Cantus Firmus: Nymphs sing

The other possibility that would arise naturally from my research – whereby I propose that the Voynich language is based on the interaction of two keywords – is that the two terms are musical.

They have been characterized here as two verbum potentiae: words of power or potency. They have been set up in counterpoise and the Voynich language arises from their interaction as coinciding opposites – the coincidentia oppositorum. There are, I have argued, two streams of text intermixed according to definite rules.

I have proposed that the keywords may be Theonyms.

But the explanation I have overlooked is that the two terms may be musical and have been set against each other in a system of vocal counterpoint.

Indeed, we have one keyword with seven letters and the other with eight. One keyword, QOKEEDY, creates a steady, even stream of text, and the other, CHOLDAIIN, creates another stream that interweaves with it.

This strongly suggests – does it not? - late medieval vocal counterpoint, There, typically, you have one voice singing a constant refrain, called the cantus firmus, while the other voice sings around and in and out of that refrain.

Counterpoint, of course, was later subject to full development in Western musical history, but early counterpoint was for only two voices, one singing a line that is constant and unchanging and the other playing against it.

This is what we seem to have in the Voynich ms. As I describe it, the Voiynich text is being presented as the discourse between the celestial and terrestrial nymphs. But this discourse may, in fact, be song. The text is a record of their singing, and the model being used is primitive two-voice sung counterpoint. 

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I overlook this possibility for the simple reason that music is not my field. And I can’t bluff my way through early Renaissance musical theory; I’m a text man. I assume the text is written or spoken because that is my bias. Musical history is not one of my resources.

But nymphs don’t write tomes or deliver orations: they sing songs.

So it may be understood, in context, that the Voynich text is being sung and that what we have in the manuscript is essentially a musical language.

There are no conspicuous depictions of musical instruments in the ms. Nor any signs of musical notation. But early counterpoint was unaccompanied, and it was, for the most part, learned by ear without notation.

The Voynich text and script, then, are not a form of musical notation. They are a record of two vocal parts singing in counterpoint.

I say no conspicuous depictions of musical instruments, but there are two illustrations with nymphs holding what might be musical instruments, or perhaps (in my estimation) monochords.

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Be that as it may, a sung text would be entirely consistent with my reading of the work and my characterization of the Voynich language as the language of the nymphs.

In that case, musical theory will be able to help us understand the rules and structures of the language.

The two keywords, QOKEEDY and CHOLDAIIN, are still best understood as verbum potentiae, but they may be musical in nature, or the relations between them are musical, not linguistic.

It has sometimes been suggested over the years that the Voynich text is musical, and I am aware of several attempts to “decode” it in this way – none of them convincing.

Some respected researchers over the years have also expressed the suspicion that the strange behavior we observe in the text may, in some way, be musical in origin. It is not a new suggestion.

But it is also true that the Voynich space is not well populated with musicologists - it is overpopulated with cryptologists, paleographers, statistical analysts and bookish people like myself - and so it is a line of research that has not been properly explored.

On the face it, this is the direction in which my analysis of the text is moving. What I have described as a dual paradigm system – a text generated from two keywords acting in counterpoint – may be a sung text, with one voice – QOKEEDY – being the cantus firmus, the model for the language being the sung counterpoint of the late Middle Ages.

Again: we have a text generated from two verbum potentiae, one of them with seven letters and one with eight. The two words are in counterpoint. What could be going on? There is, surely, a strong possibility that it could be musical. Not notation, but two-part vocal counterpoint.

And again: this would be consistent with a reading of the text in which there is discourse between the (very Solomonic) nymphs. Nymphs sing.

This would be an obvious riposte to my general hypothesis. Lingua Nympharum? But nymphs sing. 

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It is relevant to note here - by the way - that the naturalistic basis for the song of nymphs in folklore and myth is the babbling brook: the songs of running water. Nymphs sing.

R.B.