Throughout India, and especially in the south, one encounters kolam – chalk designs at thresholds. They are usually made by women, often as a daily ritual. Some designs are simple, some elaborate and decorative. They invariably involve interlacing.
The conventional folk explanation of this custom is that the kolam “confuses the evil spirits”.
That is, the evil spirits reach the threshold but cannot cross because they are bamboozled by the kolam.
What is this about?
It is about the solstices.
It is an astronomical gesture.
It is about the solstices as doorways, thresholds, the gates (maximums) through which the sun moves.
And it is about the solstices as the place of the turning of the year, the place where the sun changes course, where it loops back from north to south or south to north.
The custom of the kolam expresses the hope that ill-fortune will not move from one year to the next, one cycle to the next, that the coming cycle will bring prospitious seasons and configurations, and that malevolent configurations will be scrambled and lost in the celestial crisis of the solstice.
The symbolism can be transferred to any doorway.
* * *
This same symbolism is found in an altogether different context in the language of the Voynich manuscript.
There, as I have explained in previous posts, the system of four gallows glyphs is based upon the cycle of solstices and equinoxes.
The bedrock cycle of [o] glyphs (omicrons) is broken first by single lines and then by a double line at each alternation, thus:
o||o|o
The double line becomes the glyph [t] and the single line becomes the glyph [p], which gives us the primitive paradigm, or cycle:
OTOPO
Here, [t] signifies the solstice.
And, I argue, it presents as two lines to suggest the idea of doorway, threshold. It is a depiction of this aspect of solstitial symbolism.
Both [t] and [k] – with two legs – signify the solstice as doorway of the sun.
* * *
This symbolism is extended, I argue, in various extravagant glyphs, characterized by a series of loops, found here and there in the text.
These are associated with the gallows glyphs, or benched gallows, or especially the backward curling plumed glyphs.
This is what we would expect. The plumed glyphs mark the counter-cycle of the sun at the same points as the solstices and equinoxes. This was the subject of a previous post.
Here is one:
What we see here is a gallows glyph being unfolded.
The [q] is still attached.
The resources of the gallows glyph – here a benched gallows – are being unpacked, unfolded in the manner I have described in previous posts.
But included in these resources is the interlinked loop.
This is part of the inherent resources of the solstice: the place of loops, of turning back.
It is different to the [d[ glyph which represents symmetry: specifically the symmetry of the equinoxes.
Rather, it is a flourish of loops.
The extending of the legs of the gallows glyph depict the opening of the solstitial gate.
Another example:
This is the unfolding of a benched gallows. The loops – an inherent resource of the gallows glyphs – are unpacked, opened out, to express the idea of solstice as a place where the sun loops.
Again, the two legs of a gallows glyph – the door posts - are opened wide apart and in the intervening space the glyph forms loops.
This is the symbolism of the solstices.
I do not suppose there is the same application as in the custom of kolam – the looping is not to bamboozle evil spirits, or the like.
The Indian custom is a folk remnant of a much more coherent idea. (That's what a "superstition" is.)
In the Voynich ms. this looping is part of the behavior of the gallows glyphs and is part of their signification as the solstices, whatever application they might have in the text.
More examples:
Here the “doorposts” of the glyph are opened wide – it is the unpacking of the glyph [q] from a benched gallows - but without loops.
Here are the loops without the opening of the doors:
Another, more revealing, example:
Here we see a sequence of backward curling curves culminate in a series of loops.
We saw this series of curves in the T/O symbol on the Voynich map (Rosette) foldout.
It marks the counter-cycle.
Again: the solstice is the place of turning back, turning around, changing to a counter direction.
The Voynich glyphs – particularly the gallows system – are a way of encoding this and other aspects of the solstices (and equinoxes) into a text.
* * *
Once we understand that the gallows glyphs represent the solstices, and contain the resources of the solstice, we expose a cogent (and not especially complex or unusual) symbolism where the solstices are gateways, doorways, thresholds, marking the points in the year where the sun loops backwards.
The symbolism of thresholds and doorways as the solstitial gates is a commonplace in premodern traditional societies, but it is likely to elude modern people who are entirely alienated from a traditional cosmological framework and no longer understand (and far less, live and breathe) such things.
People who puzzle over the Voynich manuscript are in this category and are not well-placed to see what, in former times, would have been plain and familiar cosmological symbolism.
The greatest obstacles to understanding the Voynich ms. are conceptual. If we restore premodern assumptions and a premodern worldview even the strangest aspects of the work – such as these loops – make sense.
R.B.
No comments:
Post a Comment