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:
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.
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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.
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