was certainly refreshing to see someone take a positive view!
I sure wish I could have seen that citation a few years ago: though I've known that the VMS prophecies were a subset of Merlin's prophecies for some time, only in the current year (2019) have I come to realize that the link between Merlin the magician and the VMS extends to encryption. The Sigillum Dei that I have been talking about lately stands, of course, at the very heart of medieval Black Magic.
The "discoveries far in advance of Twentieth century sciences" sounds like a ploy to increase the monetary value of his manuscript but I don't think so. I think Voynich knew more about the VMS than he's letting on (there's nothing visible in the VMS that could lead one to such an outrageous conclusion), and he surely didn't acquire that knowledge from the Jesuits in Italy.
His contact might have come via his wife. She was the daughter of George Boole, the father of Boolean algebra, that is, he was someone who could have been a latter-day member of the same secret society that decoded the VMS in the late 16th century. Regardless, the VMS was likely passed on to Voynich in London on the condition that he bring it to the world's attention.
Interestingly, the aforementioned film notes that an effort was made to sell the VMS to a public institution at high price prior to giving it away to Yale. I think that was always the plan for Voynich and his wife: if they couldn't sell it to a public institution (not including private investors) that would continue to promote the VMS after their death, then they would arrange for it to be gifted to one such institution. It would have been their commitment upon acquisition of the manuscript, and I hold Voynich and his wife in high esteem.