Late in the Quattrocento, a generation after the window allowed for the Voynich ms., the Catholic Church gave official sanction to the devotion of the Nine Mountains as a substitute for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
As usual, this had already become a popular practice, and was originally a sponteneous development of folk piety: officialdom was late on the scene. In the 1490s the Church officially recognized, and blessed – and took control of – the devotion.
At the same time, it was simplified, streamlined and standardized.
It consisted of the pious – pilgrims - ascending to the summit of nine mountains, attending a chapel at the top of each, and making set prayers.
It was counted as the equivalent of making the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – a journey then difficult to impossible due to the geopolitical changes in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the official version, the “mountains” had become quite accessible hills around Milan and northern Italy.
Why nine mountains? It was a novena of mountains. As a prolonged devotion to be performed over time, it took the form of a novena.
* * *
This is what I detect behind the foldout map in the Voynich ms. In the first instance it is modelled on a pilgrimage map, with a depiction of Jerusalem in the centre circle.
But the pilgrimage – the journey to the centre, and to the highest peak – is depicted as a novena of mountains.
On my reading, the map is to be understood as the superimposition of the topography of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem upon a northern Italian alpine landscape.
To get to the centre – Jerusalem – one must traverse nine mountains.
These are stylized and schematized in the Voynich map and brought into a geometric system of nine circles.
All the same, the root idea we see in the map is the pilgrimage redesigned as a novena of mountains.
I propose, further, that the purpose of the map, and this ninefold design, is to provide a model for the transfer of material from east to west.
It is a model, a device, for the appropriation and naturalization of things that are moved from east to west, the Holy Land to Italy.
It is not necessarily being used for the specific purposes of pilgrimage: rather the pilgrimage it is the model for east/west transactions, and supplants.
What is being moved from east to west in the Voynich ms. is, evidently, a body of star lore, a system of stellar astrology.
The number 9 carries an important symbolism in the map, though. The (zodiacal) year divided by nine is forty days: 9 x 40 = 360.
It implies the forty days of Lent.
It is at the end of Lent that the Light of Christ is lit in the Holy Sepulchre.
Implicit in the map is the idea of a journey over a year, ascending nine mountains (in ascending steps), with each quest taking forty days, and the final ascent – to Jerusalem – Mount Zion – is the forty days of Lent.
The pilgrim arrives at the Holy Sepulchre as the candle is lit – Christ is Risen – on Easter morn.
This, I maintain, is the essential design of the Voynich map.
Noting here that the journey therefore requires the proper calculation of Easter.
* * *
We find the circle divided into nine in this illustration:
Here we see nine rain clouds. The illustration is meteorological. It presumably concerns the distribution of rain throughout the year – if the circle represents the year and not some smaller cycle.
It is part of the same illustration that we find a depiction of nine [o] glyphs (omicrons] seeming to transform into text glyphs:
We can find many other instances of nine – things ninefold – in the manuscript illustrations.
The number (and hence 9 x 40 = 360) clearly has a cosmological significance in the Voynich ms.
An example is the nine dots (marks) displayed on the spindle of the mountain nymph on page f80v., the subject of recent posts on this blog.
Nine marks on the cosmic spindle. And this too seems to be in a meteorological context: clouds and rain, precipitation.
* * *
The deeper significance of the nine and the forty, and their connection to rain, concerns revelation. I won’t go into it here, except these brief points:
Forty days signifies one month, plus.
Astrologically it signifies one sign (3 decanates), plus the first decanate of the next sign.
The gesture is: continuation, the cycle, move forward.
It defies the completeness of the month.
We see this in the Shi’ite practice of extending Ramadan by ten days – the ten days of Muharram.
This is because, in Shia Islam, in contrast to Sunni Islam, the revelation is on-going.
The Koran was revealed during the days of Ramadan. But for the Shia the revelation continues (through Ali and the Prophet’s family) and Ramadan is not complete in itself – the fast continues into the next cycle.
The whole matter concerns ‘The Living God’. Divine immanence.
But in Islam, as elsewhere – it is very widespread – the delivery of rain from the heavens is analogous to the delivery of revelation from the Divine.
The association of 9 x 40 = 360 with clouds and rain in the Voynich manuscript is consistent with this deeper symbolism.
R.B.
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