The inescapable conclusion of the studies pursued in these pages - now extending back over a year - is that the text of the Voynich ms. is a form of astrological notation.
It is not by any means the conclusion I expected or even hoped for, but the evidence overwhelmingly points in that direction. And, in fact, once this becomes clear it also becomes obvious. All the evidence was there long ago, but was overlooked, misconstrued or ignored.
For a long while the banner for this approach has been carried by the lone voice of Antonio García Jiménez. His thread on the Voynich Ninja forum extends back over a hundred pages, and his constant message to the Voyniuch research community has been: Not a text, a visual code.
For the most part, his admonitions are politely ignored while researchers get back to their algorithms and graphs, searching for linguistic or cryptological solutions.
In a recent post in that forum Antonio presented one of the keys to the Voynich text: it comes from a time prior to the introduction of the now standard astrological symbols. Those symbols, and the standard astrological notation, arrive after the printing press - from the second half of the 1400s onwards. Before that, a different system was commonly used in which the zodiac signs were defined and marked by the durations of day and night.
We have a celebrated example of that notation, exactly contemporary to the Voynich ms., namely the Ashmole ms. 370, dated to circa 1420. It has been known and considered by Voynich researchers for decades.
But, it would seem, Antonio is the only person to notice that several of the Voynich glyphs serve in the notation of the Ashmole.
He is surely right: the Voynich system is a development of the same type of notation seen in the Ashmole.
That is, it is a development, an extension, of the astrological notation used prior to the introduction of the standard symbols.
It should have been possible to date the manuscript on that basis, but that was never done.
And it should have been enough to dispel linguistic and other theories, or at least driven a cohort of researchers to explore in this direction. That didn't happen either. In the contemporary scene we see the obsessive drive to accumulate more and more data... and Antonio saying "it's not a language, it's not a cipher, it's not a hoax, it's astrological notation."
That is the conclusion of my own studies too, albeit arriving there by a different route, documented on this blog. I conclude that, of all the Voynicheroes abroad at present, Mr Jiménez is the man who is on the money.
To his work, I would add that our manuscript has drawn very directly from the Brescia Canones, the Handy Tables of Ptolemy, and that the Voynich project purports to give a demonstration of Ptolemaic botany.
Antonio is again correct to see this as a companion to the medieval Lapidaries and the stellar astrology of 360˚ and 360 stars.
An entirely coherent and contextually cogent picture of the Voynich manuscript emerges. It is not so mysterious.
The task still remains, though, to understand the notation. There are reasons to be optimistic. Since the Voynich system is a development from the preexisting system of astrological notation - such as we find in the Ashmole 370 - we are in a good position to reconstruct it.
A solution would entail being able to read and write the Voynich notation. We would be able to point to a word or words in Voynichese and explain it as an astrological configuration. Conversely, we would be able to point to an astrological configuration and render it in fluent Voynichese. That is the objective.
The proposal is that the Voynich glyph system is a development from the type of astrological notation found on the famous Soli-Lunar volvelle of the Ashmole manuscript:
I propose, for a start, that the large crosses that mark the solstices in the Ashmole system have been developed into the system of the four gallows glyphs marking the solstices and equinoxes, the four quarters of the year.
The idea, I maintain, came from the Helios cosmology of the Brescia Canones. It is the author's encounter with the Handy Tables of Ptolemy in Brescia that is the catalyst for the development of a new or extended system of astrological notation.
Again: we had all that is necessary to complete this task decades ago. We had the Ashmole 370, we had the Canones of Ptolemy, and medieval Lapidaries. The points of contact with the Voynich ms. are plain. It becomes obvious what the Voynich ms. is and what its text is. It may not be easy to establish how the notation works but we should be prevented from misconstruing it as something it is not.
Remarkably, it seems there is only Antonio and myself, politely ignored, and we will have to work out the notation system ourselves from scratch, as if these sources and connections have just been newly discovered.
Looking over decades of Voynich research, there is very little upon which we can build.
That is the current impasse: from this point on these pages will be focused upon the Voynich text as astrological notation and the objective is a comprehensive solution. Only a comprehensive solution will be persuasive.
R.B.