Chadwick pedigree

The only person in the modern era who might have been capable of a deep understanding of the Voynich manuscript, on a conceptual level, was Alan Chadwick. He was, as Australians say, as mad as a cut snake, but he was also widely touted as the greatest horticulturalist of the twentieth century. He certainly had green thumbs. His claim to fame was that the German polymath, esotercist and pedagogue, Rudolf Steiner was employed as his personal tutor when he was a boy. He grew up to be an actor and ballet dancer. Late in life, in America, he became famous for his remarkable gardens, gave lectures on horticulture and taught apprentices, and is now counted as one of the fathers of modern organic farming. (Harrison Ford had a restaurant named after him.)

He entertained a weird cosmology. At the core of it was the idea of the ‘Revolutionibus’. I have studied and written about Chadwick’s cosmology over many decades. I had the honour of writing the introduction to a collection of Chadwick’s lectures in this volume:

Reverence, Obedience and the Invisible in the Garden,
lectures edited by Steve Crimi.

In his lectures Chadwick sets out a traditional alchemical cosmology – the four elements, the zodiac, the planets and so on – but in a particularly dynamic form typical of early modern (rather than medieval) cosmologies. We can surmise that Chadwick took the term ‘revolutionibus’ from Copernicus, although his use of the term is distinctive. A Catholic, it seems that he was dipping into Renaissance cosmologies for his terminology and intellectual framework. His style was rambling and theatrical, and he was not always easy to follow, but he had a hard-won, brilliant, if eccentric, pre-modern understanding of plants, herbs, soil and nature. He drew upon Steiner’s ‘biodynamics’, and upon Paracelsus, and the German romantic alchemical tradition, Goethe, but the centrepiece, the revolutionibus was his own synthesis.

Of all modern thinkers, Alan Chadwick and his revolutionibus strike me as the nearest in spirit to the Voynich manuscript.

And perhaps not only in spirit. It has always seemed to me that Chadwick’s revolutionibus idea, if not the term, might be based in the mysticism of Nicholas of Cusa, rather than in Copernicus. Cusanus, along with Meister Eckhardt and others of that ilk, underpins later German intellectual traditions.

What we find in the Voynich manuscript is a cosmology that deviates from medieval Ptolemaic norms. It is, rather, early modern. This is to say it is, amongst other things, heliocentric, and rather than the static, finite cosmos of the Ptolemaic vision, it seems to present an open, infinite, ever-changing universe of the more modern conception. I draw attention to Nicholas of Cusa as an earlier pioneer of this vision in the period relevant to the Voynich manuscript. I argue that the work is, at least, Cusean.

The spiraling cosmology presented on page f68v3 is especially intriguing. This very much resembles, suggests, foreshadows Alan Chadwick’s revolutionibus.

There is a stream of Germanic pre-modern thinking that includes Eckhardt, Cusanus, Paracelsus, Goethe, Steiner, and Chadwick was uniquely placed to have special insights into that tradition.

I want to situate the Voynich manuscript in that tradition. Many have suggested that it is, at least, proto-Paracelsean. I think that estimation is correct. It stands in a pedigree.

In modern times, Alan Chadwick was the supreme exponent of that tradition in its practical manifestations. His gardens were unsurpassed, magical. His methods were founded in a cosmology gleaned largely from that rich German heritage. 

 

(Historically, we should note that German romantic vitalism was forcibly appropriated and tarnished by Nazism and has been marginalized and misunderstood in the post-war period. Chadwick was a British aristocrat. He encountered the tradition prior to the war. He seemed remarkable to Americans because he was like a character from another age.)

I am sure that Alan never saw the Voynich ms. and most likely had never heard of it, but if anyone could have understood it and given insights into it it was him. I suspect he would have made his way to page f68v3 and said, “Ah! Revolutionibus!” and understood the work and its system of herbalism implicitly from then on.

In any case, I think it is extremely helpful to know and understand Chadwick. He is a good antidote to the constraints of modern thinking. His eccentric horticultural theories take us much nearer to the worldview and the mind that produced the Voynich manuscript.

R. B.