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.