Old and New

As I see it, two bodies of material have been brought together in the Voynich manuscript. The core material, constituting most of the work, concerns or is the product of the Ladin herb gathering tradition. This is a folkish and rustic tradition, but very ancient and very rich.

Materials from this source include:

*The herbal section
*The pharmaceological section
*The nymph section

But the Voynich is not a dry ethnological account of the Ladin tradition: rather it brings to that tradition new understandings that place it in a sophisticated cosmology. The Ladin tradition is understood through an early modern Graeco-Arabic cosmology. This is not rustic and folkish: it is learned.

Materials in this section include:

*The astrological section
*The Zodiac section
*The Star section

These are two quite different bodies of material, but they have been worked into a single ensemble depicting a coherent system. We can think of them as one OLD and one NEW.

The old oral knowledge of the Ladin herb tradition is being reinterpreted in light of and synthesized with up-to-date late medieval (early modern) cosmology. Indeed, I propose that the very purpose of the work was to bring the Ladin herbal tradition up-to-date, to bring it into a more sophisticated cosmological framework.

In its oral and ancient form the Ladin herbal tradition was embedded in a mythological and indeed magical framework. This is not what we find in the Voynich manuscript. Instead, the materials of the Ladin tradition – the herbal knowledge – has been stripped of its (pagan) mythology and reworked in a Christian humanist guise. It is placed in an early modern Graeco-Arab cosmology. It's magic is now understood in terms of late medieval (elemental) cosmology.

Let us suppose a humanist scholar – someone well acquainted with the most up-to-date streams of 15th C. Renaissance cosmology – applies that cosmology to a rich oral folk herbal tradition.

In its oral, ancient (mythological or mythopoetic) form the Ladin herbal tradition was also strongly topological and crafted to a particular landscape. It was not a herb growing tradition, but a herb gathering tradition. This aspect of the tradition has been retained and again placed within an early modern (late medieval) cosmology and stellar correspondences and the four elements.

Importantly, in this reworking of the Ladin tradition it is depaganized and at the same time Christianized.

The mountain nymphs feature in Ladin mythology. They are the agents of King Lauren and disperse the dawn light (alpenglow) and paint cheeks pink with vitality. They tend and control (and measure!) the waterways of the mountains. The Ladin herb gathering tradition is intimately connected to the waters of the landscape, including the mineral waters. In the Voynich, the Ladin nymphs are reimagined as Hellenistic nymphs, and Christian. (The fingerprint of Christian humanism.)

What I call the Graeco-Arabic cosmology is at least different to the standard Ptolemaic cosmology. It is a stellar cosmology that maps correspondences to the 360 degrees of the zodiac. It is a sophisticated Renaissance cosmology that includes complex soli-lunar cycles. In this, the old eightfold pagan calendar is being given a new understanding. Much of the work is calendrical and concerns the calculation of festivals.

* * *

This is how I view the Voynich manuscript in general: the meeting of a rustic, folkish body of material and a sophisticated Graeco-Arabic, early Renaissance cosmology. In itself, I don’t think such a meeting of old and new, oral and literate, is historically unlikely. We need only suppose that a curious educated man – highly educated, it would seem – takes an interest in the medicine of the Ladin people. He is either bringing it up to date, or appropriating it.

In fact, it is best considered as a work of collaboration and as an assembly and synthesis of old and new perspectives in a single project.

R. B.

Two wrong assumptions

There are two fundamental assumptions regarding the Voynich ms. that I think are mistaken, at least as they are commonly understood:

1. It is a scientific treatise.
2. It is a medical treatise.

Scientific Treatise

There is a widespread assumption that the work contains cutting-edge science done by an early scientific genius (with the corollary that it was written in cipher to protect it from the Church and other enemies of modern science.)

This is what encourages people to see canisters as microscopes.

It is better to regard it as a deviant work of traditional cosmology than as a work of proto-science. Although it might be described as ‘early modern’ (synonymous with 'late medieval') it does not prefigure modern science. Rather, it presents a development of medieval cosmology that did not lead into modern science. It is not a lost work from the science/progress narrative.

This assumption accounts for a huge number of serious misreadings of the work throughout its entire history including the belief it was written by Roger Bacon (because it must have been written by one of the heroes of modern science.)

Underpinning this type of scientism is such spurious reasoning as:

1. It is written in a cipher.
2. The best cryptologists and modern computers cannot crack the cipher.
3. Therefore, it must be the work of a genius and contains secrets of advanced science.

Many versions of this reasoning are rife in Voynich Studies.

Medical Treatise

The work does not present a system of medicine. It provides no account of anatomy, physiology or disease. It is better described as a work of pharmacology, but even then a rustic folk pharmacology rather than that of the urban apothecary.

More specifically, it seems to be a work that concerns a tradition of herb gathering. The centrepiece of the work is not a human figure with astrological correspondences such as we might find in a medical text: it is a map of a very specific region.

The only things depicted in the work are herbs, their (stellar) astrological correspondences, cycles of the year, a map and methods of preparing and preserving herbs. There are no depictions of the medical applications of the herbs. Rather, on my reading, the work concerns the where and when of collecting wild herbs within a particular landscape.

It is not a medical text as such: it is a text about herb gathering.

The medical text assumption leads to such spurious reasoning as:

1. There are lots of naked women
2. Therefore it is a work about gynecology.

(With the corollary that it is encrypted to protect it from a male-dominated Church etc.)

Both of these assumptions - the scientific treatise and the medical treatise - are almost structural in the study of the Voynich manuscript. Both of them routinely lead researchers astray. 

The hypothesis presented in these pages attempts to have a more nuanced approach to these matters, avoiding wrong conclusions from exactly these assumptions. (The Ladin tradition is a tradition of herb gatherers, and the Cusean intellectual model in which I want to place the work is rationalist but not empiricist and, while it contributed to things like Paracelesean medicine, it made no contribution to modern science as we understand it.) We misconstrue the work if we regard it as either scientific or medical in an unqualified modern sense. In both cases, I think it is a work outside of those categories.

R.B.

Things missing

There are certain things we might expect in the Voynich manuscript which are absent (based on the evidence of the illustrations and diagrams.) Here are some that I regard as significant:

*Fire

There is no depiction of fire anywhere in the work.

*Alcohol & distillation

I do not detect any reference or allusion to alcohol, its production or use, in the manuscript. Instead, what seems to be depicted are methods of water extraction. There are no depictions of distillation. See also the absence of fire.

*Planets

The planets do not feature in the astrology. This is very noticeable and significant. The astrology seems entirely concerned with the fixed stars and the Sun and Moon.

*Anatomy and Physiology

There is no account of human anatomy or physiology such as we might expect in a medical text. There is no system of referring planets and/or stars etc. to organs of the body. The herbalism does not seem based upon organs (for this, see also the absence of planetary astrology.)

*Diseases

Apart from one figure (which may be marginalia) there is no depiction of disease in the manuscript. The herbalism does not address specific diseases (or any diseases.)

*Glyphs and symbols

While the work seems to concern such standard features of medieval cosmology as the four elements, the traditional (and very common) symbols and glyphs used for these categories are not found in the work. Instead, the work seems have its own, unfamiliar, system of symbols and glyphs for such things.

I am inclined to think these absences are all related. There is no concern for the planets, for instance, because the work does not concern an organ-based system of herbal medicine. (Spare me the lectures about arguments based on silence; this is a pattern of omissions.) These are all things we might expect in a standard astrological herbal from the relevant period which are conspicuously absent. This is one reason the manuscript is so immediately perplexing - it does not conform to our expectations. But it is not incoherent. It is just a different system.

Many problems arise from people trying to understand the work in terms of familiar modes of herbalism. In the familiar system what usually happens is this:

 *There are parallelisms between planet = herb = organ of the body. 

 *The planets correspond to and rule the inner organs of the body (the human microcosm.)

*Medicines are alcohol-based tinctures made according to correspondences between planets and herbs. 

None of this is found in the Voynich manuscript.

R. B.

Ladin diagram

I offer Ladin as a possible or likely language in the background of the Voynich manuscript because, on my reading, the document makes use of and alludes to certain mythological ideas that were only preserved in the Ladin language; Ladin myths in the Ladin tongue. Specifically, the Ladin people had a mythology concerning mountain nymphs as agents of the mythical King Lauren, who distribute the alpenglow of dawn light. This is what we see in the Voynich manuscript (joined with parallel Graceo-Roman nymph mythology). If that is the case, then Ladin must be one of the languages involved.

More generally, I make the case that the work comes from alpine northern Italy. In the 1400s Ladin was a widely spoken common tongue of the relevant region. Its oral tradition maintained a very rich and ancient herbal tradition.

I am very aware that the textual evidence does not allow for Ladin to be the basis of the Voynich language in any obvious way, but it remains my primary language of interest.

The following diagram summarizes just about everything that it is necessary to know about Ladin in the first instance. It is my contention that the Voynich manuscript comes out of this bed of languages:

In short:

*Ladin has developed from Vulgar Latin infused with pre-Roman Rhaetean.

*It is closely related to Romansch in the western alps of northern Italy (into Switzerland) and Friulian in the east near Venice. Ladin itself is spoken in the Dolomites.

*These languages splinter very readily into local dialects, often in neighboring alpine valleys. 

* These languages were squeezed and marginalized by German intruding from the north and Gallo-Italian intruding from the south. German was and remains the dominant language in the region.

R.B. 

Qokeedy

Even a casual acquaintance with the Voynich language reveals that words are very obviously grouped into what I call families. Choose any word and you will find that it is related to a whole group of similar words. We don’t need a mountain of statistics to demonstrate that this is so: it is obvious. It is one of the most notable things about the Voynich language; it is textured by words that are very similar. Indeed, in nearly all cases we can find an almost exhaustive group of combinations of letters constituting a family of closely related words. The text is characterized by apparent combinatorics. Every word appears in all or at least many of its possible combinations, apparently according to certain rules.

This is certainly a lesson to be learned from the pursuit of the word qokechy in the text. As explained in a prior post, this is the word I first chose to investigate at the beginnings of my studies, as a doorway into the text. My method was to select any word (not too common, not too rare) and pursue it relentlessly in the run of the text, observing its behavior. One of the things this reveals immediately is that qokechy is not an isolated word. It belongs to a family of similar words. Each of these words seem to be a permutation of a common form. It is not clear what causes these permutations or what they mean.

For instance, qokechy  qokechy appears to be in the family of words that includes qokeedy  qokeedy with qokeedy being the far more common word. How are the two words related? Are they entirely different words or are they, perhaps, the same word in two different forms signifying a grammatical difference?

This is the distinct impression one forms. One begins to suspect that rather than different words, these ‘families’ may be variations on the same word. We witness the permutations of the same word according to some system of rules. It is so systematic, in fact, that one suspects some system of exhaustive combinatorics.

The behavior of qokeedy is even more striking than qokechy. It is strongly favored in Dialect B (Currier Language B) which is also to say it is found in some sections of the work more than others. Specifically, it is strongly characteristic of the Nymph Section (called baneological) and then the Star Section at the end of the work (wrongly called the 'recipe' section.) It is only found occasionally here and there outside of these sections. There are over 300 cases in total but it occurs in two very strong and obvious concentrations. It is a rare word until page f75r. Then it erupts into the text until f84v. It returns to being rare until the final Star Section where it erupts into the text again.

It is rare in most parts of the work, but conspicuously common in two particular sections and only those sections.

Qokechy, which seems to be derivative, is much the same, but is even more characteristic of the final Star Section.

The sudden eruption of qokeedy in the Nymph Section.

Now, from a general reading of the illustrations – reading the text as a Mutus Liber – we know that the nymphs are connected to (if they are not personifications of) the fixed stars. (In fact, the nymphs are personifications of light – and especially the light of the alpenglow – and thus are they blonde and rosy cheeked.) We see in the Zodiac Section that the nymphs are associated with particular fixed stars. This idea is quite explicit in the illustrations.

In that case, here we see that qokeedy and related words in that family correspond to this. What we see in the illustrations is matched by this linguistic phenomenon. We can conclude, therefore, that the word qokeedy (and its cognates) in some way concerns the correspondences between nymphs and stars. We do not know what the word might be, but from context we can establish that this to what it must pertain.

One thing of which we can be sure is that the Voynich manuscript, being a work of late medieval cosmology, concerns correspondences. What corresponds with what? This is the whole habit of the medieval cosmological mind. We can expect the text to be concerned with the same. It would seem that the qokeedy family of words - qokechy included - is part of the vocabulary setting out correspondences between the nymphs and the stars.


R. B.

Greek/Latin synthesis?

Prior to the victory of the Turks and the fall of Constantinople in the mid 1400s there was an urgency to Greek/Latin reconciliation: there was a concerted attempt to bring Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism together as a united Christian front against the Turks. Nicholas of Cusa was deeply involved in these efforts as an emissary and diplomat in negotiations with the Greeks.

Pressed by the context, there was a widespread feeling that the matters that had separated Eastern and Western churches for centuries were not insurmountable. Indeed, it was felt that the important differences were often matters of semantics and language rather than theology and doctrine. After all, the whole split had occurred over a single Latin word - fililoque - and, arguably, a breakdown in understanding between Latin and Greek languages.

Given this, there might well be an incentive for someone to craft an artificial or at least synthetic language designed to be used in common between Greek and Latin speakers. "Gratin." The Voynich script is suggestive: it is arguably made up of a combination of Latin and (some) Greek letter forms and textual conventions. Many researchers have detected Greek, and Latin, influence in the script. Is the Voynich language some attempt to marry together Greek and Latin into a common tongue?

As far as I know, there is no evidence such a synthesis was attempted: it is a purely contextual conjecture. The context is that the Voynich manuscript comes from the period that climaxed in the fall of Byzantium, a period during which very capable minds (like Nicholas of Cusa) were set to the largely linguistic problem of East/West reconciliation.

Needless to say, reconciliation didn't happen. The Turks won. After that, the Greek and Latin churches no longer felt any urgency to mend their differences. In that case, an experimental language designed to help bridge Greek and Latin would have quickly fallen into disuse.

Again: no evidence, but it is a possibility within the range of a Cusean hypothesis. The scenario would be that Cardinal Nicholas, and his good friend Cardinal Bessaron, perhaps deploying the Ars Magna of Ramon Llull, devised a synthetic language and script designed to overcome the linguistic divide between the Greek East and the Latin West.

In that case, the Voynich language would have been designed for purposes other than the manuscript, but has been adapted to that use.

The conjecture arises out of the nature of the script. Presumably, the script is made to suit the language it encodes. If the nature of the script is (arguably) Graeco-Latin then perhaps the language it is used to write is also some synthesis of Graeco-Latin?

R. B.

Language problem

What exactly is the problem with the language of the Voynich manuscript? Why the consternation?

The problem boils down to this:

It looks like a natural language
made up of highly unnatural words.

The structures within words are unusually predictable and rigid compared to natural languages BUT the distribution of these unnatural words throughout the text is within the normal range of natural languages.

So, the words are highly unnatural, but above the level of words, the text looks like a natural language. 

That's the problem.

****

The words themselves have highly artificial structures. They are rigidly tripartite. They consist of three fields (prefix, midfix, suffix) with certain letters and combinations of letters restricted to particular fields. There are many strict constraints on what letters can go where and in what combinations. Certain letters are only found in certain parts of words in a small number of combinations.

This makes Voynich words far more predictable than words in natural languages. Words in natural languages are not structured like this. It is highly artificial.

But when we look at the text as a whole, these unnatural words behave like a natural language. For example:

According to Zipf’s Law, in any natural language the most common word will be about twice as common as the second most common word, and the third will be a third as common as the first, and so on. This is a hallmark of all natural languages. (We are not sure why, but it is.)

And this is what we find in the Voynich language. Even though the words are highly artificial in themselves, the most common word is about twice as frequent as the second most, and so on, just as happens in natural languages. So, surprisingly, the Voynich language conforms to Zipf’s Law.

Other tests place it within the range of natural languages too. The number of words repeated (reduplication) is about normal for a natural language, for example. Labels in the text that begin with the letter <o> seem to be nouns, and there are indeed about the right proportion of such words in the text as nouns in natural languages. Word formation seems artificial: word distribution seems natural.

Assuredly, there are odd things about the language at every level, but at the global whole-text level many indicators say it is a natural language. Some tell-tale patterns and distributions cannot be contrived artificially. It is when we look at the distribution and behavior of characters within words, however, we find that all is contrived and very different to anything found in natural tongues.

It follows: if the Voynich language is a cipher or is gibberish - as the weird structure of words might suggest - then the author has been able to imitate the behaviors of natural language such as word distribution in a highly sophisticated way. This would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to achieve. How does one write gibberish, or execute a cipher, that preserves the distributions of Zipf's Law? 

The problem, anyway, is the disjunction of artifice and naturalness. When we zoom into the word level everything seems constructed and contrived and we are sure it cannot be natural. But when we zoom out to the whole text level it seems to fit comfortably within the expectations of a natural language. How do we explain this? Any solution to the Voynich mystery must offer a cogent explanation for this confounding incongruity. So far, no convincing explanation has been forthcoming. 

R. B.

The Eight and the Twelve

The whole emphasis in the astrology of the Voynich manuscript is on the fixed stars and the Sun and Moon as chronometers. It is strongly calendrical. I discussed this in a previous post here. By simple observation of the diagrams and illustrations presented in the work we can say some a few things about this...

First, it is apparent that, in this system, the Moon is masculine and the Sun is feminine. This is not typical in mainstream Western cosmologies but is typical of older systems and certain mythological environments. There is much to be said about this, but I will leave it for another post. It is remarkable and revealing, though.

Second, there are many instances of an eightfold division of the year. This is very conspicuous and characteristic of the work. We find cosmological circles divided into eight sections. Clearly, the Voynich contains a calendar in which the year is divided into eight. This again is not typical of mainstream Western systems but is typical of some older orders (and notably those that also have a female Sun and a male Moon.) I have previously touched upon the eightfold year in the Voynich here.

There are, however, other systems besides the eightfold divisions, including, most obviously, the division of the circle into twelve - the zodiac. There is an entire section devoted to the zodiac. There we find the maths: 12 x 30 = 360. This is the maths that concerns the fixed stars:

The twelvefold division of the year and the eightfold division do not correspond exactly, however. The eightfold divisions are of 45 deg. and so four zodiac signs are bisected if we try to reconcile the twelve with the eight. This seems to be a central problem addressed in these diagrams. The soli-lunar nature of the work seems directed to this problem. The twelvefold series is masculine/lunar and the eightfold series is feminine/solar. 

Of particular interest in this regard is the diagram depicted on page f67r2. The page stands out as being the only page with script and illustrations in red ink. Here we find a series of twelve moons, but in the centre is an eightpointed star. This diagram seems to be especially concerned with reconciling the eight with the twelve.

This, I think, is the crux of the calendrical aspects of the work. There are complexities and mysteries, but the basic cosmological structures of the work are clear and concern the eight and the twelve - and the numbers and divisions that follow from them.

R. B.

Unique script?

The late Stephen Bax suggested, on several occasions in his writing, that the script we find in the Voynich manuscript may not be unique to it. He suggests that it might be an historical accident that the script has only survived in this work. He offers few arguments for this, but he rightly says that we cannot be sure the script is peculiar to the Voynich. This is contrary to the widespread assumption that the script is unique to the work and may even have been designed specifically for the purpose.

Here I want to rehearse some arguments for and against:

*The relevant period saw considerable experimentation in scripts, especially the so-called humanist scripts. The Voynich script may well have been part of a broader experimentalism rather than being made specifically for the Voynich.

*The several scribes who worked on the Voynich seem perfectly familiar and comfortable with the script as if they have used it before. This suggests there may have been other works written in it.

*The script itself contains enough glyphs to constitute a fully functioning alphabet. It seems to be an all-purpose glyph set that could easily be used for any type of text. By design it seems general-purpose.

*The fact that a team of scribes can be identified working on the Voynich counts against the script being idiosyncratic or a private folly. (It may have been an “in-house” script in a manuscript workshop or even a training script for scribes.)

*A reason the script is not found anywhere else may be that it was not very successful and so was discontinued. (Like other scripts, it disappeared with the introduction of printing.)

*The fact the script is only found in the Voynich is not evidence that it was designed for the manuscript or that it was not used anywhere else. We have lost a huge amount of material from the relevant period; it may not be surprising only one sample has survived.

Against these points:

*The script is easy and fluent. It is easy to write. Anyone can become proficient in it in an afternoon. Trained scribes could acquire it and master it effortlessly. We don’t need to suppose they had used it before or often. It’s not hard.

*Even in a period that saw the development of new scripts, and experimentalism, it is unprecedented. Not only have we not found another sample of it, we have not found anything like it as an ensemble of glyphs.

*Although much has been lost, the relevant period is very well documented. Yet not a single instance of the script – not one – has ever been found beyond the Voynich manuscript. It is not for lack of looking. We can safely say there has now been a comprehensive search of the documents of the period and nothing has been found.

*It cannot be said the script was unsuccessful: we have 240 pages of it. It seemed to have served its purpose in the Voynich very well.

*It is debatable how many scribes were involved, but even in the widest estimates there were probably one or two main scribes, while others (assistants) did selected sections or added the labels. There is no reason a unique script could not have been introduced in such a scenario. We might suppose: a small team of scribes have been employed by someone to produce a one-off manuscript in a unique script. We don’t need to conjecture about in-house scripts or such.

*Most importantly, the script appears to be carefully designed. So too does the text written in it. Both the script and the text written in it seem to be designed within rigid constraints. Arguably, they go together. The systematic artificiality of the script reflects the very systematic and artificial nature of the text itself. The script does not seem to be an ad hoc adaption: it seems designed for the job with glyphs seemingly having very specific, carefully designed functions.

*While the Voynich glyph set might constitute an alphabet, it is most unlike other alphabets and does not seem like a simple, generic general-purpose alphabet. Most obviously, the so-called gallows glyphs have very peculiar, complex properties that would not be easily deployed. In general, the glyphs display peculiar behavior under artificial rules entirely unlike that of letters in a simple alphabet made for general purposes. It might look like a generic alphabet, but it doesn't behave like one.

* * * 

 

Stephen Bax contributed many sensible observations to these studies. His open approach was very valuable. His position was: we don't know, so we consider all reasonable possibilities.  He made especially valuable comments on the idea that scripts were created when oral languages made the transition into writing: he cites Armenian as an obvious historical example. He rightly notes that the period of the Voynich manuscript was an era when formal vernacular languages and national identities were forming.

No, we cannot be certain that the Voynich manuscript was the only work written in this script, and yes, we must depend upon arguments from silence, which is weak evidence. But on the whole I think the evidence, such as it is, favors the view that the script is unique to the codex. The complete lack of any other example is not proof but it is strongly suggestive in such a well-documented period. Unless, or until, we find but one other example of the script in any manuscript anywhere, we must suspect it was created for the Voynich project.

Moreover, the peculiar nature of the script seems apiece with the peculiar nature of the text itself. Both display tight design principles applied with quite rigid system. It seems likely that they are the products of the same mind. This leads me to conclude: the mind that composed the text also designed the script.

R. B.

Models

The layered word structure does not obviously match the word structure of Indo-European languages. Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Ethiopian could perhaps be transliterated into Voynichese, but not by any straightforward mapping.

- Stolfi

Let us assume there is a plaintext. There are scenarios in which there is no plaintext, but the safer assumption is that there is. Assumption: the plaintext was composed in some natural language and the Voynich text as we have it (the V-text) is some rendering mapped from that original plaintext. It follows: if we understood how the V-text works we can extract and restore the original plaintext in its original language.

The simplest model of the relationship between plaintext and V-text is a direct correspondence between the plaintext language and the Voynich script. In such a model, the plaintext is simply rendered into the Voynich script more or less on a one-to-one basis. If the plaintext is Latin, say, then the V-text is simply Latin written in the Voynich script.

 

This model doesn't work. It doesn't work for every natural language that has ever been tested. Still, undeterred, people keep trying it. They propose, for example, that the plaintext is in Hebrew and that Voynich script corresponds (more or less) letter-to-letter to Hebrew. Therefore: if we reverse the mapping we can restore the V-text to the Hebrew plaintext.

There will always been some words that seem to fit this process. A certain number of Hebrew or quasi-Hebrew words can be found. But they make no sense and have no grammar or syntax. The only 'plaintext' that emerges is a hotch-potch lexicon of unrelated words that are at best Hebrew-ish. Worse, the results are no better than if one had tried, say, Arabic or Greek or Coptic or Catalan.

Every imaginable language has been tried in this manner, and the ones that perform best are languages, such as Polynesean tongues, that are historically and geographically so unlikely as to be not worth considering.

The only other possibility is that the plaintext language is a lost or extinct tongue. But if so, what sort of strange tongue would it be? The Voynich text is, in fact, very unlike natural languages in important aspects. Its observable structures and behaviors do not resemble those of any recognizeable natural language in any obvious way. If it is a case of straight-forward mapping, then the plaintext language must have been very unnatural among natural languages.

There are at least two complicating factors to consider here, though. For a start, there may not have been a very good mapping between the plaintext and the Voynich script. This could produce strange linguistic distortions. The Voynich glyphs might need to stand for several or many letters in a more extensive plaintext, for instance. Or the content - rather than the language - of the plaintext may produce strange effects in the V-text. A text full of numbers and measurements, for example, might be very repetitious in any language.

In general, though, this simple model seems exhausted and unpromising. There are no prospects that if we keep looking we will find an obscure dialect of an obscure tongue somewhere that maps directly from plaintext to V-text. It can't be done.

This predicament necessitates model two:

If there is a plaintext but it hasn't mapped directly to the Voynich text, then we must assume there has been in intervening step between the two. The plaintext has been prepared in some way prior to being transposed into the Voynich script. This preparation amounts to a transformation of the plaintext.

A simple scenario would be as follows:

1. The plaintext is in Latin.
2. The plaintext is heavily abbreviated according to an unknown system.
3. The abbreviated text is rendered into Voynich glyphs (which are a corresponding set of abbreviation marks.)

This is far more promising. But there are any number of possible transformations that might have taken place, for any number of reasons. Ciphers are in this category:

1. The plaintext is in Latin.
2. The plaintext is encrypted with a substitution cipher.
3. The encrypted text is rendered into Voynich glyphs which further hide the plaintext.

The transformation step can be made more elaborate:

1. The plaintext is in Latin.
2. The plaintext is encrypted with a substitution cipher and a large number of nulls are added.
3. The encrypted text - a simple substitution code with lots of nulls - is rendered into Voynich glyphs which further hide the plaintext.

There is a known level of encryption practiced in the relevant period; substitution and transposition ciphers mainly. None are sufficiently complex or sophisticated to produce what we see in the Voynich. But if several methods of simple encryption were to be compounded, then the transformation of the plaintext could be profound.

Encryption is not the only possibility here, though. Textual transformations can have linguistic purposes meant to clarify rather than obscure. Particles, articles, conjunctions and superfluous words might be stripped away, for instance. English is perfectly understandable as: quick brown fox jumped over lazy dog. The motive is economy. This simple trimming might explain why there are so few short words in the Voynich text. Perhaps the plaintext has been streamlined, cleaned up?

We should also remember that medieval texts were far more aural than modern reading texts. They were made to be spoken loud and pronounced more than for silent reading. The plaintext might be transformed for phonological reasons, in order to clarify or emphasize sounds, or to make it more euphonic. Euphonic transformation is a possibility, and perhaps even more likely than encryption.

Phonological factors might be especially relevant if the plaintext consists of material in a language that does not have established writing conventions such as an oral language being brought into writing for the first time.

* * *

Finally, there are also procedural methods - methods by which text is generated or transformed using a set procedure such as a system of cardon grille or a system of wheels (volvelles). Such systems are not necessarily devices to create gibberish. (In that case, of course, there is no plaintext. The plaintext is a phantom.) But it is conceivable that an intelligible plaintext was either composed or transformed by such systems.

An example of this are the systems of Ramon Llull's Ars Magna. Here volvelle wheels are used to create strings of letters which might seem like gibberish but which are like an algebra with meanings that can be extracted by the practice of the "Art". Deploying Llull's methods or similar might produce a text with the sort of combinatorics we see on display in the V-text and other characteristics that suggest procedural generation of some kind.

Procedural generation, or procedural transformation, does not automatically mean hoax. The text can be artificial without being meaningless. In favor of procedural generation are the various letter wheels and lists in the Voynich manuscript itself.  Do they depict a system by which the plaintext was created or transformed?

An example of procedural transformation:

1. The plaintext is in Latin.
2. The plaintext is turned into formulae of symbolic logic using a meaningful arrangement of volvelle wheels.
3. The resulting text is rendered into Voynich glyphs which are designed to facilitate this.

This method would need to be done by an adept of the Art.

Take the English: quick brown fox jumped over lazy dog.
Each of these terms (ideas) can be expressed by the Ars Magna.
The idea of "quick" (quickness, speed) can be analysed and traced to its roots in the Divine Attributes.
Its pedigree among logical ideas is expressed as a series of letters located using the volvelles. (On the element wheel, for example, we find "quickness" associated with FIRE, indicated by the letter P... or whatever.)

Similarly, the quality of the colour brown. And so on. All created things and qualities and actions have their origins in God, as the Ars Magna is designed to show.

In its fullest application the Llullian Ars Magna becomes a type of artificial philosophical language (which is where Liebniz was to take it.) In practical terms, it is as opaque as a complex encryption to one who does not know the Art.

* * *

In any case, if there is a plaintext composed in a natural language it does not reach the V-text unmolested. It undergoes some type of transformation. The evidence suggests a profound transformation. There is a step between the composing of the plaintext and its being rendered in the Voynich script. What has been done at that step and why?

R. B.

 

Elements & Gallows

Leaving aside the so-called benched gallows, there are four gallows glyphs in the Voynich glyph set. They show every sign of being designed as a set of four. I have previously misjudged that the principle of design was from simplicity to complexity; but there is another more compelling principle at play. The glyphs are representative of the four elements of traditional cosmology and take their design principles from traditional symbolism.

It should not need to be argued that a system of four glyphs - or four anything - in the late medieval context naturally lends itself to analogies with the four elements. I wager that an educated or even semi-educated man from the relevant period cannot resist such analogies. They are habitual and apparently natural in the context. From the outset, it has been my suspicion (like that of many others) that the gallows glyphs - the letters on stilts - in some way correspond to the four elements.

But which glyph corresponds to which element? From simplicity to complexity they go in EVA: F P K T. That is, one leg, two leg, one loop, two loops. But the single-legged forms might show the second (right) leg bent around crossing the first (left) leg. In that case, the natural sequence would be: K T F P.

This second sequence corresponds very well to the traditional four elements. The tell-tale thing is the crossed gesture of the line in F and P. This is what happens in the glyphs of the traditional elements too.

The four elemental triangular glyphs used in the Western tradition are extracted from the six-pointed star. The six-pointed star is the intersection of the upward pointing equilateral triangle (FIRE) and the downward pointing equilateral triangle (WATER).  The primary elements in this arrangement are FIRE and WATER. The Air and Earth glyphs are triangles that are struck through with the crossbar of the primary triangles.

Note the crossbar:

We can see that the gesture of the bent leg in these glyphs represents the same idea shown in the system of triangular glyphs traditionally used for the elements. This suggests the following order:

The gallows glyphs with the crossed legs are the elements with triangle glyphs with the crossbar, namely AIR and EARTH. I think this is the important feature in the design of the glyphs and the feature that reveals the proper correspondences with the four elements.

Our method here is to try to work out how the medieval glyph designer might have been thinking. If he has the four elements in mind, how might he have encoded this into the glyph designs?

There are, let us note, several possible arrangements of the elements. The one found in Plato, for example, and commonly used, has the elements arranged in order of rarity to density: fire, air, water, earth. But that is not what we have here in the Voynich manuscript. Instead, we have the order that starts with FIRE and WATER as the primal contraries.

We can now place the gallows letters within the full traditional system:

This concerns the design of the glyphs. It does not explain how they might operate as such within the text. That is another question.


R. B.

 

Playing Ball

One of the four figures in the centre of the circles on page f57v is holding a ball or a sphere. It is very poorly drawn, but it is clear enough.

There are various interpretations of this motif, but a close resemblance has long been noted between the figure and a court figure depicted in the murals of Runklestein Castle suggesting that what is shown is a bowling ball from a game:

I have mentioned Runklestein castle in a previous post, see here. There is a pattern of images found in the Voynich that resemble images preserved in the murals of Runklestein Castle in South Tyrol, Northern Italy. I take this of evidence that the manuscript comes from, or at least concerns, that region. It is arguable that the illustrator of the Voynich may have been familiar with the murals in Runklestein Castle. This is another instance of it.

Assuredly, what we see in the Voynich is just a cartoonish sketch, but the resemblance of gesture is plain and almost exact.

In the Runklestein mural the female figure is holding up a ball such as was used in a common courtly game. The murals in general depict courtly life and courtly amusements. This ball game - essentially bowls - was very popular. It was also ancient: various forms of bowls had been played since Roman times.

What counts against this identification is that it lacks coherence. Why would a figure in this diagram be holding a ball from a courtly ball game? The context, surely, is cosmological: the four figures represent the four directions. What has a ball game got to do with it? It makes no apparent sense. Whereas, if, as some suggest, the ball is a symbolic orb or a representation of the sun, it would be fitting to the context.

But we do find this ball game considered as a cosmological metaphor: in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa. It is a Cusean metaphor. Cusanus, in fact, wrote an entire treatise on it De Ludo Globi. Here is a link to the same. 

In this rather curious treatise, Cusanus presents himself (The Cardinal) in discourse with a layman named "John". They discuss the symbolism of the bowling ball. The philosophical import of the discussion is that while a perfect sphere can roll in a straight line, the ball used in the popular games deviates slightly from a sphere and so, because of the bias, rolls in a curved line. The distinction between line and curve is fundamental in Cusean metaphysics. Nicholas devotes a whole work to the philosophical symbolism of the bowling ball for this reason.

 

Thus we see that a bowling ball is not just a bowling ball - it signifies far more than a popular sport and might therefore be quite in order as a motif in the schema of page f57v. And Cusanus' use of the bowling ball as a symbol again reminds us that his primal distinction between curve and line is the graphical foundation of the core glyphs of the Voynich script.

* * *

There is a curiosity in Cusanus' account of the bowling ball game in De Ludo Globi. As he describes one game, he explains the method of scoring and declares that the first player to reach thirty-four points is the winner - this number, thirty-four, because Christ lived for thirty-four years.

But Cusanus certainly knew this not to be true - Christ (as the whole of Christendom knew axiomatically) only lived thirty-three years. Indeed, Cusanus famously built a home for elderly men and restricted the number of places to thirty-three explicitly because Christ had lived thirty-three years. So why does he here say thirty-four? Scholars of Nicholas can offer no explanation. Presumably, the game in question was won by accruing thirty-four points and Cusanus has assimilated this to the approximate length of Christ's life for neatness. It is an odd anomaly, though, and uncharacteristic of Cusanus.

In the context of the bowling ball, I want to point out that the glyphs on page f57v are arranged in groups of seventeen, and so two groups - or a whole hemisphere of a circle - equals thirty-four. The context might suggest some method or device for scoring. Are the four figures in the centre of the circles engaged in a (symbolic) game of bowls in which the winner is the first to reach thirty-four, i.e. complete a whole hemisphere?

R. B.