Nine sacred mountains

The following notes were among my first collected thoughts on the Voynich ms. The first contextual element that I noticed was: pilgrimage.

In the 1400s Islamic expansion in the East closed or made perilous the established pilgrim routes to Jerusalem. This was not just an inconvenience: Jerusalem was the centre of the Christian worldview. At the close of the Crusades, it was necessary to recalibrate this worldview in the face of new geopolitical realities.

In northern Italy (as elsewhere) during this time there was a movement of ideas proposing that the symbolism of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land be relocated to the local landscape.

This eventually took form as the Nine Sacred Mountains – the Sacri Monti of Piedmont – a network of Christian mountain-side chapels representing holy places on the pilgrimage route, with the first built, Sacro Monte di Varallo (1491), representing Jerusalem itself.

Mountain places were chosen because the arduous task of ascending the mountain replaces the long journey to the Holy Land.

Places were chosen on numerous criteria. Most readily, people who had traveled to the Holy Land could report similarities in the Italian landscape and land formations.

In the case of one of the Sacri Monti it seems that the basis of identification was the unusual flora of the mountain, reputedly similar to that of the Holy Land.

But there is a more ancient and arcane method of linking local sites to remote sacred places: through natural springs.

To understand this, we must appreciate some pertinent features of premodern cosmology.

It was believed, for a start, that there is an ocean of subterranean waters with underground rivers, and in this way water features on the Earth’s surface are interconnected.

It is a common device for extending sanctity from one water feature to another. In India, for example, many of the rivers in the south of the continent are believed to be connected to the Ganges in the subterranean realm. In this way they become sacred rivers and so it is not always necessary to travel to the Ganges to perform certain ritual obligations.

Another example is the way Islamic sanctity was shifted from Jerusalem to Mecca through the device of connecting the well of Zamzam to the well on the Temple Mount. The same sacred waters can be accessed locally.

This was a very ancient practice and not a haphazard matter. Across ancient cultures there were developed traditions of sacred hydrology. Knowledge of the waters of the underworld, their flows, streams and connections is a sacred science.

It is inherently alchemical, because the waters of the Earth are also understood to be the waters of the womb. If the Earth is a womb, subterranean waters are amniotic. The waters from mineral springs are amniotic and alchemical: metals dispersed in the amniotic waters of the Earth.

Different waters have different properties and powers. One skilled in these properties and powers will know which springs are connected, regardless of how remote, because they have similar qualities.

In this way the springs and water features – prolific and conspicuous in the mountain regions of northern Italy – could be identified with or connected to the remote sanctity of places in the Holy Land.

The other way to have knowledge of the underground waters is through astrology. The waters below reflect the waters above.

This symmetry is absolutely structural in premodern cosmology. There are the celestial waters above and the subterranean waters below, in mutual reflection. We can know the subterranean waters from the tides and movements of the heavens. They correspond.

In all cases – similarities in landscape, similar botany, waters with similar powers, astrological assessment – local places tend to acquire and participate in a remote sanctity at a folk or popular level before becoming official and formalized. People celebrate miracles at healing springs long before the Church officially imposes her authority and symbolism upon such places.

In northern Italy, there was a popular movement towards the localization of the sanctity of Jerusalem and the Holy Land into the mountain landscape. It took the form of the tradition of the Nine Sacred Mountains. A completed pilgrimage took the form of traveling to all nine mountains.

There were perhaps no fixed points for this at first. The Church became involved in the 1490s, appropriating the tradition. The Church decided on nine hilltops in Piedmont and Lombardy and constructed chapels on each. The tradition became approved and formalized from that time onwards.

This background provides the context for the Voynich manuscript. It is a work from the 1400s, from the alpine, German-speaking regions of northern Italy. The linguistic mysteries of the manuscript should be seen in this context.

It is a work in the Nine Sacred Mountains tradition, written before the appropriation of that tradition into Christian orthodoxy.

We can see this in the Rosette Folio in Quire 14 of the manuscript. This is a large fold-out map towards the end of the book. It shows nine sacred mountains with Jerusalem in the centre.

The mountains are interconnected by high mountain roads in a circuit around the outer eight mountains, with castles and waystops along the route.

The map especially concerns water features. Each of the mountains is a spring. It is a map of mountain springs. All the water on the map is artesian in a rugged mountain setting. No rivers. No oceans. Springs, fountains and spas. And a waterfall.

The map is making correspondences between certain mountains in northern Italy and the pilgrimage to the Holy Land on the basis of hydrological connections.

There is a very telling example of this in the third circle (upper right rotum) of the design. This shows a distinct landscape. There is a mountain with a spiral path amid strange geological formations.

In the context of the pilgrimage road to Jerusalem this landscape is surely Cappodocia. But such a landscape is not unique. The same formations are found in the Dolomite mountains in northern Italy.

Anyone who had traveled the pilgrim road to Jerusalem through Cappadocia would connect the Cappadocian landscape it to the corresponding region in northern Italy. Ascending a mountain in Italy is an adequate replacement for traveling to Cappadocia.

In both cases – Cappodocia and northern Italy – these geological formations are part of a hydrologically active landscape of underground waters. These landscapes, and their waters, have quite understandable magical associations extending into the remote past.

It is not just the strange topography that makes the connection. Importantly, the two locations are connected through the waters of the underworld. This is what allows the relocation and transfer of sacred associations.

The Voynich manuscript is concerned with this process: the relocation and transfer of sacred (and therefore therapeutic) associations and symbolism between the pilgrimare route to Jerusalem and nine mountains and their springs in Italy.

The Voynich manuscript is a herbal, with with astrological diagnostics and a balneological methodology. That is, it is a treatise or manual concerning herbalism and therapeutic bathing. But beyond, and more importantly, it concerns the development of the Nine Sacred Mountains tradition in the mountainous spa country of northern Italy.

The work contains, or claims to contain, knowledge of oriental (Byzantine and/or Saracan) traditions and methods relevant to the transfer of sanctity (and power) to a network of places in northern Italy. The hydrological, botanical and astrological material in the work is all relevant to this end.

The Voynich Ms. is Christian but not an ecclesiastical work. It is a Ghiberline text,  and open to and eager for oriental esoterica and exotica.

Needless to say, it is not the work the Church used to establish the official Sacri Monti in later times. More likely, the Church moved to counter and replace exactly this sort of extravagant and syncretic development of the Nine Sacred Mountains tradition.

Note: In my refinements of this argument I now see these matters reflected in the Ladin mountain pilgrimage to Saben, but I was unaware of that tradition when I wrote the above notes.

R. B.