On page 65r of our manuscript we find this outstanding and altogether explicit botanical anomaly. To the left this plant grows new stems alternately. On the right the same plant grows stems from the same node.
This does not occur in nature. Plants are either one or the other: either joined stems or alternate stems. Never both.
Such anomalies are altogether typical of the Voynich botanica.
What are we to make of it? A flagrant violation of nature.
By my account of the work, this is a very clear instance of the coincidentia oppositorum, and it alerts us that this principle penetrates the work as far as the depictions of the herbs.
That is, it tells us that the herbs, too, as much as anything else, are being considered from the viewpoint of the coincidentia oppositorum, a guiding philosophical idea behind the work.
In a previous post I argued that the coincidentia oppositorum is being depicted in the figures at the centre of the letter-wheel on page 57v.
Now I want to explain this botanical anamoly on page 65r in the same way.
By extension, I want to suggest that this is a herbalism alive to and guided by that principle.
It is clear to anyone who has mused over the herbal depictions in the work that something other than a simple record of plants for the purposes of identification is afoot.
Certainly, this illustration on 65r is no good for identification. What are we looking for? A herb with alternate or joined stems? The distinction divides the herb world in two.
I suggest that what causes confusion and what accounts for the strangeness of many illustrations is that the herbs are depicted in terms of coinciding opposites.
It is nowhere clearer than in this illustration.
It presents a clear and deliberate violation of botany. It is not a mistake.
Plants can be divided into two groups: those with alternating stems and those with joined stems. But in this picture we see those opposites deliberately juxtaposed and overcome in the same plant, contra natura.
There are different types of opposition to be observed in the plant world, both in plants themselves, and between plants.
For a start, there is the opposition between root and flower inherent in the plant itself.
There seems to be much of that interplay going on in these illustrations.
I suggest, on the basis of this illustration on page 65r, that we should examine the herbal illustrations sensitive to this principle – the coinciding of opposites - and this way of looking at herbs.
It is not a modern way of looking at herbs.
It will confound and complicate our every effort to identify the herbs depicted because identification is not the (first) purpose of the illustrations.
If we think we have identified a flower, the leaves are wrong. Or else every leaf is different! Or, very often, the root system is exaggerated and stylized unnaturally. Nothing is straightforward. We sometimes suspect two or more plants are being mixed together…?
Plants seem to present a tripartite form of root/leaf/flowering top (with blocks of text matching these divisions) with unusual attention given to the junctures between these sections.
I propose that the complication imposing all of this is the coincidence of opposites.
In any case, I present this illustration as a further example of the coincidentia oppositorum – and a cosmology based upon it - in this manuscript.
R.B.
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