The explication of the T & O symbol presented in the previous posts is simple enough, but I will outline it here.
I do have the conviction, by the way, that the entire matter is simple, in the end.
We work from complexity to simplicity. It appears complex, but actually it is simple.
And one should be able to explain it simply. As a general epistemological principle, I firmly believe that you don’t really understand something until you can explain it to the village idiot.
The apparently arcane and inordinately complex inner workings of Voynichese are no different. Above all, clarity!
* * *
Forget all the traditional associations of the T&O symbol (although these do follow, but are high order associations.)
Instead, let us reduce it to its raw geometry.
It shows a circle being bifurcated and bifurcated again. Divide, and then divide the division.
This is an illustration of the basic divisions of the YEAR.
First, the year is divided into ascending and descending phases. For half the year the Sun is getting higher in the sky, and for half the year it is getting lower.
It is essentially a primal division of light and dark. When the Sun is ascending the days grow longer and there is more light. In the descending half of the year the darkness grows.
This first division – cutting the circle in half – is defined by the SOLSTICES.
The summer solstice is maximum light. The winter solstice is maximum darkness.
But these half-circles can be divided again.
As well as the SOLSTICES, there are the EQUINOXES, the points between the two extremes where night and day, light and dark, are equal.
The year is thus naturally divided into four – the cardinal cross – in two steps: first in half and then in half again.
The divisions are natural to and inherent in the circle in the sense that they can be made using nothing more than a compass, the same device used to make the circle in the beginning.
If the T & O circle is the YEAR, it shows the identification of the four cardinal points, the solstices and equinoxes.
It is not shown as a circle with a full cross because it shows the two steps - in half and then in half again. The T&O symbol shows the process, not the outcome.
As I say, it is very simple.
It is so simple that I have no doubt it is a traditional understanding of the T/O symbol, in the proper sense, quite aside from its bookish and elite manifestations beginning with Isadore of Seville.
The symbol intrinsically concerns the YEAR and the divisions of the YEAR. All its historical associations (with continents, sons of Noah, etc.) are much further down stream.
It is the basic geometry, not the historical associations, that concern the author/illustrator of the Voynich manuscript.
* * *
I then want to say that this basic process of dividing the circle is the same process by which Voynichese develops from its primitive roots. Division. Divide and divide again.
A clear case is the glyph [o]. It divides into [ee] and then into [d], halves, then quarters.
Similarly, I see the sequences of the [i] glyph after the [a] as divisions of the [o] glyph.
My method is to track the paradigmatic forms and habits of the glyphs.
Readers will need to go back over my previous posts to find these transformations explained and demondstrated.
All the same, bifurcation, division, is a basic process in the structures of the text and the very design of the script.
The paradigm CHOLDAIIN readily bifurcates into two (common) words, CHOL and DAIIN (and then readily fragments further into particles.)
Again: division is a fundamental process of the text.
The T & O symbol has been used in the manuscript to indicate the processes of division that occur in Voynichese.
The YEAR and the language are in parallel. Voynichese is the year made text. It is a system of glyphs designed to generate text that duplicates and parallels the text of the year.
Basic to the YEAR is: divide and divide again.
This is basic to the Voynich language too.
The structures of the year are being mirrored in text. That is essentially what the Voynich language is, by my current reckoning.
* * *
An unavoidable conclusion from this is that the gallows glyphs must represent the SOLSTICES and EQUINOXES.
More specifically, I think it must follow that the glyphs [t] and [k] represent the SOLSTICES, while [p] and [f] must represent the EQUINOXES.
I have presented the construction of the gallows glyphs as being like: resources held in superscript.
This is solstitial. The solstices are the pregnant pauses of the year.
This is indeed extremely ancient symbolism, possibly even found in paleoastronomy: the notion that the pause of the solstices contains the year in potentia.
We still find a reflection of the idea in the ‘twelve days of Christmas’ – the idea that the twelve days during which the sun stands still at the winter solstice ‘contain’ the twelve months of the forthcoming year.
The year, we might say, is implicit, or held in potential, at the solstice.
Similarly, the period when the sun stands still (solstice) is often counted as “time outside of time” in many traditions, or the non-time that contains time.
In any case, we can see an analogy between the gallows glyphs (as I have presented them) and the solstices in the scheme of the year.
The gallows glyphs are resources held outside (above) the flow of the script, i.e. in superscript. The solstices are outside the flow of time and contain the resources of the year.
Moreover note the primitive paradigm I have identified in previous studies: OTOPO.
This, as per above, is an image of the YEAR with [t] and [p] the solstice and the equinox respectively.
Again: the [t] glyph must represent the winter solstice. The [p] glyph must represent the spring equinox (that follows the winter solstice.)
Therefore, [k] must be the summer solstice, and [f] the autumn equinox.
Going back over our previous studies we recall that the absolute bedrock of the text is an uninterrupted sequence of [o] glyphs:
oooooo
This is the sequence of the YEAR.
But the year is not uninterrupted. The flow of the year is broken by the solstices. The sun starts and stops, starts and stops.
Textually this becomes:
o|o|o|o|o|
The sequence of [o] glyphs is broken with vertical lines.
We find the distinction between two-legged and one-leg gallows. The sequence becomes:
o||o|o||o|o||o
These vertical lines – with the double lines the solstices - are then developed into the gallows glyphs - the elevated glyphs.
The resources of the gallows glyphs are then unpacked to become the Voynich script and text.
* * *
At this point we also cannot avoid the further implication that a Voynich word, therefore, must equal a YEAR.
But then, just as quickly, we must recall that a year equals a day, because the winter solstice is the midnight of the year, the spring equinox the dawn, the summer solstice the noon, and the autumn equinox the dusk.
This again is all quite simple, but it is the ultimate simplicity of it that makes it a struggle to grasp and explain.
The initial twist is seeing how a simple geometry can be transposed into textual conventions; how, for example, dividing a circle in half can be expressed in scribal text as the [o] glyph becoming [ee].
And then seeing that the circle in question is the circle of the year, and following the implications.
To reverse engineer something like this, we need to ask: how do we express the cycles and structures of the YEAR in (a viable system of) writing (using medieval Latin conventions)?
R.B.
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