The Whip of Helios

What is the inspiration for the gallows glyphs? 

That becomes the core mystery. 

The manuscript as a whole is odd, but if we remove the text and just consider the illustrations it is not entirely odd. The iconography is eccentric, but not unfathomable.

But the text is confounding. The text is the mystery. 

And at the heart of that mystery is the glyph-set, the script – a strangely eclectic collection of letters, numbers, symbols, abbreviations and orthographic conventions.

And amongst those, the most mysterious are the so-called gallows glyphs. 

Everything suggests that if we understand the gallows glyphs we will expose the core of the enigma and all, or much, will become plain. 

As a research strategy then, a focus on the gallows glyphs makes sense. 

* * *

My studies – detailed in previous posts - suggest the gallows glyphs represent the solstices and equinoxes. Four gallows glyphs and four quarters of the year. 

But whence came this idea?

There is no doubt that the gallows glyphs strongly resemble forms that appear in Latin manuscripts as decorations or pilcrows (paragraph markers), and elevators (legs) are a way of lifting elements of text into superscript. There are precedents. 

Moreover, as they are used in the Voynich text, the gallows glyphs seem connected to the paragraph as a textual unit. Paragraphs often begin with gallows glyphs, and the first line of many paragraphs feature gallows glyphs. 

This is consistent with them evoking pilcrows. It would seem the gallows glyphs were intended as paragraph markers in some way, and were selected from Latin precedents on that basis. 

This might be sufficient to explain their inclusion in the glyph set, yet they constitute a singular design, a sub-system of the text. There is a carefully designed set of four glyphs. 

* * *

I can suggest a direct source of inspiration for these glyphs.

The basis for the idea is: the whip of Helios. 

The direct source for the inspiration is the iconography of the Helios figure in the Handy Tables of Ptolemy. (MS. Vaticanus graeco 1291)

Here are some pictures. 

We see Helios with two of his emblems: the globe, and the whip with which he commands his four horses.

Notice, though, how the whip is positioned to be the axis of the globe. 

It follows from the basic symbolism of the composition. 

The four horses of Helios are the solstices and equinoxes. Helios controls them with his whip: his whip is the axis of the year. 

His depiction as a universal deity, with a globe, is later Roman/Hellenistic symbolism, but the four horses and the whip go back to early Greek models. 

His whip, and horses, and flaming aureole are standard emblems. 

In context, we see him surrounded by Horai (female personifications of the Hours) but here as nymphs, as per Ovid?

* * * 

Note the stellar associations of the whip of Helios here.

* * *

In any case, as markers of the four quarters of the solar year, might not the Voynich gallows glyphs be the whip of Helios? 

What we must suppose is that someone – our author – or at least the designer of the script – someone deeply familiar with Latin conventions - has taken inspiration from this particular stylization of the whip of Helios. 

We can see how it resembles a Voynich gallows glyph, or rather how the gallows glyphs resemble it. 

To continue, we might be then tempted to see the various flourishes of the glyphs that we find in parts of the text as the flailing of Helios’s whip.

Is that the relevant (solar) symbolism at the root of this idea? Is MS. Vaticanus gr. #1291 its source?

R.B.