RE: Any ideas about this detail? (Middle right rosette).
Barbrey > 30-08-2023, 03:23 AM
I find it difficult sometimes to isolate one rosette and interpret it without referring to others, because my interpretation is dependent on the entire diagram. Thus, what seems like a mere "guess" has some support towards a hypothesis when my theory about the whole page is taken into account! Let me try anyway:
This sphere, to me, is the Animalus/Corpus sphere of the diagram. The centre is a clot of dirt/earth. The "tail" above represents a swallowtail-type representing a bird, the "tail" below a fish tail. It would be helpful if the two did not look so much like! But much about the VMS is to me about transformation, what's above, so below, so perhaps not inconsistent with theme. We therefore have symbolic representations of air, land (including human) and water animals co-existing in a dial that when moved can transform one to another.
The cloudband is not merely a cloudband when it is closed. I've seen these closed squiggled cloudbands before, they often signify the ouroboros, the corpus or body. The bumpiness is also echoed in some of the tubes our bathers hold up. The ones that look like octopus legs!
Outside the band are what look like stones. I interpret these as the inanimate bodies on the surface of the earth (as opposed to the metals and minerals existing in the sphere below), but Im really just reaching on this one.
Basically, my overall theory is that the top row spheres represent the heavens (including genesis, the zodiac, the "kingdom" and the Mind of God)), the middle row (not including the cosmos at centre) spheres the earth, Human Soul on left, Animal Body at right, and the bottom row the Cthonic, borrowing heavily from Greco-Roman myth which saw the underworld not just as Hades/Pluto/Hell, but from whence the "seeds" of plants came and where the buried treasures - metals, mines, elements - resided. Thus from left to right Throne/Judgment/Time/Death, Vegetalis/Rebirth, and Mineralis/Foundation.
The outside of the nine spheres is also revealing, super-celestial, borrowing this time from the god/matter philosophies of ancient Greece - Aristotle, Plato, etc.
No, this is not some weird Tarot reading! There are a number of diagrams from this time period that don't look exactly like this page but categorize very closely to it. Llull's Ladder is the simplest and can be easily googled for the main categories, though imo there are many additional layers to each sphere on relational and metaphorical levels. But the division of the cosmos into super-celestial, celestial, earthly and cthonic/underworld was a common understanding of the medieval world. I don't have to stretch at all seeing this diagram as fitting broadly into this strata. I do have to stretch on the details of the spheres, but the more I research, the more it comes together. Unfortunately my research is based on medieval text not illustration, so I have few example diagrams to refer you to.
What I like about this theory is that you slowly realize (or at least I did) that the diagram serves as an index to the rest of the VMS. It pulls all the sections together into the Cosmos at the centre, and each sphere likely corresponded to a section of the manuscript. Somewhat Aristotelian: On the Soul, On Plants, On Metals/Minerals (possibly a missing section), On Creation, On the Stars, On Death, and, of course Koen you know me!, On the Water of Life.