The Voynich botany, viewed in the light of its cosmology, presents an elegant and simple system for an astrological herbalism.
It is not based upon a correspondence between plants and planets, but between plants and the zodiac, or rather the ecliptic. (The zodiac being but one system of dividing the ecliptic.)
What we find in the Voynich is a solar herbalism that follows from such ancient observations as the sun-tracking heliotrope or daisies that open and close as you shade them with your hand.
The operative order of correspondences is as follows:
The (winter) solstice is the CROWN or PRESENTIMENT of the plant.
The solstice divides the year into dark and light, night and day, the primal, cosmogonic division.
In plant morphology, the roots are nocturnal and the upper plant diurnal, the node of division being the CROWN.
The plant culminates at the equinox in this model, but there are short and long season plants: long season (six month) plants culminate at the summer solstice.
In any case, the (typically vertical) stem of the plant corresponds to the path of the sun (ecliptic) and the growing nodes (points of division) correspond to the cusps that divide the ecliptic.
That, I maintain, is the underlying system of the Voynich herbalism, in its fundamentals.
This is not the system that prevailed in Western herbalism but it foreshadows the botany of Goethe.
R.B.
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