Resources of the Star Nymphs

 

The solstices are the pivot of the year. 

They are the turning points of the sun’s annual course.

At these points the sun stops, pauses, and turns in the other direction.

For half the year the sun travels north, then stops, pauses, then travels south, where it stops, pauses, and travels north.

In traditional cosmological understandings, such as we find in astrology, these solstices mark places of the resources of the year. 

We need to understand it like this:

The sun travels north, stops, pauses to gather its resources, then travels south using those resources for its journey.

Thus, the journey south is an unfolding, an expanding, of the resources collected during the standstill of the solstice. 

The idea is reinforced by the fact the sun stands still for twelve days at each solstice: each of these days encapsulates the cycle of twelve months or zodiac signs. 

The sun pauses and gathers the resources for the coming cycle, which resources then unfold when the sun resumes its journey.

This is the model for all cusps.

In astrology, the cusp is the crucial point. It is pregnant.

It is the first degree of a zodiac sign that contains the essence of the sign. This subsequently unfolds, is unpacked, is expressed through the following thirty degrees. 

This idea of an unfolding of resources is found at all levels of astrological symbolism. 

The cardinal signs express the essence of the solstices and equinoxes, the next signs (the fixed signs) consolidate and mature these resources, while the third sign in the set, the mutable sign, distributes these resources. 

Resources are gathered, made manifest, matured and dispensed.

In the same way, the decans – divisions of the signs into three lots of ten degrees – repeat the same idea. 

The first decanate is the pure expression of the sign, the second its consolidation and the third its distribution. 

The nature of the sign is implicit in the cusp. This then unfolds until, as it were, the resources are spent.

The cusps, like the solstices, are the sensitive and potent points, the points of origin from which the cycle proceeds.

A quaint instance of this idea on a folk level – a garbled folk remnant of a much older and more coherent idea – is the tradition of Groundhog Day – the idea that the shadow of sun, on a day near the solstice, predicts the coming year.

* * *

This conception of the year as resources is what we find in the Voynich manuscript: quite literally.

The zodiac is divided, as usual, into twelve signs, but each degree of the signs is depicted as a nymph accompanied by a jar of (celestial) water.

These jars or containers are a literal way of depicting the astrological resources of each sign. Each jar represents the resources of a zodiacal degree.

These resources belong to and are mobilized by the celestial nymphs. 

This celestial water, moreover, is a condensation of the light of the stars. 

It further condenses into rain in the terrestrial realm. 

Rain is the physical resource of the year.

How do you measure a year?

By crop yield. But that is a measure of human labour. 

The natural measurement of a year – as opposed to other years - is its rain, the largesse of the heavens.

* * *

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.

- Genesis 1:7

I won’t argue this reading of the nymph iconography here but, as I see it:

*The celestial nymphs are personfications of the zodiacal degrees.

*Each degree represents a star.

*The light of the stars condense into the celestial waters.

*The nymphs are shown with (or in) vessels of celestial waters (condensations of starlight).

*These vessels contain the resources of that zodiacal degree.

*These celestial waters manifest as terrestrial rain, the domain of the mountain nymphs depicted elsewhere in the manuscript.

The influence of the heavens upon the earth is meteorological, in the first instance.

* * *

Although these are simple ideas, they are entirely alien to modern ways of thinking. 

In order to understand the Voynich cosmology we have to reacquire premodern ways of thinking. 

It is a fundamental distortion to view the Voynich ms. as proto-modern or as participating in modern ways of thinking: it is an (eccentric) work of late medieval, early Renaissance cosmology and it takes considerable effort for modern readers to appreciate the assumptions of that mindset. 

R.B.